Welcome to the StageZero Life Sciences second quarter investor conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, please press star, then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rebecca Greco, head of investor relations. Please go ahead. Thank you very much, Ariel. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the StageZero second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Joining me today is StageZero Chairman and CEO, James Howard-Tripp. Please note that management's discussion today will contain forward-looking statements about anticipated results and future prospects. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, and StageZero's results may differ materially from those discussed today. Investors should consult the company's ongoing quarterly filings and annual reports for additional information on risks and uncertainties relating to these forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned not to rely on these forward-looking statements. The company disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. On today's call, management may refer to non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. This metrics excludes certain items discussed in our press release under the heading Discussion of Non-GAAP Financial Measures and any other items that management believes should be excluded when reviewing continuing operations. Reconciliations of StageZero's non-GAAP measurements to the comparable GAAP measurements are available in the financial tables of the Q4 2022 financial results on StageZero's website or filed on SEDAR. With that, I would like to turn the call over to James Howard-Tripp, StageZero's Chief Executive Officer. James, please go ahead. Thank you, Rebecca, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. It's been an interesting quarter. In fact, it's been an extremely busy quarter. The work, as I think, where we left off the last time we spoke, was all around us, getting the partnerships in place, beginning to get all of the build-outs so that we could affect those as rapidly as possible. We'll talk to a lot of that in detail this morning. A quick recap on the quarter. Revenue was marginally up on the quarter before, but if you subtract the deferred revenue aspect, there's actually about a 10% growth on quarter-over-quarter. If you go from Q4 to Q1 to Q2, we're actually moving in the direction that we anticipated we would, which is one of steadily showing incremental gains. We expect that to pick up as we move out into the rest of the year. We're obviously all waiting for the partnerships to begin to kick into full gear, and that's what we will talk to now. As we look at the problem, we'll touch very briefly just on problem solution. That is because we will have a series of new people that are not as familiar with the company, as well as those that have been with us for a while. You look at the current cancer crisis, we're just hearing more and more about this all the time. The big issue, as we know about it, is in actual fact, the, it's the late diagnosis of essentially the vast majority of cancers. Either there's no real good screening available, or if screening is available, it's, by and large, picks up late-stage cancers. It's not always very accurate. We're all looking for better ways to be able to do this. This plays out to what I will talk about in, in, in a little while. It is the number one catastrophic healthcare claim for self-funded employers. Major focus of ours. We'll talk a lot about that, too. If you look at the national economic burden, that's just the lost productivity aspect, which is about $150 billion. If you add in the actual healthcare treatment costs, we're well over $300 billion in terms of what the overall opportunity is to actually have a positive impact. We believe we're uniquely positioned to be able to do this. Why? Because we have a suite of products that are unlike what anyone else has out there. Aristotle, I think everyone is aware of. It's the first and only mRNA gene expression profiling test that essentially would indicate whether you likely have cancer today. Any one of the specific cancers we look for. It's discrete. It also has a high accuracy. Second to that, we have the oncologist-led program, TREAT. That's the adjunctive program where it is combined with standard of care. The initial data that we have out in the marketplace is also the METRICS study. We showed a very significant doubling of overall survival over across the first 18 months of adjunctive treatment in stage four glioblastoma patients. We'll talk about METRICS II, because it provides us a significant number of opportunities moving forward. TREAT has been pulled forward into the AVERT program. AVERT links with Aristotle in that AVERT not only looks at the various metabolic parameters that an individual might have, it will flag major chronic diseases. All of those are able to have in interventional programs to change trajectory. In addition to that, it also flags whether you're likely developing the issues that will lead to cancer tomorrow. You combine Aristotle with AVERT, you have Aristotle cancer today, you have AVERT, the potential to develop cancer tomorrow. You add the significant metabolic major diseases to that, and you have a product offering that is, one, very unique, but two, of great interest. to a significant number of our partners, notably, notably nutritional groups, notably employers, notably healthcare systems, notably insurers and reinsurers. We'll talk about all of those. This is what we've spent the quarter working on. It's partnerships. It's together with the partnerships preparing for launch. It's to get METRICS II out of the door. A new aspect to this is, additional Aristotle studies. We'll walk through these, in detail as we go through the next few slides. The self-funded employer market is huge. The employer insurance market is huge. If you start at the top left, approximately 157 million Americans are in employer-sponsored insurance plans. Of those, about 100 million, it's about 64% of them, are in self-funded, insurance plans. To explain what a self-funded plan is, it's where the company essentially assumes most of the risk. Instead of paying to an insurance group to cover all of that, with all of the issues that run with it, quite often it is a better plan, it is easier to administer, it actually is often less costly for the company to manage itself, which means that they essentially self-insure their workers. We have over 100 million Americans within self-funded insurance plans with their employers. Key with all of this is that the employers will then always take insurance for what is called catastrophic healthcare claims. Number one, amongst catastrophic healthcare claims is cancer-related issues, and they will reinsure this, or they will insure it with reinsurers, for example, those like Munich Re or SCOR. They too have great interest in what we will do. When you come down to breaking out, the size of the companies, and again, this is a very specific U.S. focus, you'll see that the, the largest group of companies are those with 500 or more. More importantly, it actually ties to those that have 1,000-10,000 employees. That's where the, the bulk of the employers are. That also is the sweet spot for us. The market is huge. The market is huge. We're, we're essentially working off of about 100 million people, 100 million workers in terms of that. I think as we illustrate here, you can have a very, very small slice of that to actually do extremely well. We've given an example of what we believe is an average revenue across the combination of tests that we would use. That show, you know, what, what it looks like if we get 10,000 employees within this, obviously, what it looks like if we get 100,000 employees. The key for us is, okay, how are we going to build out in terms of this? The way we do this, is preferentially or for partners. If we do it on our own, can we do it? Yes, but it's very slow. It takes, it takes a very significant amount to build out. If you think about it, for example, firefighters are an example about us doing it entirely on our own. Firefighters, where we, have worked with a variety of groups, it takes a while. In most cases, it takes the better part of a year, for us to take it into budget, to take it to the cities, for the cities to put it through the budget process, get it approved, and then start to come through. We're having a lot of that actually come to fruition right now. It's on both sides of the border. It's Canada as well as the U.S., and the entire program is beginning to move into a much higher gear. All of that, positive. It has ramifications too, as we think about some of the studies that we do, but we'll go with it. That is it. We build it, we build, we build it ourselves, but it, of course, takes a little longer. A nicer way to do it, a better way to do it, is to partner with groups such as clinics and to partner with various labs. If you look at the clinic side, one of the clinics that we do talk to is Health Today clinics. That is because they're very amenable to us talking about them. Not everyone is. They would prefer to keep it quiet. The vast majority of our partners on the clinical side, we're not able to disclose. Health Today clinics, we are. Health Today clinics is a newer group, but it has very big plans, and it's moving very quickly. We go from a small number of centers, sorry, a small number of clinics that they are building out. They're building out essentially to eight of them. We are offering Aristotle and AVERT through them right now. That is one, it begins to build. The bigger plan is to move out to about 70 clinics by about year-end, year-end, beginning of next year. All of that moves out, and there's some very exciting initiatives in terms of how they will do this. They also have discussions with local government, where they're looking at utilizing Aristotle and potentially AVERT to screen for cancer to see whether this is a better healthcare model from a preventative aspect, and they couple it with a variety of pieces. Don't forget, that ties back to our Care Oncology clinic, in that we're able to offer interventional programs, and so you build it out. so you don't just build because there's one or two clinics, you build because you're looking at the 70+ within a reasonable timeframe as you build it full out. That's where you go. A lot of what we're doing is the same. We've recently partnered with groups in BC, for example. BC doing similar aspects in terms of yes, clinics in the BC area, but building out into the U.S.. That works very well for us, and we go. We're doing the same in Ontario. We're doing the same in Atlantic Canada. We're doing the same in the U.S.. We're across about 16 of the cities in the U.S., part of what we're doing is building out into all of those. It's to get it all live and all moving. That's how partner clinics actually help us. Remember that we immediately move into all of their patient base. Even more exciting, and one of the bigger pieces that we've been putting in place over this last quarter, is to partner with significant lab groups. If you think about what a lab does for you, it would take us from being essentially a high-complexity lab in Richmond, Virginia, to becoming local state labs, because we get that push out almost immediately. We get that push out into all of their patient base, particularly if they have a very large segment that, for example, might be catering to employers or catering to some very novel groups that are in the preventative health side. They get to take us in with them. We immediately expand that out, and essentially it becomes, we go in together, they open the door, they have the established relationships. We get to take our programs in, and then we manage them together. This is what we've very actively been putting together and in the process of taking live now. We'll make those announcements and then when, as and when we can over the next short while. We are beginning with all of that. The push to get partners for us is huge, and those are just some of the initiatives that we have in play. Others will begin to build out as we move on. Insurance companies is important, I think, as I indicated, right in the beginning, as I discussed, working with insurance groups key. Insurance plays out in two ways. One is the reinsurance model for the self in the self-funded healthcare plans. That's of great interest. As we showed in the case study that we put together on breast cancer, we can provide a savings of about 50% or more by finding these patients earlier than actually working with them actively. That is huge. It's huge for the self-funded plan. It's huge for the reinsurer. Separate to that, though, on the insurance side, why would life insurance companies not be interested? Why would they not think of offering unique products tied to prescreening with the programs that we uniquely can offer? What if you flag red on some of the aspects, let's say you're negative on Aristotle, but let's say you're positive on a series of pieces with effect. What if you enter a risk modification program that we offer? Does that not, not reduce risk? Yes, it does. Insurance company is all about reducing risk. That should therefore have an effect on premiums. Does that not work through? So there are a number of very novel programs that in actual fact are in play, and we would hope that these come to fruition in the next little while. Very interesting as we run through. From the government side, obviously continuing to work with them gets us credibility, it builds us out, it makes us part of the fabric. Ultimately, you look for that, that housekeeping seal of approval as it runs through. It's obviously not just through groups like firefighters, but it's the pilot studies that we run, but it's some initiatives that I'll talk to in just a moment. If you look at the revenue stream, again, we built this very carefully and very clearly with intertwined revenue streams. Aristotle retail is $949. However, you're not gonna do an Aristotle every year. You may not. You might, you might not. You might do it every year, you might do it every two years, every three years. You do it when it's necessary. You're certainly not going to do it quarterly. metabolic panel, however, you likely will do quarterly. You combine the pieces together. Not only do we get a healthcare product that is very appealing, but we get a combined revenue stream that is more frequent. You then move into the risk modification program, in other words, the treatment program with it, and you've now got a program whereby the people are signing on for multiple quarters. If we go to TREAT, if we go to the cancer program with Care Oncology, we have some patients that have been with us for nine years. They may not be there absolutely every quarter. They may be there for six or nine months of the year. They may take a quarter's break, but they're essentially there constantly. It's recurring revenue quarter, after quarter, after quarter. This has been a key part of how we've built the pieces. It's not only the combined program, but it in actual fact, is the combined revenue flow that, that, that repeats itself. If you think about what labs do, labs do tests. They do single tests. You do it once, you're gone. What you wanna do, ideally, is have the patient stay with you, and be able to, to treat them, to work with them on an ongoing basis. METRICS II. Where are we with METRICS II? We're moving forward with it now. three, three key pieces with it, yeah, the METRICS and why it's important to us. One, obviously, it's a prospective look at the data we got on the METRICS I. It continues to build out what we're looking for, and it continues to bolster and build on the data that we've got. The data in METRICS I was quite astounding. If, if we can continue to support that and show similar moving through, it'll actually be super. The second piece with this, is that it ties us into a series of key cancer centers. We're gonna head METRICS II out of the U.K., so it's the London groups, it's for example, King's College Hospital, also working with Barts, as we take it through two of the key centers in London, U.K.. We're also bringing in North American centers into this as we take it through. What it does is it begins to create very strong working relationships between us and these groups in what we do. The third thing with this, is that it actually will allow us to develop, within Aristotle, a screening test for glioblastoma. There currently is no screening test. There currently is no early screening test for glioblastoma. Glioblastoma is typically found very late, stage 4, where prognosis is poorest. Everyone would like something that can move it forward. Three key aspects on METRICS II as we actually get it moving into high gear. In addition to this, we're looking at Aristotle studies as we go through with where it is, and this is something relatively new to us. If you look at Canadian side, we've been approached to actually look at doing a study with two or three of the major cancer centers. Each would take one of the key cancers. One would take breast, one colorectal, one prostate. They make up about 60% of their caseload in Canada. We may add one additional cancer to that as we look at it. The intent is to look at improving on current screening methods. Why? We're a blood test. It's a lot easier to do than, than, than multiple of the other ways, if you look at the way we work with, screening on, on the others. Two, we're pretty specific. We're pretty accurate, we're pretty specific. Think, too, about, for example, let's take, let's take mammograms. Mammograms, are not as good in women with dense breast tissue. 40%-50% of women have dense breast tissue. You look at that, if we can narrow it down and we can be much more discreet and much more accurate, and it then reflexes up through the radiology groups as to how they'll, they, they'll look at, confirming the results, you can see where you would want to go. colorectal cancer, instead of using, essentially the FIT test, which, which probably about 90% of Canadians do not do, this is a way to actually get it to work better. Single blood test, multiple cancer screened for, you look it through. We continue to move forward. The intent here is to have something much more amenable, much more available, much more accurate, in terms. Again, much more specific. A lot of it has to do with the specificity. The follow-up will be at the cancer centers. Think again about what we do as we continue to build the relationships and to build it out as we run with it. Of course, obviously, all of the firefighter data that we're gathering continues to add to this. We also have an ability to look at some very novel aspects. Everyone for a long time has looked at looking for a very inexpensive cancer, yes/cancer no test. Aristotle could do that, but it's a rather expensive way to do it. We can cut the data to look at it, where it essentially says, cancer yes/cancer no, but it's a pretty expensive way to do it. Can you come down to, to another method of looking at it, where it's perhaps less than $10 to actually do that initial screen? Within, within the group of cancer centers, one of those tests is, is a potential. Part of what we're looking at is combining all it is, and then it actually takes it through. You could think about it this way: you might get screened cancer, yes/cancer no. You get a yes, you go to Aristotle, which defines what it likely is. From there, you go to your full workup within the cancer center. That essentially is part and parcel of what we're looking at, and so we'll add to that data. I think, in conclusion, as we run through this, what we will do, it's been a decent quarter from a revenue perspective, in that we've held our ground. We've also shown, the beginnings of the growth that we're talking about. We expect that to, to accelerate as we move out through the rest of the year. Those piece is good. Two, we've got all of the key pieces in place with the partners we've been working on. We're in the process of taking those live now. As we do that, we'll be able to talk to them in greater detail with where it is, and we would keep you abreast of that. In addition to that, we're looking to get the clinical studies funded and up and moving, and we'll be able to talk to those with greater detail as well. Thank you for joining us this morning, and we'll definitely keep you updated as we go through. We have a, we have a series of questions that actually have been fed into us. We'll start with those and then, Rebecca, come back to you and see if we have any more. The first, the first of the questions was just a question regarding the status of the METRICS II study. I believe, I believe we have answered that. The second is that, are we still on track to be cashflow positive by year-end? As long as everything holds, as we have it mapped out in front of us, yes, we believe that is fully possible. The next test is, are we or could we be using AI in any of our testing? The answer to that is that we are using AI. We actually were one of the groups that probably introduced AI pretty early on. We haven't, we haven't made a lot of fuss about it. For example, as we continue to, to do the gene expression profiling, as we continue to develop the algorithms, as we continue to improve, sensitivity and specificity, a lot of this is running it through the AI modeling. Perhaps, perhaps part of the question is to say, will we, will we go into, let's say, some of the more innovative aspects? We're absolutely looking at that. It needs to be appropriate. Part of what we have always believed is different modalities in terms of looking at the same problem, will invariably yield a better result, so we'd wanna do that. I'll, I'll, I'll go to the comments I talked about on the, you know, the potential study with the cancer centers on the Canadian side. Is that if you look at what we're trying to do, which is to say, is there a yes, no cancer screen at the beginning? Is there the Aristotle as it builds on through? Is there the radiology follow-up as it goes through, does that improve overall screening and enhancement? What do we add to that from a component or the other pieces in it? How does it link? What role does AI play in all of that? That is, is all there. Very important. Rebecca, any additional questions? We do not have additional questions at this time, James. If anyone does wish to submit a question, you can do so at the bottom of the webcast, and I'm happy to respond to any that we have. We'll give it a moment and see if there are any additional questions. Rebecca? No, we have no more sir, no additional ones. No, in which case, we'll thank you very much for joining us this morning, and, we certainly look forward to updating you as we continue out through the quarter. Bye-bye. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a great day.