Jerry Jabbour
Analyst · Maxim Group. Your line is now live
Sure. Again, Jason thanks for the question. And thanks for turning the call back to 2203. I think it's one of the things that makes Matinas a unique opportunity. Is that this really isn't a binary investment. We're not a single asset, omega-3 Company. We benefit from a lot of the work that has been done over the last 3 years and certainly even longer than that in advancing MAT 2203. And for us, you're right to focus on the market and you're right to say that this is a small community. And from the very beginning, this acid has been fortunate to be surrounded by some of the leading mycologists in the world. And that caused us to focus on what are the areas of greatest unmet medical need and that's where you started with prophylaxis. But as additional data started to emerge, particularly with Peter Williamson's data, in his really stringent mouse model at the National Institutes of Health, you started to see that treatment could become probably even a more important threshold demonstration than prophylaxis.And you combine that with the fact that we have an opportunity because of the NIH funding to move forward in this demonstration, essentially, without having to use our own dollars. It presented the greatest opportunity and so the combination of great data in those preclinical models, combined with the interest of the NIH and the University of Minnesota and the financial support made crypto a perfect model. And then, it became how do you design the study in a way that gets you to where you want to be in a high-risk patient population without subjecting the product and subsequently the platform to unnecessary risk? And that's why Dr. Matkovits, Dr. Mannino and the entire team spend so much time on this protocol. But it sets up the product. Yes, cryptococcal meningitis is not the largest commercial indication in the U.S. It is an acute orphan patient population, for sure and a population, unfortunately, where even those patients subjected to treatments, there's a 40% plus mortality rate. So the need is huge but it's a great demonstration in the one of the most difficult to treat invasive fungal infections that our drug can operate effectively and safely and utilizing the 505B2 pathway that Dr. Matkovits alluded to and that we've been in advanced discussions with the FDA. We believe positions this upon a demonstration in the EnACT trial, that we can treat these patients to go back after the other invasive fungal infections for which we already have QIDP, invasive candidiasis the treatment of aspergillosis.And yes, eventually, we believe the prevention of invasive fungal infections in immuno-compromised patients, those patients who are subjected to additional risk because of advances in medicine, render them immuno-compromised. So this is a great study for us to prove the point advanced MAT 2203 and then use that as the bridge that Terry talked about, to get us to those indications. And when you think about the opportunity, that an oral, safe, well-tolerated amphotericin brings, that's the billion-dollar-plus opportunity that people see, given the unmet medical need across the board in the antifungal space and the lack of investment in new therapies there. That's where MAT 2203 is going to fit.