Simon Harnest
Analyst · Oppenheimer & Co. Please proceed with your question
Thank you and welcome, everyone, to Cellectis fiscal year and fourth quarter 2017 financial results conference call. Joining me on the call today with prepared remarks are André Choulika, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Eric Dutang, our Chief Financial Officer. Yesterday evening, Cellectis issued a press release reporting our financial results for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2017. This press release is available on our website at www.cellectis.com. As a quick reminder, we will make forward-looking statements regarding financial outlook in addition to regulatory and product development plans. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those forecasted. A description of these risks can be found in our more recent Form 20-F on file with the SEC. With that, I would like to turn over the call over to André. André, please go ahead.
André Choulika: Well, thank you very much, Simon, and good morning, everyone. 2017 was a great year and of tremendous advancement for the CAR T field as a whole and for Cellectis in particular as we brought our first wholly-owned program into the clinic. We are more than ever very excited about the potential of CAR T for the treatment of cancer. Cellectis is the company of true revolutionary concepts: gene-editing on the one side and CAR T-cells on the other side. By combining these two technologies, we had set the trajectory of the concept of gene-edited allogeneic CAR Ts to become a revolutionary therapy in the field of oncology and beyond. At Cellectis we are combining the cutting-edge, our proprietary gene-editing technology with the latest generation of CAR T constructs, resulting in an unparalleled proprietary knowledge of CGMP-grade cell manufacturing. We are taking the first steps in transforming cell therapy into genuine pharmaceutical product. Since 2014, we have been producing through series of manufacturing campaigns large-scale gene-edited allogeneic CAR T-cell batches under internationally recognized CGMP standards, which led to the first-ever clinical application of an allogeneic CAR T product candidate, UCART19, for compassionate use back in June and November 2015. These first patients treated with UCART19 for an aggressive ALL are still in complete remission and cancer free today. And our partner, Servier, continues to invent this next generation product candidate through clinical trials. The driving force behind allogeneic off-the-shelf CAR T platform is our desire to make this ground-breaking treatment modality more accessible to patients and clinicians worldwide; and to remove some of the uncertainties associated with CAR T regarding cell quality, yields or manufacturing uncertainties as well as the time-lag between Asraises [ph] and injection, and to enable a treatment below the cost of individualized autologous CAR T therapy. In one word, to this revolutionary therapy, CAR T, we plan to bring market access. At the recent American Society of Hematology annual meeting or ASH in December 2017, our corporate partner, Servier, along with our clinical partner, UCL and King’s College, London, presented the first set of adult and pediatric CD19-positive ALL patient treated with UCART19 from their ongoing Phase I dose escalation trial. Only patient who have exhausted all available treatment option, including the ones that failed enrollment into an autologous CAR T therapy were eligible to be enrolled in the trial. All in all, five out of five pediatric patients were completely tumor free defined as MRD negative at the day-28 post-UCART19 administration dosed at 4 million cells per kilo. Five out of seven adult patients were completely tumor free MRD negative at day-28 post-UCART19 administration dosed with a 100,000 cells per kilo. We’re also pleased with the safety profile of UCART19 to date with no serious adverse events related to GvHD and only two cases of cytokine release syndrome gathered – greater than grade 3 in 14 patients treated to date with no neurotoxicity. We’re looking forward to more presentations this year by our partner on UCART19 that will include longer-term follow-up of these initial patients, as well as data from higher doses cohorts. These data demonstrate that allogeneic CAR Ts are not a hypothetical future for patients. At Cellectis, we made that happen and it’s happening right now today in hospitals in the United States and in Europe. Over the past three years, in addition to the production of UCART19, we have manufactured another wholly-owned allogeneic CAR T product candidate, UCART123, which is currently in Phase I trial in AML and BPDCN in United States. After a hold by the FDA in September 2017, UCART123 is back in trial at a dose at 62,000 cells per kilo as the new start dose for the dose escalation – for the escalation phase. Currently, we are manufacturing our third product UCART22, which is set to enter clinical trial in the second half of this year in ALL and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In 2018, we will build up on the clinical proof-of-concept of the selected UCART platform started almost three years ago with UCART19, by advancing our wholly-owned product candidate UCART123 and UCART22 through clinical trials. Cellectis are currently running two dose escalation trials with UCART123, the AML trial, which is led by Dr. Gail Roboz at Weill Cornell Medical School in New York City. And the BPDCN trial is by Dr. Naveen Pemmaraju at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. While, we already have a series of patient waiting to be enrolled in these trials there is one significant aspect to be considered for patient safety. It’s an FDA requirement for all allogeneic donor-derived CAR T-Cell program to go through a dose escalation phase, where the dose limiting toxicity and the maximum tolerated dose are defined. This is one of the differentiating factor to autologous CAR T-Cell program. The requirement enabled us to empirically establish the relationship between CAR T-Cell dosing and the anti-tumor effect of our CAR T-Cell. We expect to complete these dose escalation phase for UCART123 within the next 12-months before moving into the expansion phase in 2019, where we plan to enroll-up up to 150 AML and BPDCN patients. This is where the true advantage of allogeneic CAR T-Cell manufacturing process kicks in. As we have already produced enough vials of UCART123 upfront to treat patient simultaneously through the expansion phase of these studies. AML is a particularly difficult to treat disease. The current standard of care leaves a huge gap in unmet medical need. We believe UCART123 has the potential to significantly impact the tumor burden in patient. Our goal is to move through the dose escalation phases of these trials through 2018 to enable us to open expansion cohorts in 2019. We expect to report an initial clinical data by the end of this year that details the initial safety and anti-tumor activity observed in the dose escalation trial. Following in the steps of 19 is UCART22, an interesting target for the treatment of ALL and NHL in patient who either expressed CD22 from the onset or have relapsed CD19 negative for CD19 directed CAR T treatment and still expresses CD22. We are currently in the final stage of cGMP manufacturing and we plan to submit an IND for UCART22 in the second quarter of this year to treat ALL and non-Hodgkin lymphoma patient with clinical trials in the U.S. to start shortly after. While, we are in the first stage of manufacturing final stage – we are in the final stage of manufacturing UCART22, we are already running multiple production runs and process development for UCARTCS1 in multiple myeloma. UCARTCS1 is the first time that CAR T-Cell therapy will go after this target. The trick is you need to knock-out CS1 or SLAMF7 from the surface of CAR T-Cells first, using gene editing before integrating a CAR that targets CS1. We believe that UCARTCS1 represent a promising therapy for multiple myeloma patients build on one hand on the validation of the target by – produced by the use of alemtuzumab as a monoclonal antibody, and on the other hand by the promising results producing by autologous BCMA CAR T approach for multiple myeloma. CS1 has the potentially advantageous safety profile and CS1 is not expressed on healthy tissues as BCMA is. UCARTCS1 will follow UCART22 with an IND filing plan in one-year. As a platform behind our clinical progress, Cellectis is housing one of the strongest R&D department our space. One highlight was our recent presentation of our proprietary TALEN gene editing technology at the Keystone Conference in February. We presented a poster on an engineering CAR T-Cell with the TCR alpha and TCR beta knock out, beta-2-microglobulin knock out, the CAR-T knock in and NK inhibitor knock in. While our single gene knock out deficiencies are close to 100%, this multiplexed gene editing platform including the use of multi gene targeting by DNA break-induced homologous recombination with an overall efficiency of 68%, showcase the power of our technology and knowledge. We have shown that TALEN are capable of achieving simultaneous double knock out and – double knock in and double knock out efficiency over 68%. This is the highest efficiency to date achieved in such a multiplex knock out and knock in, in T-Cell with any gene editing technology back by a factor close of two times. And this is just the glimpse at our capacity. In the past, we have shown that we could achieve at the R&D level, could robustly translate into cGMP production for clinical supply. This is our strength. Therefore, this represent the next step in our manufacturing platform starting in 2019, we are planning to manufacture CAR T product candidate on the basis of targeted gene insertion of CAR T replacing the traditional antiviral vector approach. Another very important key aspect is yields. Achieving high performance gene editing is great, but selective goal is producing pharmaceuticals, therefore, yield through all the manufacturing process is key. In 2010, we have acquired an asset of CytoPulse – the assets of CytoPulse, an electroporation company based in Maryland. And we have heavily invested to develop the technology until to date to achieve very high level of cell transduction and viability post T-Cell transduction. We have perfected our proprietary electroporation technology to handle large quantities of cells like gently transducing cells with TALEN. This results in very high transduction rate of cells in cGMP conditions. But most excitingly the cell survival post electroporation is also huge. This translate into high yields and of course low COGS. This is key. A large distinguishing factor for Cellectis in the gene editing space is our IP. Our proprietary patent portfolio that encompasses a large umbrella patent in gene editing, starting by basic license homologous recombination patent, no nucleus needed, to the nucleus-based gene editing space using homologous recombination as well as non-homologous end joining, together with a specific patent families as they related to TALEN or Magnetelasers [ph]. We have recently also announced the issuance of specific patent related to the editing of T-Cells using CRISPR. However, due to the superior efficiency and plasticity as well as safety, we’re using TALEN for the manufacturing of all of our therapeutic CAR T-Cell programs. Turning now to our partner programs, we have been extremely impressed with the progress made by our partners. Servier recently announced the expansion of UCART19 in multiple centers in the U.S. and the EU, once the dose escalation phase is completed. UCART19 will move into the expansion phase in 2019, which could be followed rapidly by registration trial. We are looking forward to hear more updates this year. Pfizer has shown very exciting results on the first off-the-shelf BCMA CAR T program for multiple myeloma, and also the first allogeneic solid tumor CAR T targeting EGFRvIII for glioblastoma. We strongly believe that successes of CAR T in solid tumor will be through allogeneic CAR T and gene editing. We strongly believe in the superior potential of the CAR T programs of our partner, Pfizer and Servier, both in terms of potential and span. We form today the leading team of the allo-CART space by far. With a competition walking up – waking up on the huge opportunity, our intention is to accelerate. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Eric Dutang, our Chief Financial Officer, for a discussion of our financial results. Eric, please.