Tim Miller
Analyst · Matthew Eckler, with RBC. Please go ahead with your questions
Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us on this morning on our earnings call. The third quarter was marked by notable advancements in our goal of building a leading rare disease company with a focus on gene therapies. Importantly, we initiated enrollements in our global clinical trial sites for ABO-102, for treatment of patients with MPS IIIA, and reported additional data to underscore the durability and clinical benefit on this gene therapy. Our Epidermolysis Bullosa program achieved a very nice milestone with FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation, completed its Phase 1/2 clinical trial and is now continuing to advance as we finalize the clinical protocol before the initiation of the pivotal Phase 3 trial next year. With regard to our MPS IIIB program, we recently initiated screening and look forward to commencing enrollment shortly. In addition, work in optimizing our AIM vector platform demonstrated exciting progress, including demonstration of enhanced tissue tropisms compared to other naturally occurring AAV capsids. So to talk a little bit about some of our corporate achievements, we had a really great R&D Day. We held our inaugural R&D Day on October 11th, in New York City, where Abeona management, together with key opinion leaders and clinical experts, presented an update on our clinical program to and over 80% crowd of institutional investors and equity analysts. We next completed an equity financing on October 19th where we announced the closing of $92 million underwritten public offering and full exercise of the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares. That same week, we announced a grant of up to $13.85 million from leading Sanfilippo syndrome or MPS III foundations from around the world, further supporting the clinical development of our MPS III and IIIB gene therapy programs. We had announced a groundbreaking of the manufacturing facility here in Cleveland Ohio, where we bought in multiple stakeholders in one of the rare disease families to help out with the breaking of the ground in our manufacturing facility located again in Cleveland. The 6000 square foot center will be built up and validated over the next 12 months, and will be the home of multiple gene therapies and cell therapies for Abeona. The facility was named The Elisa Linton Center for Rare Disease Therapies in the honor of a young girl who passed from Sanfilippo syndrome and whose family’s foundation has been instrumental in raising funds and awareness for this rare and terminal disease. Just it's been brought up before, but just to clarify, Elisa was not the patient treated by Abeona that was a different patient. The center will be initiated to produce ABO-101 and ABO-102 gene therapy with treatment of patients with Sanfilippo syndrome and EB-101, our Autologous Cell Therapy for the treatment of recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. The center will also house Abeona’s expanded bio vector lab, which will continue to develop and produce unique and proprietary vectors of the use of delivery of gene therapies. We announced our collaboration with Brammer Bio in September, which is a strategic alignment for commercial AAV process development, scale up and assay validation of the commercial translation of ABO-102. And we announced, of course, some of our key hires and earlier in the quarter, in July, we announced deployment of Dr. Juan Ruiz as Chief Medical Officer. He’s responsible for leading all the clinical development medical affairs and related functions. The recent investment from high-quality investors and leading foundations is an achievement that demonstrates our internal capabilities and commitment to the investment of our robust pipeline and next generation vector platform, including MPS IIIA gene therapy products. We look forward to further strengthening our efforts of key hires, advancing clinical capabilities and commercial expansion in the coming quarters. So to talk now a little bit about our clinical program for the EB-101 program, which is again for recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. In August, we did receive the break-through designation now which is for our Autologous Cell Therapy for patients suffering from [death]. It's noted that this is the most severe form of epidermolysis bullosa. And while the technology behind this is really -- is a gene therapy Autologous Cell corrected therapy, this is again very specific for the RDEB patients. The FDA granted this based on data from the Phase 1/2 EB-101 program clinical trial. It's demonstrated significant wound healing and treated wounds or over two years for up to six patients and again going out for the seven patients. This designation is significant as it enables collaborative discussions with senior FDA personnel priority review and expedited approval process to direct candidates where the preliminary clinical trials indicate that their therapy may offer substantial treatment advantages over existing options for patients with serious or life threatening disease. EB-101 program previously received the Rare Pediatric Disease designation, in the United States and the Orphan Drug designation in both U.S. and Europe, which are prerequisites for the FDA priority review process. Earlier in the quarter, in July, we received guidance from the FDA to commence the pivotal Phase III or EB-101 and are now currently preparing to initiate the pivotal Phase III clinical trial next year. For the ABO-102 program for the treatment of patients with MPS IIIA or Sanfilippo syndrome type A, during the quarter, we announced enrollment and dosing of the first two patients in our global expansion of the Phase 1/2 clinical trial on MPS IIIA, one in Australia and one in Spain. Both received the Cohort 3 dose of ABO-102, which is three tenths ten to the thirteen per kg. One additional patient in the U.S. has also received the Cohort 3 dose, bringing the total number of patients in that Cohort to three and total number of patients in the trial to-date up to nine. After seeing dose dependent improvements in Cohort 2 with ABO-102 being well tolerated to-date, Abeona together with our principle investigators and the DSMB decided to dose escalate to potentially enhance the clinical benefits and prolong durability, a decision supported by regulatory authorities agencies across the world really in support of the trial. We have reported data at meeting on the Mesa, and early October we announced the top line one year data from the ABO-102 trial, the MPS IIIA at ARM’s Cell & Gene Therapy Meeting. The Gene therapy demonstrated durable and significant reduction of underlying disease pathology across multiple clinical measures in Cohort 1 compared to a natural history study group of eight to 12 subjects. Systemic biopotency demonstrated time and dose dependent reduction of the disease causing heparan sulfate in the CSF and liver and reduction to liver volumes. It's important to note that reduction of the disease causing heparan sulfate is really the key biomarker we’re looking at how you can modify and demonstrate that these gene therapies are getting into the CNS, getting into the system and actually exhibiting and eliciting in those responses. So we think that looking at heparan sulfate again which is I think some of the biomarkers that other trials have looked at; when you combine this with reductions in the liver and fluid volume, changes in the deep brain architecture and preserving that after this intravenous administration this has lead to a stabilization of neurocognitive assessment scores at one year post-injection. So for those of you that have heard us talk before you heard us talk a lot about this triangle of efficacy now looking at reductions in the biomarker or changes in the biophysical assessments from organ change in the liver, spleen and brain and now you’re starting to see some of those neurocognitive improvements. ABO continues to be well tolerated at all doses at all of our time frames and has enabled and accelerated enrollment schedule over the upcoming months, we look forward to providing more fulsome clinical updates and important clinical conferences, including World Symposium in February and the American Society for Gene & Cell Therapy in May. Now, moving on to our ABO-101 program, currently really just an update on the time line; we recently initiated screening now -- and at our site in the United States and look forward to commencing enrollments and describing -- and discussing those coming up soon; and we’ll also expand this overseas in the Europe going into the first quarter. Just to remind everyone, ABO-101 for the treatment of MPS IIIB has previously been granted the Orphan Product designation in the United States and the Rare Pediatric Disease designation. As we all know those are prerequisites on part of the priority review about the process. We also look forward to discussing in 2018 additional regulatory achievements in this program again as those submissions continue. Looking at our preclinical pipeline, we have a rather fulsome gene therapy pipeline, specifically for juvenile Batten disease. We received the FDA Orphan Drug designation for ABO-201 for juvenile Batten program. And we are currently in IND enabling studies for the juvenile CLN3 program. We’ll be able to provide an update on the Infantile Batten program coming up in January and February as we process with some of our regulatory meetings and anticipate that we will -- both programs, both the CLN3 and the CLN1 will be clinical stage programs in 2018. And then last and really almost as exciting as the clinical stage programs is the AIM vector program. When we initially licensed this program in from the University of North Carolina through the lab of Dr. Steven Gray, we were very excited by the prospects of finding additional vectors, AAV vectors, with tropisms specific for multiple organ systems throughout the body. Initial studies have indicated that the AIM vectors can efficiently target multiple tissues with vector-selective tissue specificity with different routes of administration relative to the first generation of AIM vectors. This we believe is providing us with second generation and third generation treatment approaches for patients as a re-dosing strategy or for patients that may have neutralizing antibodies for the natural AAV serotypes. Currently, we are continuing to develop the AIM chimeric AAV vectors, both internally and through strategic partnering efforts. And look forward to discussing in 2018 some of our additional undisclosed targets for the AIM vector platform. So with that, that’s really an overview of our clinical stage, our preclinical stage in relation with our product development. And with that, I will turn it over to Jeff Davis to talk about summary of our financial results.