Evaxion A/S

Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. And a very warm welcome to this Evaction Business Update conference call on the back of our Q2 results. I'm Christian Kanstrup, CEO of Evaction. With me today, I have Birgitte Rønne, our CSO. I have Jesper Nygaard Nissen, our COO and CFO. And I also have a new joiner with me today, which is Mads Kronborg. VP Investor Relations and Communication. And I would actually like just to start out handing briefly over to Mads for a brief introduction to who you are. This is the first time you are attending the call here.

Thank you, Christian, and thank you for the opportunity. And just for a brief introduction, I have some 15 years of experience in corporate communication and investor relations from the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, having earlier held positions like head of corporate communication at Lundbeck, and head of IR and communication at Zeeland Pharma. I'm glad to join Evaction at this very interesting time for the company with a number of milestones lying ahead. And I'm looking forward to help communicate our progress and facilitate the dialogue with you as investors, analysts, and journalists. You will find my contact information on the investor section of our website and are, of course, always welcome to get in touch.

And I am pleased to have Mads on board so we can provide even better service and support to investors all of you, so great to have you on board, Mads. Then let's jump to the next slide and look at the agenda for today. I'm going to do a brief introduction, then I'll hand over to Birgitte for an R&D business update. Jesper will be covering our financial results. I will conclude before we head into the Q&A part. But before we get going for real, let's just direct our attention to slide three, which is forward-looking statements. As you know, we will be talking about the future and that do entail uncertainty. Hence, please read this one carefully. So with that, let's look at some of the key achievements since last business update. As you know, one of the key elements in our strategy is to create value via multi-partner approach. And here I'm super pleased to see that we have been advancing our partnering discussions since our last update. We're seeing a solid interest from external parties, both in our AI immunology platform and pipeline candidates. And we do have several partnerships discussions ongoing. And this is, of course, key to execute upon our multi-partner strategy that we see these discussions advancing. What I'm also pleased about is that we are seeing progress on the EVX01 program. We did present positive and validating phase two immune data at ASCO this year. We also presented our phase one results in a leading medical journal, including the 67% objective response rate from the phase one trial, which I'm very proud about. And very importantly, we are on track for a key milestone for Evaction, our one year clinical data readout, which will be presented at the ESMO Congress in september so very nice progress on the evx01 program in addition to this an important element is of course to continue strengthening our ai immunology platform and our capabilities and that we have also progressed upon over the past quarter among other things we did get the positive feedback on a patent application for an ai based novel target identification method which is based on the endogenous retroviruses. And of course, creating a strong IP portfolio around our platform and around our pipeline assets is important for us. So getting this positive feedback is a major milestone for the continued strengthening of our platform. Finally, I think worth mentioning is the fact that we did present at the computational biology conference not too long ago, and improve performance of one of the building blocks of AI Immunology. And as you might remember, then AI Immunology has a quite unique modular structure where we have a number of building blocks used across the different AI models. And that means improving the performance of one of these will improve the performance of those AI models where it's used. So having the opportunity of showcasing what we do to increase the predictive capabilities which we'll get back to later is a major element in in strengthening and improving our ai immunology platform so i would say it has been quite busy with with several important parts of our strategy advancing since our last update and i would also just on the next slide quickly recap on our strategy Our strategy is unchanged. As you know, we have a three-pronged business model, which is based upon AI immunology. So the core of our strategy, that's AI immunology, and then we have the multi-partner approach towards value realization. Then the three prongs, it's targets, it's pipeline, and it's responders. Within the target part, that is about a multi-partner approach focusing around either single or multiple vaccine target discovery, design, and development agreements. And of course, the collaboration we have with MSD around EBXB3 is a great example of what we want to achieve here. Pipeline, that's taking select high-value programs forward ourselves, bringing these to key value inflection points. And again, that's why we are super excited about having the readout of the one-year clinical data from the Phase 2 on EBX01 in September at the ESMO conference. This is going to be a key milestone for Evaction. Finally, the responder part, that's really about taking the core capabilities we have, data, predictive analysis, and developing responder models. So three-pronged business model remains in place, multi-partner approach towards value realization. And then before handing over to Birgitte, I just want to look a little bit forward because we have a number of important milestones to report shortly. In September at the ECCB conference, we will be launching the upgraded version of EDEN version 5.0 that we are looking very much forward to and that, of course, links into the continuous strengthening of our AI immunology platform. Also in September at the 18th Vaccine Congress, we will be reporting out on the milestone for EVXB2 in an mRNA version where we have been pursuing preclinical proof of concept. I already mentioned ESMO September, one year readout on EVX01. So a number of important milestones reporting out shortly. For the latter part of the year, we are still on track with our collaboration with MSD around EVXB3, where the first phase is going to conclude. In the second half, we are on track with our earth-based precision cancer vaccine, where we are pursuing the preclinical proof of concept that will also report out later on in the year. And then finally, we have the ambition of generating business development income equal to our 2024 cash burn excluding financing activities that also remains. The only thing here is the attentive reader will see we have updated this wording here to say business development income or cash in. And that reflects the fact that, of course, now we are relatively later on in the year. Hence, if we get to the 14 million. It's uncertain if the accounting impact of upfront milestone will lead to full accounting for this in this year or that will be leading into next year. So from an income point of view, it might be divided over 24 and 25. But from a cash point of view, we clearly have the ambition which remains intact of generating a business development income of 14 million. But as you of course know, Any business development activity is uncertain, so this remains an ambition. But as I also started out saying, we are seeing a very nice traction on our business development activities with several discussions ongoing. Also pleased to say that we are seeing new potential partners approaching us on a regular basis. So strong activity around our business development activities. And we are having the ambition of generating the 14 million this year. But of course, uncertainty remains. And with that, I will hand over to Birgitte for giving an update on the exciting R&D activities that have taken place over the past quarter.