Molecular Partners AG

Good morning and welcome to the Molecular Partners fourth quarter and full year 2024 results call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. 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 and Strategy. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Drew. And welcome, everybody, to the Molecular Partners year-end results in the 2024 highlights call. My name is Seth Lewis, and I'm joined today by members of our senior leadership team, including Patrick Anstrutz, Chief Executive Officer, Robert Hendricks, SVP of Finance, Philippe Lejeune, Chief Medical Officer, and Michael Stumpf, Executive Vice President of Projects and Head of the DLL3 Radio Program. The team will make some prepared remarks, and then we will open the call for your questions. If you haven't had a chance to see the press release issued yesterday after market close, you can find it on our website, www.molecularpartners.com, where you can also access a copy of today's presentation. Today's fault is being recorded and will be available for replay. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will be making forward-looking statements about the future development of certain programs. These statements reflect the current estimates in Molecular Partners and are subject to change. For the most up-to-date information, please visit our website, www.molecularpartners.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Patrick Amstutz. Patrick, please go ahead.

Thanks, Seth, for the intro and kicking off the call. And please, again, go to our website and grab the presentation. And we will be referring to a slide number that we're on. And the slide number that I will kick off with is slide number five. A warm welcome from my side. Great to have you all on this call. Before diving into the highlights 24, we did put on the 20 years molecular partners logo because it is our 20 years anniversary. And it coincides with being 10 years listed on the Swiss and then later on the U.S. Stock Exchange. And it has been 20 years of a quest to make drugs that matter for patients. And we have never gone away from that. And this has really brought us where we are. And if we look back, it has not been a straight line. It is hard work for specific results. And twice, we actually reached clinical pop with the wet AMD drug, Avicipor, and with the COVID drug, Ensovibet. And I think the call today is really to highlight where we are and how we're lining up our new programs to be in a position to have more of such readouts in the future. So let's look at the highlights 2024 and what we have done. It was a year of execution to get our programs closer to that clinical readout. Let me start with the radio dark pin franchise where we have CLL3 targeting 712, that is our lead compound, passing all IND-enabling studies and ready to go into the clinics, and Michael will be talking about that. We also selected a new target. And I mean, if we say selected a target, it also means that we have data. We not just took a target. And it is mesothelin, and we will touch on that too. And maybe most importantly, this third bullet point is the expansion of our Oranomet collaboration. And as you know, in the radio field, we bring the vector, but we still need access to an isotope. An isotope supply is challenging. And with this collaboration, we have secured 10 slots for products, real products, not just candidates, products for lead 212, one of the most promising isotopes out there. So I think that is one of the possibly most important things of last year that we have secured that access to isotope. On the key selling gauge side, it is 533, where a year ago we had mediocre or underwhelming results. And it was a year of understanding those, working with our investigators and putting that back on track. And Philip will talk about that, how we have tackled the target-mediated drug disposition problem and are very curious and hopeful to see what the future will bring. On the switch side, there was a bit of a change. A year ago, we were moving six to one. That was the NK engager and switch. We have, call it, upgraded that to the T-cell switch, and we will talk about that as we move. There's another program, RE17. It is less of strategic focus today, but still we finalized phase one. We had very good safety. We saw biological activity. And we will be moving this one forward in combination with the PD-1 in an investigator-initiated trial. We ourselves decided that we would not invest that much, but we still see a potential future for it, and there is support from the investigators to move it forward. And last but not least, we did a small financing round late last year to bring in our friends from HBM, a very strong, reputable Swiss investor, and the round was also backed by things like BBS and Suvretta, adding $20 million to our treasure chest, which makes us well-capitalized with the runway into 27, also well beyond those inflection points that I was pointing out before. So with that, let's move to the next slide. I'm now on slide number six. again which is this one yeah so with this one the pipeline isn't that number five now it's five so okay thanks for that so I'm slide number five let me quickly start with what is missing on this slide and what is less important the one line that is missing is the Novartis collaboration so you remember three years ago we entered into a collaboration with Novartis on two targets and we made DARPs against those two targets and moved them into research. Over the years, they did not progress that fast. The results were there, but I think both Novartis and molecular partners did not see the strategic interest in the target. This happens, and Maybe an explanation is all those research targets that we're moving, we never talk about before it is a candidate for exactly this reason, because often you don't move a target forward. In this case, because it was the Novartis collaboration, they were there, and Novartis, now after three years, that was the research term, decided not to move forward. We agree with that. We would also not move forward, so that line is missing. There was no technological setback. It was just not the right targets in the right time. They might come back, but as of now, this is not where we or Novartis would invest. The other one that we are not actively moving forward is 621, a nice molecule in HSCT, so stem cell transplant, we said that is not our focus interest. The success of 533 and also the success of the radio franchise is much more relevant and important. So that is one that we can sort of put on hold and opt for partnering. Now, where are we focusing? This is 533 and the radio franchise. And I will hand over to Philip later, our chief medic, to talk about 533 and AML and all the progress And Michael Stump will be walking you through the radio work on 7-12 and the latest from Mesothelin and our collaboration with Oranamed. So before we go there, I'll hand over to Robert to give us the overview of the financial situations. Over to you, Robert.