Iovance Biotherapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:IOVA) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Michael Schmidt with Guggenheim.

Unidentified Analyst: Hi, good afternoon. This is Yige on for Michael. Thanks for taking our questions. Quick one from us for second and third line non-small cell lung cancer. Can you talk about your current thinking on the bar in this setting given that multiple upcoming Phase 3 read out of ADCs and small molecule TKIs in this setting? Thank you.

Fred Vogt: Yes, Friedrich, do you want to talk about that?

Friedrich Finckenstein: Yes. I think for bars in this space, I think you would have to look at available and approved therapies at this point. Things to look at there are docetaxel monotherapy or docetaxel plus ramucirumab. That’s usually an accepted benchmark for settings obviously as the space evolves, we’re going to have to look because we know that FDA, as they are looking at particularly single arm dataset is looking at available therapy at the time you bring this forward, but right now docetaxel, docetaxel ramu is the most appropriate benchmark to look at.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Madhu Kumar with Goldman Sachs.

Madhu Kumar: Great. Yes. Thanks for taking our questions. So I guess kind of can we expect any more updates from Cohort 4 from the ongoing Cohort 2, Cohort 4 trials in terms of things like overall survival and kind of longer-term follow-up on therapy from that study?

Fred Vogt: At some point we might do, but we put out overall survival data since last year it was pretty mature. So I would – I could – we could send you a link to that, but there’s really not a whole lot of reason for us to go back and do that again. You can see that the total in those curves has been kind of reached on the Kaplan-Meiers and there’s a publication as well. That came with that. We did – remember we did a companion publication last year too so you can check them both out.

Madhu Kumar: Yes, absolutely. So maybe kind of following up on the bed capacity commentary you had earlier about ATCs, what do you think at launch is going to be kind of the effective number of beds that’ll be available and what do you think is going to be the steady state flow? I’m thinking about the – since the event last year where they talked about kind of maybe four beds on average per site per week. Like, do you think that’s a reasonable number? How are you thinking about kind of where the study sits going to lie in terms of kind of available hospital use capacity?

Fred Vogt: No, I think you’re going to see much, much higher capacities. I visited a site last week where they showed me capacities that far, far, far exceed that in their BMT, ALLO, TIL, CAR T units. So I do think maybe that’s something that people should understand better about the sites that they really are – they’re building for cell therapies. This is an economic opportunity for hospitals too. And they’re expanding, expanding and trying to get ahead of this. And the sites that we’re working with don’t seem to have that limitation as a general matter. Yes, it came up with SITC, it was a comment made at SITC, but it’s not something we’ve seen very often. By the way, Madhu, I got – I pulled the slide up. The OS curve from SITC goes out to 60 months. So it’s pretty, pretty .