Jennifer Buell : So, I should I should share with you, Jack, that’s a great question and it is something that we – in the industry has typically been plagued with waiting 28 days per patient. I will say that given the experience and the visibility of Dr. Yelena Janjigian, she was able to navigate and negotiate this very aggressively with our regulatory partners and we do not have any gaps. So there’s no staggering in the trial, which is enormously helpful, in part, it speaks to the unmet need. It also speaks to her convincing argument about the unmet need and the urgency of delivering therapies for these patients.
Jack Allen: Got it. Okay.
Jennifer Buell : The rate of enrolment I should say it’s moving really, really quite quickly.
Jack Allen: Got it. Could you speak to maybe the patient and thoughts that they have at this – with the new centers at Memorial Sloan Kettering and what the potential demand could be for this 40 person study?
Jennifer Buell : Well, I will just share with you without disclosing too much. I’ll just share with you what Dr. Janjigian just presented to our team and board this week. She said I have patients lined up for this trial. The demand is very high. And I had to take to give anymore further guidance, but I will say, we will – I believe that we will be on track to have concluded enrollment in the first half of this year.
Jack Allen: Got it. Great. And then, just one more on the gastric study. What is the dialog between MiNK and the investigator in the study? I guess, how frequently you’re getting updates as a relates to data? And how should we think about that dynamic?
Jennifer Buell : We have Dr. Janjigian has quite a bit of experience with a genesis of bot/bal combination as well as now the cells. We have really quite frequent interactions with her. So we have a good sense of both the activity of the product, as well as the safety profile of the product in real time. I should say though, given her gravitas, it will benefit all of us to ensure that the data and her interpretations of the data will come really from Dr. Janjigian and her team and we expect that to be at a major conference. So, it would be coming from Dr. Janjigian’s team.
Jack Allen: Got it. Got it. Great. And then, shifting gears I was hoping you could provide an update on some of the other non-oncology programs. I know in the past you spoke that potentially testing the cells and graph with cells disease where do you think sit as it relates those other opportunities beyond ARDS and oncology?
Jennifer Buell : So, Jack, I’m so grateful for your for your thinking on GVHD, because as we all know the cells actually can naturally prevent GVHD and we know that they can be dosed tolerably and quite impactfully. And there are a few different settings that we have continued to pursue. We’re working aggressively. We have the trial designed and we’re working aggressively to find the support to – the financial support to execute on this trial. It would be a very rapid trial. And acute graft versus host disease and something that we could move forward very, very quickly. We do expect to announce this trial in 2024. Now we had hoped to do so a little earlier this year. But as I’ve mentioned we’re being really rigorous about our financial prudence and garnering the kind of finances that we need to advance the program.
This is something that with a small cohort of patients we believe we can generate the data that would be necessary to support what a pivotal program could look like in this indication. And this would be really quite a large indication for us and it’s something that we’re committed to moving forward very, very quickly. ARDS though should not be underestimated and I can tell you really our observations of the demand is increasing in the post-pandemic era. We are seeing a much higher frequency of a couple of different pulmonary disorders that are presenting including vulnerability and increased incidence of ICU in-patients with bilateral pneumonia and patients with RSV, as well as secondary to influenza A and this year really will profoundly contribute to the numbers that I mentioned earlier.
The 600,000 patients annually it was based on numbers that have been generated since prior to 2022 and we expect those numbers to increase dramatically based on the observations today. Additionally, these cells can prevent secondary infections from [Indiscernible] bacteremia based on the observations that we’ve seen and published. And that is a major contributor to ICU mortality in patients even when they recover from respiratory distress of those secondary components are really important. And what we have observed in our clinical trials and published in Nature Communications is in-patients on mechanical ventilation and on VV ECMO, the administration of these cells do appear to be life-saving in a number of patients. And so we’re continuing to expand that trial and we have the opportunity to do so in an incredibly efficient way through a phase 2 trial large national platform program that would allow us to interrogate the cells compared to standard of care, corticosteroids, which we believe is going to – we have a lot of confidence and what the cells can do, compared to standard of care based on what our observations have been to-date.
So, I don’t want to underestimate the importance of what we can deliver for patients with respiratory distress and the urgent need to be able to do so.
Jack Allen: Got it. Thank you so much for the color. Congratulations again on the progress.
Jennifer Buell : Thank you, Jack.
Operator: We will take our next question from Mayank Mamtani with B. Reilly Securities.
Mayank Mamtani : Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions and appreciate the comprehensive update. Jen, could you talk to the status of your engineered iNKT cell efforts including in autoimmune diseases if there is any? And also I was curious on the next steps on the ARDS programs for 797. What – are you – what sort of illustration based development do you have planned understanding you may need a partner there? And then I have a follow-up for the gastric cancer study.
