Marc Hedrick
Analyst · Ascendiant. Your line is open
Thank you very much, Gretchen. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you once again for taking the time to join us today as we provide an overview of recent business highlights and discuss our 2022 first quarter financial results. Joining me on the call today is Dr. Norman LaFrance, our Chief Medical Officer; and Andrew Sims, our Chief Financial Officer. I’ll begin the call by reviewing our recent corporate and clinical progress before turning the call over to Norman who will provide commentary on our clinical progress for 2022. And then following Norman, Andrew will review our financials. Despite the short interval since we last reported quarterly results, I continue to be very pleased with our overall progress as we work towards several meaningful catalysts and milestones throughout 2022. During the first quarter, we began enrolling patients in our ReSPECT-LM trial of 186RNL in patients with leptomeningeal metastases, or LM. The trial is a multi-center Phase 1/2a dose escalation study to determine the MTD, maximum tolerated dose, and MFD and safety and efficacy of RNL186 in LM. LM is a typically fatal complication associated with advanced cancers that affect the fluid line structures of the central nervous system or leptomeninges. Median survival with current aggressive treatment is about three to eight-and-a-half months depending on which primary tumor caused the LM and the one and two-year survival rate is 7% and 3%, respectively. Survival without treatment is only a few weeks. LM is diagnosed in approximately 5% of cancers with 20% of patients at autopsy. U.S. annual incidence is about 110,000 patients and growing, and the prevalence of neurologic impairment in these patients is about 50%. Most common tumors giving rise to LM are breast cancer, lung cancer, melanoma, and gastrointestinal malignancies. There are no FDA-approved therapies and standard treatment that is employed includes external beam radiation therapy to the affected sites, followed by chemotherapy given either orally or intravenously or even directly into the cerebrospinal fluid. Although we can only draw limited conclusions from our initial experience, we’re very pleased with the outcome and the first patient receiving a single administration of 186RNL. Specifically, we found that the drug circulated rapidly throughout the cerebrospinal fluid space. We found that radiation was released through leptomeninges and CSF for at least one week after treatment. The patient exhibited no adverse events, and 186RNL reduced the circulating tumor cell counts by over 90% at two weeks after treatment. This is really about as good as it gets in a first-in-man -- first patient in a Phase 1 trial, so we’re very excited about this very preliminary result. We now have two active sites screening LM patients, with another six sites being onboarded, as we speak. We’re on track to have at least the first two cohorts completed by the end of 2022, and hopefully a bit more than that. As to our ongoing clinical development program for 186RNL in recurrent glioblastoma, we have a number of updates. First, as a reminder, that trial is a dual Phase 1/2a multi-center sequential cohort open label volume and dose escalation study for recurrent glioblastoma or GBM. The trial is currently funded to a significant degree, as many of you may know by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and NCI. Glioblastoma affects about 13,000 patients annually in the U.S. and about the same number of patients in the EU, and it’s the most common and lethal form of brain cancer and treatment of this devastating disease remains a very significant unmet medical challenge. In terms of the clinical data, 23 patients have been treated and 186RNL appears to be safe and well tolerated, and this data presented most recently back in March can be found in detail on our website and that’s accessible to anyone. In summary, no dose limiting toxicities have been observed. Generally mild-to-moderate AEs have been seen in seven SAEs, all grade three or lower and most are not deem to be RNL-related. In terms of drug delivery, we are now reliably able to deliver over 100 gray of absorbed radiation dose to tumors, which is our empirically-determined minimal dose threshold of adequate absorbed radiation, and we can get well over 80% and we think 90% is achievable in terms of reliable dose delivery of 100 gray. Finally, we have observed both the median and mean overall survival signal that exceeds the best published rate for monotherapy bevacizumab. Based on this data, I’d like to just explain our big picture plan. We plan to bifurcate the current GBM clinical development plan based on tumor size. So for tumors of approximately 15 to 20 CCs in volume, which represents about one-half to about two-thirds of all recurrent glioblastomas, we plan to use the cohort six dose of 22.3 millicuries and 8.8 CCs of volume as our recommended first Phase 2 registrational dose. For tumors of larger size potentially requiring greater radiation dosages and treatment volumes, we intend to continue our Phase 1/2 dose escalation trial to establish the upper limits of dose and potential for DLTs or dose-limiting toxicities. In 2022, for GBM, we have two key regulatory milestones. We have already in 2022 submitted and asked for the first of two FDA meetings, specifically a Type C CMC meeting to determine the sufficiency of our CMC package for GMP 186RNL to support a registrational trial. And then relatedly to the CMC development, our team continues to make excellent progress in our drug scale-up and manufacturing activities. Specifically, the company has finalized key RNL drug development and characterization activities for GMP manufacturing to support our planned Phase 2 registrational trial and commercialization activities thereafter. The company remains on track to deliver GMP RNL by mid-2022. The second FDA meeting is a clinically focused meeting planned for Q2, Q3 to solicit FDA feedback on our planned Phase 2 registrational trial using our recommended Phase 2 dose as mentioned 22.3 millicuries and a little less than 9 CCs of volume. Also during Q1, we completed another key milestone. Specifically, we successfully completed the preliminary evaluation phase and entered into a broad partnership with Medidata to use its Synthetic Control Arm platform and Real World data as the comparators for our glioblastoma trials. The primary goal of this partnership is to develop an FDA compliant control group of patients identical to the patients thus far treated in our Phase 1/2a trial and in the planned Phase 2 registrational trial. That data will be used to support our planned end-of--phase meeting with the FDA and proposed Phase 2 registrational trial. More generally, Synthetic Control Arm or SCA platform facilitates the use of historical clinical trial data in a manner that has been favorably received by the FDA. These SCAs reduce the time and cost associated with complex clinical trials in rare diseases such as glioblastoma, allowing for fewer patients to be exposed to placebos or existing standard of care treatments that might not be effective for them. It offers them greater access to potentially life extending therapies. And although a recent advancement, the FDA has already agreed to recognize a Phase 3 clinical design incorporating an SCA in a registrational randomized control arm for recurrent glioblastoma. Besides initiating our Phase 2 registrational trial with RNL and recurrent GBM, as I mentioned above, we also continued enrollment in our Phase 1/2a dose escalation GBM trial, and that will continue. Finally, this quarter, we intend to open a Phase 2 multi-dosing extension trial of RNL in recurrent glioblastoma. As you know, if you follow the company, glioblastoma is notoriously difficult to cure and recurrent disease is the norm. This extension trial will give us important information about the utility of multiple potential doses of 186RNL in the overall treatment paradigm for these patients. The goal of the trial is to determine the safety, feasibility and potential efficacy of using additional doses of RNA in patients following the initial single administration of RNL as we have done previously in the Phase 1/2a trial. This is really important to our big dream. One day, if not curing GBM, returning it into a chronic disease in which we help patients live with brain cancer. Finally, in Q1, we announced our license of a novel radioembolic microparticle technology from the University of Texas. As we’ve said many times, we believe the future of cancer therapy is precise targeting of tumors with the most potent cancer killing agents while minimizing damage to normal tissues. This transaction builds upon our existing Rhenium NanoLiposome technology. And with this new technology, we can with a resorbable biomaterial embolic technology, coupled with a highly potent radiotherapeutic isotope, target almost any solid organ tumor in the body using the standard interventional radiologic means and leverage the breadth of the human vascular system. Rhenium-188, not 186 but Rhenium-188 NanoLiposome Biodegradable Alginate Microspheres we call 188 RNL-BAM or just BAM for short, is a next generation fully resorbable technology that solves many of the existing problems with current radioembolic technology that’s been out there for many decades. The BAM technology incorporates Rhenium-188 isotope for use as the radiotherapeutic source with a different admission criteria and characteristics than 186. It emits a high energy beta particle with a half life of only about 17 hours or longer path length of over 3 millimeters. It also produces gamma energy that we can use for high quality real-time imaging of the BAM construct in the organ. The company will initially focus on developing the BAM technology as a next-generation radioembolization therapy for liver cancer in which BAM blocks the hepatic artery segments that supply blood to the malignant tumor while also providing radiotherapy by directly irradiating the tumor. Liver cancer is a rare disease with an increasing annual incidence and a five-year overall survival rate of only about 20%. The global opportunity for localized embolization, chemoembolization, radioembolization for primary and secondary cancer in the liver is about 1.3 billion opportunity globally. We have three objectives in 2022 for our BAM program; the technology cancer phase, which has been completed and we are on track to complete key CMC feasibility studies, IND-enabling preclinical studies and an FDA pre-IND meeting this year. So with that, I’ll turn the call over to Dr. LaFrance. Norman?