aTyr Pharma, Inc. (NASDAQ:LIFE) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Hartaj Singh: Great. Thank you, Sanjay. Thanks for the questions and the updates.

Operator: One moment. Our next question will come from Edward Tenthoff of Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Edward Tenthoff: Great. Thank you very much and appreciate the update. And really applaud the execution, especially on the Phase 3. Understand the focus and one of the things I’ve always appreciated, Sanjay, about aTyr is your close relationships with the academic labs. I think it’s a really smart way to be advancing 2810. My question kind of has to do with sort of the broader utility of the platform. And are there opportunities to do partnerships with BioTechs or big pharmas around some of these other areas or is the goal really to do a lot of the early work yourselves and then do more kinds of product type deals in the future? So appreciate you taking the question. Thanks.

Sanjay Shukla: Yeah. I do think — thank you, Ted, for the question. I do think the efzofitimod data has clearly validated our platform and we’re seeing that through interest with really across the spectrum. Academics, other companies really digging in our Dualsystems collaboration is really about taking the lid off of our synthetases state. We think we can do it faster, better and frankly cheaper now with this collaboration. As we crank out new targets and thus far, this summer, we had a new target with fibroblast growth factor coming out of one of our synthetases targets. I think we’re going to have optionality now. We’re going to have the ability to say, hey, do we want to take some of these forward? We’re not going to be able to take all 10 forward ourselves, let’s just be honest.

Not all 10 are going to be necessarily winners. That’s the other thing we like to be honest here at aTyr. But I think what’s going to happen here is, we’re going to have an opportunity to look at these and frankly engage in potential partnerships. That’s another thing I’m willing to talk too much about. But I do think that now we’re at a position where we generated more interest than ever in aTyr. aTyr was very much a show me something story. We’ve done that. Now we have a process, now we even have a partnership with a group out of Zurich (ph) that can I think yield a number of pipeline opportunities And I would say some of these will keep kind of under our umbrella, others, we’re going to have opportunities to partner. And I think that’s something to expect here and prepare for in the years to come.

Edward Tenthoff: Great. Thanks guys.

Operator: One moment. And our next question will come from Yale Jen of Laidlaw and Company. Your line is open.

Yale Jen: Good afternoon and thanks for taking the questions. Due to your resources sort of focusing, do you still, well conduct — preclinical study for some new targets or whether that approach — that department was also showing their budget as well?

Sanjay Shukla: Thanks, Yale. No, I think this is really related to 2810 and the clinical program. As you can imagine, moving into clinical studies, that’s where it really starts to get expensive. We have a mechanism and now a process that certainly from a discovery and preclinical standpoint, there’s no slowing down. In fact, you’ll see acceleration in outputs. But again, we are very, very capital efficient with some of those efforts. It’s really moving into the clinic where right now, absolute fit being the largest and a late phase program. We just thought it was smarter for us to really, really reiterate and focus resources there. But from a pipeline and discovery standpoint, no, these are all opportunities that we’re going to still pursue.