Jack Allen: Great. Thank you so much for the question and all the color. Congratulations again on the progress.
Brian Culley: Thank you, Jack.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Joe Pantginis from H. C. Wainwright. Please go ahead.
Joe Pantginis: Hey, everybody. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. So Brian, my first question, I promise there is no pun intended, but do you envision or any potential complementarity between OpRegen and [indiscernible] or Syfovre?
Brian Culley: I’ve heard a lot of vision jokes in my five years here and that is certainly one of them. I’m going to refer the question to Gary to talk about the compatibility and how our therapy could be used in addition to or instead of a complement inhibitor.
Gary Hogge: Yeah. So Joe, I think, obviously, based on the initial launch of for Syfovre, clearly, there’s a huge unmet need. So a big plan space. And there’s no reason that OpRegen can be used in conjunction with the complement inhibitor, either the two approved agents or allow a complement inhibitor be used first and then follow up with OpRegen vice versa. We think that there’s a potential synergistic effect of the two products, three products, technically, and that in effect that they both might benefit from co-administration. So obviously, we’ll need to conduct coadministration studies at some point, but we don’t think it will impact — if anything, it will benefit both approaches to treating dry AMD.
Joe Pantginis: No, that’s helpful. Thank you. And then I wanted to switch over to the VAC platform. I guess, how should we view or what are you doing to percolate sort of the platform concept behind the scenes other than sort of having inbounds and marketing it as a platform? Are you doing any particular scientific work to be able to help market it? Do you have the potential to be able to hand cells out and an NDA situation where a third-party can sort of do their own experiments? So, how is the platform being percolated.
Brian Culley: The answer is that it is being viewed through a number of different prongs. So, one of those would be thinking about working with another party to use a different antigen or combination of antigens, which could be presented on the surface of the dendritic cells. And you could imagine that that idea can range from work that has been done at academic centers for more of the pan-cancer antigen like a TRC or you could imagine harnessing some of the discoveries that are coming out of the AI field and machine learning to rationally select the antigen that you might use either on an individual patient basis or again, more collectively for antigens that could serve this purpose more broadly. We have other prongs that we are considering, which include manufacturing.
We think that there is still a lot of room to improve the production and drive down the costs of the dendritic cell system. And we think that from a clinical perspective, there’s a prong that can be viewed with the dendritic cell as a tool because it essentially goes beyond the first step of the immune system, which is we are prepackaging the antigen into the dendritic cell. So, rather than using lipid nanoparticles or if you are concerned that your antigen is not tickling the immune system quite in the right way, utilizing nature’s previously designed system for presenting those antigens could be beneficial. It is extremely difficult to tackle all of those prongs simultaneously with all of their individual permutations. But when I say that the BD people have exploratory conversations, these are the kinds of prongs that they are thinking about and talking about with various parties, each of which in isolation could be beneficial in the VAC program and help elevate the visibility and importance of that program and which altogether could provide us with some derisking by having multiple approaches, partly supported by partnership and then perhaps partly supported by lineage.
