Avacta Group Plc

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Evactor Group PLC Interim Results Investor presentation. Throughout today's recording meeting, attendees will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. Due to the significant attendance on today's call, the company will not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to the management team. Chris, Brian, good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Mark. Thank you for having us and a good morning to our colleagues. across the pond in the States. My name is Christina Coughlin. I am the CEO of Avacta Therapeutics coming to you here from White City, London at our headquarters. And I am joined by my Chief Financial Officer, Brian Hahn. We look forward to delivering to you today our interim results for the period ending June 30th, 2025. As part of our presentation, both Brian and I will be making forward-looking statements. Recent research and development highlights from the company. We are currently enrolling our clinical stage program, Faridoxorubicin, happy to bring that name to you for the first time today. It has been issued by the World Health Organization, FAPDOCS or ABA 6000. We continue to enroll in the expansion cohorts in this program. Our second clinical program, and I use that term as FAP Exotecan, is quickly approaching the clinic. FAP Exotecan does remain on track to dose its first patient in the first quarter of 2026. As part of today's presentation, I would like to update for you one piece of data, one experiment that is ongoing, and show you the timeline for that IND. Our clinical data with faridoxorubicin, FAPDOX, or AVA6000, our clinical data, our preclinical data with FAP-exotecan, and translational work in the PRECISION program, all of these were presented as part of the period under review today. April of 2025, these three presentations occurred at the American Association for Cancer Research, the annual meeting that occurred earlier this year. Those three presentations were quite pivotal for the company in that we showed exactly what faridoxorubicin was able to do, some very preliminary, but very encouraging data in the lead indication of salivary gland cancers for that particular program. That exit TCAT, we did show a number of the preclinical studies. Again, with some of those being preliminary at the time, we're happy to update one key study today. And then the translational work, really highlighting some of the power of our TEMPEST collaboration there at the AACR. AVACTA is slated to present the final phase 1A dose escalation data for our lead program, Faradoxa rubicin This will be at ESMO 2025 in Berlin, a little bit later next month in October of 2025. There we are looking to present our longer term cardiac safety data, as well as updating the efficacy data that we have in that program. As promised, we have an updated data slide for you today. They're similar to how we are collecting longer-term survival data, progression-free survival data and overall survival data with our Faridoxorubicin. We continue that with our FAP Exotecan program. And this animal model is what we call a patient-derived xenograft, meaning that the tumor cells were taken directly out of the patient, and instead of passaging them in a plastic dish, which changes the cells somewhat, These were injected directly into an animal model, and those are passaged that way, meaning that these cells don't see plastic in terms of our ability to keep these cells going. There's two important points on this slide. The first is the histology in a small inset there, showing in blue the tumor cells and showing in brown the fat-positive fibroblasts. This models what we see in the clinic and specifically what we have seen with our salivary gland indication for ferridoxorubicin in that the tumor cells are all completely negative for FAP in blue and the fibroblasts, which actually come from the mouse themselves instead of humans, the fibroblasts there are staining positive brown for FAP. This is exactly what we expect in most solid tumors, a low level of FAP expression compared with the number of tumor cells. If you let your eyes wander down to the below inset there, there's an important aspect of this animal model that we think critically tells us something important about the FAPEX or TCAN program. And that is this patient, prior to the biopsy being taken where this model was developed, this patient had been treated with irenotecan, another TOPA1 inhibitor. And what you're seeing in that small graph there, that small inset, is that this animal model is topo1 resistant, meaning irinotecan has essentially no activity in this particular animal model. We expect, based on some of the early clinical data with exotecan, that an animal model such as this might be sensitive to exotecan being a much more potent topo1 inhibitor. And that's exactly what we find in the animal model. On the left-hand side, you can see the actual tumor growth in three different groups in this experiment. The first in gray are the vehicle-treated animals. This is the natural history of this tumor type in this animal model. It grows very rapidly and is very aggressive. In orange, you can see we delivered three doses of conventional exotecan. And what you can see there is after that third dose, which are depicted in the triangles, we start to see the tumors grow in these animal moths. In navy blue is the growth pattern that we see with our FAP-enabled FAP-exotecan molecule. Importantly, we see now durable, complete responses. Essentially, what you can see on the right-hand side of the waterfall plots is that Nearly four out of four of the animals treated with fat bags of Tecan developed complete responses. These are prolonged and sustained, and the durability of these responses, despite the animals only receiving three doses, is critically important to us. It took us some time to pull these data together, exactly what is happening in the Faridoxorubicin trial. It's these survival statistics and observing the patients or the animal model for some time tells us something very important about the drug. An update now on the timelines for the IND and the dosing, initiating the dosing in this particular program. In order to bring a program into the clinic, there are three activities that we continue to work on through that last year of the IND enabling studies. And that is the manufacturing for patients, the preclinical program, including the good laboratory practice toxicology studies that are in progress, and then as well developing the clinical stage program. So developing the clinical protocol for this and also bringing the clinical sites on board, which will lead us then to a first patient in the first quarter of 2026. not too far off and we're very excited to get started with this one in the clinic. Brian, let me hand it over to you for our financial update.

Thank you, Chris. Cash and cash equivalents at the period end were $12.65 million as compared to $28.56 million for the same period in 2024 and $12.87 million for year end 2024. It's important to note here that this does not reflect the proceeds from the sale of chorus that we announced in late August of $2.15 million. Cash outflows from operations and working capital movements were 12.14 million for the first half of 2025. This is compared to 12.6 million for the same period in 2024 and 26.05 million for the full year 2024. Cash inflows from investing activities were 8.77 million for the first half of 2025. This reflects the proceeds of the sale of launch diagnostics. This is compared to cash outflows of just under a million for the first half of 2024 and full year outflows of 1.43 million. I'd like to note here that we renegotiated the terms of the height convertible bond. We know this has been an overhang on the company, and we've also raised $6.5 million gross to fund two quarterly payments of the cash bond. Year-to-date bond settlement was $5.1 million. Bond balance as of 30th June 2025 was $25.5 million, and it is now reduced down to $22.95 million by the 30th September 2025.