ImmunoPrecise Antibodies Ltd. (IPA) CEO Jennifer Bath on Q4 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

ImmunoPrecise Antibodies Ltd. (NASDAQ:IPA) Q4 2021 Earnings Conference Call July 28, 2021 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

John Mullaly - LifeSci Advisors

Jennifer Bath - President & Chief Executive Officer

Lisa Helbling - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Operator

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and thank you for standing by. Welcome to ImmunoPrecise Antibodies Financial Results and Business Highlights Earnings Call for the Full Fiscal Year 2021. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will answer pre-submitted questions. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded today, Wednesday, July 28, 2021, at 4:30 P.M. Eastern Time.

I will now turn the call over to John. John, please go ahead.

John Mullaly

Thank you and welcome. Dr. Jennifer Bath, President and Chief Executive Officer of ImmunoPrecise Antibodies and Ms. Lisa Helbling, Chief Financial Officer will be the speakers on today's call. A Q&A period answering pre-submitted questions will follow their earnings report followed by closing remarks.

Before Dr. Bath begins, I have been asked by ImmunoPrecise Antibodies to read the following Safe Harbor regarding forward-looking statements. I would like to remind everyone that ImmunoPrecise's remarks today contain forward-looking statements about its current and future plans, expectations, and intentions, results, levels of activity, performance, goals, or achievements, or other future events or developments.

In preparing these forward-looking statements, several assumptions were made by ImmunoPrecise and there are risks that results actually obtained by the company will differ materially from those statements. As a consequence, the company cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will materialize and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on them.

ImmunoPrecise refers current and potential investors to the forward-looking Information section or its management discussion and analysis issued today at www.sedar.com and on EDGAR at www.sec.gov.

Forward-looking statements represent ImmunoPrecise's expectations as of July 28, 2021. Except as may be required by securities laws. ImmunoPrecise does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

I would now like to turn the conference call over to Dr. Bath.

Jennifer Bath

Great. Thank you, John and good afternoon, everyone. I offer a warm welcome and I thank you for participating in IPA's inaugural annual earnings call today. We're excited to be on this call, which is another major step forward in the accelerated evolution of IPA's identity, which has solidified in the last couple of years.

Before we begin with routine updates, I would like to take a step back and provide some runway, so everyone on the call can get a sense of where we've been, what we have accomplished, and what our future goals are.

So, for those who are joining, who I may not have had the pleasure to meet, my name is Dr. Jennifer Bath. I am the President and CEO of ImmunoPrecise Antibodies. I joined IPA about three and a half years ago. My formal training is in cellular and molecular biology with an emphasis on immunology and infectious disease.

I spent the science part of my professional career in the discovery, development, formulation, and also preclinical testing of therapeutic antibodies and vaccines. I also have about 15 years of management experience including a decade working in the CRL, CMO, and CDMO industry space that stands for contract research, contract manufacturing, and contract development and manufacturing organization. And the latter of which represents clinical manufacturing primarily.

During my 20 years of experience in biotechnology, I have performed key roles in strategic planning and execution, business operations, and value creation. Prior to IPA, I served on the Executive team on Aldevron, which is a world leading CDMO, headquartered in Fargo, North Dakota and who was also in the midst of being acquired by Danaher.

During my career working closely with management across pharma and biotech, it became incredibly evident that one of the most significant pain points in the generation of new therapies to treat diseases was the lack of effective and efficient technologies that contract research organizations.

Most products fail during R&D. And all too often those that advanced to the clinic failed in the clinic for reasons that may have been avoided had a properly diverse pool of candidates and identified and had comprehensive analytics that applied.

In response, while pharma companies on boarded additional organizations to find more effective solutions to these problems, the burden of excessive vendors pushed former management toward contract vendor consolidation, compounding the industry's challenges.

Now transforming industry paradigms is obviously no small task. And I came to ImmunoPrecise in February of 2018 because like myself, IPA believed the market transformation was not only necessary, but that was the right leadership, the right vision and personnel, it was achievable. Our employees at IPA have executed on that mission everyday for the past 3.5 years and have placed IPA on what can only be described as a remarkable and transformational journey.

Over my tenure, IPA has been nothing, but successful in our execution, and in living up to the corporate objectives to disrupt the traditional multi vendor drug discovery model, like simultaneously modernizing the antibody industry, lead candidate selection and downstream development processes using our aggregate technology platform.

We have continued IPA strong growth trajectory with an ongoing commitment to building and improving technologies, assets and IP not only as a CRL, but also using the same discovery engines to drive value creation through the development of novel therapies designed to treat a wide range of diseases.

Since taking over as CEO, my commitment to IPS clients, to our investors, to our board and to myself, has been to execute against this mission and elevate IPA to new levels. If you look at the company's operational and financial performance IPA has delivered against this commitment in 2021 and continues to expand a solid, its solid runway, which will position the company for further growth.

We closely monitor -- strategically assess the biologics discovery landscape, we aren't afraid to push the boundaries of technological innovation. We stand behind our commitment to scientific rigor, and our clients trust in the integrity of our word, and our amazing scientists. Our recipe works, and we believe it is the foundation for our continued success in the many years to come.

As you can tell, I'm obviously really proud of all that IPA has accomplished. And I'd like to acknowledge the tireless and ambitious efforts of all of IPAs employees. Without our outstanding team, we would not be in our strong position today.

And if you were to ask me just exactly where we are today compared to 3.5 years ago, I would say that we are fundamentally stronger. We possess an expanded recurring revenue base and have an even broader array of biologics discovery capabilities and cutting edge technologies that can be used to deliver traditional and or alternative antibody formats targeting any protein class and any disease class.

Our efforts have propelled IPA into the spotlight, becoming a vendor of choice, delivering end-to-end services for pharma and biotechnology companies with the capability to produce well characterized, functional, therapeutic lead candidates in a fraction of the time as compared to traditional methods.

In fact, our success is underpinned by new technologies that support an ever growing number of our clients building meaningful therapeutics pipeline. Technologies, such as the launch of our DeepDisplay platform in 2019, which is a combination of a transgenic animal immunization with phage display antibody selection, similar to our established B cell platform, our custom libraries also enable the development of antibodies from any species and delivery of multiple antibody formats, including traditional antibodies camelid or VHH antibodies and scFv.

Importantly, we are leveraging these experiences and we're using them to continually improve our technologies and our know-how, as we invest in our pipeline of fully owned assets. This two pronged approach has been our core focus in the last two years. And we have achieved these goals through investments in R&D and acquisitions, as well as developing in-house capabilities that are now proprietary to IPA.

We believe the best is yet to come. Fiscal year 2021 has certainly been an amazing year for ImmunoPrecise. We've tailored the company around the industry's current and future needs, subsequently providing long-term value creation, which not only benefits our clients, but our shareholders as well.

To this point, a major step forward in unlocking long-term shareholder value has been IPA successful dual listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange at the end of the calendar year 2020. In furthering IPA’s corporate development, the NASDAQ global markets listing has allowed IPA to successfully diversify its shareholder base with both long-term retail and strategic institutional investors, from not just the US, but across the globe.

Following on the back of our successful dual listing, IPA also closed a public offering raising gross proceeds of US$25 million. The financing which closed in February of this year strengthens our balance sheet, creating further runway to achieve our strategic goals including growing our presence in the CRO space, as well as ensuring a steady flow of internal candidates through functional and preclinical analysis towards potential out-licensing and in return the continued launch of novel programs.

We've enjoyed beginning to highlight details of some of the Talem assets with our investors, as programs mature and generate shareable portfolios. We recently highlighted TATX-112 a potent, a potential first-in-class antibody therapy for oncology and neurodegenerative diseases. TATX-112 is a diverse panel of candidate antibodies of different formats, with unique subsets of antibodies targeting cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

We intend to finalize the in vitro non-clinical functional characterization in Q3 of this calendar year to be followed by in vivo tumor model proof-of-concept work later this year. We also announced TATX-21, the potential first-in-class, best-in-class antibody for cardiovascular disease by developing antibodies that block the uptake of LDL, the company aims to target the large cardiovascular disease market.

We are currently preparing for functional testing to determine whether in the laboratory we're able to prevent the transcytosis of LDL which leads to plaque formation in the arteries. We're anxious to continue unveiling more exciting milestones, as various assets begin to reach maturity in the Talem lifecycle.

One such program is the TATX-115. And actually, forever who's controlling the slides, if you want to just keep that control with me and I'll manage them. That's perfect. Thank you. The TATX-115 target has the potential to be a powerful immuno-oncology targets via two different mechanisms of action and as such, we focused on identifying and nominating two very distinct classes of lead candidates that are currently under further development. More importantly, IPA has 100% ownership of these assets, including mono therapies and cocktail therapies across multiple disease indications.

We've been advancing our COVID program as a means of potentially addressing all current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. And we're excited about our cocktail therapy, which has been shown to have 100% efficacy in a well-established SARS-CoV-2 animal model, in both the treatment of and the protection of SARS-CoV-2 infection, holding off to all tested variants of interest, including the Eta, Iota, and Kappa variants, as well as variants of concern including the alpha, beta, gamma and delta variants, as revealed by in vitro non-clinical screening.

Our strategy enabled us to rationally design a sustained efficacious antibody cocktail and our platform has been designed to enable rapid prediction for reformulation should it be required. Our work to date, including our most recent variants of concerns have been published in a scientific paper entitled cornering an ever evolving Coronavirus TATX-03, a fully human synergistic multi-antibody cocktail targeting the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein with in vivo efficacy and that is available on bio archive.

IPA is committed to continuously outreach to the investment community to get our message out for this we continue to be grateful for the investor support that we have received over the past year which enabled IPA to reach this stage of our corporate development. We remain focused on broadening the awareness of IPA with institutional investors and with financial markets globally. Strategically, my industry experience has played a pivotal role in why I remain so excited about IPAs future. Most importantly, the experiences garnered with CROs and with large pharma have informed me as to the direction that IPA needs to move toward in order to advance beyond the functional role of a traditional CRO.

Our CRO services are at the core of our business model. In 2017, the company unveiled a therapeutically optimized B cell platform to engage and onboard therapeutic development focused partners, addressing a market with significantly higher value and revenue potential. This key pivot led to a shift in our client distribution from a past majority of diagnostic companies and research institutions to 68% of fiscal year 2021 Discovery program being conducted for therapeutic clients. Our retention of onboard of therapeutic companies remains impressive, making our revenues extremely sticky. As a result, we've enjoyed a CAGR of 28% since 2019.

On a related note, our B cell technology is the most frequently requested discovery offering and continues to grow in popularity. This is in part due to the relatively quick workflow we have implemented for identifying antibodies with preferred characteristics, which includes rapid prime immunization, various early stage high throughput characterization capabilities, and single b cell sequencing expertise. We expect this to continue due to the broadly applicable character of this antibody discovery platform. So its use is not limited to certain species or target types.

As we move forward with our business strategy and then industry experiencing massive consolidation, we are very well positioned to be one of the consolidators of other CROs as well. To this effect, we've already acquired and successfully integrated several companies and technologies, since our own launch as a publicly listed company. If you have not done so already, we encourage everyone on the call to review our company filings available on SEDAR and sec.gov.

In the interest of time, I won't be able to cover all of IPAs achievements, but just to highlight fiscal 2021 achievements or not – we won't be able to cover all of the highlights in fiscal year 2021. But I do want to cover some of the most important accomplishments that we believe will help ensure the company's future success. We continue to build out on our global infrastructure. And in fiscal year 2021, we completed the global rollout of IPAs, ERP and CRM system.

We are advancing our partnership and have previously announced deals with Twist Bioscience's, Zymeworks and Life X during the fiscal year to name a few. We've also advanced our technology stack, including the release of the second generation B cell select platform, increasing automation of its selection technology and subsequent single cell cloning.

Furthermore, in developing IP that will propel our space, both in efficiency and innovation. We have formed a research partnership with Mila, a world renowned Research Institute dedicated to artificial intelligence development and focused on deep learning optimization for AI and machine learning language. The partnership provides us with access to World Class specialists not just at Mila, but across the globe. We use these connections to hire, an experienced deep learning specialists in our recently established CoVAX subsidiary, as well as a protein engineer who has in depth knowledge of immune repertoire in silico design and in-vitro antibody selection. His publication work and book chapters have been cited more than 4,000 times.

Furthering our deep learning efforts, we are optimizing our next-generation sequencing pipeline and evaluating in depth analyses and prediction tools for their integration into IPA’s platform, while using IPA and innovative in silico approaches to enhance IPA's computer aided antibody discovery and optimization.

We've also shored up our financial strategies and have had – have completed the final deferred payments and profit sharing payments for prior acquisition, which is a good segue into turning this call over to Lisa to discuss IPAs fiscal 2021 financial results, Lisa?

Lisa Helbling

Thank you, Jennifer, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Lisa Helbling. I'm IPAs, CFO. And unless otherwise noted, all numbers referred to in this presentation are in Canadian dollars. The company achieved revenues of $17.9 million during the fiscal year 2021 compared to $14.1 million in 2020. A $3.9 million, or 27% increase another record high.

The company's CRO business increased $2.7 million or 19%. And we recorded a sale through Talem of internally generated therapeutic antibodies for $1.2 million. As Jennifer noted Talem and the assets in its portfolio are an important part of IPA strategy. And this transaction mark Talem's first notable sale. The company's CRO business continues to grow both in the number of projects and the financial side, as Jennifer mentioned, due to our expanding breadth of services and the technologies offered we're attracting new partners and retaining our existing business partners.

The company's gross profit was $11.5 million with a 64% gross profit margin compared to $8.8 million and a 57% profit margin in 2020, a $3.5 million increase. This increase is due in part to the Talem antibodies sale. The cost associated with developing these antibodies were expensed research and development in prior years. so the sale had a 100% profit margin.

Accounting rules generally do not allow a company capitalize these types of research and development costs. The company’s operating expenses for the fiscal year were $19.1 million compared to $12.6 million in 2020, an increase of $6.5 million. The report expenses that primarily make up the increase. As you know, the company became dual listed in NASDAQ in December of 2020, the cost associated with uplifting were approximately $1.8 million.

These costs are spread across many expense categories, such as office and general, professional fees and insurance and includes expenses such as our advisors, our directors and officers insurance and filing fees. The company invested $2 million in research compared to $400,000 in 2020 for COVID-19 and other research projects. Salaries and benefits increased $1 million due to an increase in headcount, merit pay increases, incentive compensation and providing Directors with cash compensation.

Share based payments increased $2 million. Stock options are awarded to employees and certain advisors to align their interests with the goals of the company and shareholders. Stock options are expensed over the vesting period. In our other income and expense category. I mentioned that the company had invested $2 million in research and development, while the company also recorded $1.9 million in grants to support its research efforts. In addition, the company received subsidies of $844,000 from Canadian and US government’s COVID related programs to retain employees and to subsidize rent.

One last thing off note in the other income and expense -- spend section, the company recorded $1.1 million in unrealized foreign exchange losses due to cash held in the US dollars from our capital raise. This is an unrealized loss and its non-cash. The company recorded a net loss of $7.3 million for the year compared to $5 million in 2020. The increased loss can be summarized as a result of our higher gross profit and grant and subsidy income offset by the NASDAQ uplift costs in our investments in research and development, higher salaries and benefits and share based payments.

Before I touch upon adjusted EBITDA, I must caution the investor that adjusted EBITDA is a non-IRS measure, do not place undue reliance on adjusted EBITDA. I urge you to read all of the IFRS accounting disclosures presented in our consolidated financial statements for the year ended August 30th, 2021 and 2020. Adjusted EBITDA is management's view of our operating earnings.

For the year ended 2021, the company's adjusted EBITDA was $2.3 million compared to $52000 in 2020. The significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA is primarily the result of our increased gross profits. The awards of government research grants and subsidies related to COVID-19, partially offset by our higher research costs, our salaries and benefits, and expenses related to NASDAQ uplist.

I will touch briefly on the company's quarterly results. The themes for the quarter are very similar to IPS fiscal year 2021. The company achieved its highest quarterly revenues during fourth quarter of $4.9 million, continuing the upward trend over the past eight quarters. This revenue growth is primarily from the company’s CRO business, which is noted before is due to our expanded service offerings, resulting in an increase in the number and size of projects.

The company achieved gross profits of 2.8 million compared to 1.9 million in 2020, an increase of over $800,000. The company's gross margin was 57% in the fourth quarter compared to 47% in the prior year. The increase in gross profit is a result of historical year-end accounting entries to allocate overhead expenses to cost of sales.

With the implementation of the new ERP system, overhead allocations are now being done monthly and we anticipate seeing a more consistent growth profit in the future. Regarding the quarterly operating expenses, other income and expenses and losses, the Q4 noteworthy comments are very similar to what we had on an annual basis. So, I will not take time here to review those, but I'll refer you to the MD&A.

However, the company received an investor -- or couple of investor questions related to Q3, and that's the period ended January 31. The questions were what happened in Q3 causing a depth in the CRO revenue. And with the company’s focused on talent, why was there so -- why was there no research and development expense recorded in Q3.

Two years ago, the company began a major effort to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning system to support management in the board in exercising their oversight across the company. The ERP system is comprehensive supporting a wide range of activities, such as customer relationship management, tracking of our pipeline, and of course, accounting and financial reporting.

The ERP system was implemented May 1, 2020. So while the system was used across the company in 2021, the final implementation steps were complicated by travel restrictions due to COVID-19 in addition to the system, the company implemented new processes and procedures, and transition most of the accounting and financial reporting to its shared service centre here in Fargo, North Dakota.

At the same time, the three labs began doing significant intercompany research and development projects for talent. For consolidated financial reporting, all intercompany transactions must be eliminated. During Q1 and Q2 of fiscal 21, the company miscalculated the intercompany eliminations, which was corrected in the third quarter.

The pro forma effect of the corrections can be found in the MD&A. The impact to our public financial statements was immaterial overstatement of revenue in Q1 and Q2, but a noticeable understatement in Q3. The correction also impacted gross profit and our research and development expense, as all of the intercompany profits need to be removed from research and development expense.

So, for those of you that have a visual, you can see on the chart, the impact of the actually reported revenue and the pro forma. And for those without a visual, the pro forma is showing an upward slope line in the pro forma versus a slight dip in Q3, as reported.

I would be remiss, if I didn't touch on IPAs balance sheet. At a very high level, you will note that IPA liabilities have been reduced by approximately $2 million. During the year and subsequent to the year-end, the company satisfied all its deferred acquisition obligations.

On the asset side of the balance sheet, the company increased its assets by approximately $40 million. As of April 30, 2021, the company held $41.8 million, as compared to $2.7 million, as of April 30, 2020. We have working capital of $42.8 million. The increase in cash is primarily due to the public offering of the company stock and proceeds from the exercise of warrants and stock options.

From my finance perspective, during the fiscal year 2021, IPA has many accomplishments. The company earned $17.9 million in revenue, another record high from its growth in the CRO business, plus recording our first notable sale through Talem. The company continued to invest in its future through research and development, and it’s people, both of which are needed to support our strategies.

The company achieved a major milestone with its NASDAQ uplift and a capital raise that growth proceeds at US$25 million. The company completed the third and final deferred acquisition obligations for past two acquisitions. And the company completed its significant ERP system implementation with as many benefits for the board, management, investors and employees across the companies.

The benefits have yet to be fully realized but from my perspective, we've already realized improved visibility and financial reporting.

And with that, I will turn the call back over to John and Jennifer to address some questions-and-answers.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

A - John Mullaly

Thank you, Lisa. Before Jennifer adds any closing remarks, I'd like to spend a little time asking some questions that were received from both analysts and investors. So the first question reads as follows. Can you please provide us with an update on any GMP manufacturing plants?

Jennifer Bath

Sure. Thanks, John. So earlier this year, we launched a campaign to – was actually significantly early in fiscal year 2021 to design a cGMP certified CHO based protein manufacturing facility. This was to meet the downstream needs of our clients. And I think we discussed this several times in our written MD&A and articulating our strategies for the future.

And when we recognize that GMP manufacturing was obviously a natural extension of our workflow, and also a very high profit margin area and very compatible, not only with our current offerings but also with the expertise of our management team. We completed an in depth engineering study and budgets, and we began working with investment groups.

Then, really interesting phenomenon occurred in the CDMO and therapeutics market. After years of uncertainty and hurdles around regulatory approval for the use of messenger RNA as a direct injectable in patients, so rapid approval during the pandemic regulatory landscape led to a broad acceptance of RNA in a clinical setting, which generally had otherwise, previously faced regulatory delays, and in the eyes of some still lacked sufficient safety and toxicity data.

This is and was an unprecedented change in the landscape for the manufacturing of clinical products. In a market where downstream applications, such as DNA and RNA vaccines and therapies, cell and gene therapy, gene editing, and viral vector production are all converging. And almost overnight transformation of the industry changed the way that researchers and physicians look at vaccine and therapeutic drug administration. This has led to a paradigm shift, in how we approach clinical manufacturing of these products, and also led to the rapid acquisition of nucleic acids CDMO leaders in the field, such as AbCellera and also recently Lake Pharma.

This is in part due not only to the strong forecasted DNA and RNA based therapeutic and vaccine markets, but a global strain also on capacity. So in true fashion, despite the work we put into protein based manufacturing, ImmunoPrecise pivoted rapidly. We engaged engineers, specialists, investment groups and industry leaders to help position our plan for the future of therapeutics and vaccines.

For the past many months, we've employed a well known respected expert on the design of a 6,204 square meter in-house, high capacity manufacturing facility, capable of processing 50 CGMP batches of plasma DNA per year. DNA can be used in many applications such as the delivery of therapeutics and vaccines, in a fraction of the time, when utilizing protein, gene therapies, cell based therapies and viral vector production, and it's also the starting material for in-vitro messenger RNA production.

The facility design, include the dedicated messenger RNA manufacturing suite for RNA based therapeutics and vaccine development. We've completed the engineering plans and the budget and we're in the process of applying for regional and federal funding, which if received, we expect with catalyze our plans into action this fiscal year.

John Mullaly

Thanks, Jennifer. I'll proceed to the next question, is as follows. Has there been any progression towards a commercialized vaccine with the light backs partnership? Can you provide any further updates?

Jennifer Bath

Yes, yes, we can. There has been progress there. And we're happy to share this because we do consider this a non material update. Quite recently, we were informed that TRANSVAC2, the EU vaccine and R&D infrastructure approved after many months of analysis to determine recipients to award a second round of funding to ImmunoPrecise in LiteVax. The funds cover the further evaluation for the potential of our SARS-CoV-2 low single dose vaccine candidates. This will include an immunogenicity study in swine using a slightly fine tuned version of the vaccine to enhance functional immunogenicity and also reduce mutagenic escapes. In the event that that data further indicates the induction of functional immunogenicity, trends back to has also committed to funding a follow on vaccination challenge study in Syrian hamsters to accelerate proof of concept to support further development.

John Mullaly

Thanks, Jennifer. The next question reads as follows. Do you think there's still a large opportunity for therapeutic antibodies in the broader COVID treatment landscape?

Jennifer Bath

Yeah, so we get this question a lot. And resoundingly, my answer is, yes. Absolutely. We feel very comfortable in saying that the scientific community in general, and the experts that were in communication work with and work with, believe it will take more than a vaccine to gain an edge against COVID. As vaccine immune responses, as many of you know, they are largely variable, some individuals are ineligible to receive them. We're witnessing breakthrough cases more frequently than previously, which are speculated to rise due to the reduced efficacy of the vaccine against variants. And there are highly impacted countries, which also tend to be the ones that see higher rates of variants spread and lower vaccine distribution. It's unfortunately a perfect storm that in some ways may perpetuate itself.

Many now call into question, the eventual herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2 in particular. As of May 2021, the availability of therapeutics for affected patients was still limited, with so far only one product remdesivir, not a therapeutic, authorized for emergency use.

The main reason for that is the antibodies that had been authorized for use did not stand up to the variants that emerged. So in response to your question, yes, we believe there is not only still a need for a sustainable antibody therapeutic, but that given the current trajectory of the disease and higher infectivity of variants, compounded by the lack of availability of vaccines in certain regions, and the knowledge that vaccines are losing efficacy, we think the need is greater than ever.

For those of you who are not familiar with how our TATX-03 therapy was designed specifically to address SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and remain sustainable during variant emergence, please refer to the reference materials on our website or our recent publication as previously mentioned.

John Mullaly

Thanks, Jennifer. I'll read the next question. It reads as follows. What is the status of the PolyTope program for outlicensing, funding and potential clinical trial work at IPA?

Jennifer Bath

All Right. So a lot of information here, there’s kind of a lot of multiple parts of this question. But in the past year, we've built, first and foremost, an exceptional team, consisting of clinical study experts, actually several, CMC and regulatory consultants, clinical consultants, a strategic advisory board and also KOLs.

And these individuals have worked closely with our Chief Scientific Officer to lay out our SARS-CoV-2 clinical roadmap, while taking into account ongoing discussions with prospective partners, including partners that have their own clinical manufacturing facilities.

We continuously clean the path, moving TATX-03 toward the clinic, reserving optionality for partners and IPA. Clinical development of this product includes planned upcoming pharmacokinetic and toxicology studies to reveal the safety profile that we expect to be available to us in Q4. But please keep in mind that we cannot control the timing of outsourced work entirely. This work can be conducted in parallel with clinical manufacturing, if we do elect to do so.

If the program does move forward to the clinic, we have worked on a potential combined Phase 1 and 2 clinical trial design, intended to determine the safety and efficacy with respect to transmission prevention and also the reduction of disease in humans. These guidelines may be used by IPA or by prospective partners of IPA if that program is out licensed.

John Mullaly

Thanks, Jennifer. Next question. Are there any acquisition targets in sight? If so, what sort of technologies or space is IPA looking at?

Jennifer Bath

Yes, thanks. That's another question that we get fairly frequently and it's a great topic. Unfortunately, we do not believe we can discuss the type of technology or expertise, as our market is, what we would call, a big-little market where everyone knows everyone else. And tipping our hand strategically or toward which technology sectors are under review, could result in the loss of a competitive advantage for IPA. As a result, if and when we have information to publicly disclose, we'll certainly do so.

John Mullaly

The next question is on the CRO. Is the CRO back on track? Was the last quarter just a one-off? Is the pharma industry post-COVID down in terms of delays and are, back-to-full speed like, pre-COVID times?

Jennifer Bath

Yeah. So I believe, we have covered this in our presentation so far. But just to be clear, our CRO actually demonstrated consistent quarter-over-quarter growth, with no debt. The temporary artifact was due to the nuances in the tracking of the R&D programs in the ERP.

As covered by Lisa in the quarterly financial update, every quarter was over and above the quarter prior, showing not only year-over-year increase in revenue, but also consistent quarter-over-quarter revenue increases. In addition to fiscal year 2021, being a record year for IPA, quarter four, fiscal year 2021 was also a record quarter.

For more information, one can also review the past eight quarter revenue trend and the MD&A. In terms of pharma companies being past delays, and back to full speed that depends on the pharma company of course, but clients and partners of IPAs did not express concerns in order to be see any material cumulative impact on outsourcing to ImmunoPrecise.

John Mullaly

Thanks. I'll read the next question. How did the Eurofins partnership come to fruition? How exactly will they be promoting your discovery platform?

Jennifer Bath

Another great question, this is something that we're really genuinely excited about. So for those of you not familiar with Eurofins, Eurofins is a globally operating group of laboratories. They offer analytical testing services. They are in about 47 countries. And they have over 50,000 employees. And they serve about actually over 2500 clients.

So their annual revenue is at around US$5 billion. And previously, Eurofins did not have a dedicated Biotherapeutics department, that's not a focus of Eurofins activities specifically.

And they recently decided to add one. And the leadership of this new division at Eurofins had become aware of ImmunoPrecise's capabilities and successes with multiple discovery technologies. This individual also has worked with several members of management in the past and had formed good relationships over the course of the last several years, by five or six years.

And so, it was actually Eurofins that approached ImmunoPrecise to partner on the co-promotion initiative since ImmunoPrecise's discovery services perfectly complement Eurofins portfolio. Together, the two companies offer a broader spectrum of services than otherwise possible.

So how it will work is the companies will use joint marketing materials such as, printed items, social media, and online presence on both companies' websites. They'll attend conferences and tradeshows together. And market both companies' comprehensive and non-overlapping services together.

The activities are coordinated and regular updates call. Importantly, also ImmunoPrecise is in direct communication with the prospective and one clients and retains their details without any imposed limitations.

Also, I think you know, another thing that is important and a question I've been asked, neither company has agreed to nor have been encouraged to norm plans to offer discounts or promotions regarding the co-marketing. We simply believe that, we are stronger together.

John Mullaly

Great. Thank you, Jennifer. That concludes the Q&A portion of our program, but the company would like to genuinely thank you for submitting your thoughtful and concise questions today. The company hopes that they were answered either in their script or in the Q&A or in the MDA. We will move forward now to some closing remarks from Jennifer to offer some insight into this current fiscal year strategic planning. Jennifer?

Jennifer Bath

Great. Thanks, John. So we look forward to a rich -- future rich and business opportunity in partnerships, in novel discoveries. We've tackled the past three years with a strong result, with ambition and with an unwavering belief in our strategic plan and in our team. We've taken active steps, which we believe will help provide continued aggressive growth in our contract research base.

With our sites focused on tackling new and emerging markets, and emphasizing targeted geographies. To this end, we seek several key hires to leave this initiative working together to help actively engage and secure our share of these markets. In addition to our plans to continue to grow the CRL business, we also anticipate a number of firsts for talam [ph], providing external validation of the scientific value of our pipeline assets.

We've also placed a strong emphasis on our goal of securing early stage collaborations with well-established partners for this fiscal year, and will continue to work toward executing on this goal.

We will also continue to add additional services and support including state-of-the-art equipment, as we have done each of the past three years, and look to leverage some of our existing technologies in single B Cell isolation and multiplex screening with some of our more recently refined offerings and analytical testing, such as our higher throughput bidding and mapping capabilities and our next generation sequencing adaptations.

Finally, as mentioned, we anticipate an active movement towards securing a cGMP manufacturing facility to support a variety of markets, including our committed clients and partners. We're grateful to you for joining us on this journey. And we are excited to continue executing on our goals and share with you in all of our successes. Thank you.

Operator

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.