Ugur Sahin
Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please ask your question
Thank you, Sylke. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to our first 2020 conference call. I will start with a few introductory remarks about our quarterly and recent highlights. I will then provide an update on our COVID-19 program. Özlem Türeci will provide a brief pipeline update before handing the call over to Sierk Poetting, who will review our financial results and provide an update on our manufacturing-scale activities. I will then make a few closing remarks on the outlook for 2020 before opening up the call for your questions. I wanted to start by quickly highlighting the significant progress we have made since the beginning of the year despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Slide 3 illustrates our vision of building a global next-generation immunotherapy company. Our strategy is to utilize our suite of novel therapeutic platforms to fully exploit the potential of the immune system. We are advancing a pipeline of potentially first-in-class immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases. The most recent coronavirus vaccine program, which we named Project Lightspeed, shows the speed and flexibility of our mRNA vaccine technology. We have invested significantly in our manufacturing capabilities in the mRNA and cell therapy areas, which is a key pillar of our long-term strategy. I am incredibly proud that we have been able to quickly generate GMP-grade clinical drug supply for multiple vaccine candidates for our ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials. Finally, as we outlined in our last call, we quickly implemented a three-point plan to manage the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our clinical programs. To date, that plan has been successful and expectations for clinical trial timelines have not changed substantially since our last update. This week, we achieved an important milestone with the close of the acquisition of Neon Therapeutics. Neon offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts will now serve as our U.S. headquarters and the hub for the US research and development site. This has provided an immediate R&D footprint in the US. As we have highlighted previously, the acquisition brings novel neoantigen-based T cell therapies and deep expertise in the development of neoantigen therapies, with both vaccine as well as T cell capabilities. We are pleased to report that Neon recently received a clinical trial authorization from the Dutch health authority for NEO-PTC-01, which we have now named BNT-221 [ph]. The drug candidate is a personalized neoantigen-targeted T cell therapy derived from patients’ peripheral blood mononuclear cells or PBMCs consisting of multiple T cell populations targeting the most therapeutically relevant neoantigen from each patient’s tumor. The initial Phase I clinical trial of BNT-221 will be in patients with metastatic melanoma who are not responsive to checkpoint inhibitors. We will focus on the integration efforts in the coming months and look forward to providing additional detail in the coming quarters. Now, let’s move to Slide 4. I’m proud of our progress towards developing a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infection to combat the pandemic [indiscerible]. Since the beginning of the Project Lightspeed in late January, we have selected four vaccine candidates and initiated clinical trials in the US and in Europe following a fast and rigorous preclinical testing program that included a number of studies in animal models as well as many, many [indiscernible] assays. The first cohorts in both US and Europe have now been dosed; and we expect first clinical data in late June and July time frame assuming that our trial will progress as planned. The clinical trial materials for these trials has been manufactured at our state-of-the-art GMP-certified mRNA manufacturing facilities in Europe. In parallel, we are working closely with Pfizer to scale up manufacturing for global supply capacity [indiscernible] to provide worldwide supplies. Our goal is to be in a position to produce hundreds of millions of doses in beginning 2021, along with Pfizer, if our vaccine program is successful in trial. Slide 5. I want to provide a quick overview on the mRNA technologies being utilized for BNT-162. On April 23, we hosted a webcast that provided a detailed overview of the science behind our program. A replay of that event is available on our website, in the Investor Relations section for those that missed it and would like to know additional details. Our mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 exploits a highly potent lipid nanoparticle or LNP mRNA vaccine product. We believe that mRNA vaccines are highly suited for this challenge because, first, mRNA vaccines have been shown to be highly immunogenic and induces neutralizing antibodies as well as T cell response. Second, messenger RNA is a naturally occurring molecule with the well characterized safety properties as well as defined biopharmaceuticals with a high purity and animal free. We believe that our vaccines may offer several advantage over traditional vaccine approaches, including the ability to precisely design and manufacture them rapidly and in large quantity. We believe that our vaccine program is differentiated in a number of key aspects. The first is that our program utilizes multiple mRNA formats. Two of our four vaccine candidates include a nucleoside-modified mRNA backbone, one includes a uridine-containing messenger RNA, and the fourth vaccine candidate utilizes a self-amplifying mRNA. We expect that - these different mRNA formats to produce different immunogenicity profiles, which could be relevant in determining the dose and dosing frequency ultimately required to generate immunity. Self-amplifying messenger RNA in particular has advantage that it may allow for greater potency and potentially enable a single administration at a very low dose. Further, our program is differentiated in that we are bringing vaccines against two distinct targets into clinical testing. One is the full length type protein of the virus, and the other is the much smaller optimized receptor-binding domain or RBD from the spike protein. To our knowledge, we are the only company currently in clinical testing with a vaccine targeting the RBD domain. Ultimately, we will need to wait for clinical data before we can draw some conclusions whether this domain has advantage as compared to full-length antigen. I will now turn to Slide 6. I will provide an update on our ongoing global development program for BNT-162. As stated before, we have completed dosing for the first cohort in both our US as well as in our European Phase I/II trials. In both cases, BioNTech is the sponsor of these trials. The dose escalation portion of Phase I/II trials will include about 200 healthy subjects in Europe as well as 360 healthy subjects in the US. In both trials, the objective is to determine the safety, immunogenicity and the optimal dose level for our four messenger RNA vaccine candidates; and is evaluated in a single continuous study. The design of the US study has the advantage that it could allow us to move seamlessly into Phase II testing if the Phase I results are successful and allow us immunization of several thousands of subjects. Both trials are currently enrolling healthy subjects between the ages of 18 to 55 and will target a dose range of at least 1 microgram to 100 microgram. The study will assess the effects of repeated vaccination following a prime injection for the three vaccine candidates that utilize uridine-containing messenger RNA or nucleoside-modified mRNA. The fourth vaccine candidate, which contains self-amplifying mRNA, will be evaluated after a single dose as well as a prime-boost vaccine. All the adults will only be immunized with a given dose level of a vaccine candidate once a testing of that candidate and the dose level in younger adults has provided initial evidence of safety and immunogenicity. We have a number of key objectives with our trial design. First, it is designed to accelerate the clinical development path to approval. Another objective is to get insights into the immunogenicity of our vaccine candidates in different subject groups across multiple regions. The ultimate goal is to quickly identify a safe vaccine candidate that can prevent COVID-19. I will now hand over to Özlem to discuss key updates in our development program.
Özlem Türeci: Thank you, Ugur. Today, I am going to provide key updates for our oncology pipeline since our last call. In our call at the end of March, we have indicated those programs for which we expect delays due to the pandemic. There have been no major changes to our trial time lines since our last call. As the COVID-19 pandemic remains dynamic, we will continue to monitor the situation as it evolves then provide further updates accordingly. As Ugur previously mentioned, we made progress in our oncology clinical trials, and I’ll lead you through key updates to our clinical pipeline, as shown on Slide 7. We have 11 product candidates in 12 ongoing clinical trials. We are planning to initiate two randomized Phase II trials for our FixVac candidates BNT-111 and BNT-113 in melanoma and in head, neck cancer, respectively. For BNT-111, our melanoma FixVac, we expect the next program update to be publication of our interim Phase I trial data in advanced melanoma in a high-ranked peer-reviewed journal in the next few months. As we previously noted, we have held discussions with regulatory authorities regarding next steps and the design of the Phase II trial. Based on those discussions, we believe there may be potential for it to be registrational. We expect to evaluate BNT-111 in combination with a checkpoint inhibitor in patients who are checkpoint inhibitor experienced at baseline. We plan to provide a further update on the expected trial design in the third quarter of 2020. Moving on to our iNeST program, to BNT-122, which is partnered with Genentech. On our last call, we indicated that a data update for the Phase I/II trial in multiple solid tumors was planned at the AACR annual meeting, which due to the COVID pandemic was rescheduled for August 2020 at that time. Since the AACR meeting has gone virtual, we now plan to present the data at the AACR Virtual Annual Meeting II in June. We expect abstracts to be available on May 15. The data to be presented in June will include safety and immunogenicity data in multiple solid tumors types. For BNT-122, two additional randomized Phase II clinical trials in the adjuvant setting are planned. The first adjuvant Phase II study will evaluate the efficacy, safety, pharmacokinetics, immunogenicity and biomarkers of BNT-122 plus atezolizumab compared with atezolizumab alone in patients with stage 2 to 3 non-small cell lung cancer who are positive for circulating tumor DNA following surgical resection and have received standard-of-care adjuvant platinum-doublet chemotherapy. For our next-generation checkpoint-immune modulatory program partnered with Genmab, the ongoing trial with BNT-311, the PD-L1x4-1BB dual body, continues to advance rapidly, as the expansion cohort has been initiated. Data from this Phase I/II trial in multiple solid tumors is expected in the second half of this year. We expect the updates to include dose escalation and safety data from the trial. We are excited about this program. We believe it has broad potential in a range of solid tumors, including those where checkpoint therapy is currently established but also more difficult tumors where first-generation checkpoint inhibitors have not been as successful. This bispecific antibody has outperformed conventional checkpoint inhibitors in preclinical animal models. We have seen strong evidence in the preclinical setting of its ability to amplify the effect of our vaccines as well. Finally, BNT-211, our CAR-T program targeting solid tumors, remains on track to go in the clinic this summer. This program combines our CAR-T therapeutic approach with our mRNA vaccination and uses our proprietary tumor-selective target Claudin 6. I will now hand the call over to Sierk to provide an update on our manufacturing scale-up activities and discuss our current financial results for the first quarter of 2020.