Brett Monia
Founder, CEO & Director
Good afternoon, welcome to the 2026 Annual Shareholders Meeting Corporate Update. My name is Brett Monia. I’m Chief Executive Officer of Ionis and Board Director at Ionis, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to provide an update on the remarkable progress we have made at Ionis to drive accelerating value for all Ionis stakeholders over the last few years, and more importantly, how we are set up to drive even greater value in the years to come.
Of course, I will be making forward-looking statements during my presentation. So please take this under consideration in any interest you have in Ionis going forward. The field of oligonucleotide therapeutics has emerged as one of the most exciting and important new approaches to drug discovery and drug development in the pharmaceutical industry. And we’re proud of the fact that Ionis pioneered this field. Accordingly, we have a rich history in discovering and developing transformational RNA-targeted medicines for a whole range of medically important diseases.
In support of this, we created the industry-leading medicinal chemistry and keep manufacturing capabilities here within Ionis. We were the first to optimize and validate oligonucleotide therapeutics of any kind to liver for diseases related to liver-derived factors as well as to the central nervous system for human therapeutics. We are at the forefront of validating, optimizing mechanisms of action of RNA-targeted therapeutics, whether it be mechanisms that result in the degradation of the targeted RNA to block the production of toxic proteins, such as through an RNase H mechanism or to modulate and improve splicing mechanisms, so that we can replace proteins, upregulate proteins that are lacking in loss
