Bassil Dahiyat
Analyst · Leerink Partners. Your line is now open, please go ahead
Thanks, Paul. So I’ll sum up the 5871 discussion by saying that while our excitement for the potential of 5871 in autoimmune disease is bolstered by the promising results from our Phase 1b/2a study in RA, we decided as we stated before to focus on the development of treatments for diseases with the highest unmet need and are no longer pursing RA. Now development in IgG4-RD and SLE provide complimentary opportunities to start to build the value of 5871 in a portfolio of autoimmune diseases. IgG4-RD is a smaller new indication with no approved therapies that Xencor can see rapidly. And SLE is a larger indication with a high unmet need and the chance to engage in an innovative trial design to potentially overcome historical development bottlenecks. Now, we’ll turn to our second lead internal clinical program XmAb7195. 7195 is our antibody that targets IgE with its variable domain and that uses an identical XmAb immune inhibitor Fc as 5871, resulting in this case in three distinct mechanisms of action for reducing IgE levels, in particular rapid clearance of IgE via Fc-gamma-RIIb binding on liver sinusoidal endothelial cells. And we believe that 7195 has the potential to provide a first-in-class mechanism for reducing IgE that will address the full spectrum of [Indiscernible] XmAb including the hardest treated population higher IgE levels. And during 2015, we reported top line interim data and continued our ongoing Phase 1a trial of 7195 and we look forward to announcing full data from this completed study in the first half of 2016. As a reminder, this study evaluated a single dose of 7195 in both healthy volunteers and patients with high base line IgE levels and in June of 2015 the trial was expanded to include cohorts of healthy volunteers with a split dose of 7195 consisting of small priming dose and a second descending dose after one week. The expansion portion of the trial designed to extend an IgE reduction and drug safety following the second infusion. Top-line interim data from the Phase 1a -- Part 1 of this Phase 1a study was reported in January of 2015. I’ll recap that healthy volunteers received a single dose of 7195, data shows that our drug is very potent with a rapid reduction of free IgE levels to below the limit of detection in 90% of treated subjects, including those treated at the lowest dose level of 0.3 mg/kg, as well we saw parallel reductions observed in total IgE. A dose limiting toxicity of transient, asymptomatic thrombocytopenia was also observed at the 3.0 mg/kg dose. Now, for this year we plan to initiate a multi dose trial with a subcutaneous formulation of 7195 and expect to announce initial results from this trial in the first half of 2017. So next, I’d like you to discuss our bispecific oncology pipeline. The core of our bispecific program is a novel XmAb Fc demand, which lets us create a single molecular combined two target simultaneously, now we believe that this is a flexible approach and allows us to rapidly create drug candidates by combining any two binding demands while maintaining the full length antibody properties conferred by the XmAb Fc demand, such as favourable in vivo XmAb and simple manufacturing. Now our initial bispecific programs are tumor-targeted antibodies that contain both a tumor antigen binding domain and a cytotoxic T-cell binding domain, in this case CD3. 14045 target CD 123 in acute myeloid leukaemia or AML cells and CD3 on the other side of the molecule to engage T-cells. It showed sustained and potent depletion of target cells in primase [ph] studies from well tolerated single IV doses. We expect to initiate a clinical trial this year. 13676 targets CD20 on malignant B-cells and of course CD3 on the other side for the T cell engagement. We expect to begin a clinical trial for B-cell malignancies also this year in late 2016. Now we plan to initiate clinical trials for additional bispecific oncology candidates in 2017 and will nominate targets for these trials later this year. Now the parallel events of multiple candidates as well as our partnership with Amgen are enabled by the simple, plug-in-play portability and robustness of the XmAb Fc demand. We announced the Amgen research and license agreement this past September and it granted Amgen the right to use our XmAb bispecific Fc demands to develop and commercialize five bispecific molecules based on their antibodies. We also licensed Amgen our preclinical T cell engager against CD38 and CD3 in this case targeted for multiple myeloma. Now the Amgen program consists of predetermined targets that is we know what they are, they were part of the negotiation of the licensed agreement and they include a T cell engagers for oncology and bispecific antibodies for inflammatory. Xencor is going to be performing initial molecular engineering work and Amgen will do all development in commercial of the programs. We received $45 million upfront and eligible to receive $1.7 billion in milestones as well as royalties on sale. Now Amgen is an excellent partner for our bispecific Fc platform. They have a lot of experience with bispecific oncology antibodies having one bispecific immuno -- antibody in the United States. I’ll note that we also announced preclinical data for the CD38xCD3 program at the American Society of Hematology Meeting in December which demonstrated the activity tuning possible for our flexible XmAb bispecifics. Now, I’ll touch briefly on some of our other partnerships. In the fourth quarter, Alexion Pharmaceuticals exercised an option for a commercial license to Xencor's Xtend antibody technology for use in a therapeutic candidate which triggered an option prepayment and as well they paid a development milestone for an undisclosed molecule against an undisclosed target. Now in September of 2015, our partner, CSL Limited, through its licensee Janssen Biotech, initiated a Phase 2 clinical trial of CSL362 which is now called JNJ-56022473. It uses our Cytotoxic Fc Domain, for the potential treatment of patients with AML. This trial initiation also triggered a milestone payment to us. And finally, I’ll turn to the leadership team here at Xencor. In May of 2015, we announced the appointment of Mark Lotz, as vice president of regulatory affairs and Wayne Saville, as vice president of oncology clinical development. Together, Mark and Wayne combine 60 years of experience in Xencor in biotech and pharma regulatory affairs and in Medical research respectively and they will contribute greatly to our expanded clinical development efforts. We also appointed A. Bruce Montgomery, and Yujiro Hata to our Board of Directors in 2015. Now, I’m confident these new appointments will be invaluable to be continued to develop Xencor into a product focused company. And with that, I’ll turn it over to John Kuch to review our financial results.