Alpine Immune Sciences, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining the Alpine Immune Sciences Fourth Quarter 2020 Financial Results and Corporate Update Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the management prepared remarks, we will hold a Q&A session. To ask a question at that time, please press star followed by one on your touchstone telephone. If anyone has difficulty hearing the conference, please press star zero for operator assistance. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded today. Thursday, March 18th, 2021. I would now like to introduce Alex Sharif, Director, Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Josh. With me on today's call from Alpine Immune Sciences are Executive Chairman and CEO, Dr. Mitchell Gold, President and Head of Research and Development, Dr. Stanford Pang, Chief Financial Officer, Paul Rickey, and Chief Business Officer, Dr. Remy Durand. This afternoon, Alpine Immune Sciences issued a press release announcing the company's fourth quarter and year-end 2020 financial results and corporate update. If you have not received this news release and would like to read it, or if you would simply like to be added to the company's distribution list, you can do both on the investor relations page of the company's website at www.alpineimmunesciences.com. During the course of today's conference call, Alpine's management will make forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the company's preclinical and clinical development plans and the timing thereof, expectations regarding the sufficiency of cash to fund operations, including any cash received from potential milestone payments under Alpine's collaborations. the timing and publication of future clinical data, expectations regarding Alpine's ongoing collaborations and potential future collaborations, including the anticipated strategic and financial benefits of the option and licensing agreement between Alpine and AbbVie for the development and commercialization of ALPN 101. Alpine's ability to successfully develop its product candidates and achieve milestones under its collaboration with AbbVie and others and the financial and business outlook for Alpine. These forward-looking statements are based on the company's current expectations and inherently involve significant risks and uncertainties. Actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements. as a result of these risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause results to be different from these statements also include factors the company describes in the section entitled Risk Factors in Alpine's annual report on Form 10-K for the period that ended December 31st, 2020 and filed with the SEC on or about March 18th, 2021. Alpine cautions you not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and undertakes no duty or obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or changes in its expectations. With that, I will now turn the call over to Alpine's Executive Chairman and CEO, Dr. Mitchell-Gold.

Thanks, Alex, and welcome to our fourth quarter and year-end 2020 financial results conference call. 2020 was truly a transformative year for Alpine Immune Sciences as a company. Going forward, we look to build on the strong momentum to accelerate development of our pipeline of innovative therapies for patients living with cancer and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. I would like to dive into our three most advanced programs, starting with Alpine 101, our dual CD28 IQOS inhibitor. In June of last year, following a highly competitive process, we entered into an option and license agreement with AbbVie for worldwide rights to Alpine 101. That deal provided an upfront payment to Alpine of $60 million and has a total potential deal value of up to $865 million in milestone payments as well as royalties. Importantly, There is up to $75 million of potential pre-option payments related to our development of Alpine 101. We anticipate achieving the first of these milestones in the middle of this year as we progress Alpine 101 program with AbbVie and Lupus. Moving next to Alpine 202, our first-in-class conditional CD28 co-stimulator and dual checkpoint inhibitor. As many of you know, CD28 has emerged as a potentially key co-stimulatory pathway for overcoming resistance to checkpoint blockade, and we are encouraged by the strong interest in this space. Alpine 202 remains the only therapeutic candidate that we are aware of that combines conditional CD28 co-stimulation with PD-L1 CTLA-4 blockade in a single molecule. In June of last year, we initiated NEON1, a phase one study of alpine 202 in patients with advanced malignancies. We will have a presentation at AACR next month as a trial in progress poster, and we anticipate presenting initial interim data from the dose escalation cohorts later this year. At a high level, the trial continues to enroll well. We are seeing signs of potential CD28 engagement, and we'll continue working to identify a dose regimen to move forward in our expansion cohorts by the end of this year, as well as initiating a combination study with PD-1 therapies that we are calling NEON2. We anticipate that our third development candidate to enter the clinic will be ALPN303, a dual B-cell cytokine antagonist with best-in-class potential for the treatment of B-cell-mediated inflammatory diseases. We are particularly excited about this program and are targeting being ready to initiate a phase one study in Healthy Volunteers in the fourth quarter of this year. As we advance our clinical and discovery programs, we continue to strengthen key functional areas of the company, as evidenced by the recent hiring of Pam Holland as Senior Vice President of Research, and the promotion of Remy Duran as Chief Business Officer. We are also pleased to have appointed Natasha Hernday to our Board of Directors. Natasha's deep experience and strategic insight will be beneficial to us as we develop our programs globally and consider various business opportunities for the company. With that, I'll turn the call over to our President and Head of Research and Development, Stanford Bain, to provide an update on our research and development. Stanford?