Jounce Therapeutics, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Jones Therapeutics First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded at the company's request. I will now turn the call over to your host, Eric Laub, with Jones Therapeutics. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. This is Eric Laub, Vice President of Investor Relations at Jounce Therapeutics. Good morning and welcome to the Jounce Therapeutics First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. This morning, we issued a press release which outlines the topics that we plan to discuss today. The release is available in the Investors and Media section of our website at www.jouncetx.com. Speaking on today's call will be our CEO and President, Dr. Richard Murray, who will review our pipeline progress and key milestones, followed by our CMO, Dr. Beth Trehu, who will provide an update on our clinical activities. And lastly, our CFO, Kim Trapkin, will review our first quarter financial results. We will then open the call for your questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's discussion will will include statements about our future expectations, plans, and prospects that constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the Safe Harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including the risk factors discussed in our SEC filings. In addition, any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today, May 5, 2022, and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. While we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so even if our views change. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Rich.

Thanks, Eric. Good morning, and thank you for joining today. Before I turn to our pipeline and quarterly accomplishments, let me take a moment to recognize the entire Jounce team on their continued commitment to excellence and dedication to improving patients' lives, which they bring to work every day. We were pleased to announce this morning in our press release that we met the initial pre-specified response criteria to continue expansion of two of the innate study cohorts to 29 patients. We are encouraged by this progress and continue to execute across all cohorts. Beth will provide more detail on the innate study in a few moments. While the use of PD-1 inhibitors continues to grow and expand into earlier lives of therapy, including non-metastatic settings, the size and scope of PD-1 inhibitor resistant markets continues to grow. as there are more patients who are resistant to the therapy than benefit from it. Unfortunately, there are few alternatives for these patients in many tumor settings. We see this resistance as a fundamental scientific and medical problem that stands in the way of the broader and more durable impact IO could have for cancer patients. As scientific evidence continues to point to the myeloid immune cell lineage as being causal to at least some aspects of IO resistance, we undertook a comprehensive target discovery interrogation of the myeloid cells from human tumors. Our discovery work prioritized the low RB or ILT family of receptors as being key mechanisms that could mediate such immunosuppression leading to IO resistance. These mechanisms could occur in certain patients independent of any T-cell focused immunosuppression, such as PD-1 or CKLA-4. There are five LLRB inhibitory receptors and six LLRA activating receptors. From this work, we prioritize LLRB2, or ILT4, as our lead, LLRB4, or ILT3, now in IND enablement studies, and LLRB1, or ILT2, in discovery. Each of these programs has common as well as unique features of biology and the mechanisms by which they may lead to therapeutic benefit. Our highest priority program, CTX8064, blocks the function of LIL-RB2 on tumor-associated macrophages and other myeloid cells. It aims to convert immunosuppressive activities of these cells to an immune-active state. First, by inhibiting ligand binding to LIL-RB2, the immunosuppressive macrophages can be reprogrammed which we believe favors an immune response in the tumor. Second, we believe the mechanism also allows for more effective antigen presentation leading to T cell activation, thus creating a bridge between the innate and adaptive immune systems. This is something T cell checkpoint inhibitors cannot do alone. And the preclinical data tells us it may result in the potential to reverse PD-1 inhibitor resistance. We're extremely pleased with the progress of the innate study as we try to bring benefit to the patients that historically have not benefited from or become resistant to PD-1 inhibitors. I'll now turn to SELECT, our randomized phase two proof of concept trial of vopratilumab, or VOCA, in combination with our PD-1 inhibitor, PIMI, and non-small cell lung cancer. We've completed the test VOCA biomarker screening and expect to complete enrollment this month, as we reiterate our guidance of expecting to share full clinical trial data at a medical meeting in the second half of this year. Our next potential clinical program, JTX1484, is an anti-LowRD4, or IL-3, program currently in IND-enabling studies. LowRD4 is expressed on immune-suppressive myeloid cells in the tumor microenvironment, with both overlapping and distinct cell types in biology compared to LIL-RB2. We look forward to advancing this program to the clinic. Led by the LIL-RB family, as well as additional myeloid target mechanisms, our discovery teams are actively building rationally designed bispecific antibodies, where our goal is to identify development candidates that have activities superior to that of the combinations of individual antibodies. We're excited for what lies ahead at Jones as we work toward our key data readouts this year. Our strong financial position enables our continued growth and execution beyond the proof of concept inflection points of innate and select, while continuing our robust novel discovery efforts, identifying and progressing new mechanisms to benefit cancer patients, particularly in the settings where patients have few therapeutic options. With that, I'll turn the call over to Beth to discuss our clinical pipeline in science in more detail.