Mark Lowdell
Analyst · Mayank Mamtani with B. Riley. Please proceed with your question
Great. Thank you. Well, thank you all for joining the call. I’m – as RJ said, I’m going to update the current status of our INKmune development program. For those of you who need a refresher, our initial in-human trial of INKmune are taking place at a single center in the UK. That’s enrolling patients with initially a bone marrow disease called myelodysplastic syndrome, MDS, or more recently with a more severe disease called acute myelodysplastic or AML. And at this point, as of today, we’ve treated four patients. Each patient has received three doses of INKmune, in fact, patient four received her third dose only today and we are monitoring their response and their progression. The four patients are actually very different from their disease perspectives. The first patient is an MDS patient enrolled in the trial and responded very well, remains alive and well, more than 14 months from the day of his first treatment last year. He showed no side effects to any of the three doses that he received and he showed increased NK cell activation and generation of as RJ described memory-like NK cells after both the first, second and third doses. These memory-like NK cells remained in peripheral blood for over a hundred days after his last infusion, which we found both remarkable and very encouraging. He is a 78-year-old man at the time of the treatment and he had severe MDS. In other words, all three lineages of his blood production were impaired. He had low neutrophils, he had low red cells and he had low platelets, had a very poor quality of life, regular hospital admissions to receive blood transfusions to cope with those certain inadequacies, including platelet donations. Months after completing INKmune treatment, his disease burden has reduced somewhat, but more importantly, his quality of life has improved so dramatically that he’s returned to playing badminton with his friends. He no longer needs frequent transfusions and he doesn’t require platelet transfusions at all. And his improved clinical status is reflected in a decrease in what we call as ECOG status from two, which is severely impaired to zero, which is what you and I would score. Now, second patient actually was a young lady of 20 years old with relapsed acute myeloid leukemia, which had relapsed after an allogeneic transplant from a nonrelated donor, so a very high risk young lady. Her bone marrow was completely dysfunctional and she’d been hospitalized for six months due to inadequate blood neutrophils, which the cells would prevent bacterial sepsis. She had a single dose of 300 million INKmune followed by two doses of the trial dose of 100 million. And as with the first patient, she immediately showed a presence of memory-like NK cells after each infusion and these persisted with over 60% of the NK cells in her bone marrow at 140 days being activated memory-like NK cells. Within one month of completing her treatment, so that’s a 21 day treatment course. Within one month her neutrophil count improved significantly and sufficiently for her to be discharged home for the first time in seven months, the disease burden reduced and she went from mixed donor chimerism to full donor chimerism. But to put that in simpler terms, her donor stem cell graft initially did not fully establish itself. And after the immune therapy, it did. Her disease became controllable with routine chemotherapy and seven months after completing INKmune treatment, she remained alive and with control disease and was awaiting a suitable donor for a second transplant. Sadly, a few weeks ago, I heard from her clinician that her disease relapsed rapidly, then she died no longer responsive to chemotherapy. But what we were delighted to hear from her treating physician was that “she definitely improved post INKmune use, this gave her a good quality of life as an outpatient, something we did not achieve with chemotherapy”. And I think that really does point the aim of this drug program it’s to improve quality of life to get people home and to ultimately cure their disease.
. : And then two weeks ago, we treated our fourth patient, another really seriously ill young lady. And I think this is the story that you will be aware of with other early stage drug development companies you end up treating really extremely ill patients until you’ve proven the efficacy of your drug. So this is another young lady with refractory acute myeloid leukemia. She’s now received all three doses of INKmune. So the third one was today. In fact, today she received it as an outpatient, the group of having been now so convinced that that the infusions are safe. And once again, she’s shown no side effects. We’re waiting the lab test results to see if she’s responded. But she is again another patient with a high level disease burden. So, we don’t expect to see curative results, but we hope to see an improvement. So during the quarter, we received national registration by the United Kingdom National Institute for Medical Research for INKmune MDS trial. And that means that it’s promoted in the UK to National Hematological Oncologists at all UK hospitals, and allows them to submit patients to be enrolled in the trial at the single trial center, which is the University Hospital in Southampton. Additionally, we are pleased to report that the company will be expanding its INKmune MDS trial into the European Union with submission underway for two trial – the trial in two hospitals in Athens with whom we’re working very closely. The company will provide an update along with data on this patient’s response to INKmune in the future. And then future corporate INKmune platform updates. In our previous call, we announced that we were about to submit an applications to the UK medicines regulator, the MHRA to open a second trial of INKmune in ovarian cancer. This was submitted, but it’s not been acted, and was approved, but was not been acted on by the hospital due to a moratorium on opening new Phase 1 trials in cancer in the UK because of the backlog of cancer treatment plus COVID lockdown. We’re fully committed to expanding the INKmune program into solid tumors and have a trial in discussion with relevant key opinion leaders; we will provide more guidance on the solid tumor initiative once we’ve completed discussions with the FDA. I’ll now pass the call back to RJ. Thank you very much.