Oncopeptides AB (publ) (ONCO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, and warm welcome to Oncopeptalks, the last edition before the summer vacation. Unfortunately, David cannot join us today. So today, I have the pleasure to host this session. At Oncopeptides, we have a very thought-through business model and organizational model we're working with. We are really careful to ensure we drive performance and we execute and deliver according to our plans. And to do that, we have Project Directors hired to keep us all on track and ensure smooth cross-functional collaborations. And today, I have the pleasure to welcome one of our Project Directors, Denise. Please tell us a bit about your background and what you do at Oncopeptides.

Absolutely. And thank you for inviting. I come from a very entrepreneurial background and have a very diverse experience ranging from big pharma to management consultancy and also running my own MedTech startup. So here at Oncopeptides, I oversee the launch of melflufen in our European countries, in the Middle East as well as North Africa. And in addition to that, I also manage our presence at the global congresses.

And I know that you are working intensely with all those areas. We had many congresses in the first half of this year. Would you like to tell us a bit about those and your affections?

Definitely. It has been a hectic 6 first months of the year, that is natural because many of the global congresses are placed in the beginning of the year. These global congresses are vital for us as a company because they provide a platform where we can generate awareness, we can nourish our existing relationship, but we can also form new relationships to continue building on. These events are key opportunities for us as a company to showcase our scientific progress as well as to interact with the medical community.

And why do you think it's so important to attend in person?

Well, all these global congresses, they provide a unique opportunity for companies such as ours, because it is a platform for interaction between the medical community, the patient organization and then the industry such as ourselves. They're also a very effective and crucial platform to interact with key stakeholders simultaneously as well as gaining insights from scientific progress as well as competitive intelligence.

And what do you think the perception is on Oncopeptides lately at these events?

Well, we have been on a journey in the past 2 years since when we started attending congresses. And initially, of course, as with any company, it starts with small scale and then start building up. But it has always, and from the start being very clear to us what the path and the goal for attending congresses has been. And if you fast forward 2 years, leading up until today, we said that there is such a significant change in the external perception of us as a company, and that is measured by the amount of attention that we're getting on these congresses. And today, we are confident in our position, and we place ourselves among the giants of the industry because that is where we think we belong. And we also believe that reflects us as a company in terms of our progress and growth.

I fully agree. I attended EHA myself, as you know, and I was super impressed how we, in a cost-efficient manner, managed to kind of take a quite small space, but making it big in terms of awareness in between all the others, mostly due to our creativity and how different we were perceived and looked. So I got really good feedback from our key customers.

I fully agree with you. And I think in many perspectives was a big success for us as a company.

Thank you so much, Denise, for attending and telling us a bit about your work but also with focus on congresses. Thank you so much. And before we leave this episode, I would like to comment on the recent announcement we have made on the CD selection from our SPiKE's platform. Oncopeptides is a company that is focused on both research development and commercialization, and I believe that is a strength of ours to have both, a full approval for our drug capacity as well as a pipeline that is progressing with promising signs for the future. And I can probably talk a full day about cancer immunotherapy and how NK cell engagement can be groundbreaking in that field. But what I would like to say for now is that we are truly happy to have found a candidate drug with such promise. We will now move on with the preclinical research with the aim to be able to enter the clinic eventually. And we have the next steps funded by our previous rights issue and we'll, over time, strategize around how we go about to bring them to clinic and to further develop this very exciting assets. By that, I would like to say thank you for listening in, and I wish you all a very nice summer period.