Akari Therapeutics, Plc (AKTX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome back to another CEO Corner segment. I'm Abizer Gaslightwala, Chief Executive Officer of Akari Therapeutics. ASCO remains one of the most important scientific and strategic events in oncology each year. This year's meeting did not disappoint by any means, featured more than 5,000 abstracts spanning virtually every area of cancer research and drug development. What stood out to me this year was not only the accelerating pace of innovation across oncology, but also the continued industry focus on the most difficult-to-treat genetically defined cancers, in particular, KRAS-driven tumors like pancreatic cancer, where significant unmet need still exists today. We also continue to see significant momentum surrounding the ADC landscape and accelerating investment by pharma and biotech in this category. Importantly, based on many of the talks, I believe we are now at the cusp of ADC 2.0 to transform this category. This was aptly stated by a key leader in the field, Dr. Anthony Tolcher during his presentation when he called it on his slide. Now it's all about ADC payloads and maturity of Top1 and MMAE. This talk drove continued emerging data that highlights the limited efficacy of ADCs that follow other ADCs of the same payload class. One data set highlighting this point was in breast cancer. When patients who took an ADC with a Top1 inhibitor relapse and then tried a different ADC with the same type of payload, the efficacy seen was minimal and not deemed successful. This is really important, given that there is now a growing number of patients who have relapsed after their first ADC therapy and currently have no other ADC options for them to take due to payload homogeneity. This further emphasizes the urgent need for novel payloads like Akari is developing that can serve all these first-line ADC refractory patients with new hope. We believe our PH1 payload platform may be uniquely positioned within this evolving ADC landscape, given its novel and first-in-class mechanism of spliceosome modulation to attack cancer tumors through multiple methods and avoid the potential resistance mechanisms that current ADCs with traditional payloads experience. We are now very proud of our first accepted ASCO abstract with what we believe more to come in the future. This abstract highlighted preclinical data demonstrating unique combination synergy between the PH1 ADC payload and a KRAS inhibitor in KRAS-mutated pancreatic cancer models. Given ASCO's strong focus on precision medicine and the extreme excitement regarding KRAS therapies at this conference, we believe this data could open up a new potential dimension of opportunity for Akari's novel ADC payload in the rapidly evolving multibillion-dollar potential KRAS therapy category. Looking ahead, we remain focused on continuing to advance AKTX-101 through our targeted initiation of a Phase I first-in-human clinical trial by mid-2027 while further scientifically validating our PH1 spliceosome-modulating payload platform. We also look forward to continuing to provide updates and evolving data as we progress along the path to IND and clinical development. Thank you for your continued support, and I look forward to sharing additional updates with you in the CEO quarter.