Garo Armen
Analyst · B. Riley Securities
I think it's very important to address your question in a way that doesn’t violate any confidentiality. So we have, as you know, talked about partnering BOT/BAL for the last couple of years. Now of course, when we started our discussions with prospective partners, we had a fraction of the data we have today. Fraction of the data. And thanks to our enthusiastic physicians, investigators and of course, patient inquiries, we have had an explosive growth in our clinical trial enrollment. I mean if you look at, for example, our Phase 2 trial enrollment, we enrolled 230 patients in less than five months, which is a record that has surprised many people. Now with all of that, you would expect, of course, that there's a fair amount of enthusiasm by prospective pharmaceutical companies amidst, as we've talked about earlier, all of the fascination with treatments that result in weight reduction and radio biopharmaceuticals as well as ADCs. But when I ask a question to experts, I say, do ADCs and biopharmaceutical cure cancer? The answer is often not, no. Now of course, we don't know if we're curing cancer. We don't know that. And the term curing cancer is a very dicey term because how do you demonstrate it? How do you clinically demonstrate curing cancer? And the only thing that we know for sure is that there is a product called Yervoy that has cured, de facto cured a slice of melanoma patients. But it's been mostly restricted to melanoma. In fact, Dr. O’Day was one of the pioneers in clinical development of Yervoy. Now of course, one of the attributes of the Yervoy is that it binds to CTLA-4, a very important receptor in the activation of the immune system, specifically T cells. Now we also know that our botensilimab binds to CTLA-4, but it does so many other things. So we are hopeful, hopeful that eventually, botensilimab’s activity will be broader than what Yervoy's activity has been in melanoma. And so with that, of course, we're excited about what we're going to be doing with it. And that makes the question of a like-minded partner that will put in the resources to develop botensilimab and balstilimab for the kinds of cancer patients that deserve it, deserve it, meaning that our aim is that once we get the regulatory buy-in and we go for our first BLA filing, our aim is an explosive expansion for the development of botensilimab. Explosive expansion because, as you know, we have said, across nine different indications, with varying denominators of 900 patients in total, we've seen some remarkable activity. There is no two ways about it, remarkable activity. And that is, of course, the basis for why the right partner that will be selected hopefully, in the next several months would be the partner, not just for us, but for the benefit of the patients to develop this product in the way it deserves to be developed. So again, we have, I think, Christine slipped a number of active discussions. There are a number of active discussions right now that are going on. And unfortunately, on one hand, these discussions take a long time. Our longest corporate discussion that has resulted in a significant partnership has taken nearly two years. The shortage one was a year. So I'm not suggesting that the partnership is going to be a year from now. But I just want to give you guidance that these things take time.