Oric Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Common Stock Wells Fargo 21st Annual Healthcare Conference

Thanks for having us. Excellent.

Sure thing. Happy to, Derek. At Oric Pharmaceuticals, Oric stands for Overcoming Resistance In Cancer. In a nutshell, that's the mission of the company. We have two late stage programs, one for prostate cancer, one for lung cancer. Both are differentiated in their own ways versus the competitors that are out there. Both are either, say, in the case of rinzimetastat, our prostate program, it's already in its first phase III study, a study called Himalayas-1 in castration-resistant prostate cancer. I'm sure we'll get into some of the details of that. And then enozertinib, our lung cancer program, is, we think, headed towards its first phase III study, which would start next year. Both programs are going well in terms of development. We're well-funded with a healthy balance sheet, long cash runway. And let's dive into any specifics you'd like to discuss.

Yeah, I chuckle a little bit, Derek, because we hope to get as many questions about mevrometostat at this point as we do about our own program.

Hey, rinzimetastat. Yeah, rinzimetastat, and at this point, I feel like we can speak in a pretty educated fashion about Pfizer's program.

I think what folks caught was in Pfizer's Q2 quarterly call, they mentioned some further specificity around mevrometostat timelines, and so they narrowed the guidance to Q4 this year for the first readout of their first phase III study, MEVPRO-1. That obviously has, I think, positive implications if you do the trial modeling and event accrual modeling that the street is doing, and obviously that we've done. Under a whole variety of assumptions you can make around control arm performance, control arm distribution, meaning distribution of patients to various aspects of the control arm, and how each of those components of the control arm might perform.

Really in any sort of reasonable scenarios you can construct, including assumptions you make around enrollment curve and exactly when Pfizer was fully enrolled and whatnot, them narrowing that guidance to Q4 seems to have positive implications in terms of how that study is likely to read out. I think more broadly, as you folks just take a big step back and look at the mechanism of action, look at the data that Pfizer has produced now in not just one population, but actually two different populations within castration-resistant prostate cancer from two different phase I data sets, and then subsequent to that, a randomized data set in the post-abiraterone CRPC population, which is the one that we are all talking about. You look at our own data with rinzimetastat, obviously in uncontrolled setting, but phase I data across those two different populations.

You now have about half a dozen different data points, all of which point to the synergy of adding a PRC2 inhibitor, which is what these drugs are, in combination with an AR inhibitor. All of that should play out quite favorably in addition to now the stats and trial modeling folks are doing around MEVPRO-1.

Yeah, look, I think in terms of actual trial expectations, it is probably a question that is better suited to Pfizer as opposed to us. I think from our own perspective as drug hunters, drug developers, you obviously want to see as clinically beneficial a profile as possible on behalf of patients. You have a pretty good sense of what the control arm would do in this patient population. Maybe if you take a step back, Derek, from just the stats of the phase III trial alone and just think about the actual patient experience and what physicians in this space are looking for. Really what you are looking for is you have three big androgen receptor inhibitors that get used widely today. So that is enzalutamide, apalutamide, and darolutamide. In combination with those three drugs, you also have a fourth drug called abiraterone.

Those four are the ARPIs, and the ARPIs are the mainstay of therapy today for prostate cancer patients. The issue is, as good as those ARPIs do for patients, and with abiraterone in particular, which is the drug that we're talking about following at this point. What happens is once patients in the CRPC setting progress on abiraterone, there really are no other good options to give them. You can do an AR switch. You tend to get anywhere from 4 to 6 months of additional PFS when you do that AR switch. It's a tried and true treatment methodology for physicians, and what I mean by that is it's another oral agent. They're generally well-tolerated. Physicians are very used to giving those AR inhibitors. Obviously, the downside to that, though, is 4 to 6 months of PFS.

Really the holy grail in that space has been what do you give a patient that's progressed on abiraterone if you're trying to get more than that 4 to 6 months of PFS? While in the trial design, you obviously include chemotherapy as one of the options, nobody wants to give their patients chemotherapy in that setting. In terms of what would be clinically meaningful, if they can get anywhere from 2 to 3 months of additional PFS above and beyond what you can get with your other standard of care, in particular an AR switch, any of that would be clinically meaningful. Obviously, they're going to have to show a bit more than that in the phase III trial because they're also going to have to show that they can also do better than chemotherapy.