David Berman
Analyst · Jefferies. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Ralph. I'm happy to share an update on our clinical stage portfolio and let's start with PRAME. Our PRAME opportunity spans across multiple solid tumors including melanoma, ovarian, lung and endometrial carcinoma. By the end of this year, our franchise will include three clinical programs targeting PRAME including a program for HLA-A02 with a half-life extension, and a program for patients who are HLA-A24 positive. Today, I will focus on the leap program F106C. Across the four major tumor types we are studying with F106C, the melanoma data matured first and provided confidence to launch the Phase 3 PRISM-MEL301. We will share the melanoma monotherapy and anti-PD1 combination data in second quarter. After melanoma, the ovarian monotherapy and chemotherapy combinations have been maturing. And we are on track to share this data by third quarter. For lung, we are currently enrolling monotherapy and combinations. Unlike ovarian and melanoma, where we enrolled all comers; for lung, we have focused on select subsets where we would expect to see initial signals before expanding more broadly. This data will continue to mature in first half and will be shared by fourth quarter. Additional exploration continues, including endometrial, contract combinations and dose confirmation. Several data points led to the initiation of the Phase 3 trial in first line melanoma, including F106C monotherapy activity in heavily pretreated patients, the ability to combine with anti-PD1 and insights that our platform works best in early stage disease. We have opened clinical sites for the Phase 3 trial and expect to start randomizing patients in the near future. We are pleased to have a clinical trial collaboration and nivolumab supply agreement with BMS for this trial. I will now turn to highlight the power of our target discovery engine with a novel first-in-class target against PIWIL1. R117C is the first immunotherapy to target PIWIL1, a protein which is expressed in colorectal carcinoma, a tumor that has historically been insensitive to checkpoints. PIWIL is an attractive target since it is not expressed in normal vital tissues, is a negative prognostic marker, and has broad expression in about a quarter of colorectal cancer patients. The CTA in Europe was submitted in December of last year and we are on track to start the trial by the second half of this year. Turning now from oncology to HIV. In addition to redirecting T cells to kill cancer cells, we believe that technology can be used to redirect T cells to kill virally infected cells. For HIV, the current standards of care of antiretroviral therapy block replication that cannot eliminate the virus, which hides it as a reservoir in CD4 T cells. In the single ascending dose portion of the M113V trial, we demonstrated safety and biomarkers indicating target engagement. The goals of the ongoing multiple ascending dose portion are to demonstrate antiviral activity, including one, reducing the reservoir in blood and two, delaying the viral rebound. As we round out the clinical pipeline, I will transition to highlighting further the versatility of our platform. We validated that our ImmTAC technology can recruit and activate T cells against cancer. We are using the same T cell activation approach to target HIV and chronic HPV. Today, I will share the third platform called ImmTAAI, which has a different goal of turning off inflammation and is intended to treat autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. The current standards of care for ANI are systemic immune suppression, which can lead to systemic toxicity. Our vision for the future is down modulation of the immune system focused only in the organ or tissue, which is under immune attack. As part of our cancer peptide discovery work, we have been mapping the normal human peptidome. Therefore, when we want to develop a program to downmodulate the immune attack in a specific organ, we have a large preexisting library of peptides that we know are tissue specific. On Slide 20, you can see our ImmTAAI molecule. The blue targeting end tethers the ImmTAAI to the target tissue. The purple effector end is a PD-1 agonist, which presses on the PD-1 brake to turn off the T cell. There is also an Fc fusion, which prolongs the half-life and enables less frequent dosing. Our first application is for patients with type 1 diabetes, which remains a large unmet need. Type 1 diabetes results when auto reactive T cells kill pancreatic beta cells, which normally secrete insulin. To protect the pancreatic beta cells, we designed an ImmTAAI that binds to a peptide from the preproinsulin protein, which is only expressed in beta cells. The PD-1 agonist effector in will turn off these autoreactive T cells. As seen in the data on the right, we see protection against autoreactive T cell killing only when using an ImmTAAI that tethers to the beta cells. Our second candidate is for skin inflammatory diseases, including atopic dermatitis and psoriasis among others. We designed an ImmTAAI that binds specific lead to a target that is only expressed on antigen presenting cells in the skin. In a T cell stimulation assay, we observed inhibition of T cells only for an ImmTAAI that tethers to the antigen preventing cell. This candidate has another exciting feature. It is universal and not HLA restricted. This is an example of how our technology can be broadened to all populations. This is certainly an exciting and productive period at Immunocore as we continue to pioneer TCR bispecifics for cancer, for infectious diseases, and now for autoimmune diseases. I will hand over to Brian.