Lantern Pharma Inc. (NASDAQ:LTRN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

The dosage and safety data obtained in this trial will be used to advance the central nervous system trials, central nervous system cancer trials for a future Phase II to be sponsored by Lantern’s wholly owned subsidiary, Starlight Therapeutics. Globally, the aggregate annual market potential of LP-184 target indication so far is in excess of $11 billion, consisting of about 4.5 to 5.5 plus for CNS cancers and well over 6 billion for solid tumors. So you can see why we’re very excited about this drug as a potential blockbuster across multiple tumors. As we mentioned, our drug LP-300 in a previous multicenter Phase III clinical trial, a subset of never-smokers and non-small cell lung cancer patients who received that drug with chemotherapy showed an increased overall survival of 91% and an increase in 2-year survival of 125%, respectively.

This was compared to patients who only received the chemo doublet alone. Now we’re doing that currently in a 90-patient Phase 2 trial, and we continue to expand into multiple sites. Dr. Joseph Treat, who has been appointed the lead principal investigator of the Harmonic study, Dr. Treat is a leading expert in lung malignancies including non-small cell lung cancer and never-smokers. Additionally, he has specific experience many Asian collaborators where this population is at a significantly higher percentage. So we’re advancing the trial the Harmonic trial into Asia, specifically Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, where there’s a higher incidence of never-smokers in non-small cell lung cancer, but double or higher than that of patients in the U.S., 32 to 35-plus percent.

And these are largely driven by pointed and subtle mutations in EGFR or other kinases. So as I mentioned earlier in our call, we’ll be sharing our preliminary work in the ADC category. This work has been accomplished in the last 6 months at a very tremendous pace, but also at a very, very reasonable cost, largely driven by insights from our AI platform and through the good collaborations with our partners in Germany. We’ve had very good results with our initial ADCs designs and believe the cryptophycin link conjugate has picomolar IC50 values across multiple cancers. We’ve zeroed in on five or six. Again, we’ll be talking more about the detailed update of this program and how this program will expand. We’ll plan on that update for all the investors and analysts in January of 2024.

This past quarter, we had two major presentations. Presentations like this are important because they help highlight why we’re excited about the molecules and how we’re derisking them and how we’re thinking about development. It also generates interest among the pharma community. So for 284, we presented at SOHO 2023, we talked about the drug having tremendous efficacy in B cell cancers, which are normally non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas that have what’s called homologous repair deficiency. This allows us then after the Phase I to perhaps zero-in on HRD focused B cell cancers. For 184, we presented at a joint ASCO SNO conference, showing how the molecule is activated in certain high-expressing PTGR-brain cancers and both adult and pediatric and it completely inhibits or kill off the cancer cells.

So again, we’ll take that to not only pharma companies, but also to sites that have expressed an interest. And we believe this kind of posters and presentations and data are important to help us better understand where we can point the drug to get the most effective way to market. And during this coming quarter, next week on November 17, we’ll continue driving awareness for our data in our platform. We’ll be presenting at Society of Neuro-Oncology where our collaborator, Dr. John Laterra, will be showing how our drug candidate works across GBMs, independent of MGMT status. Dr. John Laterra is a Director at the brain cancer program at Johns Hopkins. Now the MGMT status is very important since about 50% to 60-plus percent in GBM cases have little or no methylation of MGMT.

This means that they either don’t respond or they stop responding to the current standard of care temozolomide. And that’s not only in GBM, but also many other high-grade gliomas and brain cancers. On December 1, we’ll be presenting at the Bengaluru Tech Summit in India on our AI platform and how we’re building a future forward pharma labeled as Pharma 4.0. And then on December 5 in Boston and at the CNS Drug Delivery Summit, we’ll be presenting on how we’re leveraging our AI to accelerate the development of drug candidates for CNS and brain cancers, specifically how we believe we can save hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars through our algorithms, which can predict the blood-brain barrier to permeability of any compound with 92% to 95% accuracy.