Xencor, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. And welcome to the SEND course first quarter 2022 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that this call is being recorded at the company's request. Now, I would like to turn the call over to our speaker today, Charles Lyles. Head of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon. Earlier today, we issued a press release which outlines the topics we plan to discuss today. The press release is available at www.zencore.com. With me on the call are Basil Dehiet, President and Chief Executive Officer, Alan Yang, Chief Medical Officer, John Cush, Chief Financial Officer, and John Desjarlais, Chief Scientific Officer, who will join us when we open up the call for your questions after prepared remarks. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that during the course of this conference call, Zencore Management may make forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the company's future financial and operating results, future market conditions, the plans and objectives of management, future operations, the company's partnering efforts, capital requirements for product offerings, and research and development programs. These forward-looking statements are not historical facts, but rather are based on our current expectations and beliefs and are based on information currently available to us. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results anticipated by these forward-looking statements, including but not limited to those factors contained in the risk factors section of our most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly report on Form 10-Q. With that, let me pass the call over to Basil.

Thanks, Charles, and good afternoon, everyone. Continuing with the approach we took last quarter, we're going to make a few brief comments before spending the majority of today's call on questions. So, you know, as I like to usually open with, we've used our array of modular approach and engineering tools to create a broad internal development portfolio in oncology and autoimmune diseases, which allows us to take multiple simultaneous shots on goal in the clinic. Our intent remains to use proof of concept data from these early stage studies to guide which programs we advance, which we terminate, and which we partner, so that we're most efficiently using our cash and our employees' time. In a moment, Alan is going to review our advancing clinical programs and upcoming plans. But first, today we announced our plan to terminate internal development of two Phase I programs, XMAB841 and Tidutimab, which focuses our resources on those clinical programs of ours with the greatest potential for success and makes room in our portfolio for the next wave of XMAB bispecifics and engineered cytokines. For Tidutimab, our SSTR2 by CD3 bispecific antibody and XMAB841, our CTLA4 by LAG3 bispecific antibody are After reviewing the data generated to date, we believe that neither program has a competitive enough clinical profile in their respective areas, particularly when compared to the programs we are currently advancing. So we're going to keep supporting patients currently enrolled in the study, including by continuing to provide study drugs. Now, a core piece of our strategy is leveraging our plug-and-play XMAP FC domain through licensing transactions, especially in therapeutic areas outside of our core focus on oncology and autoimmune disease. We wanted to highlight the recent FDA approval for Lexion AstraZeneca's Ultramiris for adult patients with generalized myasthenia gravis, its third approval in the U.S. Ultramiris, of course, incorporates our Xtend FC domain for longer half-life. We also bolstered a cash position with over $70 million in royalty revenue this quarter for the COVID antibody Citrovimab, which incorporates the same Xtend FC domain from our partners Veer and GSK. though because of the rapidly shifting COVID variants that keep emerging, we expect this revenue to drop very substantially next quarter and beyond. Now, looking at our partnerships for the XMAP bispecific FC domain and our T-cell engager toolkit, last quarter we highlighted encouraging early clinical data from Amgen's AMG509 program in prostate cancer, which in addition to being an XMAP bispecific, uses the XMAP 2 plus 1 multivalent format for T-cell engagement. Now, within the past quarter, Astellas' ASP2138, an ExMab Clouden 18.2 by CD3 bispecific antibody, has advanced into clinical development for patients with gastric, gastroesophageal, and pancreatic cancers. And we look forward to following this program, too. Now I'm going to turn it over to Alan Yang, our chief medical officer, who's going to briefly review our clinical programs and upcoming plans.