Timothy Miller
Analyst · Jefferies
Good morning, everyone calling in from the East Coast. Welcome to our second quarter call. We've got a lot of notable advancements in this past quarter and looking forward to updating everyone as well on even more recent updates as we go into September and October. So we continue to advance our goal of building a leading rare disease company with our focus primarily on gene therapies. Importantly, we've initiated our clinical frames for our ABO-102 program, which is for MPS IIIA or Sanfilippo syndrome, as planned. And we continue to begin the process for enrolling patients, additional patients at the U.S. site as well as opening up these sites in Spain and Australia. We have continued to drive the development of our library of next-generation AAV viral vectors, our AIM vector platform, for which we have global and exclusive rights of license. Now we have had a number of recent highlights, including some corporate achievements with the key hire of Dr. Juan Ruiz as our Chief Medical Officer. Well that's certainly a big step for our company. We have been searching for a CMO with rare disease and gene therapy experience for a while now. Juan brings with it also a business-savvy career. He's been involved with the EMA in discussing multiple gene therapy programs, has a number of successes under his belt as well and has been involved with developing patient-reported outcomes, particularly for dermal programs. So as we look to our EB-101 program, certainly welcoming Juan on board. For our EB-101 program, there have been some very successful and notable clinical achievements, notably that we've received guidance from the FDA to basically stop the Phase I/II clinical trial and commence our pivotal Phase III for EB-101 gene therapy for patients with recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, or RDEB, which is the most severe version of epidermolysis bullosa. And it's really a wonderful thing for us to be able to have the therapy. There's obviously a large clinically unmet need for this. There are only a few other programs in development, some of which that we believe that will be complementary to. But when we apply our EB-101 product, it is actually the wounds are closed from the beginning. And as we prepare to initiate our Phase III clinical trial, we're meeting with a number of our patients, and we hope to continue develop patient-reported outcomes and working on our manufacturing strategy. Speaking of which, we do have some updates for our manufacturing strategy, plans and progress or in the development of its clinical and commercial-grade production facility, which will be provided at our R&D Day on October 11. So Jeff will talk a little bit about that. I'm happy to answer some questions at our R&D Day. We're certainly very fortunate that with three clinical-stage programs and two more coming up as well as the vector program to be able to have a significant R&D Day. Data from the EB-101 program was presented at the recent Society for Investigative Dermatology Conference, where, as we've reported out, we demonstrated significant wound healings, we defined as greater than 50%, in 100% of the treated wounds at three months, 89% at six months, 83% at 12 months and 88% at 24 months with – again, going out to three years post administration. As we look at natural history studies and how these are used to help us support our clinical paradigm, especially as we go forward potentially with the BLA filing, the clinical endpoints are supported by the natural history study that looks at almost 1,500 wounds from over 128 patients with RDEB, and that has certainly been notable in the FDA's commentary and the discussions we've had with them. And even meeting with some of the patients just yesterday in Cleveland, there – these are the type of therapies where these kids wake up and they're afraid that their clothes are going to be stuck to their skin. And you hear stories from the parents about how they've had actually cut the pajamas off of their kids and then soak them in olive oil. These are painful, itchy. And even these kids then, upwards of 60% of their body area in wounds that are bandaged that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So we are very excited to begin the pivotal Phase III. Some of the regulatory achievements in this program for EB-101, we do have the Orphan Product designation, and we are expecting this year soon a Breakthrough Therapy, on the presumption then we do get it for some of the other programs that will enable priority review and help us initiate the Phase III trial program mainly for the ability to have much faster turnaround on [indiscernible] with the FDA. So – and that data was based on the Phase I/II for the EB-101 program. And while we also have the Rare Pediatric Disease designation, we do note that we have the U.S. and Orphan Drug designation both here and abroad in Europe. So those are, of course, part of the prerequisite program for the priority review process, and we look forward to, hopefully, announcing Breakthrough set is coming in very soon. Moving on to our ABO-102 program, which is, again, our program for MPS IIIA or for Sanfilippo patients. We announced data from a top line of the Phase I/II trial at the American Society for Gene & Cell Therapy Conference, where we saw a positive dose response in the CNS, or central nervous system, with 60 – about a 60% reduction of the disease causing heparan sulfate GAG. And that's very exciting as we see that dose response going from Cohort 1 to Cohort 2. The mantra in gene therapy is that, particularly for these lysosomal storage diseases with AAV vectors, that you want to treat with more and you want to treat earlier. So we are certainly excited to continue our enrollments in this program. We have seen reductions of disease manifestation observed by decreased liver volumes and decreased wound volumes. It's been well tolerated in all of the subjects to date. It's more than 1,700 days of cumulative follow-up with no drug-related serious adverse events, which we find quite notable. And as we start to look at the nonverbal IQ scores and the adaptive behavior exams versus Leiter and the Vineland scores, certainly at six months, we did see some evidence for stabilization or improvement. And now as we look to one-year data starting to roll in for the first cohort and six months' data coming in for the second cohort, these are going to be presented at upcoming conferences in September and October, notably the European Society for Gene & Cell Therapy. We have seen these improvements in clinically relevant biomarkers. And again, looking at – we consider this triangle of efficacy, looking at biomarker reduction, changes in pathophysiology and then, certainly, neurocognitive scores. And we believe those are going to be – we'll be having discussions with the FDA in the fourth quarter about our chemo registerable endpoints and look forward – and we look forward to providing more fulsome clinical update at these conferences coming in, in September and October. Just a note and really remind, we do have Fast Track status for the MPS IIIA program for ABO-102. And we have, again, the Orphan Product designations in Europe and the United States as well as Pediatric Designation. So we do – we have announced recently the planned expansion that we'll enroll an additional 8 to 10 MPS IIIA subjects. And so we're hoping for somewhere between 12 and 15 subjects completely enrolled in first quarter 2018. And that will be across all three sites, both in the United States, in Europe and Australia. In the interest of time, moving on, I'm sure there'll be a number of questions towards the end, but we'll talk a little bit now about our EB-101 program for Sanfilippo syndrome type B or MPS IIIB. As an update on the time line, we've completed all the necessary manufacturing for clinical materials. I anticipate that enrollments will begin very shortly now. And we are very pleased of that. We have had that IND for a while now, and as with many of the programs in the space, looking forward to starting those enrollments. That is also a program that has been granted the Orphan Product designation in the U.S. and the Rare Pediatric designation as, again, part of the priority process. So again, we'll be looking to enroll three patients in Cohort 1 there and probably 3 to 9 patients in Cohort 2 in the MPS IIIB program. Our dosing is a little bit higher. Just to remind everyone, that's a single-stranded vector self-complementary. And again, there has -- a lot -- there's been a lot of preclinical data that's been published. If you have any questions, please contact us, and we're happy to send you the papers for either one of those programs. For our preclinical development programs, we do have two that are getting into the IND-enabling phases for juvenile Batten and infantile Batten. So juvenile Batten is the CLN3 version, and infantile Batten is the CLN1 version. So we do get questions every now and then. To help clarify, yes, we have two Batten programs. One is CLN1 and one is CLN3, just to differentiate from some of the other programs that are out there. We received the Orphan Drug designation for ABO-102, which is for the juvenile Batten disease program. And we'll start that process for the CLN1 program very, very soon. So for the ABO-102 for CLN3, we are in IND-enabling studies. Things have gone very, very well. There's been no animal test attributed to the drug. We go through a number of time points that have been negotiated with the FDA. They did allow us to submit the IND at certain points through the IND-enabling studies. And we look forward to doing that either later this year or the beginning of next year. Similarly, for the CLN1 program, there's a lot of excitement around the CLN1 program. It's very difficult disease to treat, but we're using the same paradigms we have for our other programs, again, using an IV delivery of an AAV vector. But we would like to note that this is a – actually, a combination delivery program where we'll be using both an intrathecal and an intravenous delivery. So there are not many programs out there that have really moved down the path of trying to be combination delivery. And I think that – if we look forward three to five years from now, I think that many of the programs that have a CNS component will be – as well as systemic issues or manifestations of the disease, will be talking about treating infants because there'll be newborn screening tests approved and probably through multiple delivery methods for both intrathecal and intravenous. So we look forward to providing an update for that in the first half of 2018 as we have some regulatory guidance from the FDA, but we do note that there is some precedence for this out there. And again, there is no program, no approved program out there for these children. And then moving on to our AIM vector program, our AIM vector platform. So to remind everyone, this is a vector library of over 60 AAV vector capsids we have – that we have brought in-house and we continue to develop. We have a number of vectors that have multiple specificities, some for the CNS, some for muscle tissue, some for the heart and lung and some for the intestine. So you can imagine that as we look forward to our – expanding our pipeline, leveraging this into some of the existing programs as well as some of the de novo deliveries and new disease programs as well. So our initial studies have indicated that these AIM vectors can efficiently target different tissues with vector-selective tissue specificity. And so we go through different routes of administration when we test by distribution. And really, this is providing us a second-generation treatment approach for patients that had either been dosed previously or potentially have neutralizing antibodies to a particular serotype or actually both have a re-dose. So again, we are very much looking forward to talking more about the AIM vectors at our R&D Day on October 11, so please join us then. And with that, I've taken up, I think, my portion of this call. I'll turn it over to Jeff to give some of our second quarter summary of financials.