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

Now of course, it could happen a lot sooner. And so it will – we could have 1 or 2 readouts for Harmonic next year. For the Phase I, LP-184, I expect that to be definitely in the first half of the year. And then as I mentioned earlier, LP-284 is about a quarter behind that. So I expect data in Q1, Q2 and throughout the year, but definitely Q2, Q3 and Q4. Another question, great questions. This is regard to the ADC program. So in terms of the ADC program, we will be refining some of the indications. We’ll be sharing the data in January. So we’ll talk a little bit about the timing for 2024. So we expect that IND application to be in €˜24 early ‘25? It really depends on how quickly we can manufacture and get clarity on manufacturing at GMP level.

That’s going to be the key driver. We think we have a super potent molecule. We think there’s no other design like it with the cryptophycin. So we believe that it’s novel and can extend to many of their cancers. For us, it’s really going to come down to manufacturing it. And there are some things that we’re looking at that will potentially really shorten the manufacturing of the ADC, including, again, kind of stealing from the January, but we’ll talk also about synthetic nanobodies that can take on the form and function of an antibody but are easier and cheaper to manufacture. And so this might be one of the very first kind of synthetic fragment nanobody drug conjugate. But good question. So for – another question, 184 and 284.

On 184 and 284, the question is, can you please – from another [John Heerdink]. Can you please discuss the timing of the potential – hello, John, can you please discuss the timing potential readouts? Yes. So since 184 just started this past quarter, we have that designed in what’s called cohorts of 3. So you have 3 patients that you dose the first level 2. And then if we see everything green light, we go to the second cohort has 3. And we can do these cohorts of 3. We think about cohort 3 and 4, maybe 5, we’ll start seeing some really good signals, and we’ll continue basically advancing the cohorts until we get into a maximum tolerated dose, which we expect to see sometime during Q1 and maybe early Q2. So we’ll obviously be sharing that.

And then same with 24 24, it’s about a quarter behind that. But that cohort design for the first two cohorts in 284 are a little different. Those are designed as cohorts of one. And so we’ll be able to get to the first 2 cohorts pretty quickly and then take cohort 3 with just 3 patients. So again, in both, I think they’re a quarter behind one another over the 24 could speed up because we plan on some outbound activity with the lymphoma community, so maybe that will help us. Again, these are fairly focused trials. We expect to see hopefully some signals as well. But I’m looking at Q2 and Q3 for those particular trials for 184 and 284. And if not earlier, then we’ll start, obviously, in parallel some partnering discussions as well. Okay.

Got some more questions via e-mail that we’ll be talking about. One is about Starlight. Yes, so is our goal for Starlight, the reason we went after Starlight is when we first started looking at where LP-184 could be pointed at best in our AI platform, we came back with a signal for CNS cancers. Now we had – we kind of weren’t thinking about that because we thought other solid tumors would be exceptionally more sensitive. And we didn’t know enough about the blood-brain barrier permeability of the molecule at the time, which is why we started creating the algorithms now, which are top of the world for that purpose. And so we realized, once we got the data and signals for GBM, that there’s dozens and as I found out later, 120-plus other brain cancers.

So we second all the data as we possibly could. And I think in one quarter, we set like almost 1.5 billion or something. And these are wide large-scale genomic biomarker drug sensitivity studies. We normalize that data as quickly as we could. And it wasn’t just mutation data. It was also epigenomic data. And we discovered that there were another wide range, other brain cancers, secondary and primary, the drug was active in. As we went to lab to see if those in silico concepts made sense, many of them were right on. In fact, we’re even more sensitive. And so that led us to the insight that, wow, we have a lot of opportunity across a wide range of neuro-oncology. We shared that data with key thought leaders and KOLs. And we also published at Society of Neuro-Oncology in the last two years, and we’ve got a lot of interest from pharma and we realized that this is a massive market opportunity.

This is exactly what we want to do is we want to change the pace of finding these kinds of insights and then generating value for patients and value for investors and generating new medicines. And so the Starlight opportunity really took on kind of a life of its own. It went from one indication to look five, six, seven indications, which obviously we can’t do as one company. And since there’s a lot of commercial needs for patients, and there’s a lot of pharma interest to develop a neuro-oncology franchise. We think that there’s interest in a new codes. And this could be one of the very first new codes that’s spun out directly as a result of AI-driven drug development. And so Starlight, we’ll get drug product potentially, obviously, just from us, we’ll have a license to pursue neuro-oncology indications.

They won’t have to worry about an AI platform and growing it. They won’t have to worry about a lot of some of the fundamental drug product infrastructure and CMC questions, and so they’ll be purely focused on execution in the CNS trials, which is great. And so we think we can make exceptional progress if we get a stand-alone management team focused on that and fund it. So we’re very excited about it. We get fairly very good, unique positive feedbacks. And for us, that’s a Q1 event to raise some funding around that early part of next year, Q1, Q2, and then launch the Phase 2 trial for multiple indications in GBM and potentially brain mets in Q2, Q3. So a very good question. Yes. So a couple of more questions have come in. I’ll take these.

So a question during the third quarter of 2023, Lantern filed 4 new patent applications relating to breast, liver and blood cancers and an additional application directed to the lyophilized formulation for these molecules. And where does our patent portfolio sit today? David, would you like to take that?