Opko Health Inc. Wells Fargo 21st Annual Healthcare Conference

Sure. Sure. I am Adam Logal.

I am the CFO of OPKO. I have been with the company for many years now. OPKO is a diversified company. We have a couple of different business lines between diagnostics and pharmaceuticals. I will just spend a few minutes on the diagnostic side and turn it over to Elias. On the diagnostic side, we have BioReference Health, which we have been working on over the last several years to simplify the business model, focus it from a national basis to a regional basis. We have done a few divestitures. Really focused on the New York, New Jersey clinical lab market with a national presence through our urology sales force selling our proprietary 4Kscore Test, which is a diagnostic for identifying aggressive prostate cancer.

That business has been through a transition over the last several years, and we are step by step making it more on a path to more profitable growth over time.

I am Elias A. Zerhouni. I am the President and Vice Chairman of OPKO. Actually, what he is describing is a sort of transition for the company that I will describe for you. We have decided to become more of a therapeutics company, less of a diagnostics company. As part of that, OPKO bought a company called ModeX Therapeutics, and I am a co-founder of ModeX Therapeutics. Before that, I was the head of R&D for Sanofi for 10 years. I developed about 13 drugs, including DUPIXENT and so on. My colleague, my co-founder and I, decided to create a company, and we did in 2020. By 2022, the market was not so nice. We knew Phil Frost, who is the founder and the Chairman of OPKO, and we decided to come together. We did in 2022. Now we have a pretty diversified portfolio.

ModeX is really a very unique company. It really is the first company in the world to design and put in the clinic what we call high-order multi-specific multifunctional molecules. No one else has ever done that. We are the only company that has put five molecules in the clinic currently in about four years with quadri specifics. There is no such thing in the market. We are in phase I. When you do a new thing, people want to see, can you produce it? CMC has been successful, so much so that we have had Merck come and do a transaction with us around a multivalent vaccine that we developed against the Epstein-Barr. Regeneron came and realized that what we had was pretty unique, so we have a large collaboration with Regeneron on metabolism, immunology, oncology.

We have our own four molecules we drive ourselves that are in phase I, for solid tumor, for hematology, immunology. We are pretty diverse, but focused company in terms of the ability of the platform to apply to different areas. We just finished the phase I for a COVID antibody that the government funded for $200 million and that they wanted for their stockpile, in case COVID comes back. The thing about this antibody, it has four warheads, and we have tested it against every variant that ever showed up, including the ones we did not know about, because we started two years ago, and it is effective against all. That is a pretty powerful statement about the technology. ModeX is in Boston and is really the most advanced arm of OPKO in terms of therapeutics.

OPKO itself has quite a bit of a record, and we have developed in the hormone field with a growth hormone, which is commercialized by Pfizer and generates part of its income. We are developing an anti-growth hormone product, which is now entering development because people have acromegaly, and this is a sort of a niche, rare disease type approach. We also develop a GLP-1 glucagon for obesity and MASH. We are in phase I, and my view is that we should really see if we can differentiate that. If not, then we will not develop it much further. It has potentials because our preclinical data shows that this is a molecule that triggers anti-fibrotic activity in the liver. For reasons that I can explain, but we may not have the time now.

We are trying it because if it has the right half-life, so for expanded treatment, and if it has the right biological activity, which I suspect it has, then we will develop it further, but we are in phase I. In our OPKO Biologics division, which is located in Israel, we are very focused on hormonal treatment. We are developing a PTH, which is a parathyroid hormone, with our collaborators, Entera Bio, which knows how to do it orally. We produce the molecule, and they formulate it so that you can actually take a pill, which is really different than what you have. Then a GLP-2. It is not GLP-1. GLP-2 is a completely different indication, which is really for folks who have malabsorption. They cannot absorb nutrients for various reasons. Either they have had surgery or they have had inflammatory bowel disease.

The word is, we're trying to truly reconcentrate OPKO away from diagnostics with these restructurings that I'm talking about into a main line biotech, biopharma company.

Well, so I was telling you about what's in the clinic, right? Because people say the way I sense things is that investors are interested in what's in the clinic and what's coming next. But we've developed a CAR-T technology which is unique also because we use our multi-specific high-order targeting. So we're the only company that can do the CAR-T cells, the CAR-B cells, the CAR-NK cells, the CAR muscle cell, whatever we want to target. Why? Because we can actually design the antibody and then put it on the surface of the lipid nanoparticle. Right. Others do that, but they do it to activate the T cells or the B cells. We do it for both reasons. We target the cell we want, and we activate the cell we want. We've done all the pre-clinicals.

We are basically doing the CMC for the first clinical trial, which is at the end of the year or beginning of next year.