Novartis AG

Good morning and good afternoon and welcome to the Novartis conference call and live webcast. Please note that during the presentation, all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions by pressing star 1 and 1 at any time during the conference. Please limit yourself to one question and return to the queue for any follow-up. A recording of the conference call, including the Q&A session, will be available on our website shortly after the call ends. With that, I would like to hand over to Mr. Samir Shah, Global Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much and good morning and good afternoon, everybody. And thank you for taking the time to join us on the first of our two conference calls today. And this obviously relates to the ESMO presentation relating to Plavictor. Before we start, just a safe harbor statement. The information presented today contains forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. These may cause the actual results to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. For a description of some of these factors, Please refer to the company's Form 20F and its most recent quarterly results on Form 6K that, respectively, were filed with and furnished to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The participants, which you'll see in the slide deck, which is available on Novartis' website, the participants today will be Sriram Aradia. He's actually the Global Head of Development and Chief Medical Officer for Novartis. together with Jeff Lagos, who's actually our global head of oncology development. And with that, I'd like to hand it across to Shreya.

Thank you, Sameer. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. As Novartis has become a focused pure play medicines company, oncology is a key therapeutic area for us, and within it, prostate cancer is a really important indication. If we go to the next slide, We, with 1.4 million prostate cancer cases worldwide, this being the second most common cancer in men, and a 30% five-year survival, we believe that there is still a significant need for developing therapies that have better efficacy and tolerability for these patients. On the next slide, you all know the results that we had from our phase three vision study where we convincingly showed a benefit on both the risk of progression as well as the risk of death with Pluvicto in a metastatic, castrate-resistant prostate cancer post-axane setting, as published in the New England Journal. Next slide. Emboldened by those results and the subsequent performance of Pluvicto, where it is now approved in 37 countries, and more than 7,400 patients have been treated with Pluvicto in that setting, we designed an ambitious program, on the next slide, to explore the role for Pluvicto in additional indications in this important disease. Today we will discuss the results of PSMA4, and you're all aware that in addition we are looking at PSMA addition as well as PSMA delay castration as two additional important trials that Novartis is now evaluating. Next slide. We were excited to present our data yesterday where PSMA4 demonstrated both a robust efficacy and a favorable safety profile. I'm sure that you all have a lot of interest in these results, and I'm delighted to hand over to Jeff Lagos, my colleague, for a detailed review of the data of PSMA-4. Jeff, let me hand it over to you.