Michael Weiss
Analyst · SunTrust
Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Jenna. And thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. I want to kick off this call by thanking our long-term shareholders for their continued support and patience. [Indiscernible] all to know we've been working extremely hard to build shareholder value and to advance our pipeline vigorously toward approval. Please be confident that we are working tirelessly to develop our drugs with the best interest of the patients in mind, and we are confident that, that will eventually translate into significant shareholder value. We hear every day about patients who are benefiting from our drugs. Many have seen improvement, but for a variety of reasons, mostly tolerability, they need to seek new treatments. We also hear about patients who can't tolerate venetoclax. Fatigue can be crippling. U2 has the potential to become the universal go-to regimen across first-line and second-line treatments alone and in combination with either a BTK inhibitor, like ibrutinib, or own proprietary BTK, or in combination with venetoclax, or potentially with both. The goal was to get CLL patients the deepest response in the shortest amount of time and get them off these drugs before tolerability or resistance occurs. We have novel triple and quad combination trials planed with venetoclax as well as with our own preparatory BTK inhibitor, our anti-PD-L1 and our CD19/CD47 bispecific. These are very exciting times in the development of treatments for CLL as well as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and your support is extremely important to us and to the patients who are in need of novel treatment options. We believe cures are truly within our reach. Hopefully that gives just a little sense of why we're so excited about what's going on at TG and our future here. We believe as a company, we have never been better positioned for success. We have a number of exciting milestones and value-generating events occurring over the course of the coming months. And most significant, of course, will be the announcement of top line overall response results from the UNITY-CLL Phase III trial, for which we are targeting for announcement before the end of the summer. Before providing an update on the current status of our ongoing development programs, I thought I highlight some of the notable achievements for 2018. First, we have presented a number of very important data sets this year, including the publication of the Phase I study for single-agent umbralisib in Lancet Oncology. We've also presented an analysis of long-term safety follow-up on umbralisib. In that presentation, we demonstrated the ability to safely dose umbralisib up to five years in certain patients with incidence of target toxicities remaining very well. And finally, we presented updated data from our Phase II MS trial, ublituximab, at the European Academy of Neurology meeting, showing with longer-term follow-up now up to 48 weeks in some patients that ublituximab continued to show complete elimination of T1 gad-enhancing lesions, reductions in T2 lesion volume and, importantly, very low annualized relapse rates. In addition to important data sets, we have also expanded our portfolio of B-cell targeted drugs under development. Our vision is to develop functional cures across B-cell cancers. And to do so, we need agents targeting multiple key mechanisms. So far this year, we've added a novel BTK inhibitor, TG-1701, as well as a novel first-in-class anti-CD47/anti-CD19 bispecific antibody known as TG-1801. A few important points to note about this molecule. First, this is a true bispecific [indiscernible]. Accordingly, this agent should have the half-life of traditional antibodies, which could be approximately 3 to 4 weeks. Additionally, unlike other CD47-targeted agents, this agent is designed to specifically attack B-cells by including the CD19 arm. This avoids toxicity concerns of other agents in this class. And finally, this agent has retained CD19 activity. So this drug also should provide a dual mechanism for enhanced efficacy. We have a high level of confidence that this will be a best-in-class CD47-targeted agent. And finally, we've broadened our senior management team this year with hiring of Adam Waldman as our Chief Commercial Officer. Adam was formerly head of U.S. hematology/oncology marketing at Celgene and will lead our effort to bring our products to market. Let me give a high-level overview of the ongoing Phase III and pivotal programs. First and foremost, let's talk about UNITY-CLL Phase III program. For those of you are joining us for the first time, this is a Phase III trial comparing our U2 combination to an active control arm of obinutuzumab plus chlorambucil in patients with both treatment naïve as well as relapse or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The trial is being conducted under Special Protocol Assessment with the FDA and is a large global trial, including over 600 patients. Enrollment into this trial exceeded our expectations and was completed ahead of schedule in October of 2017 and included approximately 60% frontline patients and 40% relapsed/refractory patients. As previously guided, we are targeting top line overall response rate data from this trial by the end of the summer. To remind everyone, we are targeting a 15% absolute improvement in overall response rate. It is also worth reminding everyone that the primary endpoint to this study is progression-free survival, which is expected to support full approval of the U2 combination and ideally support a very broad label for the treatment of CLL. Sticking with the CLL theme, let's chat a little bit about our GENUINE trial. As a reminder, GENUINE is a randomized Phase III trial of ublituximab plus ibrutinib compared to ibrutinib monotherapy in patients with high-risk relapsed/refractory CLL. We have previously discussed the hurdles for approval for this study and believe the key for successful filing will be demonstrating meaningful benefit over all currently available therapies, including venetoclax-based therapy. We continue to believe that this regimen does provide meaningful benefit of our all available therapies, and we are continuing to work on a risk-benefit analysis, which will highlight such benefits and would be included in the potential BLA filing. Moving along to our UNITY-NHL trial. As you may recall, this is a multifaceted program, evaluating single-agent umbralisib and building towards evaluating U2 double combination and, potentially, triplet combinations using U2 as the backbone across a variety of subtypes of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The UNITY-NHL trial currently has three distinct cohorts, evaluating different subtypes of NHL. The current phase of this trial includes a cohort evaluating patients with follicular lymphoma, which is enrolling relapsed/refractory follicular lymphoma patients into a single arm of umbralisib monotherapy, a cohort evaluating patients with marginal zone lymphoma, which is also enrolling relapse - patients with relapsed/refractory marginal zone lymphoma into a single arm of umbralisib monotherapy. And finally, the third cohort is evaluating patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. In this cohort, we have completed target enrollment in the U2 combination arm and are now enrolling into the triple combination arm of U2 plus bendamustine. We have made substantial progress with enrollment across all three major subtypes, follicular, marginal zone and diffuse large B-cell, and believe we are only one month or so away from completing enrollment in all three of these cohorts. Once complete, we plan to amend the protocol to open up the next phase of enrollment to study new combinations while we file the current cohort of patients for approximately 9 to 12 cycles. Next, let's review our multiple sclerosis program. As mentioned at the start of this call, we've recently presented updated Phase II data. We believe this Phase II data is every bit as good, if not better, than the ocre Phase II data at the same point - at the same time point and thus, we believe, highly supportive of our ongoing Phase III program known as the ULTIMATE MS Phase III trials. As a reminder, we are running two identical Phase III trials under Special Protocol Assessment with the FDA, evaluating ublituximab in relapsing forms of MS. And as announced this morning, we completed target enrollment into the ULTIMATE I and II trials, and we are anticipating completion of full enrollment by mid-September. This is updated from our original guidance for both studies to complete by the first quarter of 2019. So right now we are well ahead of schedule. Currently, ocrelizumab is the only anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody approved for multiple sclerosis and remarkably in its fifth quarter after launch at approximately $500 million in sales in the U.S. alone. That is a current run rate of over $2 billion per year and growing. I'm sure I don't need to state the obvious that this is a major opportunity for us, and we look forward to completing full enrollment into this program shortly and potentially having data available as early as mid-2020. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to the conference operator to begin the Q&A session, following which I will return and provide some concluding remarks as well as a review of our remaining milestones for 2018.