Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CytomX Therapeutics Fourth Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only-mode. After the speaker's presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Chris Ogden, Senior Vice President, Finance and Accounting. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that, during this call, we will be making forward-looking statements. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties and risks that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. Important risks and uncertainties are set forth in our most recent public filings with the SEC at sec.gov. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. Earlier this afternoon, we issued a press release that includes a summary of our 2023 full year financial results and highlights recent progress at CytomX. We encourage everyone to read today's press release in the associated materials, which have been filed with the SEC. Additionally, the press release, a recording of this call and our SEC filings can be found under the Investors and News section of our website. With me on the call today is Dr. Sean McCarthy, CytomX’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman. Sean will provide introductory comments on CytomX’s progress and key milestones before we cover our pipeline progress and financials for the fourth quarter and expectations for the year ahead. With that, I will now turn the call over to Sean.

Thanks, Chris and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us for an update on CytomX continued progress. The promise of masking and conditional activation strategies to improve the therapeutic window for potent biologics like ADCs, T-cell engagers and cytokines continues to be an important and exciting frontier in cancer R&D and our leadership in this field at CytomX derives from more than a decade of innovation with the Probody therapeutic platform. Our foundational clinical work with the Probody platform has achieved many firsts in demonstrating how marketing strategies could be effective in cancer patients, and we have opened a broad field in which progress continues to accelerate. The CytomX team is highly focused on delivering on the promise of conditional activation for the benefit of patients. We're currently advancing a generation of product candidates that span multiple modalities, leveraging validated oncology targets, potent effective mechanisms and tailored masking strategies. Each of our candidates is designed to address large commercial markets and major unmet medical need in cancer. We've had a highly productive start to 2024. We remain on track for initial CX-904 Phase 1a dose escalation data in the second half of this year, and we are busy launching Phase 1 clinical trials for our newest therapeutic candidates CX-2051 and CX-801 with initial Phase 1a data anticipated in 2025. Let me now provide additional context and detail for our lead programs. I'll start with our -- with CX-904, our Probody T-cell engager targeting EGFR and CD3. T-cell engaging bispecific antibodies have enormous potential for the treatment of cancer and first demonstrated meaningful clinical benefit in hematologic malignancies. Looking across the T-cell engager landscape for solid tumors is taken time to see meaningful clinical results, but we're now starting to see important breakthroughs generating great excitement. Successes include Immunocore Tebentafusp in…

Thank you, Sean. I'm pleased to be able to share an update on our 2023 financial results with everyone today. CytomX entered 2024 with a strong balance sheet, with $175 million in cash, cash equivalents and investments as of December 31, 2023, compared to $194 million at the end of 2022. We expect our cash balance will fund the operations of the company well into the second half of 2025. This cash guidance does not assume any additional milestones from existing collaborations or any new business development, both of which CytomX has a strong track record of obtaining. Our cash position reflects our focus on controlling costs and efficient capital allocation, as well as our consistent track record of funding the company through a mix of both strategic business development and equity financing over time. Our partnerships have consistently been a strategic pathway for value creation and financing opportunities that allow us to generate non-dilutive capital while increasing the reach of our platform. Our partnerships continue to advance and have generated more than $500 million of incoming cash to date, and we see near-term opportunities for additional milestone payments in 2024 and 2025. Despite a challenging macro environment in 2023, we maintained a strong balance sheet position and executed efficiently to position the company to create potentially significant value inflections that will be realized over the next 12 to 18 months. Now moving to revenue and operating expenses for the year. Total revenue was $101.2 million for 2023, compared to $53.2 million for the corresponding period in 2022. We saw an increase in revenue due to a higher percentage of completion for research programs in the Bristol-Myers Squibb collaboration and the recent collaborations with Regeneron and Moderna. Operating expense for Q4 2023 was $27.2 million, compared to $29.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. R&D expenses decreased by $34.3 million from last year to $77.3 million, compared to $111.6 million in 2022. General and administrative expenses decreased by $13.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 to $29.8 million, compared to $42.8 million for the corresponding period in 2022. Overall, our prudent financial management of the company and focused capital allocation priorities has resulted in continued balance sheet strength as we progressed our pipeline. Now, I'll hand the call back to Sean for closing remarks.

Thank you, Chris, and thanks, everyone, for your time this afternoon and for your interest in CytomX. 2024 promises to be an exciting year for us and the longer-term outlook for 2025 and beyond is also very compelling as we make progress across our multimodality pipeline. The field of antibody masking and conditional activation is continuing to accelerate, and we remain very well positioned to build on the depth of our experience as a leading innovator in this area. We are leveraging our multimodality Probody therapeutic platform to discover and develop new cancer therapies based on T-cell engagers, ADCs and cytokines, each of which represents a highly relevant and timely area of strategic interest across the industry. The CytomX team is intensely focused on delivering an innovative pipeline for the benefit of people living with cancer. And I'd like to close by thanking everyone involved for their commitment to our vision. With that, operator, let's go ahead and we can open up the call for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today will be coming from Peter Lawson of Barclays.

Operator, maybe we could put Peter back in the queue and go to the next question.

Yes. Thank you. Our next question will be coming from Joe Catanzaro of Piper Sandler.

Hey, everybody. Hopefully, you can hear me okay. Thanks for taking the questions and the update here. So I know we saw recent data from a competitive masking program, and they showed look like near zero detectable unmasked antibody in circulation. Just maybe can you remind us what you've historically seen with Probody programs around this metric, whether you're tracking it for 904 and what your expectations would be? And then maybe my follow-up question is on the safety side. So in preclinical tox work for 904, I know you've reported some data around CRS. But in GLP work, was it CD3-mediated tox or EGFR-mediated tox that showed up first and which was dose-limiting?

Joe, thanks for the questions. Yes. So we're tracking, obviously, all innovations in the field and all progress. I think we can conclude from multiple recent data sets from several companies that, first of all, something that I think we've shown quite some time ago, is that masking works. Masking antibodies and other modalities is clearly having -- showing the ability to decrease systemic target engagement, and depending upon target and format, to also improve tolerability. So we're excited to see this progress across the field. What we've shown over the years pretty consistently with multiple programs, whether it was our PD-L1 Probody or 2009 [indiscernible] some of our earlier programs from which we've learned so much, we've shown that the vast majority of the circulating entity, the Probody therapeutic, is in masked form. And that, again, has translated into what we interpret as a successful decreasing of target engagement. So the field has come a long way, and we're excited to see now in the hands of others these types of approach is also beginning to gain some traction. In terms of our work on EGFR-CD3 and 904, we have presented -- quite honestly, we haven't presented a lot of data on this program for various competitive reasons, but we did share an early iteration of our EGFR-CD3 program with pretty extensive characterization in syngeneic animal models and in Sino. And we focused in large part on the cytokine induction in those monkey studies showing a dramatic shift with the masking, dramatic shift in terms of the ability to induce cytokines. But we haven't shared a whole lot of data on the actual CX-904 molecule yet. That will come in the future.

Our next question will be coming from Anupam Rama of JPMorgan.

This is actually Malcolm Kuno on for Anupam. So what is the size and scope of the Phase 1 dose escalation data that we should be thinking about in 2H '24 for CX-904? And on that, when should we get a better sense of a more granular time line?

Yes. Thanks for the question. So we remain on track with 904 to share data in the second half, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks. Our principal objective at this moment in time is to build the data set to share with our partner, Amgen, in the second half of the year. And then that would result in presentation externally in an appropriate setting. We're not guiding to any specifics at this point in time. Obviously, what we're looking for though in Phase 1a is to demonstrate the -- and really fully explore the safety profile of 904 in terms of CRS, in terms of EGFR-mediated toxicities, obviously, look for any early evidence of antitumor activity. I would expect the update in the second half. It would be a meaningful number of patients, but that's really all that we're ready to say at this moment in time.

[Operator Instructions] There are no more questions in the queue. Thank you so much for joining the conference call today. Everyone may disconnect.