Ventyx Biosciences, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Vintex Biosciences first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star 2. So others can hear your questions clearly, we ask that you pick up your handset for best sound quality. Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Dr. Marty Oster, Vintex's Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Angela. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today, and good afternoon. Welcome to Vintex Biosciences conference call and webcast, where we'll be discussing our first quarter 2023 financial results and providing a business update. As a reminder, the company's most recent investor presentation can be found on our website at www.ventexbio.com and the Investors tab in the News and Events section. Before we begin the call today, I'd like to remind everyone this conference call and webcast will contain forward-looking statements about the company, including, without limitation, statements about the anticipated timing of commencement, enrollment, and completion of clinical trials for our product candidates, the anticipated timing of release of clinical trial data, and other information about our product candidates. the market opportunity for our product candidates, and the expected timeframe for funding operations with current cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. Factors that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements are discussed in greater detail in our most periodic reports filed at the SEC, including our Form 10-Q for the first quarter, which ended March 31, 2023, which we anticipate filing later today. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinion only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events, except as required by law. With that said, I'll hand the call over now to Dr. Rajiv Mohan, Ventex's founder and CEO. Rajiv, please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks, Marty. So good afternoon to all again, and thank you for joining Ventex's first quarter 2023 financial results conference call. Let me briefly run through this afternoon's agenda. And given that we just had our call in late March, I'll be brief and keep my comments focused on high-level business update. Bill Sanborn, our President and Chief Medical Officer, will then provide updates across our pipeline programs in a bit more detail. Finally, Marty will present an overview of our first quarter 2022 financial results before we open the call for Q&A. As I always like to remind our audience, the foundation of VENTIX is our mission to bring differentiated, safe, and effective oral medicines to large immunology markets and markets with high unmet medical need and that are currently dominated by injectable biologics. With 2023 shaping up to be a transformational year for VENTIX, we're off to a great start. Our team is executing across the board with five, and I repeat, five phase two clinical trials now ongoing across our wholly owned pipeline of internally discovered small molecule drug candidates. So with BTX958, we remain confident that we are developing a potential best-in-class allosteric TIK2 inhibitor. Based on class-leading target coverage and safety that we observed in phase one, we see great potential to not only establish a differentiated profile in psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, but also to be a first mover among TIK2 inhibitors in Crohn's disease, where we believe our ability to achieve TROF IL-23 IC90 coverage will be particularly important. We have three Phase II trials now underway in black psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, and Crohn's disease. And Bill will discuss these in more detail during his section in his comments. On the development of an extended release tablet for QD dosing for 958, we continue to make progress towards the target profile, the TPP, and we remain confident that we will have optimized once-daily tablet to advance into Phase III trials in 2024. As we have previously disclosed and discussed, our development strategy for this path incorporates an iterative process that allows us to sequentially evaluate multiple prototype formulations in humans. We look forward to providing a more detailed update in the early part of, early second half of 2023. With our S1P1 modulator, VTX002, We believe we will be the first to truly explore the full potential of this mechanism in ulcerative colitis, and our aspirations for this asset have always been very clear, which are to demonstrate efficacy in moderate to severe UC patients, ulcerative colitis patients, that is unambiguously differentiated from both atrazumab and zeposia, and is competitive with or superior to levels achieved by biologics. This efficacy profile, if achieved, should position VTX002 as a potential class-leading safe oral agent in ulcerative colitis. And again, Bill will provide more color on the progress of this trial. Beyond these lead programs, we continue to advance our novel NLRP inhibitor portfolio including our peripheral NLRP3 inhibitor VTX2735, which is now in Phase II trials in CAHPS patients, and a CNS-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitor VTX3232, which is expected to advance into Phase I studies this quarter. So with that, I'll hand the call over to Bill Sanborn for a more detailed pipeline update.