Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ENTA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jay Olson: Great. Thank you. That’s super helpful. And then on 514, can you talk about what sort of mechanisms do you plan to combine with 514? And will it be an existing antiviral treatment or something in clinical or preclinical development? And will it be something in your own pipeline or something external? And what are your latest thoughts on seeking a partner for 514?

Jay Luly: Yeah. So the right combination, hep B is €“ it’s a slow story to play out in terms of combination therapy. I mean, combination, when we’re working on hep C, combination therapy, even though all combination therapy takes a while, combination therapy was fairly straightforward by comparison and as much as the trials were much shorter, you had things that you could measure very quickly. You had profound changes in viral loads and those seem to correlate with getting to basically a cure. And all of those rules are slightly different than HPV. And so I think we’re still at the stage where the right combo is not yet known yet. We know that nukes and core inhibitors do useful things in terms of reducing viral load, not only the DNA that nukes do well, but you can also, with the core inhibitor, reduce DNA and RNA.

So I think we’re going to need something that will adequately address the s-antigen reduction component of this, might you need an immune modulator in the mix. I mean, these are all things that other people are starting to do combinations on and get data readouts on. But it’s not perfectly clear yet what that best asset class would be. And so we’re being a little bit patient here. We’re thinking and doing a little bit internally, and we’re looking externally as well. And ultimately, we’ll pool the right assets. I hope that we’ll be able to do that at some point to really get back on the triple combination horse that we really want to be on. But in the meantime, the spend on clinical trials isn’t going to happen until we’re clear on that. Is that helpful?

Jay Olson: That’s super helpful. Thanks for all the color. Appreciate you taking the questions. Thank you Jay.

Jay Luly: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Roy Buchanan from JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

Roy Buchanan: Hey, thanks for taking the question. I had a follow-up on the 235 comment, around the higher tissue uptake. Jay, you said you’re going to have more data on that topic this year? Is that going to be a publication or a meeting presentation? And then relatedly, for 938, any near-term plans to publish the RSVP results?

Jay Luly: So the RSVP results, I’m not sure what the timing is on that quite perfectly honest. I’m not sure what that timing is. It’s an important study to have conducted. It’s not the most important thing we’re doing right now in terms of execution. The 235 data that I referred to in tissue distribution, as you know, some of it’s been out there and other abstracts are being written and submitted. So Steve tune’s on that front. We just — we will report once we’ve been accepted and announced a confirmed entry for that.

Roy Buchanan: Okay. But we’ll see that data before the end of this year?

Jay Luly: Before the end of 2022?

Roy Buchanan: Yes. That’s what I heard you say. No?

Jay Luly: I don’t believe I said that. If I did, I didn’t mean it — I didn’t meant to say that. Not sure about what you’re talking about. Are you talking about 235 tissue uptake data — is that what you?

Roy Buchanan: Yes.

Jay Luly: Not this year. Not anymore this year.