VBL Therapeutics

Therapeutics First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Lee Roth with Burns McKellen. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Cherry. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's VBL Therapeutics first quarter 2021 financial results and corporate update conference call. Leading the call this morning will be Professor Dror Harafs, Chief Executive Officer, and Amos Ran, Chief Financial Officer. A press release with the company's financial results was issued earlier this morning and is available on the investor relations page of the company's website at vblrx.com. Before I turn the call over to management, I'd like to remind everyone that during this conference call, forward-looking statements made by management are intended to fall within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. As set forth in our press release, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may affect the company's business and prospects including those discussed in our filings with the SEC, which include, among other things, our annual report on Form 20F. These filings are available from the SEC or on our website. Any forward-looking statements made on today's conference call speak only as of today's date, May 11, 2021, and the company does not intend to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after today's date. As a reminder, the call is being recorded and will be available for audio rebroadcast on the company's website. And we will have a Q&A session following today's prepared remarks. With that said, I'd now like to turn the call over to Professor Heratz. Go ahead, Gerard.

Thank you, Lee, and good morning, everyone. Joining me on today's call is Amos Rohn, our Chief Financial Officer, who will discuss the first quarter financial results for 2021. I'm pleased to say that it has been another productive quarter for VBL with continued progress for our lead program, VP111, our novel gene therapy for solid tumors. We continue to be encouraged by the ongoing progress with our phase three oval pivotal trial in ovarian cancer, which, if successful, has the potential to reshape cancer therapeutics and to establish a new standard of care in challenging disease setting where patients currently have limited options. In today's call, I would like to focus on two significant points. The first of which is a progress of the overall trial towards potential BLA and the second is VBL's cash position as we prepare for the success and hopefully for commercialization of VB111. Starting with the OVAL study, as a reminder, OVAL is an international placebo-controlled, double-blind, phase III registration-enabling study in recurrent platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. To date, we have had three successful DSMC reviews of the study, the most recent of which was in February. Following the review, looking at 200 patients, the DSMC again gave us the green light to proceed as planned. Enrollment in the Oval is going very well and is now two-thirds through. As we continue to advance the study, we look forward to the next DSMC review in the third quarter of this year and the achieving of full enrollment at the end of this year. We remain encouraged by the high response rate in the total blinded data set as well as by the safety profile of the study population and intend to provide an update on the overall trial at the upcoming ASCO conference in June. We are excited to advance VB111 for the potential benefit of ovarian cancer patients and would like to thank all the patients and their families, as well as the investigators, healthcare professionals, who are taking part in this important international study. As for the financial state of the company, we were pleased to announce in mid-April that we closed a straightforward public offering at market price to raise $28.3 million from existing shareholders as well as institutional funds from the US and Israel, together with an additional $12.3 million that was injected into the company during the first quarter, mostly through the exercising of warrants that were issued in 2020, our cash position is now over $60 million. This is expected to fund the company until year-end 2023 through many milestones, and most importantly, the readout from the overall study and potential BLA submission for VB111 in ovarian cancer. We appreciate the continued support from our investors and look forward to rewarding their confidence in us as we continue to execute on our key strategic objectives. Before I hand the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Amos Won, I would like to say that we have continued the momentum we experienced in 2020 into 2021 and are encouraged by the significant advancements of VB111 and our additional programs. We look forward to sharing updates on our ongoing program, specifically on the Oval Study during the upcoming ASCO Conference and later through the rest of 2021. With that, I will hand off the call to Amos, who will discuss the financial results for the first quarter. Amos?