Zura Bio Limited Class A Ordinary Shares 12th Annual Cantor Fitzgerald Global Healthcare Conference

Tech equity research team, and very pleased to introduce from Zura Bio, Sandeep Kulkarni, Chief Executive Officer. Sandip, maybe set the stage for us for Zura. We are actually entering a really important point of time and period for the company with tibulizumab data coming up. You joined as CEO fairly recently.

It seems like so much longer ago.

Right. Maybe kind of give us the setup and why you joined Zura in this role at this point in time.

Sure. That would be my pleasure. Josh, thank you for hosting me. It is really good to see you and be back here in New York City. You are right, we are entering a pivotal stretch for Zura, the most important in the company's relatively short history. The company, in a nutshell, kind of came together in 2022 around a few programs that we licensed from pharma. We are an autoimmune and inflammatory disease company. The thinking was, well, can we get molecules, can we get antibodies that are bifunctional or multi-specific in their nature and do multiple things, inhibit multiple pathways?

And that's the kind of thing that I think we hear echoed from a lot of folks, is seeing the efficacy ceiling seen with single pathway modulators and recognizing that we may need to do more than just hit one pathway, however hard, to really get that degree of benefit. The three programs that we brought in all are multifunctional in nature. They all came with clinical data sets from the pharma companies that we licensed them from. The lead program is tibulizumab, which is a bispecific antibody we licensed from Eli Lilly back in 2023. We, and they describe it as a four-headed hammer in that it's tetravalent, it hits two targets, IL-17 as well as BAFF, both of which are highly characterized, highly validated targets across a number of indications. And we can uniquely modulate both those pathways with a single antibody.

As we both kind of noted, we are entering a really critical, important stretch for the company where we'll have our first two data readouts coming over the next six-ish months. The first one being our hidradenitis suppurativa study reading out in Q4 of this year, and then followed by a phase II readout in systemic sclerosis, both of which we think are high value indications with high unmet need that a drug like ours, given its bifunctional nature, could be uniquely well suited to address. As I was considering my opportunities post my previous company, I was just really excited by what was happening at Zura, where a lot of things we had said, I think we were maybe a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of being excited about bispecifics, excited about multi-specific drugs for autoimmune disease.

We're starting to bear out the data across different mechanisms, different indications, with suggesting that this really has some real legs. The company was getting close to a couple of readouts. There were other indications that we could potentially pursue with tibulizumab. We have other assets here, and so it truly was too good of an opportunity to pass up as we enter this critical stretch for the company.

Because you had recently said to me you joined for more than just a phase II readout.

Yeah. I guess that's kind of what you're alluding to, the rest of the portfolio or the vision.

Yeah, I think that's right. If all we had was a binary readout in HS, I still would've been really excited about it given the evidence supporting Yep the role of BAFF as well as IL-17 in HS, and the fact that we are doing something that is different.

The fact that we already had two high-quality shots on goal with tibulizumab, we just announced a third indication, polymyalgia rheumatica, that will start later on this year with tibulizumab, another, we think high quality, high probability shot on goal. Even beyond it, the optionality from the pipeline, it was again, there's a lot of different directions to go, which I and we as a team are excited to pursue.

All right. Excellent. We're going to spend a lot of time on tibulizumab, but I think the context is important here because the three assets that you in-licensed from pharma, we actually now have the other two that are being validated.

Yep. Right? Suggesting that there is a very keen eye for unmet need in the immunology space.

Maybe talk a little bit about the IL-7 receptor- Sure external validation, IL-33, plans you might have for those programs, but more importantly, talking to the keen eye Yep right, to have those two now validated and what it might mean for tibulizumab.