Molecular Partners AG

Good day and welcome to the Molecular Partners fourth quarter and full year 2023 results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Seth Lewis, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Betsy. And welcome, everybody. Good morning and good afternoon to the 2023 full-year earnings call for Molecular Partners. My name is Seth Lewis, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. I wanted to just go over a little bit of housekeeping before we began. Obviously, we are speaking today in reference to the press release, which was issued after the close of market yesterday, as well as the full year annual results, which are in the annual report, which can be found on our website, molecularpartners.com. And we'll be making reference and prepared remarks today to the presentation, which slides are also available under the investor section of our website, molecularpartners.com. If you are following along in the presentation, I will refer to you, we are going to make certain forward-looking statements today, and I would refer you to our latest filings and most recent filings with the SEC and with the SICs. For the sake of the replay today, we are recording this on March 15th, 2023. If you were on slide three, I just wanted to take you through the agenda briefly. We are joined today by multiple members of our management team, including Patrick Amstlich, our CEO, who will take you through both the highlights of 23 and the outlook for 2024. Robert Hendricks, our Senior Vice President of Finance, who will go over some of our financial numbers. Philippe Lejeune, who is our Acting Chief Medical Officer, who will touch on our MPO 533 program in AML MDS. Anne Goubier, our Senior Vice President of Research and Early Development, who will discuss the Switch DARPN technology as well as our C-Kit program. And Danny Steiner, our Senior Vice President of Research and Technology, who will touch on the Radio DARPN platform and the DLL3 program. With that, I will pass the call over to Patrick. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Seth, for the introduction and kicking off our full-year earnings call. and also a warm welcome from my side to all the audience on this call. And it is a special pleasure today to be here, not only with the usual suspects, Robert and Seth, who are usually joining these calls, but also to have Philip, Anne, and Donny on the call with me, as they are the ones who are really driving the progress of our programs, and they will be speaking about that progress here today, and that's a special pleasure. to see the team coming together and move molecular partners forward. I'm now moving to slide number four, and I will start with a short recap of what we do and how we do it. The DARPN is a novel therapeutic modality, a novel class that we have validated in more than 2,500 patients in seven clinical, with seven clinical compounds. And the DARPINs are different to other modalities, so not antibodies, not small molecules. They're at a size, maybe a tenth of an antibody, and they're really well applicable for multi-specifics. And our quest is to use the DARPIN difference to turn that into differentiated drugs. So what we do is we create unique DARPIN solutions to clinically validated problems that are of high medical needs. So true patient value means high medical needs. And we termed the early clinical readout that you can translate into similar agent activity as when we move a drug into development. We also will want to know if it works or not fast. And as we are working in many different fields, we love to work with partners that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. And that is why that main molecular partners and our strategy on partnering with those or collaborating with the world class partners is part of the strategy. I'm moving to slide number five. The 23 was an exceptionally productive year with progress on literally all of our programs. And those who are working in our field know that that's usually not the case. Often one has a setback in one or the other program. But this year, every single one was moving forward at speed and producing the results we were looking for. First and foremost is MPO533, our tetraspecific T-cell engager. A year ago, roughly, we dosed the first patient. At ASH, we reported good safety and efficacy of the first four cohorts, and today we are recruiting, or we have fully recruited those cohort six. On the Switch platform, we were able to nominate the first target, and we're working towards a candidate, and we'll talk to that. And we are absolutely excited, as the Switch concept is something that is very dark and unique. And you will see we will be able to target targets that are not easily accessible other ways. On the radiotherapy side, this is a whole field Molecular Partners is heavily investing in. There is two key breakthroughs after last year. One is the reduction in kidney retention or accumulation, and we were able to now increase tumor uptake by engineering the half-life. We were able to strike a collaboration with Oranomet, providing lead also for our lead asset DLL3. And we have progressed with Novartis on the targets and programs we're working with them. Those are two distinct targets that are exclusive to Novartis. 317, we have advanced through phase one. We have those several patients and could see a favorable and strong safety profile. And we have biological proof of concept showing activation of antigen-presenting cells and remodeling of the tumor microenvironment. And we end the year with 187 million, and this brings us well into 26, meaning we are capitalized to reach key value inflection points. Moving to slide number six, this is the pipeline chart and sort of is my agenda for the next, for the call. 317 I did speak about, that's the antigen presenting cell activator. This molecule has little single-agent activity. It is ideally combined with other IO drugs. That's why this is on the partnering track, and I will talk to that in the summary, but we will not cover it in the presentation itself. 533, Philip will talk about, and we'll talk about the switch start pin and explain that, and Donia will cover the radio piece. With that, Before we go there, I will hand over to Robert to share the financial overview.