Agenus Inc. (NASDAQ:AGEN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Mike King with EF Hutton. Your line is open.

Mike King: Congrats on the updated non-small cell lung cancer data. I wanted just to see if we could get any — just maybe a housekeeping question first on financial guidance. What — I don’t know, Christine, if you want to say anything about how far the cash runway would take you, what cash use on what expenses R&D and G&A might look like this year? I would imagine given the ramp-up in trial activity that the R&D spend is going to increase, but I don’t know if you want to quantify any of that?

Dr. Garo Armen: Okay. Thank you, Mike. Notwithstanding the little excitement we had over the weekend, of course, even though we didn’t have a majority. And all of that has resolved now at least from our perspective. And so without any additional milestones, which is unlikely and without any additional cash infusion into the Company, partnerships and other means. We believe our cash runway will take us through the second quarter of next year. And of course, realistically, given our track record is not to we expect that we’re not going to be able to bring in additional cash from sources that I outlined.

Mike King: Do you — can you say how much do you have left on the ATM?

Dr. Garo Armen: We have — I mean, as you know, Mike, we have a very comfort zone with the ATM. I mean, as I’ve said publicly, we don’t use ATM day in and day out. Some companies do that. We don’t do that. We’ve used ATMs opportunistically to manage our cash based on our spending pattern is the prospect of near-term cash infusion and so on and so forth. But we do — I think we have about 75 million shares remaining with ATM.

Mike King: This is a question that comes up a lot with investors. Can I speak to that? Okay. And then…

Dr. Garo Armen: And by the way, I also want to point out that a number of ATM executions for us have been not just going out and selling in the market. We’ve also had a reasonable amount of ATMs coming as a result of inbound inquiries from institutions. So instead of waiting for a transaction, sometimes institutions will come to us. As they have as recently in the last few months and said, would you consider giving us x amount of shares through the ATM, sometimes we comply and sometimes we don’t, depending on the price of the stock and the timing of things.

Mike King: Okay. Great. Just again, to come back to the lung cancer data, the question we get a lot, obviously, is what defines refractory, what definition do you guys use? Because there’s always that concern about whether patients are truly refractory or not, the pseudoprogression comes into play, et cetera. Steve, I don’t know what — how much you can add to that?

Dr. Steven O’Day: Yes. These are not pseudoprogression. These are refractory patients who have come off PD-1 chemo combinations and then we’re on PD-1 maintenance and progress our met therapy. So these are what we would consider refractory PD-1 patients.

Mike King: Okay. So they come off of maintenance.

Dr. Steven O’Day: Sorry, what was that?

Mike King: I thought I heard you say it must have come off of maintenance with PD-1.

Dr. Steven O’Day: Well, so the standard first-line treatment is combination chemo and KEYTRUDA as one example of a triplet combination is most commonly used. Those patients get a limited amount of chemotherapy over four to six months and then they continue on PD-1. So obviously, most of those nations respond upfront to the chemotherapy piece of that. And then during the refractory at some point, and it’s usually during the maintenance phase.