I'm ready. Nice little Chicago. Hello. Next, we are pleased to welcome Ligand Pharmaceuticals, a company focused on developing and acquiring technologies that help drive innovation across the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. On behalf of Ligand, we are joined today by their Vice President of Strategic Planning and Investment Analytics, Lauren Hay, and Melanie Herman, Executive Director of Investor Relations and FP&A. Great. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thanks for being here. My name is Lauren Hay. I'm the VP of Strategic Planning and Investment Analytics at Ligand. I'm pleased to be with you this afternoon to go through an overview of our business, including our portfolio and pipeline. Then I'll turn it to Melanie, who will go through a financial review. Ligand today is a Nasdaq-listed biopharmaceutical royalty aggregator. What this means is that we invest in late-stage clinical and commercial programs in order to attain royalty. We have 12 major commercial royalty revenue drivers, and those are expected to do roughly $150 million in revenue this year, up from $109 million last year. Behind that, we have a pipeline of 90 partnered programs, and we operate two technology platforms, including Captisol and NITRICIL. I'll go through those in a few minutes. We've invested the last two years really building out this strategy and, importantly, building out the team around it. We've really built out an exceptional team with many decades of investment experience and also operational experience. We have a team around the table here at Ligand. We know what it takes to source deals, underwrite them, and diligence them. We also have a good sense of what it takes to bring new drugs to market and commercialize them successfully. We operate from a position of financial strength. Our operating cash flow run rate is around $150 million this year, and we have OpEx of just $40 million. One of the things that's attractive about this business model is it's infrastructure light. We have the ability to grow our top-line revenue at a pretty substantial rate for the foreseeable future, with largely the team that we have in place. We'll add a few more investment professionals, but for the most part, we have the team around the table that we need to execute on the strategy. We also have a strong balance sheet. We have $245 million in cash and investments, access to a $200 million credit facility, and we just closed on a $460 million convertible note. We have access integrated to around $800 million in deployable capital. We're doing around $150 million- $250 million a year in annual investments. We're well kind of on our way. Taking a step back, for those of you who are a bit less experienced with royalty investing, I wanted to provide a little bit of an overview in terms of what royalties are and why we think this is such an attractive business model. A royalty is quite simply just a percentage of net sales of a pharmaceutical drug. We get these generally on a quarterly basis. If we have a 5% royalty on a $100 million drug, we'll collect a $5 million royalty over the course of the year in quarterly installments. Royalties are non-dilutable, and they transfer to a new market upon acquisition. Whereas the equity investors will exit when a company like Verona Pharma is acquired, our royalty interest on Ohtuvayre, the underlying asset, continues. Other reasons that this strategy is effective are that royalties have special protection in bankruptcy proceedings. As I mentioned, it's a low OpEx strategy. At the end of the day, this is a high-margin, predictable, and profitable growth business. There are four main tactics that we use to acquire royalties. The first is called royalty monetization. This is where there's an existing license in place between an inventor or an academic institution or a biotech company. They have an asset. They out-license it, say, to a large pharmaceutical company. They might take an upfront payment at the time of the license, but then they'll also take a royalty interest upon the approval of that product. We come in before the drug is approved, generally, and we offer to monetize that royalty interest. We'll offer a lump sum payment in exchange for the future rights to the royalty if the drug is approved. Project finance is similar, although in that situation, there's not an existing royalty in place that we're monetizing. Rather, we're creating one. You might see this referred to sometimes as synthetic royalty investing. In that situation, it's typically a company that has a phase III asset. They may need somewhere between $20 million- $50 million in capital, and they're looking for a non-dilutive solution. We'll go in, say, give the $50 million in order for them to finance their phase III trial. Then we'll effectively create a royalty. If the product is successfully approved, we'll achieve those quarterly installments. One of the unique things that sets Ligand apart is our special situations tactic. Here, we'll use M&A as a tool to acquire a royalty. We executed on a cross-border M&A deal last year. We will also take assets and hold them on a temporary basis while looking to either repartner them or spin them out into a new co. We never operate clinical trials ourselves. We're never going to hire a sales force to do the marketing. We will kind of take and hold an asset on a temporary basis and then look to repartner it. The final tool here is platform technologies. We're looking for technologies that will generate additional royalty cash flow to Ligand. They're scalable, have broad applicability, and are importantly infrastructure light. The two technology platforms that we operate today are Captisol and NITRICIL. Captisol, we acquired through the CyDex acquisition in 2011. It's a cyclodextrin business, and it's cyclodextrin technologies used to improve solubility and stability of pharmaceutical products. There are 16 FDA-approved or other jurisdiction-approved products that have Captisol in them. Each time we execute a new Captisol license, it generates an additional royalty to Ligand. NITRICIL, we acquired more recently through an investment in Novan Pharmaceuticals in late 2023. This is a nitric oxide delivery platform that was used in the development of ZELSUVMI or berdazimer gel. We're looking for other applications of this technology moving forward. For us to be interested in a platform, it has to be OpEx and infrastructure light and really have a pretty prolific opportunity to generate royalties. Strategic differentiation, we've been through the financial strength. In terms of the strategy, we estimate that royalty capital comprises only around 5% of total capital that's deployed in the biopharmaceutical market, and most of that is on the commercial stage. For us going pre-approval, we kind of see limitless potential for the foreseeable future to grow this strategy. When we enter into a term sheet with a partner, we're typically doing our diligence under CDA. We get access to a lot of information that equity investors would not have access to, things like FDA correspondence and meeting minutes, manufacturing information, forecasts, and all of that sort of thing. We have a lot of structural flexibility as a publicly traded company, and we really are excited about our ability to scale this business in the coming years. In terms of the team, Todd Davis came in as really the vision behind this new strategy for Ligand in late 2022 after being on the board of Ligand for many years. He comes from a commercial royalty investing background at Healthcare Royalty, where he worked very closely with our Head of Investments, Paul Hadden, and Andrew Reardon, our Chief Legal Officer. Our CFO, Tavo Espinoza, is here with us today, also has operating experience in the biopharma sector. We've really built out our team around both private equity backgrounds, with Rich Baxter having come from Fortress and Hayfin. I was at DRI Healthcare, another commercial stage fund. Mike Vigilante has done a lot of company formation and equity investing at Gurnet Point. Dr. Karen Reeves and Keith Marschke help support our clinical and scientific diligence and also have a very extensive background in operational roles. With that, I'll walk you through a snapshot of our portfolio. These are our 12 major commercial royalty revenue drivers. You can see that they're well diversified across partnerships with big pharma, but also mid-sized companies. You'll see companies like Amgen and Merck, but also mid-sized companies like Recordati, Travere, and those sorts of players. We're pretty well diversified across therapeutic areas. You can see that depending on the asset, our royalty rates range from kind of the low single digits all the way up to the mid-teens. In terms of the pipeline programs, we're really excited about Travere's FILSPARI potentially being approved in FSGS. I'll go through that in a little bit more detail on the subsequent slide. Our pipeline is comprised of products that would be getting FDA approval for the very first time, like Palvella's QTORIN rapamycin, Castle Creek's D-Fi, and also products that are looking for lifecycle expansion opportunities. They're approved in one disease state like FILSPARI or Ohtuvayre or Qarziba, and they're looking for additional opportunities. I'll provide a snapshot of just three of our major growth drivers so you can start to get a flavor for the types of investments that we make. The first one is FILSPARI. FILSPARI was approved for the treatment of a rare kidney disease called IgA nephropathy. It received accelerated approval in 2023, and that was converted into full approval last year. It's a pretty devastating disease that can lead to progressive kidney function loss and often occurs in younger adults. Consensus peak sales for Ligand alone are around $1 billion at the moment, which would translate into a $90 million annual royalty revenue to Ligand because we have a 9% royalty here. Travere has also applied for FDA approval of FILSPARI in FSGS, another rare kidney disease that's even rarer than IgAN and is even more progressive and fast-moving. If approved, FILSPARI would be the first FDA-approved treatment in FSGS. Consensus sales for this asset in FSGS alone are an incremental $1 billion, and that would be an incremental $90 million in annual royalty revenue to us. The drug is launching well in IgAN. The most recent sales in Q2 were $71 million, 165% growth year-over-year. there are two upcoming important catalysts. First, tomorrow we're anticipating a potential easing of the monitoring that's required for patients in the IgAN setting. Importantly, in January, we're expecting a potential decision on the approval in FSGS. Next up is Ohtuvayre. Ohtuvayre is a really exciting product. It was the first novel inhaled treatment for COPD in over 20 years. COPD is a really devastating disease. People are oftentimes bedridden and really unable to have anything that we would sort of deem a normal quality of life. These patients and pulmonologists have been waiting for many, many years for anything novel to offer these patients. It's launching now. Ohtuvayre has the strongest launch in COPD history. It was approved mid-last year. There are 8.5 million maintenance-treated COPD patients in the U.S. today, half of whom we estimate are still symptomatic despite maximal treatment. There are additional opportunities to expand to new indications for Ohtuvayre in non-CF bronchiectasis and then a fixed-dose combination and a handheld device with a LAMA. Consensus peak sales have been coming up. The drug has been launching really, really well, currently standing at around $3.5 billion, which would translate into around $100 million in annual royalty revenue for us at a 3% royalty. Recently, Merck announced it plans to acquire Ohtuvayre, a marketer of Verona Pharma, for $10 billion. Importantly, as I mentioned earlier, our royalty then transfers to Merck and continues on for the duration of the drug's life. The drug is also launching really well. Q2 sales are $103 million, up from $70 million in Q1. The acquisition by Merck is expected to close at the end of this year. Finally, I wanted to highlight one of our pipeline programs that we're excited about. This is Palvella's QTORIN rapamycin. It received FDA breakthrough therapy designation. If approved, it would be the first FDA-approved treatment for potentially two rare serious skin diseases: microcystic lymphatic malformations, where it's in phase III, and cutaneous venous malformations, where it's in phase II. Consensus sales across both of these indications are around $1.2 billion. We get a tiered 8% to 10% royalty rate, so that's around $150 million in royalty revenue to us. Palvella went public at the end of last year through a merger with Pieris Pharma. They raised an $80 million PIPE, and their stock's up around 340% year to date, last I checked, which is roughly a $540 million market cap. They're doing really well. We're excited about the phase II CVM readout, which we're expecting at the end of this year, and, importantly, the phase III readout early next year. As I mentioned earlier, we've deployed $400 million across 10 investments in the last year and a half. It really reflects the breadth and depth of our strategy in terms of royalty monetization, project finance, and special situations. I wanted to call your attention here to just one transaction in particular, Pelthos Therapeutics. We had an existing partnership with a predecessor company here, Novan Pharmaceuticals. They entered into bankruptcy proceedings while their drug was in registration with the FDA in late 2023. We acquired the asset out of bankruptcy for $12 million. We got the drug approved in January of last year, and then we spent around a year and a half incubating the business. We hired a top-notch, world-class commercial team around the asset, restarted the manufacturing process, and prepared it for launch. With a $50 million financing, we recently merged the Pelthos subsidiary into Channel Therapeutics, which now trades publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. Our equity interest in the company is around 50%, so our equity alone today is worth around $100 million. Plus, we received a $5 million launch milestone, and we retain a 13% royalty interest. It gives you an idea of some of these special situations investments that take a lot more time to execute and are a lot more complicated, but really an area where we can see some pretty outsized returns. We've already more than recovered our basis on that. In closing, our team's been really busy this year. We've reviewed a record-setting 100 investments in just the first half of this year. We have 25 that we're actively diligencing. Those span sort of pre-approval and commercial stage opportunities. We've closed four deals year to date. We expect to close probably another couple of deals before the end of the year to keep us on pace with that $150 million- $200 million or $250 million pace. We look forward to continued strength. With that, I will turn it over to Melanie. Thanks, Lauren. I'll walk through our most recent quarterly results and then I'll provide some details on our longer-term outlook as well. In the second quarter, total revenue grew 15% to $47.6 million. We revised our full-year revenue guidance up from a range of $180 million - $200 million, up to $200 million- $225 million. Our second quarter royalties were $36.4 million, a 57% increase over the same quarter of the prior year. Adjusted EPS grew 14% to $1.60 per share. We revised our full-year adjusted EPS guidance from a previous range of $6 - $6.25 per share up to $6.70 - $7 per share. We also ended with a strong balance sheet with $245 million of cash and investments. When you include our revolving credit facility, we had $450 million of deployable capital at the end of the quarter. Earlier in August, we also took advantage of the strong convertible debt market and executed a $460 million convert. We were really pleased with the pricing terms and received a 75-basis point coupon rate and a 32.5% conversion premium, which represented the best of both the coupon rate and conversion premium. We also structured the transaction to be net share settlement, which will further reduce dilution as we'll be repaying the principal amount in cash. In conjunction with the convert, we also executed a call spread for approximately 10% of the overall cost of the convert. We purchased an up 100% call spread, which will result in no dilution to the stock up to a price of $294 per share. Our stock is currently trading around $160 per share. Not only do these net proceeds bolster our balance sheet, but they are accretive to earnings and allow us to take advantage of our robust business development pipeline that Lauren spoke of earlier. I'd like to take a minute to talk about our track record of execution. In 2022, we went under a pretty major restructuring where we spun out our antibody business. We also brought in new CEO, Todd Davis. Since that time, we've been focused on our high-growth, high-margin business with low operating expenses. We've acquired accretive investments, and we've also had four products which were approved in 2024 alone. With these products being at the beginning of their launch trajectory, we expect this growth to continue well into the future. I touched a little bit on our revised financial guidance earlier, but I'd like to delve into a little more details here. The increase in guidance was really the result of two things. The first is outperformance of several products in our royalty portfolio, one of those being Verona 's Ohtuvayre. Another is Merck's Capvaxive, as well as several other products in our portfolio. We revised our royalty guidance up $10 million or 7%. In addition to that, we revised our contract revenue guidance by $15 million as a result of the out-license of ZELSUVMI and first commercial sale milestone. As Lauren mentioned earlier, Pelthos was spun out this year, merged with Channel Therapeutics, and is now publicly traded. Ligand owns about half of the common shares of that entity, which are valued over $100 million. Looking ahead to our long-term outlook, this is a slide that we put together and first presented at our 2024 Investor Day. We only update this on an annual basis, but we're still on track to meet or exceed a 22% CAGR over the next five years. Those bottom layers represent our commercial portfolio and represent about 13% growth over time. In addition to those commercial programs, our pharm team, which represents our late-stage development pipeline on a risk-adjusted basis, is expected to contribute to an additional 5% growth. In addition to that, future investments that we're able to make with cash flows that we generate, and we're currently generating about $150 million per year in operating cash flows, are expected to contribute an additional 4%. As I mentioned, we only update that slide on an annual basis at our Investor Day. I'd like to point out some positive developments that we've had since we initially presented that last year. The first is Ohtuvayre's increases in peak sales consensus estimates. Last year, when we put that slide out, peak sales consensus was around $1.2 billion for Ohtuvayre. Since then, analysts have been increasing their expectations, and it's now around $3.4 billion for Ohtuvayre. In the hands of Merck after the recent acquisition, it's expected that sales could be as high as $6 billion- $7 billion. In addition to that, FILSPARI, which is marketed by Travere, also has the potential to be approved in FSGS. FILSPARI is currently approved for IgA nephropathy, but is under FDA review for FSGS, for which there are currently no approved therapies. This is a huge opportunity for Ligand in the future if it is approved. That PDUFA date is in January of 2026. As a reminder, we do earn a 9% royalty on sales of FILSPARI. The last program I'd like to talk about is Palvella. Palvella has two programs in development, and estimates for peak sales for those two are a combined $1 billion. We receive a royalty of between 8% and 10% on those programs as well. Another big potential for us in the future. With that, I think we can open it up for Q&A. I don't really know the story. I'm just going to emphasize to question five. As a new investor, when we look at your peak sales per tenth or per tenth whole prong rate of royalties, how do we think about the flow through from revenue to EBITDA? Yeah, it's basically 100%, yeah, on the royalty side. We do have, you know, we didn't touch a lot on sales of Captisol, which is another line item that you'll see on our financials for material sales and then also contract revenue. Yeah, generally, that's right. Yes? How does it work when drugs go off patent? I'm sure you maintain your royalties. When there's competition in those markets, do you have any case studies where that's happened? Nothing really historical. The one that we're keeping an eye on right now is KYPROLIS. I'm just going to go back to this slide here. You'll see that darker gray line about three up from the bottom. You'll notice it's kind of shrinking, and that's because it is expected to have generic entry in 2027. Yes? There are about 15 biotech companies out there that are trading below the cash on the balance sheet. You can see a couple of different companies, including [SilverOil], are buying one every week for the past two months. They bought one last year at a significant discount. I think we have looked at that in the past. It's funny you say 50. I think at one point we looked at it. It was 187. It's getting a little better. I think that's something we have looked at in the past. It doesn't seem like a very great strategy from our perspective. For instance, some of the deals that we've seen XOMA do, you're getting very little cash and then not much else. Not really worth our time. Is that, Lauren? Yeah, we're always looking for companies that are trading below cash that have royalties, right? That's what we're interested in, like, OK, could we net out and even make a couple of million bucks just on the cash, but then effectively just get a couple of royalties for free? We have a constant screen that we're updating. We're certainly open to the idea, but nothing that has commanded our attention to really move forward at this point. I think that these come primarily from our investment banking relationships to bring down those stocks. We saw so far the best return on not only our capital, but our human capital resources, which is limited, is on the existing funnel, which is very robust. We will look at these opportunities to think for exploring the assets that reside in these organizations. If we think that they meet our criteria and there's a potential upside, we won't do it purely for the $2 million- $6 million that it might give because of the negative outlook. For others to guide me, an acquisition such as [Venera or Alphago] is actually going to be like beneficial for you because Merck has about a sales force. In this case, especially because it's not currently licensed in Europe. In this case, we think Merck will scale globally much faster than Verona would have been able to do, which for us, you know, when you're on a cycle of you get royalties for 10 years, that's what really matters. In your example, you said you guys looked at about 100 drugs, like 24. Is that correct? Yeah, we've reviewed 100 year to date in the first half, and then we're kind of in active diligence on around 25, about. Other than probably the ROIC profile, what keeps you from investing in the bulk of those? Is there a few underlying factors that keep you from moving forward with the ones that you don't? Yeah, I mean, some of the opportunities don't meet our investment criteria. So like an asset is not very clearly differentiated. We may not have strong conviction in the team that's developing it. We may not have great alignment with the counterparty. In this market environment in particular, we're really calling our pipeline with terms and just putting terms out to counterparties and saying, look, this is market right now. You know, we're busy. We can move forward with these terms or not, and sort of using that as another way to triage. Our team is relatively lean, so we have to kind of kill things quickly and move forward and kind of focus on the most promising opportunities. As you grow and get scale, how often are opportunities coming to you now on their own? It's probably, I would guess, maybe around 50/50 of inbound versus outbound. The inbound, you know, inherently tend to be a little bit more competitive than the outbound where we're going after inventors, like individual inventors at a university, right, and talking to them about estate planning. Maybe they have philanthropic motivations and stuff like that. Those are very unique and sort of high-touch outbound opportunities for us, as opposed to a deal that comes into us that's brokered by a bank and you know going to have multiple. We prefer the outbound origination. All right. Thanks, everyone.