Lantern Pharma Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Lantern Pharma's third quarter 2020 conference call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and all participants are in listen-only mode. We will open the call for questions and answers after the presentation. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Marek Krzyzewski with Lantern Pharma. Marek, please go ahead.

Thank you, Chloe, and thank you for joining us for Lantern Pharma's third quarter 2020 conference call. On the call today are Panna Sharma, Lantern's president and CEO, and David Margrave, Lantern's CFO. A press release was issued this afternoon with our third quarter financial results that we will be discussing here today. Following the safe harbor statement, Panna will provide an overview of business highlights, after which David will share quarterly financial results. Panna will then offer concluding comments after which we will open this call to questions. Please also note that we have provided a link on the IR website to the slides that we will be referencing in today's call. I would also like to remind everyone that remarks about future expectations, plans, and prospects continue to constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Lantern Pharma cautioned that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. There are a number of important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those indicated by forward-looking statements, such as the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, the results of our clinical trials, and the impact of competition. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements can be found in the risk factors section of our final prospectus dated June 10, 2020 for our initial public offering that is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Any forward-looking statements made on this conference call speak only as of today's date Thursday, October 29, 2020, and Lantern Pharma does not intend to update any of those forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after today. A webcast replay of the conference call will be available on Lantern Pharma website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to President and CEO, Panna Sharma, for his opening comments. Please go ahead, Panna.

Thank you, Merrick, and good afternoon to everyone on the call today. Thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2020 conference call. As many of you know, a few moments ago, we issued a press release at 4 p.m. highlighting both the operational and financial results for our third quarter. We'll be reviewing those in some detail on this call and also spending time on questions that investors and analysts will have after our prepared remarks. For those investors that are new to the Lantern story, we are an oncology biotech that leverages the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to both rescue and develop oncology therapies. We're one of the few AI-based biotechs that has multiple clinical stage programs and also a rapidly growing proprietary platform for accelerating our understanding, modeling, and prediction of patient and tumor response to cancer therapies. This is a very powerful tool for the development of targeted cancer drugs. In this regard, we are a very unique company at the forefront of the data and machine-enabled transformation that's happening today in drug development and drug discovery. Our team has been working very hard this past quarter in advancing our collaboration, developing meaningful lab data, advancing our manufacturing, Onboarding new team members, both employees and consultants, while also hitting major new milestones for our platform. Shortly after we began trading in June, we announced that our proprietary AI platform for precision oncology drug development, RADAR, surpassed 450 million data points. This was roughly six months ahead of our previous plans. And during our last earnings call on July 29th, I had indicated that we should reach 1 billion before the end of the year. I'm very pleased to announce another even more important milestone that we've actually now crossed over 1 billion data points, 1.1 billion actually, and we expect to cross the 3 billion data point mark during 2021. This is several months ahead of our schedule, and these datasets have been curated specifically for our drug development programs, but also for oncology drug development and drug response prediction. Our team has made tremendous progress leading to this billion data point milestone. And more importantly, in selecting, cleaning, curating, and tagging the data. And the data is only making our engine now more efficient and more powerful. This will allow our company to develop cancer therapies and better understand where and how certain compounds work with even greater precision, reduced risk, and also now at a much, much more rapid pace. Beyond merely the sheer amount of data, the quality and relevance of the data also continue to grow exponentially because we're feeding data back into the system from our own experiments and from the lab results of our collaborations and partnerships. Our radar AI platform stands at the core of our business model alongside our targeted and accelerated drug development path. The growth in the quantity and quality of our data set is an important driver of the value of our franchise. Radar's growing genomic drug sensitivity and patient outcome data sets combined with our AI and machine learning algorithms enables us to streamline the drug development process while also identifying two very important things. What are the mechanisms that drive activity or sensitivity to the drug? And what are the patient types that will benefit from our targeted oncology therapies? This at the core is really essential to oncology drug development. And we are confident the power of radar will enable us to add one additional de-risk genetically defined or biomarkerly defined program to our pipeline every 12 to 18 months. During our last earnings call, I mentioned that we are today all experiencing and living in the beginnings of a golden age of artificial intelligence. An era where the availability of relevant data, computing power, cloud resources, on-demand sequencing, talent, and the acceleration of AI large-scale data analytics, along with algorithms, have aligned to make highly responsive machine-driven approaches to solving complex and sometimes unknown problems of reality. This is especially true in drug development. And we are harnessing the trends and capabilities of this golden age to accelerate our pipeline and drive meaningful results for our investors and, most importantly, for cancer patients. For those of you that are just beginning to follow the lantern in our story, our pipeline of small molecule oncology assets includes new compounds that we have identified or we have developed through our biomarker discovery efforts, as well as potential therapies that have extensive prior clinical experience that we acquired after previous owners abandoned development efforts following late stage failures. Our radar AI platform underpins each of these efforts. And as the quantity of quality of radar goes above and beyond 1 billion data points and continues to grow, we are confident that the value of our ability to transform drug development and develop an enduring business model will rise. During the third quarter, we entered into two very important collaborations, both for LP184, which is a DNA damaging agent with nanomolar potency. It's a preclinical asset that we are aggressively working on getting into clinical trials. Collaborations such as these are core to our strategy to leverage leading cancer centers to help us develop insights, generate data, and eventually help serve as clinical trial sites for our clinical trials for the drugs. Our collaborations that we announced during the past quarter were with Fox Chase Cancer Center for pancreatic cancer and with Georgetown University in prostate cancer. Let me talk a little bit about each of these collaborations and what we expect from each. In Georgetown, we launched the next stage of collaboration for LP184. The first stage of the joint research activities began in the fourth quarter of 2019. prior to us being public. And it was there that we generated very compelling evidence of the efficacy of LP184 in solid tumors that overexpressed PTGR1. The anti-tumor activity of the drug was actually linked in a dose-dependent fashion to the overexpression of PTGR1. And now we will be further validating this in the ongoing second stage of the collaboration with Georgetown in various specific subtypes of prostate cancer, and this research is also expected to help guide the development of a signature that correlates to increase sensitivity to the drug both for metastatic hormone refractory prostate cancers and potentially cancers that are DNA damage repair gene deficient. This is an important and very underserved market. The next phase of the collaboration research program with Georgetown will focus on a larger set of PDX models and help pinpoint the specific mechanism of action and seek confirmatory validation of the rural PTGR1 as both a gene and potentially as an enzyme or protein have in driving the DNA damage repair pathways that make the drug highly potent to these cancers. The research will also focus on completing the acquisition of detailed genomic information in prostate cancers, which will involve work in animal models as well as in cell lines that have been edited to under and over express key driver genes. The goal of phase two of this collaboration is to create a biologically relevant, robust gene signature that can be used in our clinical trials. The objective is to personalize prostate cancer treatment and allow patients to experience the benefit of a personalized targeted program that ultimately shows great and Dr. Kishor Gopal. and the further development of LP184 in pancreatic cancer. This collaboration advances the targeted use of LP184 in genetically defined subtypes of pancreatic cancer and again to develop the biologically relevant robust gene signature that we can use in the upcoming clinical trials. We believe that LP184 is successful, could provide pancreatic cancer patients a personalized therapy option that has the potential to improve survival. The research of Fox Chase will be led by Dr. Igor Astis-Turov, an internationally recognized researcher in GI cancers in the molecular therapeutics program at Fox Chase, where he specializes in investigating signaling pathways. And these are pathways that typically form the choice of biomarkers in innovative therapy and therapy combinations for clinical trials. We expect initial early results in Q1 from this collaboration, but actually we're already beginning to see data from that collaboration that's informing our thoughts on the best use of LP184. During our last call, we talked about how LP184 was also demonstrating high nanomolar potency and the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier. This is work that we did prior to going public, and we had very solid evidence of LP184 crossing the blood-brain barrier. that was done in silico and from prior analogs. We think now what we have done during this past quarter is we moved ahead with the further validation in the wet lab and actual models on two important fronts. We validated that the in silico generated hypothesis about LP184 crossing the blood-brain barrier was valid in real-world biology, which we did by using a 3D model that replicated the biology of glioblastoma. and by doing so, we demonstrated and gathered data that LP184 would have a blood-brain barrier permeability equivalent to the current standard of care to mezolamide and other drugs that are being used in GBM patients. We also validated that LP184 does not compromise cell viability while it crosses a blood-brain barrier, leaving neuronal cells intact and functional. As you may know, less than 10% of drugs make it through this very important first gauntlet. and we believe that the validation and data places us in a great position to develop our next collaboration to further develop LP184 in GBM which we believe has several hundred million dollars in opportunity in the US alone in cancer therapy sales. This data that we are getting that's genomically targeted and biomarker driven allows us to pursue a transformational drug development strategy, one that we can identify, rescue, or develop drugs and advance our small molecule drug candidates in what we believe is a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional cancer drug development, which tends to be highly serial and also very much driven by large-scale lab experiments and usually trials that are not very targeted. We believe that our dual approach of developing de novo biomarker-guided drug candidates but also rescuing historical drug candidates using AI and using our growing AI platform is really an emblematic of a new era of drug discovery where the continuous advances in genomics and computational biology are being used to de-risk programs and bring them to market in a more meaningful time and cost perspective. Together, our current portfolio of drug candidates and our radar AI platform has the potential to provide, we believe, multiple value-enhancing milestones for shareholders over the coming year, including the potential for our most mature asset, LP100, which is partnered with Alerity Therapeutics, for that drug to be partnered to other pharma companies, and that asset also can receive significant economic participation. That's currently in a phase two trial for metastatic hormone refractory prostate cancer. And later this quarter, we will be having a joint scientific and development committee meeting with Alerity, and we should be in a position to provide updates on the program and progress on that front as well. Now I'll hand the call over to David Margrave, Lantern's CFO, for a review of our third quarter financial results.