Then, Dr. Fremeau will provide an overview and an update on recent scientific achievements made this year and the vision ahead. Finally, Andy LaFrence will take us through a brief financial update and discuss key accounting matters for the reporting period. I will make some closing remarks and then we will open up the line to answer your questions. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Andy LaFrence.
This conference call is also being recorded for audio rebroadcast on Vyant Bio's website at www.vyantbio.com. With that, I would like to turn the call back over to Jay Roberts. Jay?
Jay Roberts: Thank you, Andy. At the beginning of the call, I'd like to remind everyone we committed to our shareholders during the first half of 2022, the focus of Vyant Bio on discovering novel therapeutics to treat patients suffering from neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative brain disorders. We believe that as we execute our focused strategy on demonstrating the power of our drug discovery platform and bringing important therapeutic assets onto our pipeline, we strive to enhance value for our shareholders. As a reminder to those of you who have been following us, I'd like to start by reiterating our mission, which is uniting human biology, engineering, data science and our passion to transform lives. We have attended various scientific meetings over the last several weeks.
We continue to remind you that the acceleration in the drug discovery sector of our industry continues to be rapid, notwithstanding the headwinds we are feeling in the biotechnology industry, disrupting the underperformance of widely used models for predicting drug efficacy and safety. Our approach to use human cells in IPSC disease modeling and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to convert digital images into useful data, thereby providing meaningful insights to our scientists will transform the way we treat patients and cure diseases. It has never been a more exciting time to work in this industry. Our approach is innovative, and I believe we are amongst the leaders, focused on transforming drug discovery. Our disease centric approach that brings human understanding into the lab, providing a greater level of certainty to neurological drug discovery and development will allow us to bring disease modifying therapeutics to patients.
On that note, Dr. Fremeau will talk more about some of the very promising data and recent news about our pipeline and upcoming proof-of-concept clinical trial work in just a few minutes. As we close on the third quarter, a number of subsequent events transpired that are consistent with several corporate goals that we set for this year. So today we will share those highlights with you. At a high level on November 6, 2022, we announced the closing of the sale of our U.S. operations of vivoPharm to Reaction Biology. We are continuing to work through a strategic process for our Australian CRO business, as well as the product sales business operating under our StemoniX sub. Andy will take us through some of these details and related cash impacts.
Our exit from the preclinical CRO services business and our product sales businesses anticipated to be completed in the coming months will allow us to put all of our human and capital resources into our R&D efforts to discover and develop therapeutic assets for CNS diseases. We have been at the podium during two recent scientific meetings, including the 2022 CDKL5 Forum hosted by the Loulou Foundation and the Rett symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, which is concluding today. I will now turn the call over to our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Robert Fremeau, who will talk to you a little more about the scientific meetings and take us through some of the compelling data that we have generated from our R&D work on our discovery platform, as well as details of the collaboration with the International Rett Syndrome Foundation to advance VYNT-0126 into a proof-of-concept clinical trial in Australia.
Dr. Fremeau?
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Dr. Robert Fremeau: Thank you, Jay. I am delighted for the opportunity to share some key recent advances we have made over the past several months that highlight the promise and potential of our human-first CNS drug discovery platform to drive the discovery of therapeutic candidates for CNS genetic disorders. As we have discussed previously, a key element of our strategy is obtaining a deep understanding of human disease biology at the cellular level through the application of innovative enabling technologies to allow us to identify and interrogate target specific disease biology and drive positive drug discovery efforts. Our current drug discovery programs are targeting two rare CNS genetic neurodevelopmental disorders, Rett Syndrome and CDKL5 deficiency disorder and Parkinson's disease, the second most common neurogenic disorder.
As you may recall, Rett Syndrome is a rare genetic early onset neurodevelopmental disorder resulting in severe mental or physical disability, affecting nearly every aspect of a child's life, including their ability to speak, walk, eat and even breath easily, cognitive dysfunction, autistic-like behaviors and seizures are prominent neurological features of the disease. Rett is usually recognized in children between six months to 18 months of age as they begin to miss developmental milestones or lose the ability they have gained. Rett is primarily caused by mutations in a gene called MECP2 on the X chromosome. One of the challenges developing therapeutics to Rett has been a lack of a streaming system that recapitulates the underlying human disease pathophysiology.
Vyant Bio has developed an in vitro human Rett cortical organoid platform that exhibits abnormal functional neuronal network activity that can be recorded in a high throughput way, providing a stable foundation for drug screening. We conduct a functional screening of a targeted compound library developed for Rett by the International Rett Syndrome Foundation called the smart library and identified several known inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase and histone deacetylases that rescued the functional Rett disease phenotype. We chose to further explore rescue potential of donepezil, the generic version of Aricept. The FDA approved compound for treating Alzheimer's disease that we prioritize as a potential repurposing candidate for Rett, which we refer to as VYNT-0126.
We found that donepezil rescue the Rett disease phenotype at concentrations that are known to be achieved in the human brain after chronic treatment correlating with near complete inhibition of the acetylcholinesterase enzyme. Interestingly, there is strong literature support for cholinergic deficits in Rett patients, as well as donepezil-based rescue of electrophysiological behavioral deficits in a mouse Rett models. We were especially intrigue to find that donepezil appears to exhibit a distinct mechanism of action from the most advanced Rett clinical development candidates, Trofinetide and blarcamesine, also known as Anavex2-73. These molecules do not rescue the disease phenotype in our Rett patient derived organoids. And we think that's because the cell types to Rett's disease other compounds work are missing in our assurance.
Based on these findings and with the support and encouragement of the clinical trial committee of the International Rett Syndrome Foundation, I am pleased to announce that on November 14, 2022, we submitted a clinical trial application with the Alfred Hospital Human Research Ethics Committee to conduct a Phase 2 proof-of-concept clinical trial for donepezil in adult Rett patients in Australia. In addition, we received acknowledgment that the FDA accepted our request for a pre-IND meeting to provide the feedback and guidance for our clinical development plan for this program and they expect to give us our feedback by December 27th of this year. For me, these recent events really represent important milestones for Rett Vyant Bio as we strive to establish the value of our proprietary CNS drug discovery platform to discover novel therapeutics for CNS genetic diseases that could potentially halt disease progression or perhaps even cure disease.
We are also making promising progress on the identification of new chemical entities or NCEs for Rett Syndrome. In collaboration with our joint venture partner, Atomwise, we have identified small molecules directed against two discrete biological targets but also rescue the Rett phenotype in a differentiated manner and are the basis for our NCE discovery efforts for Rett Syndrome. Finally, our ongoing work of CDKL5 deficiency disorder and familial Parkinson's disease has further established that our patient-derived discovery platforms represent a robust model for human-first CNS drug discoveries. Vyant Bio is honored to participate in the 2022 CDKL5 Forum hosted by the Loulou Foundation on November 7th and 8th in Boston, Massachusetts. Matt Green, our senior scientist at our Maple Grove site in Minnesota presenting the results of phenotypic and target-based screening of our proprietary patient derived CDKL5 organoids.
Matt and the team established a CDKL5 organoids exhibit a hyperexcitable functional phenotype that is robust, reproducible and suitable for high throughput screening. Matt and the team identified several promising novel drug targets and small molecules that rescued the disease phenotype including potential new chemical entity and repurposing candidates. Vyant Bio is proud that we have been formally recognized on the CDKL5 Forum 2022 company making a difference preclinical, an award that was presented by the CEO for the Loulou Foundation, Majid and Lynn Jafar, Loulou Foundation at the award ceremony during CDKL5 Forum dinner on November 7, 2022. And finally, our Parkinson's disease program has identified a disease relevant biomarker and the human induced pluripotent stem cell derived from familial model of Parkinson's disease that we are optimizing for conducting a high throughput drug stream.
We are on track to submit an SBIR grant to NINDS on a familial PD work for the January 5, 2023, deadline. Thank you and I will now turn the call back over to Andy.
Andy LaFrence: Thank you, Bob. Hello, everyone. Thank you again for joining our call. I will have a brief overview of our financial cash position and other elements that impacted our cash positions in the fourth quarter. First and foremost, we ended the third quarter with $9.4 million of cash on hand. As previously reported, we implemented two new financing vehicles in the first half of 2022 to facilitate the raising of additional equity capital at the company's option with our Lincoln Park Equity line of credit allowing us to access up to $15 million of capital, as well as on a $14.5 million at-the-market or ATM offering with Canaccord Genuity. As of September 30, 2022, we have not tapped into these financing facilities. As noted in Jay's and Bob's remarks, we have completed several stated goals over the past several months.
Notably, we completed our sale of the vivoPharm LLC operations based in the United States. We received $5.5 million from the sale, which is expected to net $4.4 million in net proceeds after tax and transaction costs. Further, we expect to incur approximately $600,000 of exit costs related to this transaction. We continue to work on potential transaction partners with our vivoPharm Australian operations during this quarter. Further, we have also signed a clinical research agreement to start our Rett adult clinical trial in Australia in early 2023. We are leveraging infrastructure already in place in Australia to effectively deploy capital for this trial. We also completed a 1-for-5 reverse stock split in early November to regain compliance with the NASDAQ listing requirements.
We issued a separate press release within the last several minutes noting that earlier today, the company received a letter from the NASDAQ Stock Market LLC, stating that the company's shares of common stock had a closing bid price at or above $1 per share for a minimum of 10 consecutive days. As such, the company's common stock has regained compliance with the minimum bid price requirement of $1 per share for continued listing on the NASDAQ Capital Market. For the nine months ended September 30, 2022, we used $10 million of cash to fund operating activities. The company's current cash balance and funding resources are adequate to fund the company's operations until the fourth quarter of 2023. I will close for now and hand the presentation over to Jay Roberts for closing remarks.
Jay?
Jay Roberts: Thanks, Andy. As we come to the final part of today's call, I'd like to conclude by reiterating our intense focus on meeting key milestones initially with our programs to further validate our drug discovery platform through the work we are doing in the two rare diseases for Rett and CDKL5 deficiency disorder and the subsequent R&D investments we are making to the identification of novel therapeutics to address these diseases. Stay tune as we continue to make progress. As news and information becomes available, we will be communicating updates via press releases, LinkedIn, our Vyant Bio website and other social media channels. Interested parties are invited to sign up the press release distribution list. Please visit our website. With that, we will go to the question-and-answer session and thank you to everyone who has submitted questions.
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