Xencor, Inc.

Good afternoon, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Zencore's second quarter 2023 conference call. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that this call is going to be recorded at the company's request. I would now like to turn the call over to your speaker today, Charles Lyles. Head of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. Go ahead, Charles.

Thank you, and good afternoon. Earlier today, we issued a press release which outlines the topics we plan to discuss today. It's available at www.zencore.com. Providing comments on the call is Basil Dehiat, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Nancy Valenti, Chief Development Officer. Afterwards, we will open up the call for your questions, and we will be joined by John Desjardins, Chief Scientific Officer, and John Cush, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that during the course of this conference call, CENCOR management may make forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the company's future financial and operating results, future market conditions, plans and objectives of management, future operations, company's partnering efforts, capital requirements, future product offerings, and research and development programs. These forward-looking statements are not historical facts, but rather are based on current expectations and beliefs and are based on information currently available to us. 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, I'll pass the call over to Basil.

Thanks, Charles, and good afternoon. We'll have brief comments and then get to the Q&A because we've received positive feedback on having abbreviated comments on our calls the past two quarters, so I think we'll keep to that. At Zencore, we're advancing a broad internal development portfolio of antibodies and engineered cytokines in oncology and autoimmune disease that we've built with our array of modular, continually advancing protein engineering tools. By taking multiple simultaneous shots on goal in the clinic, we can let clinical data guide which programs we advance, which we terminate, and which we partner, so that we focus our resources on programs with the greatest potential for success and make room in our portfolio for the next wave of innovative biologics. Now, before heading into our pipeline, we'll cover some updates on partnerships which provide validation across our suite of XMAP technologies and revenues which offset our development costs. First, the label on Altamiris continues to expand in the EU and Japan, where it is now also approved to include neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder. We earned $11.2 million in royalties in the second quarter, and if Altamiris sales keep up, we would anticipate earning our remaining sales-based milestone payments of $20 million this year. Notably, we're enhancing our extend patent coverage and term in multiple global geographies, and we've begun to see country-by-country progress in Europe. Our CD28 bispecific collaborations with Janssen Biotech are also progressing well for both the prostate and B-cell targeted CD28 bispecific programs, and we anticipate both of them to advance into clinical testing. Finally, as noted in the abstract titles for the European Society for Medical Oncology, we anticipate data from Amgen's study of AMG509 in prostate cancer at ESMO. AMG509, or now xaloridamig, that's with an X as in XMAB or XENCOR, utilizes our XMAB2 plus 1 bispecific antibody format that allows for multivalency of targeting domains. And Amgen previously presented very encouraging PSA response data in early 2022. In the case of xaloridamig, 2 plus 1 format allows for higher avidity and tighter binding to a receptor that is barely exposed extracellularly. But we also use this highly versatile format to dial into high-expressing tumor cells much more selectively over lower-expressing normal cells, like we do with our XMAV819 and XMAV808 programs, or to distinguish between nearly identical receptors in the same family, like we do with our XMAV541 programs. Now, for updates this quarter on our wholly-owned clinical portfolio, I'll turn it over to Nancy Valenti, our Chief Development Officer.