Lantern Pharma Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Lanterns Pharma's second quarter 2021 conference call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and all the participants are in a 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, and Jocelyn with Investor Relations at Lantern Pharma. Jocelyn, please go ahead.

Thank you, Gretchen, and welcome everyone to Lantern Pharma's second quarter 2021 conference call. On the call today are Panna Sharma, Lantern's President and CEO, David Margrave, Lantern's CFO, and Dr. Kishore Bhatia, Lantern's Chief Scientific Officer. A press release was issued today with our second quarter financial results that we will be discussing in our call today. Following the State Harbor Statement, Panna will provide an overview of our business highlights after which David will overview our quarterly financial results and Dr. Bhatia will provide an update on our R&D efforts. 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 Investor Relations website for additional slides that we may reference in today's call. I would also like to remind everyone that remarks about future expectations, claims, and prospects constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Legation Reform Act of 1995. Lantern Pharma cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. A number of factors could cause our actual results to differ materially from those indicated by forward-looking statements, such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, 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 the forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factor section in our annual report on Form 10-K, which is dated March 10, 2021, on file with the SEC. Forward-looking statements made on this conference call speak only as of today, Thursday, July 29, 2021, and Lantern Pharma does not intend to update any of these 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's website. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Panna Sharma, President and CEO of Lantern Pharma. Panna, please go ahead.

Thank you, Jocelyn. And good afternoon to everyone on the call today. Thank you for joining us for our second quarter 2021 conference call. For those of you that are new to our story, Lantern Pharma is an oncology biopharma company that leverages the power of our internally developed artificial intelligence and machine learning platform called RADAR to both rescue and develop oncology-focused therapies. We believe that we are transforming the development of oncology drugs by changing the pace, the cost, and the risk of drug development. were one of the few pure play AI-based biopharma companies with multiple clinical stage programs as well as a rapidly growing proprietary platform for accelerating our understanding, modeling, and prediction of tumor response to cancer therapies, namely the drug candidates in our portfolio and those in classes that show synergy with our molecules and also those of our partners. We reached several milestones in the second quarter. In April, we announced that our radar AI platform exceeded 4.6 billion data points. And now we're enhancing our data lake with data from a wide range of blood cancers. We are really excited about the rate of growth that we're undergoing at this time period. Additionally, there's significant new functionality that we're building into our platform. And this is because of the massive growth rate of over 4x since the beginning of the year and now we're approaching 5X. As her growth rate has expanded, we now expect to achieve over 8 billion data points during the next campaign, which is scheduled to begin later this quarter. In terms of our portfolio, we've made a major announcement this past week. We announced a major milestone in our existing Phase II clinical program in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer by reacquiring all global development and commercialization rights in an agreement with our former out-licensing partner. That program was previously licensed to Alerity Therapeutics, a public Danish biotech company. And this transaction ensures that the appropriate resources and focus are applied to the future of the irofolbin or LP100 program. We reached other very important progress points during the second quarter, such as our progress in pancreatic cancer, which Dr. Kishor Bhatia, our Chief Scientific Officer, will expand on later today. And as you know, pancreatic cancer is an orphan disease, has a five-year survival rate of 7.9%, and with nearly 490,000 cases globally, 62,000 just here in North America, there's a significant need for improved therapies. We believe that nearly 35% of these pancreatic cancer cases are ideal candidates for our LP184 drug candidate, which is an area of high patient need. There's roughly over 1 billion in annual therapy sales that this represents in North America alone. Also, very importantly for LP184, we made new advances in validating the application of this drug candidate to bladder cancers and potentially other cancers that have DNA damage repair mutations. We will be sharing data in these indications as we prepare for conferences, publications, and manuscripts in the very near future. We also made progress in initiating clinical trial site selection for LP300 in an upcoming Phase 2 trial for non-small cell lung cancer in never smokers. This is an important program for never smokers where there are currently no approved therapies. During the quarter, we did experience delays in the program due to equipment and materials issues with our primary manufacturing partner, but we now expect to have final drug product later this quarter. This product will then be ready for subsequent shipment to sites that are selected for our clinical trial. Selecting patients and sites that are aligned with the inclusion criteria for LP300 will be a critical component of this Phase II clinical trial, meaning we need to select patients that are not only never smokers, but that are chemo-naive, have no prior history of chemo treatment, and have become non-responsive or have relapsed from prior TKI therapies. will be working closely with leading sites to provide awareness and education of LP300 and identifying potential patients that may benefit from this therapy. The current Phase II trial is focused on having two arms for a total of 80 patients, one arm with the current standard of care, which is a chemo doublet, and one arm with LP300 plus the standard of care in a combination regimen. During the quarter, we also advanced our ADC program by further testing and refining our conjugation processes and testing various approaches to developing a highly targeted and potent new molecule for certain solid cancers. Based on the initial work that we're doing, we believe that the same approach can also be applied to certain hematologic cancers. This is again an early development but will require additional validation which we expect to accomplish during this quarter and Q4. We also do expect to finalize our conjugation process for this molecule and also its design this quarter, and we'll plan on announcing details of the program as well as its design and targets later this year. Also during the second quarter, we announced a collaboration with Accurate Therapeutics where we will be leveraging our AI engine. And our AI engine will help them advance key aspects of their drug candidate, 9-ING41. We discussed this briefly during the first quarter conference call, but as a quick reminder, the 9-ING41 drug candidate is a best-in-class GSK3 beta inhibitor, which is an active development in multiple Phase II clinical trials, including for pancreatic cancer. This type of collaboration can potentially yield meaningful equity-based milestones for Lantern and our shareholders. We are actively in discussions with select other biopharma companies for similar collaborations where our platform can help de-risk development decisions and advance meaningful therapeutic options for cancer patients. Patent and intellectual property is a major component of developing significant modes around our business. Our drug candidates, how we apply our drug candidates, our AI platform, and our methods are all areas that we are focused on patenting. During the second quarter, we filed 11 patents, two of which are focused on the RADAR platform, and the remainder around our drug candidates and their application in specific cancers or in combination with other drugs and drug classes. We expect to continue our aggressive development and filing of intellectual property, especially since our data-driven approach is actually accelerating the creation of unique insights and also generating precision correlations of response or potential response and also other findings. We then take these findings and validate and refine them in the lab. This iterative, rapid approach is generating patents that we feel will be quite valuable in the future. We are particularly excited by the fact that we're entering into areas where there's a large clinical need for improved therapies, especially in certain rare and ultra rare cancers. This may enable faster development and the potential for priority review vouchers with certain assets and indications such as LP184 in atypical keratoid rhabdoid tumors in ultra-rare brain cancer, or LP284 in certain ultra, again, ultra-rare blood cancers where we're finding potential for meaningful response. This is an important point to note, and more, very important, will help us develop transformative value, not just for our shareholders, but more importantly for cancer patients that need improved and personalized cancer therapy options. especially in many cancers where there are very few or no therapy options. At Lantern, we believe passionately about changing the pace at which oncology drugs are brought to market and reducing the cost of cancer therapy. We believe the best way to do this is to use AI machine learning, which has already dramatically altered the product development cycle and cost curve of other industries. And now we can now witness how it will transform, if not smash, the product development cycles in cancer drug development. I will now ask David Margrave, our CFO, to provide an update on our financials, our transaction regarding LP100 or Ira Fulman, and other financial details. David?