Garo Armen
Analyst · B. Riley Securities
Thank you very much, Divya and thank you all for your participation and your interest in Agenus as well as MiNK Therapeutics. As we have shared previously, our business model is comprised of four pillars. Now for today’s discussion, I will redefine what those four pillars are. And we will primarily talk about pillar number one, two and three. I’ll make some broad comments about pillar number four. The first pillar is what we describe as our significant value creators. We believe these compounds and opportunities could be significant. And they represent certainly our next generation compounds in one primary example of that, which we will talk about in some detail today is our next generation CTLA-4inhibitor, AGEN1181. The second pillar is represented by our partner programs and recently launched affiliated businesses, including MiNK Therapeutics and SaponiQx. The third pillar we describe as supportive programs, such as balstilimab and zalifrelimab. And I will define what we mean by supportive programs in just a bit. And our fourth pillar, which is a silent component of our business, we don’t talk very much about it, but a very important component, because without it, we wouldn’t be able to accomplish the kind of things, innovations and advancements as we have. And that is represented by our vertically integrated structures comprised of key operational capabilities for the company, including our commercial manufacturing, including our vision technology, which is our response prediction platform designed to facilitate the development of our pipeline by targeting patients who are likely to respond to therapy. Now, I would like to begin the call by addressing the first pillar, which is driven by our flagship program, AGEN1181. Now, as you know, we have a SITC presentation coming up. This morning, we announced the SITC publication of an abstract summarizing data from a dose escalation study of over 100 patients treated with our next-generation CTLA-4 inhibitor, AGEN1181 as both monotherapy and in combination with our PD-1inhibitor, balstilimab. More details will be presented this Friday. I will provide a top line summary here. AGEN1181 is the first reported CTLA-4 inhibitor to demonstrate clinical activity in 9 cold or treatment resistant tumors as monotherapy and in combination with balstilimab. Secondly, AGEN1181 monotherapy and in combination with balstilimab has shown compelling clinical activity and durable responses across a number of cold tumors, such as colorectal, endometrial, pancreatic cancer. And they have been, as I said, in treatment resistant settings, such as PD-1 relapsed and refractory melanoma, non-small-cell lung cancer and cervical cancer. Importantly, we are seeing evidence of more favorable safety profile relative to first generation CTLA-4 molecules. Also, AGEN1181 is performing as designed. We designed this move for a specific performance and so far in the clinic, it is indicating that it’s delivering that performance and that is to expand the benefit of immune therapies to a broader patient population with deeper, more durable responses than what is available to them today. Dr. Steven O’Day will share additional comments along with our plans to accelerate development of 1181 alone and in combination with balstilimab. As I mentioned earlier, full details of this will not be released until the poster is released this Friday at the SITC Conference, this Friday, November 12. Next, I would like to address our second pillar of our business model, which include our recently launched affiliates and partner programs. As you know, amongst our accomplishments with regard to our second pillar is the launch of these businesses. To start with, on October 15, we announced the successful IPO of MiNK Therapeutics, which has raised over $40 million at a valuation of $400 million. We are pleased that MiNK has been one of the best performing IPOs recently, having appreciated 58% as of the closing price rate yesterday. Dr. Jennifer Buell, the newly appointed CEO of MiNK Therapeutics will tell you more about MiNK programs and share a preview of the three abstracts, where we announced recently which will be presented at SITC this week. Now, separately in September, we also announced the launching of SaponiQx. SaponiQx is our subsidiary working on building an integrated vaccine platform based on scalable and secure manufacturing of saponin-based adjuvants. This premise behind SaponiQx business model is captured in the following. And I will outline this in four different categories. Firstly, the need for vaccines offering long lasting efficacy and efficient production has become amplified because of the needs as described by the current reality, which is the pandemic. Secondly, the durability offered by QS-21 Stimulon, which is our flagship adjuvant, has been validated by SHINGRIX, which protection – which offers prediction exceeding 9 years and this is particularly important in the current climate, where we know the current vaccines are waning in activity after 3, 6 months and whereas QS-21 Stimulon is largely responsible in SHINGRIX for this long-lasting efficacy. But on the other hand, the supply is limited due to the reliance on a complicated and extensive extraction process from the Chilean soapbark tree. So to this end, we are working with two companies, Phyton Biotech and Ginkgo Bioworks to optimize the plant cell culture process, which we have developed for the purposes of manufacturing QS-21 Stimulon and next generation saponin-based adjuvants. This is very important, because some of our next generation saponin-based adjuvants are particularly relevant to respiratory viral infections. Among our objectives is to also establish a platform for developing next generation adjuvants effective and scalable vaccine formulations with optimized antigen and adjuvant pairing. And in the future, we will talk about what we mean by that. Now, in addition to this, also part of our second pillar is the driver of our certainly past and also importantly, future partnerships. In October, we announced the first patient dosed with AGEN1777, our Fc-enhanced TIGIT bispecific antibody, licensed to BMS recently. This achievement triggered a $20 million milestone payment from BMS and BMS-intensive advanced AGEN1777 in high priority indications such as non-small-cell lung cancer. We are very excited about the prospects of AGEN1777. Our clinical stage, AGEN2373 is a differentiated CD-137 molecule. It’s a CD-137 agonist. Otherwise, in the past it was known as 4-1BB as well. It is designed to selectively enhance tumor immunity, while avoiding toxicity associated with systemic CD-137 activation. We presented clinical data at ASCO this year showing that AGEN2373 lead to prolonged disease stabilization in heavily pretreated cancer patients with good tolerability, no evidence of liver toxicity, which has been one of the issues with other CD137s. Associated of course with this is the fact that this has been done in a monotherapy setting. And we are of course studying combination trials with this AGEN2377, with our AGEN1181, which is our next generation CTLA-4 in PD-1 relapsed and refractory melanoma this year. Another program involves our clinical collaboration partner, Nelum, which has recently dosed the first patient in a combination study of our first generation CTLA-4 zalifrelimab with Nelum’s hedgehog inhibitor and chemotherapy in first line, pancreatic cancer patients. Now, next is our third pillar, which is our supportive programs and they constitute the third pillar of our business model and our strategy. Now, what do we mean by this? Our supportive programs include balstilimab, our PD-1 antibody and zalifrelimab, our first generation CTLA-4 anybody. These are programs, which are the one do not represent blockbuster opportunities for us. However, in combination with other novel agents in our portfolio or in combination with agents in other company’s portfolio, they represent important opportunities. So, when people ask us, why does the world need another PD-1 antibody? It isn’t that the world needs another PD-1 antibody, but we need it, because we have an extensive portfolio of agents and in the context of developing combinations, our PD-1 antibody will make that job a lot easier, a lot more efficient, and at the end, deliver much more prudent economics to the healthcare system and to patients. Among the important achievements of our supportive programs was this year, we reported at ESMO back in August that the combination of balstilimab and zalifrelimab resulted in near doubling of responses, that is 33% responses versus what has been reported for pembrolizumab in PD-L1 positive cervical cancer patients. Now, let me touch upon some of the recent announcements that we made and the potential implications of those developments for our company, for our portfolio going forward. As you may have noticed, we recently withdraw the BLA for balstilimab monotherapy due to a technicality associated with the accelerated approval window closing for us. Following of course, the technicality associated of the accelerated window closing followed the full approval of pembrolizumab in second line cervical cancer, which the FDA granted the approval 4 months ahead of the FDA goal date. Now, of note is the fact that this BLA withdrawal was not related to balstilimab’s performance. In fact, our agent met and exceeded predefined clinical milestones for this indication, for this trial. Our agent achieved trial endpoints with 20% response rates in PDL-1 positive patients versus 14% reported in pembrolizumab label. And of course, in single arm trials, it’s very difficult to compare these types of numbers to each other, but we are still hoping very much that we showed 20% responses versus 14% responses as opposed to the other way around. Now, we also completed successfully three FDA approved inspections for our PDUFA date of October 16, 2021, with no 483 cited, which is a very big achievement for our company, our organization and we are very proud of that. Given the clinical benefit demonstrated by balstilimab, we are planning to launch expanded access programs to give patients and doctors access to balstilimab in several countries, perhaps including the U.S. pending the regulatory process associated with expanded access. As a result of our BLA withdrawal, we also announced discontinuation of our balstilimab confirmatory trial product, which is expected to reduce our R&D expenses by over $100 million over the next couple of years. Now with these developments, we expect to end the year with approximately $250 million in cash to execute on our combination development programs for AGEN1181 and beyond. Now, let me pause here and address two frequently asked questions that have been put to us. One is the fact that we withdrew the BLA for balstilimab, does that impact our development programs going forward, that involved balstilimab, for example, balstilimab plus 1181, does it impact it? Now, before I answer that question, let me address the fact that we have amassed an enormous amount of safety information in over 400 patients treated with balstilimab. And as I mentioned, we have shown clear activity of balstilimab certainly in cervical cancer, where we treated a substantial number of patients, but also in other indications. So, we have a highly active PD-1 antibody. Now, with regard to how will this withdrawal of the BLA affect our next steps going forward with combinations? We are certainly going to use the data or the efficacy data that shows the activity of PDL-1, I mean PD-1 antibody as well as the safety of it. We are going to use this going forward in our justification of combinations. And given the way we have designed our trials, we do not expect – at this stage, we do not expect this to be a hurdle for our expeditious development of combinations. So, that’s number one. The second question that gets asked is because of what has happened with the FDA having requested us to withdraw the BLA, a question such as, are we blacklisted by the FDA now, that’s going to make our lives difficult going forward? Well, we certainly don’t think so. And we certainly hope that that’s not the case, if we provided that we show high activity with our compounds going forward, which we expect to do, which compounds like 1181 alone and in combination with balstilimab, provided that we show profound activity. Of course, anyone stuck in to get in the way of an expeditious approval to bring access to patients would have to be questioned. So, we do not expect that our honorable agency will blacklist us or any other company for that matter, for reasons that relate to what we have experienced. But having said all of that, we plan on proceeding in a pristine fashion with data that will be generated and that could justify the next steps associated with our portfolio of novel agents reaching patients. So with that, I would now like to turn the call over to our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Steven O’Day to discuss the AGEN1181 clinical update shared today in our SITC abstract. And just to remind you that on Friday, there will be more details associated with the release of our poster that will have more data. So, we will hold back on some of the details today to respect the confidentiality with the SITC rules. Steven?
Steven O’Day: Thank you, Garo and thank you all for joining us this morning. Today, we shared the first presentation of clinical data from a dose escalation study with over 100 patients treated with AGEN1181 as monotherapy or in combination with balstilimab. The patient population was heavily pretreated. Half of these patients received at least three prior lines of therapy, including anti-PD-1 therapies. This makes their response to AGEN1181 even more encouraging. AGEN1181 as monotherapy and in combination with balstilimab was efficacious across a range of tumor types, including cold and poorly immunogenic tumors and PD-1 refractory setting. Both monotherapy and combination therapy were well-tolerated with no observed cases of hypophysitis, pneumonitis or high grade hepatitis, which you may know are clinically meaningful toxicities of first generation CTLA-4 based therapies. We have established our recommended Phase 2 dosing for AGEN1181 monotherapy and in combination without balstilimab. As of the abstract cutoff date, which was July 16 2021, we observed 4 confirmed responses to single agents, AGEN1181. These include a complete response in a patient with microsatellite stable endometrial cancer, a partial response in pancreatic cancer and a partial response in cervical cancer following failure of anti PD-1 therapy. To our knowledge, these are the first reports of response to CTLA-4 monotherapy in these specific disease settings. Our fourth response was in a patient with melanoma with failed prior anti PD-1 therapy. We also observed significant benefit of the combination of AGEN1181 with balstilimab across multiple cold poorly immunogenic tumors. Among 17 evaluable MS stable colorectal patients treated with at least 1 milligram per kilo of AGEN1181, we observed four partial responses and 7 cases of stable disease or disease control rate of 65%. Just to put this in perspective, multiple trials have demonstrated limited to no activity of PD-1 inhibitors alone or in combination with first generation anti-CTLA-4 in MS stable colorectal cancer. The efficacy that we have demonstrated in this setting to-date highlights that AGEN1181 is a differentiated anti-CTLA-4 and has potential to address this high unmet need. Among 6 evaluable ovarian cancer patients receiving at least 1 milligram of AGEN1181, we observed two partial responses and three cases of meaningful stable disease. We also observed clinical activity in other GYN tumors with the combination, including partial responses to both of our MS stable endometrial cancer patients who were treated with combination therapy. Finally, additional combination responders, including one partial response in non-small-cell lung cancer patient who had failed prior PD-1 therapy and two partial responses in visceral angiosarcoma, a subtype of angiosarcoma historically resistant to checkpoint inhibition therapy. The majority of these responses are durable and ongoing. I want to remind you that additional patient accrual and follow-up data will be included in our poster presentation at SITC this week, with a cutoff on September 17, 2001 for clinical data. Based on the exciting anti-tumor activity demonstrated thus far, randomized Phase 2 and Phase 2/3 trials are in active development across colorectal, MS stable and GYN malignancies. We anticipate the outcomes of these important trials will strengthen the efficacy and safety signal demonstrated to-date and support a potential filing for full and/or accelerated approval based on the magnitude of benefit demonstrated in the studies. I would now like to turn the call over to Dr. Jennifer Buell, Chief Executive Officer of MiNK Therapeutics.