BioAtla, Inc. (NASDAQ:BCAB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Arthur He: Hey. Good afternoon, Jay and Team. Thanks for taking my question. So just follow up on the CTLA-4 program. So far in your study, could you give us a little bit of color on the average of repeating dosing of the study 3071 and how about the maximum repeated dosing have been so far reached?

Philippe Martin: Yes, we’re starting to get in the read but we’ve had patients have been on treatment for quite some time and by quite some time I mean 11 cycles. But again we got to look at each cohort individually and see what is going on with these patients. But so far, the drug is even at doses that are above the doses approved with ipi plus nivo, there’s really nothing to report. We’ve only had one SEA so far that was unrelated to treatment and was in one of the early cohorts, so far, the drug is very well tolerated, patients are able to stay on treatment. Again, we need more time to be able to tell you exactly how long patients are able to stay on treatment at a specific cohort. But what we can say is that so far, no DLT is really not much to report from safety or efficacy standpoint.

Arthur He: Great. Thanks for the color. And regarding the AXL program for the sarcoma part of the study, I’m just curious what’s the rationale to testing more frequent and intensive dose regimen in the LMS cohort? Why not go for the other subtype of the sarcoma? Just curious.

Jay Short: I think. Well, first off, it’s worth mentioning that these more frequent dosing, more intense dosing, actually, from those that like to follow Cmax and Cmin, it actually on the 3Q4W were lowering the Cmax, which is often associated with any toxicity, but we’re also increasing the Cmin. So from a modeling standpoint, this is very exciting. So the other side of it is, I think, when you look back at our Phase 1 data, we saw some PRs in the line of myosarcoma, and those came in the Phase 1 study where we used Q2W and 2Q3W. So what was interesting was we didn’t see a PR in the Phase 2 using the kind of Q2W. And so this we felt by going into LMS, we certainly could answer the safety question quickly. And the FDA was agnostic, in which indication we went to.

So it gave us a chance to look at LMS to see if we could also tease out PRS, which really could open up a broad in the future, a potential broad soft tissue sarcoma expansion study. And it also answers the safety question. So you kind of kill two birds in one stone, and of course, those six wouldn’t have counted for the UPS portion of our first part of our Phase 2, part 2 potentially registrational study. And so it just really was a way to optimize a whole bunch of questions very quickly without in any way delaying the UPS potentially registrational study.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Reni Benjamin with JMP Securities.

Reni Benjamin: Hey, guys, thanks for taking the questions. I guess just sticking with the more frequent dosing regimens, can you talk a little bit about what you’d like to see before declaring a go forward dose? Are you looking for just improvements in ORR or just deeper responses? Or is it primarily from a safety perspective that will lead you to declare go forward dose? And I guess related to that, if you don’t see anything meaningful or of course something that doesn’t meet your hurdle, how do you choose the appropriate dose kind of going forward into the registrational study?