Voyager Therapeutics, Inc.

Happy to be here and moderating this chat with Al Sandrock, CEO of Voyager. I'm sure everyone knows Al who's here listening in and got to know Al at his days at Biogen. So Al, maybe just give a quick overview of Voyager and then we can do a fireside chat and dive deeper into different programs.

Yeah, great. So we are a multi-modality neurotherapeutics company where we're trying to optimize delivery. We have two platforms. We have a gene therapy platform platform where we're discovering capsids that cross the blood brain barrier after IV delivery. And that platform identifies not only the capsids, but then the receptors that the capsids leverage to get into the brain, we're now gonna be looking to see if we can use them as shuttles. And the first one of these is called ALPL, so you see that's already appearing on our pipeline chart there. So the idea is that these are validated receptors in the sense that we know they can carry large viral particle across the BBB. And so we're gonna make ligands against these receptors and conjugate oligonucleotides, put them on various protein therapeutics, and optimize delivery. So multi-modality focused on optimizing delivery. We have a heavy emphasis on Alzheimer's disease, as you can see. And we have multiple partner programs with some great partners, Neurocrine, Novartis, and AstraZeneca. And so we're heavily into gene therapy. And I guess I should end by saying we have one program that is in phase one. It's in a multiple ascending dose study, the anti-Tau antibody study. which we expect to read out next year. Maybe of note is that there's a lot going on in TAO, as you know, Paul, and we think that not only our program, which we'll read out next year, could be an inflection point, there's J&J, that has an antibody that we expect to read out early next year. And then there's BIB80, the biogen antisense oligonucleotide that we expect to read out in mid-year. I think both of those could have read-through to our programs because we also have an antibody and an siRNA tau silencing gene therapy as well.

Yep. Okay. Great. Well, on the antibody side, I think some people, myself, someone included, have interpreted the failures of other antibodies as maybe concerning that maybe the antibody strategy for tau can't really access the majority of the target. What would you say to that? And how do you think the shot on goal here is fundamentally different from what hasn't worked?