Lantern Pharma Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Nicole Lieber with Investor Relations here at Lantern Pharma. Welcome to our first quarter 2023 earnings call. I will be your host for today's call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and all attendees are in a listen-only mode. We will open up the call for questions and answers after our management's presentation. A webcast replay of today's conference call will be available on our website at lanternpharma.com shortly after the call. We issued a press release after market closed today, summarizing our financial results and progress across the company for the first quarter ended March 31, 2023. A copy of this release is available through our website at lanternpharma.com, where you will also find a link to the slides that management will be referencing on today's call. I would like to remind everyone that remarks about future expectations, performance, estimates, and prospects constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of safe harbor provisions under the Private Security Litigation 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 actual results to differ materially from those indicated. by forward-looking statements, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, results of clinical trials, and the impact of competition. Concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements can be found in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, which is on file with the SEC and available on our website. Forward-looking statements made on this conference call are as of today, May 9, 2023, and Lantern Pharma does not intend to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect events from circumstances that occur after today unless required by law. The webcast replay of the conference call and webinar will be available on Lantern's website. On today's webcast, we have Lantern Pharma CEO, Pana Sharma. and CFO David Margrave. Pana will start things off with an overview of Lantern's strategy and business model and highlight recent achievements in our operations, after which David will discuss our financial results. This will be followed by some concluding comments from Pana, and then we'll open up the call for Q&A. I'd now like to turn the call over to Pana Sharma, President and CEO of Lantern Pharma. Pana, please go ahead.

Thank you, Nicole. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2023 earnings call, and company update. We've had a tremendously progressive and productive quarter. I want to tell you all about the corporate progress so far at Lantern Pharma. Lantern Pharma is at the leading edge, leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, biomarker clinical genomic and drug response data to transform the costs, compress the timelines, and de-risk oncology drug discovery and development. During the first quarter, we made many exciting and valuable advances to our platform and our pipeline of cancer therapies. Our team continues to be extremely focused on taking these insights for our new programs and driving them to meaningful clinical programs that can be launched in the coming months for both LP184 and LP284. We've done this for both molecules in a fraction of the time and in a fraction of the cost of traditional drug development. And what we're also practicing is the future of oncology therapy development, where data can be used to accelerate programs and de-risk the identification and progress of potentially life-changing medicines. My colleagues at Lantern and I are united in a core belief that a rise in sophisticated, highly scalable, analytical storage technologies, coupled with high-value data from cancer biology research and genomics, along with a decrease in the cost of AI computing, is allowing us to do two very important things, better model, understand, and predict cancer biology, and secondly, design and develop cancer drug programs at a fraction of the cost and at a fraction of the timeline that has traditionally been possible. This is true not only in cancers that have been well-researched and highly characterized, but also in cancers that have traditionally gone under-met or unresolved. As I know from talking with investors, analysts, and our partners, what's in everyone's mind right now, or at least many people's mind, is ChatGPT, a very sophisticated model of language that's generative and real-time and allows us to understand huge swaths of data. Everything on the internet, or even off of the internet, all in one place and interacts in a pretty compelling and interesting way with all of us, not only us as humans and end users, but also very importantly with us as researchers, developers, clinicians, and scientists. And this is being done at a scale that was never thought possible before and never at a level of precision, automation, and cost as today. The technologies and tools that make up those large language models, data automation and analytics, are the same approaches in AI technologies we believe that we are leveraging and deploying to create new drug programs and cancer biology insights at a cost and timeline that was unimaginable in the near past. Today at Lantern, we have at a highly massive scale, think highly massive scale, millions of simultaneous instances of competing algorithms that are working to help create correlations and relationships that would be far too complex and time-consuming for any team of humans to fully approach, let alone replicate with precision. Right now, we can understand and predict parts of these drug interactions with cancers, but not all of it as a complete system or with the required level of personalization. That's why we're constantly on the hunt for new data, curating it, ingesting it, evolving our systems. And we're evolving not only the underlying data and data sets and data tags, but also the algorithms. We're also now training the algorithms to update themselves and also finding methods in which we can allow the AI platform to find and ingest new data on its own. This is the future of developing cancer therapies, where data can be used to accelerate programs, de-risk the identification and progress of potentially life-changing medicines, and potentially find new patient groups or new patient classes that can have a big impact from our therapies or therapies of our partners. During the quarter, we made some very meaningful progress. Let me give you some of the highlights here. We dosed the first patient in the Phase II harmonic clinical trial, a study for the unique population of non-small cell lung cancer patients who are never smokers. And they make up about 15% to 20% of all lung cancer cases in the U.S. today. We're about to submit the IND application for LP184 to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. We anticipate submitting that this week. This is for a potential blockbuster therapy with $6 to $7 billion in annual sales, where we can use it both as a single agent or as a combination therapy. This phase one clinical trial for LP184 in genomically defined solid tumors is will be launching in mid-2023 for patients with recurrent solid tumors, including brain cancers. We also plan on completing our IND-enabling studies for LP284 and launching a first-in-human phase one clinical trial in multiple non-Hodgkin's lymphomas. This is about a $1.2 billion indication, and this is targeted in the second half of this year. We also received notice of allowance from the USPTO for composition of matter patent for LP284 as well. This gives us exclusivity for this new molecule into 2039, 2014. We also developed an industry-leading series of AI algorithms. These are a series of algorithms that not only are now top-ranking, at the Therapeutic Data Commons, which is an industry consortium. But it helps solve one of the most challenging problems in brain cancer drug discovery, which is predicting with some level of accuracy a compound's blood-brain barrier permeability. So our top four algorithms are not only highly accurate, but also ultra-fast and scalable. We can run thousands of molecules at a level and scale that was not possible before on a daily basis. We also established an additional radar collaboration, this one with one of the leaders in breast cancer, TTC Oncology, to help advance their phase two ready drug candidate, TTC352, in ER-positive breast cancers. This continues to prove and validate that, in fact, our AI platform radar is valuable currency in deal-making and in drug asset development. We also continue to show fiscal discipline, and end of the quarter with $51.5 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, giving us cash runway into 2025. Now, with those highlights behind us, let me turn the call over to our CFO, David Margrave, who will provide an overview of our first quarter financial results.

David? Thank you, Pana, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll now share some financial highlights. from our first quarter ended March 31, 2023. Our R&D expenses were $2.6 million for the first quarter of 2023, down slightly from $2.7 million in the first quarter of 2022. We see R&D expenses increasing in the second half of 2023 as we advance our LP300 Phase 2 trial and commence our phase one trials for LP184 and LP284. General and administrative expenses were $1.7 million for the first quarter of 2023, up slightly from $1.4 million in the prior year period. We recorded a net loss of $3.9 million for the first quarter of 2023, or 36 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $4.1 million or 38 cents per share for the first quarter of 2022. Offsetting the loss from operations in the first quarter of 2023 was interest income and other income net in the aggregate amount of $419,000. Interest income was approximately $134,000 for the first quarter of 2023 Other income net was approximately $285,000 for the first quarter of 2023 and reflected increases in dividend income of approximately $80,000, increases in unrealized gains on investments of approximately $207,000, and increases of approximately $136,000 in research and development tax incentives related to our Australia subsidiary. These were offset in part by increases in foreign currency losses of approximately $60,000. As of March 31, 2023, we had approximately 10.86 million shares of common stock outstanding and outstanding warrants to purchase approximately 177,998 shares and outstanding options to purchase approximately 1,095,046 shares. These warrants and options combined with our outstanding shares of common stock give us a total fully diluted shares outstanding of approximately 12.1 million shares as of March 31, 2023. Our cash position which includes cash equivalents and marketable securities at March 31, 2023, was $51.5 million. This balance is expected to carry us into 2025. Importantly, we believe our solid financial position will fuel continued growth and evolution of our radar AI platform, accelerate the development of our portfolio of targeted oncology drug candidates, and allow us to introduce additional targeted products and collaboration opportunities in a capital efficient manner. Our team continues to be very productive under a hybrid operating model. This hybrid model also removes geographic restrictions to our hiring initiatives, which gives us the ability to recruit extremely high caliber team members that otherwise might not be available. We currently have 23 employees who are primarily focused on leading and advancing our research and drug development efforts. We see this number expanding slightly in coming quarters as we add additional experienced and talented individuals to help advance our mission. I'll now turn the call back over to Pana for an update on some of our development programs. Pana? Thank you, David.