Joe Pantginis: Appreciate the color Brian. Thanks a lot.
Brian Culley: Thank you, Joe, and thank you also for participating as a moderator at that spinal cord — 1st Annual Spinal Cord Conference. We appreciate you and Jack and others.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Kristen Kluska from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.
Jason Bouvier: Hi. Good afternoon. This is Jason Bouvier on for Kristen. Thanks for taking our questions. I have two questions. Just going back to the Phase 2a trial being managed by Genentech. Do you have any information on the number of patients or subjects that have been enrolled sort of the rate of enrollment and how many are left? And the second question is how are you thinking about prioritizing earlier-stage programs and any potential projects that are not yet out in the pipeline? Thanks.
A – Jill Howe: We’re not permitted to disclose or share that level of granularity with respect to enrollment, you and everyone, unfortunately, will need to just kind of make their own estimates and projections. With respect to what I will call the balance between our lead program and other programs, we are trying to strike a balance within that balance, which is to say that we are certainly planning for success. If one isn’t planning for success, one presumably is planning for failure. So that is — it is pretty straightforward that we are looking to build a company here that in part will be elevated by the success — the future success of OpRegen and dry AMD. However, it’s also abundantly clear that this environment is not one of the best that has ever been for the biotech industry, so we can’t be irresponsible in how we invest in our pipeline programs.
So we have today multiple assets. They are staged with respect to where they are clinically or preclinically, i.e., how far they are along in development. And that staging can be intentionally adjusted to reflect an appropriate level of financial commitment. So there are some areas that we think that the return on our investments and the value to our business is quite high. And the best example I would point to there was our decision to spend approximately $1 million to initiate the ANP1 program and to get that into preclinical testing with that relatively small amount of R&D spending. And I shared previously some exciting early stage acquisitions that were done for what I believe were essentially single-asset hearing loss program. So we use that sort of discipline and that critical ROI evaluation as a way to manage our spending across the platform.
And we’re always asking ourselves if it’s something that we should look at grant funding? Is it something we should be thinking about partnering, or is it something we just want to carefully and stepwise move forward all the while, while we wait with others for what we hope will be exciting future data from the OpRegen program.
Jason Bouvier: Great. Thanks a lot for that answer.
A – Jill Howe: Thank you, Jason.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Mayank Mamtani from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.
Q – Unidentified Analyst: Hi, guys. Madison [ph] on for Mayank. Thanks for taking the call and congrats on the progress. Just a quick question. Once you submit your IND amendment in 4Q in the 30 days past, how long will it be before you actually move into the on clinic there? And then secondly, it sounds like you guys will no longer be responsible for production as you’re transferring capacity to your partners regarding OpRegen, I’m just wondering how long that transport process would take? Thanks.
