Q2 2022 Mink Therapeutics Inc Earnings Call
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Good day and welcome to the Mink Therapeutics second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Please note today's conference call is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star followed by the number one again.
Thank you. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Kimberly Haw.
Head of Investor Relations.
Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining us today. Today's call is being webcasted and will be available on our website for replay. I'd like to remind you that this call will contain four looking statements, including statements regarding our clinical development, regulatory and commercial plans, as well as timelines for data release and partnership opportunities.
These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and we refer you to our SEC filings for more details on these risks. Joining me today on the call are Dr. Jennifer Beal, President and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Joy Zhou, Vice President of Manufacturing, Christine Klaskin, Principal Financial and Accounting Officer, and Melissa Orlal, Director, Global Financial Operations.
Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Dr. Buell to highlight our progress and speak to our outlook for the remainder of the year.
Thank you very much, Kimberly, and thank you all for joining us for our first quarterly earnings call.
Moon Therapeutics was launched as an IPO just about 10 months ago and today we stand as the most advanced company pioneering allogeneic or off-the-shelf invariant natural killer T cells or iNK T cells in three active clinical programs.
We have shown that we can isolate these cells from healthy donors. We can produce them at scale in our in-house GMP manufacturing suite.
And we've also demonstrated that our product retains full potency and tumor-killing potential after freezing.
Thus, for all of our clinical trials, our cells are at the site when the patient needs them.
Our focus is on isolating the most highly conserved cells in immunity and delivering them to patients who need them most, patients whose immune system has failed to eliminate cancer or prevent serious complications from infection.
Currently, we have three active clinical programs and we expect to share data from these programs at a conference this year.
As a pioneer in the field, we appreciate that MINK must not only advance science at record-breaking paces, but also contribute to the growth of information in the application of INKT's immune-related diseases.
By way of background, our immune system has two distinct arms to immunity, innate or natural immunity, that which we are born with, and responds immediately when faced with a threat.
And adaptive immunity, that which we acquire over time to adapt to new external threats.
like COVID-19.
At Mink, we are pursuing I and K T cells because of their unique properties to modulate both arms of immunity and leverage the strength of both T cells and NK cells.
This makes them critical in every line of the body's natural defense.
So what happens without INKT cells or when these cells are in limited quantity in vivo? What we've shown in preclinical models and in humans.
When INKT cells are not functional or are deficient, we observe the development of autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma and cancer.
A remarkable feature of these cells is their invariant T-cell receptor or TCR.
This receptor is common in everyone and this allows us to isolate cells from one individual, a healthy donor, and deliver them to another individual or a severely ill patient. Without engineering the cells and without rejection from the recipient, there is no graft-versus-host disease with these cells. In fact, we actually have evidence to suggest that INKT cells could actually prevent rejection. They may help patients accept transplants.
prevent graft-versus-host disease
This is why we're pursuing our INKT cell therapies for cancer and other immune-related or immune-mediated diseases. We expect these cells to have a major impact with a significant effect specifically in solid tumor cancer.
And MINKS developed the platform to achieve this.
For cell therapies to deliver transformative benefits across the majority of tumors, and I'm talking about solid tumor cancers, they need to be affordable, effective, and able to be manufactured at scale.
and our recent progress including the full internalization of our discovery platforms.
our engineering capabilities, and now our internal GMP manufacturing, we're set up in the best position to deliver.
for these patients.
Our newly appointed Chief Scientific Officer is Dr. Mark Van Dyke, an industry veteran who has built the platforms and technology that have given rise to dozens of clinical and commercial stage novel antibodies, bi-specifics, and TCRs, including those at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gen-Mag, and a Genus.
Additionally, we recently appointed Dr. Joy Zhao as head of manufacturing.
Joy brings decades of cell therapy, cell and gene therapy manufacturing expertise from J&J, from Takeda and more recently from Rubeus.
And now she's applying those internally here at Mink. Our manufacturing platform and proprietary reagents are set up to deliver more than 10,000 doses annually. Thank you for joining me.
These programs and platforms are scalable to deliver nearly a billion doses with our own in-house capacity.
Our proprietary reagents and process enable a product that is more than 99% pure INKT cells from healthy donors.
these cells retain their tumor killing of preservation.
Thus, they can be stored.
and delivered internationally.
Our manufacturing team has delivered a process in infrastructure to facilitate a scalable and reproducible manufacturing
that are available to the patient the moment they need them. They're currently distributed to our site for clinical trials internationally.
We recently recognized our in-house GMP readiness with the completion of our GMP manufacturing runs internally at scale.
This is a remarkable achievement and the first known industrialization.
of native INKT cell manufacturing in the field.
Importantly, this progress was completed with an already outfitted manufacturing facility and an experienced team.
This was also completed without the capital intensive requirements commonly necessary for cell therapy production.
Today, our lead program, Agent 797, in allo cell therapy of native IMKT cells is in three active clinical programs. Our phase 1-2 study of IMKTs alone and in combination with Keytruda or Optivo in patients with solid tumor cancers launched in May of this year. Later readouts are expected at a major conference within the next few months.
Our encouraging signals including the reduction of metastatic liver disease in a patient with Robustory Rectal Cancer builds on data presentations from the Society of Immune Therapy for Cancer, otherwise known as CITSE last year. Our leading scientist Dr. Bojoo Yeh presented and showed that INKT cells traffic to the liver, lungs and bone marrow. They light tumors and they persist.
We believe that these features will contribute to the cells ability to bring durable protective benefit to patients with cancer.
These data also support the potential benefit of INKT cells over other cell types like gamma delta cells and natural killer cells. INKT's are unique in that they can take advantage of their invariant TCR that recognizes the lipid ligand CD1D.
which enables the initiation of T cell responses. So importantly, if you think about INKT's with their invariant TCR, they're naturally engineered effectively to home to where they need to go. INKT's also express activating NK cell receptors, making them able to initiate a potent NK cell-like cytotoxic response.
And importantly, they don't express the inhibitory NK cell receptors.
So they can retain and advance that response.
Lastly, INK T cells can modulate the tumor microenvironment and transactivate T cells and NK cells.
We're also evaluating HN797 native allo-INKT's in relapsed refractory multiple myeloma. While progress has been made with BCMA CAR T therapies in myeloma, the treatments require cytotoxic liquid depletion and the durability is still somewhat underwhelming.
Importantly, two-thirds of patients who progress following BCMA CAR T therapy still exhibit the BCMA antigen.
The other feature of multimyeloma is that it's rich in CD1D ligands, meaning that INKT is well naturally home to this lipid antigen that's highly expressed in this cancer type. The cells will recruit T cells and NK cells and secrete tumor killing cytokines without engineering.
And importantly, we believe that Agent 797 can be administered without lympho depletion. And we expect that these cells will also improve the durability of response in this tumor type. In our earliest patients treated, we reported lengthy disease stabilization beyond 10 months and suppression of tumor biomarkers in our first treated patient. A 50-year-old male was treated with 100 million cells per dose and experienced...
A rapid reduction in M spike protein, a greater than 50% reduction in tumor cells in the bone marrow, and disease stabilization exceeding 10 months. Enrollment is ongoing and we plan to present more data later this year.
These cells are also very active in controlling infection. INKT cells are one of our earliest lines of defense and are particularly active in protecting lung epithelial tissue. This is critical in severe cases of acute respiratory distress, secondary to COVID or influenza, pneumonia or other related diseases.
As such, we brought our therapy in to help during the heart of the pandemic. Our preclinical data had shown that these cells can extend survival and influenza, mitigate harmful consequences of pneumonia, and treat effectively SARS-CoV-1 and MERS in preclinical models.
In our phase one trial of agent 797 and viral acute respiratory distress syndrome secondary to COVID-19,
We previously reported survival benefit exceeding 77% in our first release of 13 patients.
These patients were predominantly elderly, all were on mechanical ventilation, and all had failed available therapies.
We completed our Phase 1 cohort evaluation and we plan to present data before the end of this year which will include expanded data of survival as well as other important secondary benefits of Agent 797.
These data have led to our INKT cells identified as selectable for funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to investigate the cells against immune dysregulation in viral infections, including ARDS and influenza.
Our next step with DARPA is to evaluate what our collaboration will look like including contract negotiations and we're thrilled with the possibility of supporting DARPA in mitigating current and future pandemic threats with Agent 797, a potential variant agnostic
We expect to provide more details of our potential collaboration later in this year.
In addition to the signal to clinical activity, we've also demonstrated that 797 can be administered in patients with a host of immune diseases with a favorable safety profile at doses now up to a billion cells per dose. We've observed no neurotoxicity or cytokine release syndrome and we've also been able to detect low depletion.
Mink's wholly owned pipeline spans our next generation engineered INKT programs including CARS, TCRs, and bi-specific INKT cell engagers.
Our BCMA CARiNKT and Stromal Targeting CARiNKT are both an IND-enabling activities and we plan to present data on these programs in an upcoming meeting this year. This includes the target selection and first data presentation on our Stromal Targeting CARiNKT for solid tumors.
Through our relationship with the genus, we are uniquely positioned to launch novel combinations with our INKT cells and potential best-in-class immune activating agents like a Genesis Bocan and Isilinab.
Our priority is to advance Agent 797 in its native form alone and in combination with checkpoint modulating antibodies with approaches that can lead to rapid registration, such as in combination with standard of care agents in cancers including cancers of the liver, bladder, and lung.
At Mink, we remain focused on delivering our allogeneic off-the-shelf therapy to eliminate diseases of the immune system.
I appreciate your time and I will now turn the call over to Christine Klaskin to go over our financials. Thank you for your time.
Christine?
Thank you, Jen.
We ended the second quarter of 2022 with a cash balance of $29.8 million as compared to $38.9 million at December 31, 2021.
Cash used in operations for the six months ended and second quarter ended June 30, 2022, with $8.8 million and $4.6 million, respectively, compared to $7.6 million and $3.4 million for the same periods in 2021.
Net loss for the quarter ended June 2022 with $6.1 million or $0.18 per share, compared to a net loss for the same period of 2021 of $6.3 million or $0.26 per share.
Net loss for the six months ended June 2022 was $13.9 million, or $0.41 per share, compared to $10.2 million, or $0.42 per share, for the six months ended June 2021.
I now turn the call back to Jen.
Thank you very much, Christine.
And operator, we will now open up the call for Q&A.
At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, please press star, then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.
Your first question comes from the line of CalPIT Patel with B. Riley Securities.
Yeah, hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess first, starting with the clinical update for Agent 797 and second half, can you provide details on expectations for this update? Maybe how many patients' worth of data would be included and should we see results from both the monotherapy and combination based arms?
Thanks, Calvin. Thanks for your question. We won't share, of course, the size of the cohort, but what I can remind you of is that we launched the program actually in May of this year. We announced our first in-human dosing with dose escalation with the monotherapy cells as well as in combination with approved checkpoints, Keytruda and Apdevo in patients with solid tumors. We have enrolled these cohorts actually at a...
quite a fast pace, really somewhat of a record pace, because of the interest in the program. So I can share with you that the cohort will include, we believe, meaningful follow-up information on patients with advanced cancers enrolling in our phase one study with our monotherapy as well as in combination with PD-1.
Okay, got it. You mentioned early observations of disease modulating activity in a patient with rectal cancer and then maybe another patient with refractory multiple myeloma. Can you provide additional color on these data? Were they on monotherapy or combination-based therapy? What dose level of cells did they receive?
Stay tuned, Kalpa. I don't want to compromise some of the data that's specified in our abstract. So we would look forward to getting this information out to you at the public presentation.
Okay, fair enough. And then how are you, based on the activity that you're seeing to date, how are you thinking about approaching multiple doses of Agent 797? Is there any data or learnings that you can point to that suggest multiple doses might be useful?
So I'll tell you, what we have launched when we launched the program, what our platform has been based on were really some very exciting findings of autologous INKT's in solid tumor cancers, head and neck cancer, lung cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma. These data are publicly available and some of the underlying hypotheses of the performance of the autologous cells would be that they can home in traffic.
to tissue. These are tissue dominant INKT's and that's why they're in such low quantity in the periphery. Because of that trafficking, when they advance and through their lipid ligands, CD1D, these cells will home to the disease site and then they recruit T cells and NK cells and they're actually one of the most highest interferon gamma secreting cells. The amount that they can produce really contributes to their ability to lyse.
In the ALO setting, pre-clinically, we're seeing those same features. Now in the clinic, what we would expect to do is to recapitulate the data that has been observed with the autologous cells, but in a setting and with a platform that is scalable and accessible and, of course, affordable to patients. The doses that were observed in the autologous setting, to go to your specific question, were really single administrations where we saw some pronounced benefit.
Our dose plan today is a single administration. Of course, the patients are being dosed in combination with Keytruda or Opdivo. And we are now exploring persistence, how long the cells actually persist at the site of disease where we need them to be. Our preclinical data shows that they persist beyond the measurement time of about 36 days. Some of our clinical data show that we can go far beyond that in the clinic.
And we will be exploring the best time to dose following the change in persistence of the cells. So that's still under evaluation, something that we'll explore. But the data that we have built our programs on has really been built on the autologous platforms that have shown that really sufficient tumor control. And that tumor control is not only because of these cells' ability to modulate both T and N, both arms of immunity innate and adaptive, and recruit T and NK cells.
the indications that we're going to be expanding in.
We'll provide some additional information on dose and dose frequency.
Okay, got it. And one, maybe one last question related to lympho depletion. Is the plan to continue exploring agent 797 without lympho depletion in future studies, or do you think you might have sort of an exploratory cohort testing lympho depletion before finalizing the next steps?
Well, based on what we're seeing today, we would continue to proceed without lymphodepletion. We will consider exploratory programs, of course, in partnership with investigators, whether lymphodepletion could expand the benefit of our observations. However, lymphodepletion is really difficult for patients to endure. And what we've seen, of course, from data that had come out with the J&J ABCMA CAR is that these lymphodepletion may be attributed to...
data.
Okay, great. Thanks very much for taking the question.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Jack Allen with Aarid.
Hi, thank you so much. This is Jack Allen from Baird. I really appreciate you taking the questions and congratulations on the progress. I guess the first one I had was a little bit outside of the solid tumor and multiple myeloma settings, but as it relates to the negotiations with the public entities around the COVID opportunity, I'd love to hear some more color about any comparative contracts.
I think about the timing of that arm of the business moving forward.
Okay, so for the infectious disease program that we discussed today and in our annual program, so what I will share, what we have identified of course in patients when we launched our IND, of course it was the very beginning of the pandemic and the data that we had and others had generated showed that these cells can modulate immune dysregulation and they can dampen pro-inflammatory cytokines in lung in particular.
promote survival and influenza, a great benefit of models of pneumonia, and have quite a significant impact on SARS-CoV-1 and MERS. We went to the agency with that data in hand and we cleared to start testing in COVID. We released data at CITSE last year showing a 77% survival benefit in patients who were elderly, mechanically ventilated, and who otherwise would have been predicted to have a 22% survival rate.
dealing with Ebola and then of course MERS and SARS, CoV-2, monkeypox, etc. So our government is looking for variant agnostic approaches in which they can really mitigate immune dysregulation and these cells may actually present that opportunity. DARPA of course is their emphasis is on very high science and that's something that will be partnering with them to elucidate mechanisms initially.
before expanding the cells in humans. So we have a partnership that's under discussion right now that will help us better understand mechanisms of these cells in mitigating the harmful side effects of infections more broadly and viral ARDS. And then we would expand those findings, of course, to an expanded clinical program that would go beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and possibly be applied much more broadly.
You will hear more this year about that partnership.
Great. Thank you so much. And then just one other question, and I have one more follow-up. But on the Graft-versus-host disease program, I know you mentioned the positive central impact of the cells in Graft-versus-host. I'd love to hear where things fit as it relates to advancing potentially Agent 797 in that indication as well.
That's right. So, we at…you know, graft-versus-host disease, that's a beneficial… Because there's a big gap and we actually get this brand new thing for Wrestling World
side effect really of these cells is it actually mitigates graft-versus-hosts. I think, Jack, we've shared with you and we could make public certainly some public presentations and publications of our team and our advisory team members' results of the mechanism as to why these cells may mitigate graft-versus-hosts. Now there are two areas where these cells can be helpful. One is transplant uptake, the ability to actually have a successful hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and then mitigate graft-versus-hosts as well. So there are two points of intervention where we believe that the cells can be helpful.
of interest for hematologists. So we will be providing some more guidance of the launch of this trial which we plan to launch this year, testing the cells and transplant acceptance as well as mitigation of GVHD and we see an opportunity to do that particularly in the earlier disease setting.
Great. Thank you so much. And then my final question was, more recently, there have been a few comments made by reporters as it relates to a peer of yours and the potential acquisition of an IANKT program out in the domain. I was wondering if you had any comments as it relates to business development of your assets moving forward and how you're thinking about advancing the various pipeline programs that make into the clinic, maybe more the CAR programs. Thank you.
Sure, so I think really importantly, Jackie, bringing up an important point, the capabilities that we have at MINK are really deep and broad. So we were of course born out of a long-standing veteran in immuno-oncology, a Genes, and as such we have the capabilities of delivering a platform that I think is unprecedented that I've seen so far in this field. So we launched as a starting point the cells in their native form because of the features that they boast.
across these platforms and has designed and developed these platforms for MINCS.
We will pursue business development very strategically. It's certainly non-diluted partnerships such as government partnerships are really instrumental for our ability to expand and advance the technologies and capabilities that we have. Partners fall into that approach as well. We have a number of active discussions underway and we'll certainly keep you informed on our progress.
I think to the extent that if you take a look at the productivity of partnerships that our parent company, Jennis, has been able to deliver on, and that includes a number of programs that generated about nearly a billion dollars in partnerships, transactions, and milestones, you can see the scale that we were able to actually monetize our research productivity to finance and fund the business and bring our lead pro-
Thanks so much, Jeff.
Again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star, then the number 1 on your telephone keypad.
Your next question comes from the line of Matt Phipps with William Blair.
Hey Jen, hope you're doing well. Couple questions for me. So first, I think this is the first time I've seen the word armored used to describe the BCMA CAR-T. I was wondering if you might be able to give us any hints of what that is ahead of seeing maybe a post or something. I know others are looking at the...
maybe cytokine secretion or things when they talk about armored cart to cart.
Matt, you are so astute and I so enjoy working with you for that reason. We will be giving you some more clarity when we announce details around this program this year.
So we'll share with you how we've actually created a product that is differentiated not only by the car design itself, a car I-N-K-T, but also to how we engineered this to be differentiated and we think to be potentially superior to what's available today. So stay tuned on that. Okay, thanks. And then I guess just wondering if you can give us an idea.
if you're seeing any differences in the persistence and distribution of the cells in the ongoing solid tumor myeloma indications compared to what you showed last year in the ARDS trial.
Yes, so now that's really important. Since last year we presented data in the ARDS trial, but it was based on peripheral data only. So the important point here is that these cells upon administration rapidly home to disease sites of interest, rapidly. So they are actually out of the periphery quite quickly and the data we presented was exclusively for this drug.
the periphery, so it showed us sort of a low window of persistence. What's very important about data that we'll be presenting in an upcoming conference is we actually have insights into where these cells are homing and how long they persist in the locations that they are homing to. And that includes biopsies from patients as well as important tissues of interest. So I think that you will certainly see differences in the data.
closing remarks.
Thank you very much, operator, and thank you for your participation. We're really thrilled to have an opportunity to share an update on our progress, and we'll be looking forward to connecting at our upcoming data releases. Thank you again.
Thank you for participating. You may disconnect at this time.
Hi, may I have the name of the conference? Should I call in to join? Hello? Yeah, hi. Can I have the name of the conference? Yes, ma'am. I'm here for the MINK Therapeutics Gurnings Call. All right. May I have your first and last name with spelling? Yes. Sure. First name is Rach. R-a-c-h-e-l. Last name is Smith. S-m-i-t-h. All right. Thank you. May I have the name of the company you're calling from? Yes, I'm with Aera. That's A-i-e-r-a. All right. Thank you. I'll join you now. Thank you.