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Q2 2024 Cue Biopharma Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Daniel Passeri; Chief Executive Officer, Director; Cue Biopharma Inc

Anish Suri; President, Chief Scientific Officer; Cue Biopharma Inc

Matteo Levisetti; Chief Medical Officer; Cue Biopharma Inc

Stephen Willey; Analyst; Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated

Ren Benjamin; Analyst; Citizens JMP Securities, LLC

Maury Raycroft; Analyst; Jefferies LLC

Leland Gershell; Analyst; Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Ted Tenthoff; Analyst; Piper Sandler & Co.

Presentation

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Cue Biopharma second-quarter 2024 earnings call. (Operator Instructions) Please note this event is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Dan Passeri. Please go ahead, sir.

Daniel Passeri

Hey. Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. As a reminder, this presentation and discussion is being recorded and will be available on our website for the next 30 days. Also, please be aware that the slides accompanying today's update may be advanced directly by those listening in, and we will notify you on what slide we're on throughout the presentation.
Joining me on today's call is Dr. Anish Suri, our President and Chief Scientific Officer; and Dr. Matteo Levisetti, our Chief Medical Officer. Shown here on slide 2, this presentation and overview may contain some forward-looking statements, and any forward-looking statements made during this call represents the company's views only as of today, August 19, 2024.
I'd like to begin the call by providing you with some context pertaining to our recent announcement focused upon near-term developments with our autoimmune programs and associated corporate restructuring. I'll begin with a brief synopsis of the objectives underlying these measures and just to underscore, we carefully assessed our strategic positioning and evaluated various options for optimizing probabilities of success within the challenges and constraints of the current capital market conditions. The measures recently implemented aim to reduce our capital requirements while also achieving enhanced productivity through what we consider to be basically a balanced business model focusing upon accessing capital and additional resources through a series of anticipated strategic partnerships.
Furthermore, we've taken measures for our clinical data to further mature to enhance competitive positioning, particularly relating to patient survival data, enabling near-term cost savings and delaying the launch of a capital-intensive trial towards registration. This path provides a higher probability of success as more mature data should bolster the veracity of our mechanistic advantages for establishing the potential of a new standard of care for cancer patients.
As shown in slide number 3, we believe we've developed a breakthrough proprietary therapeutic approach to establish a new standard of care for treating both cancer and autoimmune diseases by restoring immune balance to the patient's immune system. As Matteo will elaborate upon shortly, our data from the ongoing CUE-101 Phase 1b trial clearly demonstrates evidence of substantial prolongation of survival in patients treated with monotherapy in the second-line-plus setting and emerging data from the combination trial in frontline with Keytruda -- that's pembrolizumab -- that also appears to be following a similar pattern as what we saw with the monotherapy trial.
We believe this data to be quite remarkable, underscoring what we believe to be the true competitive positioning of our approach. As such, it's our intention with the measures taken to enable clinical data to further develop and mature in support of our foundational platform that we believe can induce effective and long-lasting antitumor activity or can be harnessed to rebalance the aberrant immune responses to address autoimmune disease.
We've also made significant progress with our lead autoimmune disease program, CUE-401, being developed in collaboration with our partner, Ono Pharmaceuticals, to address multiple autoimmune and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, graft-versus-host disease, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, amongst others, representing large multibillion-dollar market potential, addressing significant unmet medical need.
Through this partnership, we've made impressive progress to date and moving towards selection of a lead candidate, which we anticipate in the first quarter of the coming year. Our collaboration with Ono has been highly productive and supportive, resulting in a growing body of promising data, demonstrating the ability of CUE-401 to generate and expand regulatory T cells or T-regs fostering disease control in several disease models tested to date. As a reminder, Cue Biopharma has retained an option to a 50% US co-development co-marketing rights to CUE-401.
Turning to 501, this program continues to advance and progress forward with the potential of eliminating autoreactive B cells with a highly selective and well-tolerated biologic. This program has the promise of addressing multiple B-cell-mediated autoimmune diseases such as lupus, myasthenia gravis, Sjogren's disease, and myositis, amongst others, representing significant unmet medical needs with large multibillion-dollar market potential.
Furthermore, the same mechanism of action that we would be seeing in B-cell ablation for autoimmune disease may be deployed to address B-cell malignancies such as B-cell lymphoma. We're presently assessing strategic partnering alternatives for furthering the development of this promising program and look forward to providing updates as they become available.
We have positioned ourselves with a growing portfolio of highly promising drug candidates in both oncology and autoimmune disease, all of which represents significant market opportunities addressing major unmet medical needs. We believe we've derisked and validated our therapeutics platform with the existing datasets from our CUE-101 and CUE-102 programs and have established foundational preclinical data pertaining to our autoimmune programs with potential to rebalance the patient's immune system to restore health. We've implemented a cash-efficient business model, enabling a reduction of capital requirements with an emphasis on validating near-term partnering structures.
I'm going to now turn the call over to Anish, who will describe the core attributes and advantages of our approach to treating autoimmune disease as well as provide some additional context on our underlying platform developments for both oncology and autoimmune disease. After Anish, Matteo will provide further updates on the CUE-101 and 102 clinical trials and highlight the importance of the maturing data sets with particular attention to the survival metrics that are emerging. I'll then return for a brief summary before opening the call up to questions. Anish?