Evommune, Inc. Morgan Stanley 24th Annual Global Healthcare Conference

Well, thanks very much for the Morgan Stanley and Judah for having me here. My name is Luis Peña, President, CEO, founder of Evommune. The company has been around six years now. I founded it just after I was a co-founder of Dermira. We had sold that to Lilly, that had bought lebrikizumab, which is now Ebglyss and doing very well on the market in atopic dermatitis. The goal for us has been to be a serious player in chronic inflammation, and we have been very disciplined since the inception of the company of putting a brand new program into the clinic with a novel target every 18 to 24 months or so. Fast-forward six years later, we have four programs currently in the pipeline. There really are two co-leads. There is an oral MRGPRX2 inhibitor, which is currently in a Phase IIb study in migraine.

There is an IL-18 biologic that just showed very positive Phase IIa data earlier this year. We are scaling up the manufacturing and will be in a Phase IIb study in atopic dermatitis the middle of next year. We have just started talking about a very potent TLR7/8 inhibitor that we plan to put into the clinic in the first half of next year, and there has been some very interesting positive data recently with the TLR7/8, as well as previously. We also have a very deep STAT6 inhibitor degrader program that is preclinical, and we would file an IND towards the end of next year. So very busy and pretty excited about the current pipeline.

Sure. We have a very talented medicinal chemistry team, and we do on our small molecule all the discovery work internal. We had a gap between two of our programs, and following that 18-24 month discipline, we had been scouring the world to in-license and fill the gap. We found a company in South Korea called AprilBio, and what they do is they take existing or new biologics or novel biologics, and they bind them to a fob that allows it to bind the albumin. That gives us two really cool properties. One is that it extends the half-life, so the naturally occurring binding protein, which we like a lot, it has been optimized for a long time by nature, but it is cleared very rapidly. From a therapeutic perspective, it is pretty tough.

The binding to the fob allowed it to increase the half-life to two weeks, which in the maintenance phase, for example, for atopic dermatitis, you could probably dose every two months or so. That is a distinct advantage. In addition, it also helps it penetrate inflamed tissue, so that was really a bonus that was thrown in, and that might actually add deposition effect over time in the right area as we dose these patients for longer. From that perspective, we really liked the background, the phenotype of, not the phenotype, but the makeup of the molecule.

It had already been through Phase I.

It was very well tolerated, and it continues to be so. Right after we got the molecule, we took it into a- Phase II-A study that had very exciting data.

Yeah. You are right. It has really been over the last 5 to 10 years that there has been a lot of different publications that have shown elevations of IL-18 levels in many different indications, but no one has really dug into one. GSK generated some data that really caught our eye, and the reason it did so is the following. They had done a single dose study with an IL-18 monoclonal, very similar in potency to our binding protein. After one dose, they showed really somewhat of a similar profile to what we showed in our Phase II-A. They had IGA 0/1 scores in the mid-20s.

Reasonable EASI 50, 75, 90 scores, although those are not dose optimized.

It looked exactly like the data that we had looked at when we in-licensed lebrikizumab from Genentech. Lebrikizumab had done also a single dose study with topical corticosteroids on top, which somewhat increases the efficacy, but it was okay. After a single dose, they showed IGA 0/1 scores in the mid-20s, percent EASI change similar to what we had. Once we saw that- that to us was pretty clear validation that they had a biologic here with relevance.

We very aggressively went after the molecule and then licenses it and put it in a phase IIa with an IV formulation.