CytomX Therapeutics, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Cytomics Therapeutics First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Call. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. I would like to hand the call over to your host for today, Mr. Chao Cheng, Cytomics Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Cindy. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Dr. Sean McCarthy, Cytomics' Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, Dr. Amy Peterson, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Carlos Campoy, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, we issued a press release that includes a summary of our first quarter 2022 financial results and highlights the progress we made during the quarter. We encourage everyone to read today's press release and the associated materials. which have been filed with the SEC. Additionally, the press release and the recording of this call can be found under the Investors and News section of our website. Please note that during today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties and risks, including the uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. Important risks and uncertainties are set forth in our most recent public filings with the SEC at sec.gov, including our Form 10Q that was filed today. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Sean.

Thank you, Chao, and welcome back, Carlos. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for an update on recent progress at Cytomix. Let me begin today's call by reaffirming our commitment as an organization to making the biggest difference we can for people with cancer. Our dedication to destroying cancer differently is embodied in our robust therapeutic pipeline that represents the potential for conditionally activated biologics to lead to new and differentiated anticancer therapies. Conditional activation holds great promise, and we remain highly focused on delivering new therapies based on our world-class research and development capabilities. Leveraging our ProBody therapeutic platform, we now have six experimental therapeutics in development. During Q1, we make great progress executing towards important data readouts from our lead programs. Now, I want to stress up front that we understand that in the current protracted bear market for small and mid-cap biotech, judicious financial stewardship has never been more important. At Cytomics, a central tenet of our integrated financial strategy has been the formation of foundational partnerships with global biopharma companies, including AbbVie, Amgen, Astellas, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. These alliances have not only broadened the impact of our technology platforms, by increasing the number of pro-body therapeutic candidates being advanced into clinical studies, but they've also added considerable financial resources in the form of non-dilutive capital, enabling us to consistently maintain balance sheet strength. We ended this past quarter with $263 million in cash and liquid assets, providing sufficient resources to advance our pipeline. We also continue to be active with our business development efforts relating to our platform and to our product pipelines. I'd like to make a few specific comments on our pipeline programs before handing over to Amy for additional perspective. Our most advanced wholly owned drug candidate, the conditionally activated ADC, Pralizatumab Ravtanzine, is one of two clinical stage ADC programs designed to open a therapeutic window for novel cancer targets that have proven inaccessible by conventional approaches due to their widespread presence on healthy tissues. Indeed, Pralizatamab is the first ADC targeting CD166, a transmembrane glycoprotein that has been reported to play a role in multiple aspects of tumor biology, including angiogenesis and invasiveness. CD166 is highly expressed on the cell surface of many cancer types and, as such, has attractive molecular properties as an ADC target. However, developing a conventional ADC against CD166 is precluded by its widespread presence on healthy tissues. Based on our published Phase I clinical data, we see monotherapy pralizatumab as having potential in the evolving treatment paradigm for hormone receptor-positive and triple-negative breast cancers. Patient enrollment in our Phase II study of pralizatumab in breast cancer has continued to progress well, and we remain on track to report initial data for both ARMS A and B of this study in the second half of this year. Furthermore, we continue to evaluate the combination of pralizatumab with our anti-PD-L1 probody, pacmelamab, in triple negative breast cancer. Our second lead conditionally activated ADC is CX2029, which is partnered with AbbVie. This potential first-in-class ADC targets CD71, the transferrin receptor. Presented at high levels on many cancers, CD71 has been seen for decades as a target with great potential, but it presents a high bar for the development of anti-cancer therapeutics because of its widespread expression in healthy tissues. We previously reported encouraging initial data on CX2029's activity in a phase two expansion study in patients with squamous non-small cell lung cancer, all of whom had received prior treatment with checkpoint inhibitors. Given the widespread use of checkpoint inhibition in squamous lung cancer and the lack of therapeutic options in the post-checkpoint inhibitor setting, We believe these initial Phase II results bring into focus a potentially significant commercial opportunity for CX2029. Our ongoing Phase II expansion study continues to enroll, and we remain on track to provide a data update in the second half of 2022. In addition to our ADC programs, our multi-modality platform has enabled us to enter the emerging field of T-cell engaging by specific antibodies. Specifically, we're excited to have advanced our first conditionally activated T-cell bispecific, CX904, into clinical study startup activities. CX904, partnered with Amgen, is directed toward the validated cancer target, EGFR, which is highly expressed on many solid tumors and presents a broad opportunity for this therapeutic candidate to make a difference for people with cancer. As we have previously reported, we are further broadening and exploring our probody platform's full potential by applying our conditional activation technology to the field of cytokines, starting with interferon alpha. Interferon therapy, if harnessed effectively, has the potential to redirect to the immune system to destroy tumor cells. Interferons have also demonstrated combination activity with immunotherapy to potentially expand the benefit to patients with IO unresponsive tumors. Despite its potential, however, the toxicity of interferon-alpha has limited its clinical use. We're therefore thrilled to have created a novel, masked version of interferon-alpha 2B designed to harness the powerful activity of this immune modulator to target and preferentially kill cancer cells more safely and effectively. The promising preclinical profile of this conditionally activated cytokine was the subject of our recent presentation at AACR, and we aim to rapidly advance this program towards clinical evaluation. We're excited about our execution and progress across our entire pipeline, and I'll now hand the call over to Amy to provide you with a more in-depth update on our clinical development activities.