Aptose Biosciences, Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Mary, and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to Apto's BioSciences conference call for the second quarter ended June 30, 2021. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press Start followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Thank you. As a reminder, this conference call may be recorded. I would like to introduce Ms. Susan Pietropaola. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mary. Good afternoon, and welcome to the Aptos Biosciences Conference call to discuss financial and operational results for the first quarter and to June 30, 2021. Joining me on today's call are Dr. William G. Rice, Chairman, President, and CEO, Dr. Yodi Morongo, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Business Officer, and Dr. Rafael Behar, Senior Vice President, Chief Medical Officer. Before we proceed, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made during this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of U.S. and Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements reflect Aptos' current expectations regarding future events but are not guarantees of performance. and it is possible that actual results and performance could differ materially from these stated expectations. They involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results, performance, and achievement to differ materially from those expressed. To learn more about these risks and uncertainties, please read the risk factors set forth in Aptos' most recent annual report on Form 10-K and SEC and CEDAR filings. All forward-looking statements made during this call speak only as of the date they are made. Aptos undertakes no obligation to revise or update the statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call, except as required by law. I will now turn the call over to Dr. Rice, Chairman, President, and CEO of Aptos Biosciences. Dr. Rice.

Thank you, Susan. I'd like to welcome everyone to our call for the second quarter ended June 30, 2021. The quarter is highlighted by the continued progress of our clinical trials, especially with leptinib, or LUX, in patients with acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, and in patients with B-cell cancers. We continue to move through dose escalations, and our chief medical officer, Dr. Rafael Behar, will bring you through that in a moment. Because we have observed clinical activity in our early cohorts, our clinical sites are highly engaged, and we're pleased with the risk patient flow to both our B-cell cancer and AML cancer trials. Before I turn it over to Dr. Behar, I'd just like to emphasize the continued need for therapies in these hematologic cancers. While there are a number of active drugs on the market and in development, responses are often insufficiently durable, and most patients will relapse or develop resistance. Lecseptinib is our oral, highly potent, non-covalent inhibitor of the BTK and FLT3 driver kinases, and it is like no other commercialized or drug under development. I remind you that LUX is more than just a typical FLT3 or BTK inhibitor, as it not only inhibits wild-type and mutant forms of BTK and FLT3, it selectively targets clusters of related kinases and suppresses the mutations that occur in AML and CLL cells that render such cells resistant to other agents. And it has been found remarkably safe and well-tolerated to date. Thus far, LUX has been shown clinically to target the primary drivers of B-cell malignancies and AML, including BTK and FLT3, yet with a precision that avoids known targets such as TEK, EGFR, and ERB2 that are often associated with toxicities. This selectivity is what sets LUX apart from other hematology drugs on the market or in development and what makes it compelling. I'll also remind you, and this point that sometimes gets lost, that the patients in both of our trials are relapsed and refractory patients who already have been treated with and failed by the best available therapies. So the progress we're observing in our ongoing clinical trials in these very difficult-to-treat patient populations is encouraging, and we are hopeful that LUPS will prove to be valuable in the armamentum of therapies for a diversity of hematologic cancers. With that, I'll ask Dr. Rafael Behar, our chief medical officer, to provide an overview of our clinical activities. Raf?