Matt Coffey
Analyst · Ladenburg
Hello, and welcome to our year end 2019 and corporate update conference call. 2019 was an incredibly productive year for Oncolytics and that momentum has carried over at the beginning of 2020. We’re very pleased with our execution over this time. It was the year of laying groundwork for multiple studies as well as building on our capital market strategy as we put in tremendous efforts to increase our liquidity and balance sheet. Cumulatively, this work now sets the stage for an extremely important year ahead. I like to use this call to frame a significant progress we’ve made and how this progress positions us for a catalyst rich future with the first of these announcements coming before the end of this month. I’ll also outline our ongoing programs, how these programs are evolving and additional indications we may investigate it in the future. Let me start with some highlights that have built the foundation of where we are now. And to be clear, everything has evolved from significant clinical results with pelareorep, particularly the Phase 2 randomized IND-213 study in metastatic breast cancer, but also recent findings from pancreatic cancer and multiple myeloma studies. The results we have demonstrated in a broad range of both solid and liquid tumors are based on pelareorep’s ability to treat systemically through intravenous delivery and create an unprecedented amount of viral replication. We started 2019 with a very strong set of collaborative studies involving Roche’s Tecentriq in breast cancer, Merck’s Keytruda in pancreatic cancer and Bristol Myers Squibb AK BMS’s Opdivo in multiple myeloma. After identifying our biomarker at the beginning of 2019, we entered into a co-development agreement with Pfizer and EMD Serono to study their PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor Bavencio in the same setting we had the strong results in previously. That is HR+ / HER2- metastatic breast cancer. This tumor type encompasses over 70% of breast cancer and represents a completely underserved patient population and an absolutely massive market opportunity valued conservatively a $2 billion for the drug that can provide the first meaningful overall survival benefits. Remember, the current standard of care for these patients after first line therapy is simply antiquated paclitaxel and we demonstrated a doubling of overall survival in our target patient population of HR+ / HER2- when combining pelareorep with paclitaxel in IND 213. Exiting 2019, we’re now working with some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Through these collaborations, we’ve earned the credibility that comes with being vetted by the most respected oncology teams globally, which have allowed us to leverage large pharma’s expertise and resources across four of our five clinical studies. The collaborations and investments by pharma reflect their focus on checkpoint inhibition at $56 billion market. Our work since the beginning of last year has resulted in the advancement of all trials underway, including the imminent initiation of BRACELET-1. The upcoming data from these trials will be leveraged to firstly prove out our biomarker for use in the Phase 3 program. Secondly, it confirms that pelareorep is acting as an immunotherapy in primary and metastatic breast cancer and finally to verify that pelareorep stimulates an immune response to augment the efficacy of checkpoint inhibitors. With reference to our biomarker of T-cell clonality, it’s hard to believe it’s been just a year since we announced it and began testing. The pancreatic cancer study presented at the American Association of Cancer Research meeting last year was the first demonstration that the degree of T-cell clonality has the potential to serve as both a predictive and prognostic biomarker for response to pelareorep therapy. As we’ve discussed that a number of times and had a key opinion leader presentation on this biomarker could provide physicians with a simple blood test to understand which patients are likely to respond to treatment. We’re not providing further confirmation of this biomarker and early and late stage breast cancer. These findings are expected to enhance our patient selection criteria in our Phase 3 and also have the potential to provide for more robust patient stratification within our registration trial. This information is invaluable and will allow the medical community to target the right treatment to the right patient with the confidence that a treatment effect is occurring. With an incredible amount of groundwork achieved, our clinical programs are beginning to drive data and data will drive the eventful partnership we’ve been focused on to provide the funding and additional expertise for our Phase 3 registration study in metastatic breast cancer. I’ll turn your attention now to our ongoing programs in breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and multiple myeloma, and this study is being run in each indication beginning with breast cancer. AWARE-1 as I think everyone’s well aware pun intended is investigating pelareorep in combination with Roche’s checkpoint inhibitor, Tecentriq and additionally in combination with the standard of care in each cohort in the study. The study will provide biochemical data by recording changes in the tumor microenvironment and monitoring inflammation changes in the tumor, confirming that pelareorep is indeed acting as an immunotherapy in this indication. Early observations in AWARE-1 are supportive of our biomarker with higher peripheral T-cell clonality correlating with beneficial changes in the tumor microenvironment. They demonstrate that pelareorep can prime new T cells where the expanded T-cell repertoire has activity directed towards tumor cells after treatments. This is an important finding, speaks to the potential pelareorep’s potential to enhance the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors, which require anti-tumor T cells to mount an effective response. As the study continues to mature in 2020, the steering committee consisting of many SOLTI’s network of investigators and medical professionals as well as our Oncolytics colleagues met earlier this week. The meeting was the first step in providing the interim safety data to be announced before the end of March, as well as discuss how the study will proceed in order to be as quick as possible and provide the optimal data required to assist in the design of the Phase 3 registration program. The first two cohorts of HR+ /HER2 patients, one cohort being pelareorep, plus a standard of care and the other being the same plus the addition of Tecentriq are moving along well with no material changes expected. The third cohort of triple-negative breast cancer or TNBC patients is proceeding as planned where the use of pelareorep will focus on its ability to increase PD-L1 expression in these patients as Tecentriq’s approval here is based on the positive expression, a PD-L1 defined as having a PDL level of at least 1%. This level while seeming very low accounts for about 40% of triple-negative breast cancer patients yet still represents a market opportunity of $500 million to $1 billion. If we can increase the number of TNBC patients expressing PD-L1 above 1% something that we’ve exceeded dramatically in multiple studies in different tumor settings. This could represent a doubling of Roche’s market opportunity and be an additional lucrative market for pelareorep. Now while TNBC does not represent the same market size as HR+ / HER2- breast cancer, and by no means would it distract us from our focus on this tumor type it could possibly represent another path to approval. This cohort in AWARE-1 will determine if additional studies are warranted and therefore deserves our attention. AWARE-1 has been accepted for presentation at the European Society of Medical Oncology Breast Cancer meeting in Berlin taking place this May, where Dr. Alex Pratt, the President of Salty and our lead investigator will present biomarker data from the study. Additional data from the study will be presented throughout the year with final data announcement around the end of the year. Our second breast cancer study BRACELET-1 is our Phase 2 trial investigating pelareorep in combination with Pfizer and EMD Serono’s PD-L1 inhibitor, avelumab or Bavencio for second line HR+ / HER2- metastatic breast cancer. The same indication which we saw the almost doubling of overall survival in a randomized Phase 2 study. The intent of the study is similar to that of AWARE-1, but importantly, BRACELET is looking at treatment effect for the Phase 3 study in our intended patient population. PrECOG, a leading cancer research group with a focus on breast cancer is collaborating with us on this study and has already demonstrated great commitment with site enrollments and investigator education and we’re on track to begin patient enrollment very soon. We expect to have interim data from this Phase 2 clinical trial during the fourth quarter of 2020 and final data 2021. AWARE-1 data is suggesting that there is a role for pelareorep in early stage breast cancer and that a checkpoint inhibitor lowers the threshold of response suggesting the potential role of a checkpoint inhibitor going forward. BRACELET will confirm this in the metastatic breast cancer patients and the data may recommend if we use a checkpoint inhibitor and our registration Phase 3 program. Now before moving on from breast cancer, I’d also like to highlight data presented by our academic collaborators from Cancer Research UK at the International Oncolytic Viral Conference in October. The preclinical data demonstrated synergistic activity between pelareorep and Pfizer’s CDK4/6 inhibitor, Ibrance, which is currently used as the first line treatments for metastatic HR+ / HER2- breast cancer. The preliminary data suggest that pelareorep synergizes with CDK4/6 inhibitors by blocking cellular signaling pathways releasing more double-stranded RNA into the tumor cell and triggering immunogenic cell death resulting in another effective way to make a cold tumor very, very hot. Between IND 213 and BRACELET we are currently targeting the second line metastatic setting estimated to be approximately $2 billion. The potential to work in combination with CDK4/6 drugs in the first line metastatic breast cancer can than double this opportunity. The AWARE-1 data and preclinical data with CDK4/6 drugs also indicates that pelareorep creates significant viral replication in early stage primary breast cancer, suggesting role for pelareorep in this treatment setting as well. A particular interest here is pelareorep demonstrated memory or vaccination effect raising the hope that these early stage primary disease patients are less likely to experience disease recurrence. This suggests that pelareorep has the potential to grow the opportunity for CDK4/6 drugs already on pace to sell well over $6 billion in 2020 in primary disease as well and become an integral component across the breast cancer treatment spectrum. The impact of pelareorep in breast cancer from early to late stage disease represents a massive multibillion dollar opportunity. Again, no study has been defined and the CDK4/6 combinations will not distract us from our focus on the Phase 3 in metastatic breast cancer, but this could represent a significant opportunity for any pharma with a CDK4/6 inhibitor or drug candidate in an opportunity our team is definitely looking at. In addition to our lead program in breast cancer we continue to execute our clinical studies testing pelareorep in pancreatic cancer in multiple myeloma. Our current pancreatic adenocarcinoma study, an investigator-sponsored trial with Merck and Northwestern University is evaluating pelareorep in combination with Keytruda. The trial is progressing well and we anticipate reporting interim data at the American Society of Clinical Oncology better known as ASCO in June this year and final Phase 2 data in the second half of 2020. Now to remind you, REO 024, our previous Phase 1b study in pancreatic cancer combining chemotherapy, pelareorep and Keytruda demonstrated compelling response data and confirmed a favorable safety profile. It’s also the study in which we found our biomarker of T cell clonality and it provided the rationale for our current Phase 3 trials studying pelareorep in combination with Keytruda without chemotherapy. So the purpose of our ongoing Phase 2 pancreatic trial at Northwestern is to verify our biomarker of T cell clonality we saw in the previous study, but it’s also determined if a cytotoxic stressing agent such as chemotherapy is necessary for pelareorep to enhance the effect of checkpoint inhibition. Now subsequently, NCI-8601, a separate randomized pancreatic cancer clinical trial brought about our recently announced positive biomarker data in first-line pancreatic cancer. Data presented at the beginning of 2020 demonstrated that low levels of CCAM 6 genes were associated with the near doubling of progression-free survival in pancreatic cancer patients treated with pelareorep. And we’ll evaluate this biomarker in future studies. Based on these announcements, we received significant interest from large, globally recognized clinical centers that want to work with pelareorep in combination with checkpoint inhibitors in pancreatic cancer and additional gastrointestinal or GI cancers. Now those studies have been defined at this time, but the concept of a basket study including pancreatic cancer, colon cancer and anal cancer has been discussed. Given some of the positive results we’ve had in GI, including significant progression-free survival and overall survival readouts in pancreatic cancer this basket study concept is of interest to us, but we’re still in the investigational stage with these concepts. We’ll provide an update on the potential for a GI study later this year. Turning to multiple myeloma, we are presently advancing two studies, a National Cancer Institute called 9603 in combination with carfilzomib and a BMS investigator-sponsored trial in combination with carfilzomib and OPDIVO. At the American Society of Hematology or ASH Conference in December, investigators presented encouraging data from 9603 that demonstrated synergistic activity between pelareorep and proteasome inhibitor, Kyprolis, in a very heavily pretreated patient population. This study, the feature of a recent key opinion leader call conducted by one of our covering analysts is enrolling patients who have recently failed proteasome inhibitors. What it’s demonstrating is that the addition of pelareorep recovers the activity of the proteasome inhibitor with dramatic tumor responses. These responses can be so rapid in fact, that they’re on the spectrum of cytokine release syndrome, a manageable response and an extremely positive signal for the activity of pelareorep in combination with proteasome inhibitors. The data presented at ASH in December last year demonstrated that the combination promotes the expansion of CD8-killer T cells and confirm the selectivity of pelareorep, which infected multiple myeloma cells while leaving normal bone marrow cells alone. This positive signals would garner the interest of pharma and provided the scientific rationale for our ongoing Phase I trial studying pelareorep in combination with Kripalu and BMS’ checkpoint inhibitor OPDIVO. Given the viral infection that was associated with significant increase in PD-L1 tumor expression in 9603, we want to determine if this combination, including a checkpoint inhibitor will enhance the duration of effect or even potentially increase the quality and duration of these responses. Based on feedback from our investigators, we expect to announce interim data from 9603 at ASCO in June and interim data from the combination with Opdivo at the ASH Conference towards the end of 2020. Finally, I like to highlight a very important addition to our Board of Directors towards the end of 2019. In October we welcomed Leonard Kruimer to our Board of Directors. Mr Kruimer has more than 30 years of experience in corporate finance, planning and strategy, most notably serving as CFO and Executive Community member of acting company Crucell, where he played a pivotal role in the sale of Crucell to Johnson & Johnson for $2.3 billion. His experience will be extremely valuable as we advance our business development efforts and focus on partnering to move into a registration Phase 3 program and we’ll definitely leverage his experience and expertise in these developments. With that, I will turn the call over to Kirk Look for review of the financials.