CEO, Evogene
Evogene Company Presentation June 2024_ By Ofer Haviv
Evogene Company Presentation June 2024, by Ofer Haviv, President & CEO.
About Ofer Haviv
Ofer Haviv, President and CEO of Evogene, described the company's business strategy and recent developments in a June 2024 company presentation. He stated that Evogene is a publicly traded company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Haviv outlined the company's focus on developing life science products based on microbes, small molecules, and genetic elements, using three AI technology engines. He explained that Evogene's business strategy involves forming partnerships through licensing or collaboration with domain-specific companies to develop novel products while reducing financial and development risk. Haviv highlighted a success story involving Evogene's subsidiary, Ctera, which entered into a frame supply agreement with Eni, a major global oil and gas producer, in early 2023. Following this agreement, Ctera received purchase orders for its elite seed varieties totaling over 11 million, expected to be supplied by the end of 2024. In a 2021 interview, Haviv discussed the company's shift in business model starting in 2015, moving from helping partners develop products to developing products internally and spinning out scientist teams into separate legal entities. He also noted that Biomica, another subsidiary, identified four gut microbes (BMC128) that improved the efficacy of PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors in mouse cancer models, with plans to initiate a first-in-human clinical study.
Transcript (17 segments)
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Ofer Haviv0:04
Hello and good day everyone. My name is Ofer Haviv and I serve as Evogene President and CEO. I am pleased to present to you our company and its unique value proposition. Evogene is a publicly traded company both in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. This presentation contains forward-looking statements relating to future events based on our current expectations and estimations, and actual results may differ from those forward-looking statements. I will start the presentation with a brief overview of Evogene, continue with presenting our unique value proposition and business strategy, followed by two success stories. I will end with a short summary.
Since the dawn of history, humans have been on a journey of improving life quality. The desire for progress and a better future is the engine of innovation. In our vision, we see Evogene as a pioneer company for creating groundbreaking life science products rooted in microbes, small molecules, and genomics to improve the quality of life. Why did we choose to focus on life science-based products, and specifically on products based on microbes, small molecules, and genetic elements? Because their contribution to society and their business potential is enormous. The potential varieties of products in those areas open a wide range of markets and industries for us, from pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food, and diagnostics to renewable energy, wellness, and environmental conservation. An ecosystem of life science-based products.
But as great as the potential, so is the challenge. Developing these products is complex and even gets more complicated over time. In the last decades, the time invested and the resources required to develop a life science-based product keep increasing, and most challenging is the low probability of reaching a novel product. The question arises: why is this the case? What is the main cause of the challenge? The biggest challenge in developing life science-based products is finding the candidates that meet a long list of required criteria from a huge quantity of potential candidates, like finding a needle in a haystack. It is mainly the beginning of the product development process in the discovery and optimization phases.
In recent years, we have witnessed a transformation in our ability to develop new products, an ability created by the computational revolution. The computing capabilities at our disposal today allow super-fast processing and analysis of huge amounts of information. It allowed the development of tools and methods that speed up research and product development processes. We believe that now is the time for life science industries to benefit from this revolution. This is exactly what Evogene is focusing on. Our mission is to leverage deep understanding of life science with dedicated big data sets and cutting-edge computational technologies to address the discovery and optimization challenges and drive product innovation, securing our position as a leader in developing life science-based products that advance humanity's future.
Before moving to the next part, I would like to present in the following two slides key highlights of Evogene. Evogene is an Israeli company founded in 2002 and, as mentioned, it is traded in NASDAQ and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. It employs 135 employees, over a quarter of them hold a PhD degree in life science, and 50% are women. Evogene offers three innovative AI tech engines for the development of products based on microbes, small molecules, and genetic elements. We have four subsidiaries which use Evogene's technology to develop products in various life science fields. Presently, two of our subsidiaries already have commercial products: Lavie Bio's Yalos, a biological product for yield improvement in specific field crops, and CTEra with elite castor varieties for oil production, mainly for the alternative fuel industry.
I would like to emphasize how proud I am of the achievements of Evogene and its subsidiaries to date, reflected by a growing list of commercial and financial partners that the Evogene group is engaged with. Having Bayer, Corteva, ENI, ICL, and Syngenta as business partners is a clear testimony to the important contribution of our technology to the life science-based industries.
I will now continue with our offering and value proposition. With an investment of tens of millions of dollars and over a decade of intense work, Evogene has created a groundbreaking platform called Computational Predictive Biology, the CPB platform, which integrates profound scientific knowledge with public and proprietary big data and AI technologies. Based on this platform, during the past years, Evogene developed three innovative AI tech engines addressing the main development challenges of three product categories: MicroBoost AI directs and accelerates the development of microbe-based products, ChemPass AI for small molecule-based products, and Gene2Product AI for products based on genetic elements.
The value proposition of our AI-driven tech engines stems from the efficient finding and optimization of the most promising candidates, therefore increasing the probability of successfully reaching a breakthrough product within a competitive time frame and in a cost-efficient manner. More specifically, the discovery phase consists of computationally selecting the most promising candidates to initiate the product development process. The optimization phase provides computational-driven solutions addressing optimization challenges for the selected candidates without impeding their ability to address various other product attributes.
This slide shows a screenshot of the MicroBoost AI tech engine dashboard. Building the engine user interface, our goal was to make it as friendly and as flexible as possible, providing valuable application for the researcher. Each AI tech engine has been designed to be at the core of the development of a wide variety of products and not just one specific product. This way, around each tech engine, an ecosystem of life science products can be efficiently developed.
Moving on to Evogene's business strategy. As stated, our three AI tech engines were structured to be compatible with the tremendous potential of various market segments. These slides demonstrate the varieties of markets that can benefit from our technology. In order to capture the value of our offering, our business strategy is to establish diverse collaborative partnerships for life science product development. The partners we collaborate with are experts in specific fields that complement our technology. We adopt this approach to maximize the potential of our tech engines while reducing financial and development risk. Therefore, we form partnerships through licensing or collaborations with companies possessing domain-specific knowledge. Together, we will develop novel products aiming for full or partial ownership upon project completion. We believe this strategy holds the potential for groundbreaking innovations and significant financial gains for Evogene.
To implement this strategy, we apply two main partnership structures. The first is through a license agreement. In this case, Evogene grants a time-limited license to use one of its technology engines in a defined commercial field to a third party. This type of agreement will usually be signed with a company in which Evogene holds partial or entire ownership, such as a subsidiary. The second structure is in the form of a collaboration with a leading company, in which Evogene uses its unique engines for earlier stages of discovery and optimization, and the partner leads later stages of product development and commercialization.
The expected revenue streams in the licensing model are license fee and R&D reimbursement, royalty from sales of end products, dividends to Evogene as a shareholder, and significant one-time payment upon an exit event. The expected revenue streams in the collaborations model are upfront payment, R&D fees, milestone payments, and royalties from sales of end products. These two models, licensing and collaborations, are already implemented. At present, Evogene has engaged in licensing agreements with its four subsidiaries: Biomica, Lavie Bio, AgPlenus, and CTEra, and with a related party, Finally Foods. In addition, Evogene entered into four collaboration agreements in areas not covered by our subsidiaries. These activities are already generating revenue streams for Evogene, as reflected in our financial statements.
I will now share with you two success stories of products that reached the market which were developed using Evogene's technology. The first success story I would like to present is of Yalos, a bio-inoculant developed by our subsidiary Lavie Bio through the use of the MicroBoost AI tech engine. Lavie Bio's mission is to develop biological products based on microbes. The ag-biological market has been growing rapidly in recent years, but its challenges in developing breakthrough products are significant. Lavie Bio has built a technological platform powered by Evogene's MicroBoost AI tech engine to deal with the complex challenges of selecting the right microbe or microbes combinations from the billions of existing candidates that address the required criteria for a commercial product. Using the platform, Lavie Bio established a diverse pipeline of products, and currently two products are in advanced stages of commercialization: Yalos, a product for yield improvement in field crops sold in the US for a second year and this year in Israel, and LAB 311, a biofungicide licensed to Corteva for global commercialization. I am happy to point out that Lavie Bio's shareholders also include Corteva and ICL, who invested in the company and are in collaboration with it.
Returning to Yalos, the product is already providing farmers with real financial and sustainability benefits, showing higher performance compared to other alternatives in the market. At present, Yalos is available for spring wheat, durum, and barley growers and is expected to be available for additional crops in the coming year, significantly expanding its market potential. Illustrated here is the development process of Yalos, which shows the contribution of our technology in the discovery and optimization phases. In the discovery phase, we screened specific high-potential microbes from hundreds of thousands of candidates and selected them based on their genomic functionality with a success rate of 5%. Currently, in Lavie Bio's new programs, our efforts reach an impressive 10 to 20% success rate. In the optimization phase, the technology enables us to identify the genomic functions that have the potential to be optimized in order to upgrade the product. We can then run various optimization practices to achieve a superior product.
The second success story is of the elite castor seeds developed by CTEra through the use of Evogene's Gene2Product AI tech engine. CTEra, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Evogene, aims to provide an integrated solution for the industrial cultivation of castor, mainly for the bio-based industries and more specifically for the biofuel market. Its offering consists of elite varieties suited for mechanized farming practices as well as agricultural protocols. The alternative energy market, which seeks sustainable energy sources, is a fast-growing and attention-receiving sector in the global economy. CTEra oil provides an alternative to fossil oil, not competing with edible plant oil. Until recently, castor growers were using traditional practices in castor cultivation, such as hand-picking harvest. In order to support the growing demands needed for the biofuel industry, an adoption of commercial-scale cultivation is required, such as mechanized harvesting and seed varieties suitable for such harvesting. The development of such advanced varieties using common classical breeding takes a long time. This is specifically the challenge CTEra solved using Evogene's technology, directing and speeding the breeding process.
We were very proud when, in early 2023, CTEra entered into a framework supply agreement with ENI, a major global oil and gas producer. Following the framework agreement, CTEra received purchase orders for its elite seed varieties totaling over 11 million, which are expected to be supplied by the end of 2024. This slide illustrates the development process of CTEra's elite seed varieties, presenting an accelerated and speedy process utilizing Evogene's Gene2Product AI tech engine. It saved time, money, and increased the product probability to be commercially successful. Currently, CTEra has three commercial seed varieties in the market. It continuously develops brand new proprietary varieties of elite castor seeds suitable for specialized purposes.
We are nearing the end of this presentation, and to summarize its main takeaways: Evogene is a pioneer in developing groundbreaking life science products based on microbes, small molecules, and genetic elements by merging scientific expertise with AI and big data. We built three AI tech engines powering these product development efforts. Evogene maximizes its technology potential and minimizes risk by employing a business strategy of partnering with experts in specific fields that complement our technology, either through licensing or collaboration agreements. At present, the Evogene group has several commercial products already in the market and numerous commercial and financial partnerships with world-leading companies. I would like to end my presentation with the following statement: we are committed to continuously expanding our activity and contribution to the life science industries. I would like to thank you for your time and attention. Thank you.