Gritstone bio, Inc. (NASDAQ:GRTS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And how do I do I capture those in a vaccine in a form that enables the patient to mount now a strong immune response to multiple antigens, which is likely to reduce the frequency and tempo of acquired resistance, all things being equal. So that’s the biological problem as we framed it, and we think we’ve got a good solution to that. And we’ll be talking about that more in due course, as I say, as we start to prepare for launch of that study.

Corinne Jenkins: Maybe just a quick follow up on that because as you said, you had the pieces D3 there and that didn’t work great. How confident are you that you’ve been able to find the right additional antigens to go forward with this next generation product?

Andrew Allen: We’re confident, because obviously we we’ve been learning a lot about how to encode antigens within our vaccines. And we’ve been learning a lot about antigens, obviously, as we continue to study human tumors in great depth. And as I mentioned earlier, we have a large team in Cambridge that does work using sequencing, but also this sophisticated mass spec technique where you literally observe peptides presented on the surface of tumor cells. And you can actually quantify them. You can do quantitative mass spec. So you can kind of count the number of HLA peptide complexes on the surface of human tumors. And you can do that for different antigens and different HLA alleles. And that probably relates to this dominance phenomenon.

So we think we’ve got a way of assessing that outside of a clinical trial, just from tumor samples. And then of course, we design accordingly, and then tested again, back in humans. So again, this iterative loop, and I think, long-term, if you want to deliver good new antigen on cancer, tumor antigen vaccines to large numbers of patients cheaply, the off the shelf product, obviously, is where we need to end up. We’ve got a lot to learn still, but I think this is a game that really is worth playing hard. And the winners I think, will be those who figure it out and deliver these multi targeted products in an off the shelf format, to huge numbers of solid tumor patients. And these products are obviously a lot cheaper to make them personalized products.

That’s obviously the one of the key attractions here.

Corinne Jenkins: Yes, thank you.

Andrew Allen: Thanks Corrine.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. There are no further questions at this time. And this will conclude today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines and thank you for your participation.