Noah Berkowitz
Analyst · Bank of America.
Sure. Thanks, John, and good to hear from you, Tazeen. So yes, 102, it's just such an exciting story for us because just to review and build off of what John and Andrew just said, if you think back, we've been working in oncology, but also developing neuroscience. And here, we are on the heels of a positive registration study for [ VEP-2 ], out-licensing of luxdegalutamide, an AR degrader to Novartis, and we're advancing 2 oncology drugs. And here now, we have ARV-102 that -- where we've shared some incredible results recently that drive us in this direction for PSP and possibly for Parkinson's disease. So for years -- over the past many years, there's been tremendous investment in the Parkinson's disease community and the PSP community to understand what are the pathways that drive this neurodegenerative disease. And so there's a large biomarker study called PPMI, and this looks at the natural progression of Parkinson's disease. And it has demonstrated that there are markers such as GPNMB, IAB1 -- IBA1 and also CD68, a series of cathepsin. So markers that are predictive of progression of disease because they are driving neuroinflammation and also driving neurodegeneration because of mistrafficking of proteins. And so that's because of endolysosomal function. So these markers are all elevated in the disease. And we just reported out a study at MDS that drew tremendous excitement from investigators or scientists more broadly because we showed that in healthy volunteers, we were able to reduce these biomarkers, right? And now we're running the Parkinson's disease study that is looking at all of these biomarkers and we expect that if we degrade LRRK2 as much as we saw in healthy volunteers where we achieved 75% reduction, more than enough to advance this into PSP and PD studies that we should be able to drive down these biomarkers that cause the neuroinflammation and the mistrafficking of proteins such as tau. So building on that, we have the healthy volunteer data. We're going to report out our Parkinson's disease, LRRK2 degradation and biomarker data. And then next year, things go right, start a PSP study. PSP is a neurodegenerative disease that relies also on this mistrafficking of tau and we know that our drug can correct this mistrafficking. It can improve the -- decrease the neuroinflammation that is also at a root cause of PSP. And we'll be treating patients for continuously, meaning no longer just limited to 28 days, continue to accumulate biomarker data and correlate that with clinical measures like PSPRS and others. And we will hope to report out in short order the results of that Phase Ib study. And if things go right, we may be able to start a Phase II study even before we have the Phase Ib study has completed. So a registration quality Phase II study. But exactly guiding on when that can start that we have to await clearing our IND and starting the Phase Ib study.