ImmunoGen's CEO Presents At Morgan Stanley Healthcare Conference - Transcript

So, a lot going on in the partner front. Our newest partner Lilly and Novartis are doing a lot of work pre-clinically. We think that those will lead to compounds coming to the clinic in a reasonable period of time, but back to the proprietary side as for the strategy is to build on the technology base that really has been funded through a lot of partner activity over the years and advance the proprietary pipeline.

Our most advanced proprietary compound is IMGN901 that is in page 2 clinical studies for first line small cell lung cancer in combination with carboplatin and etoposide. Small cell lung cancer we know is a very difficult disease. Patient’s respond to the existing therapy, but with no durability. So, what we are looking for is to be able to extend the durability of a response by adding 901. We had data just to the symposium last week out in Chicago and what that data showed in establishing the phase II dose, it was essentially an all comers study for patients who would be getting a carboplatin etoposide therapy to which we added 901. Most of these patients expressed their target CD56, but what we found was, a) that we could dose 901 at the same level that we dosed it in monotherapy studies, which again speaks to the tolerability of this approach but also that we saw some interesting activity in small cell lung cancer patients, because they were a number of them in the study. A few of them chemo-naïve, many of them platinum-refractory/resistant and we saw some activity there, which can be very difficult in later stage small cell lung cancer patients. So, very encouraged with that. Behind that we have two other compounds that have come into the clinic over the last several months one, for Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the target there is CD37. We think while Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma receives a lot of attention, there are a number of therapies there, we think this is a highly differentiated offering because again using our antibody-drug conjugate technology. What we’ve done is we’ve developed an antibody that pre-clinically has shown a high level of activity as a naked agent, to which we have then added our conjugate technology. So, we think that offers tremendous promise and then, the last proprietary compound which really just started dose in few months ago, is one that targets the Folate receptor 1. And we think that it’s an interesting target, over expressed in a variety of cancers. And what we have with that particular compound, in addition to it being an interesting target, we brought forward our fourth unique linker, and each of our linkers conveys a different set of characteristics on the conjugate, this one happens to counter multi-drug resistance which it can common in many cancers and pre-clinically this looked to be a highly efficacious compound. So, we’re excited to see that develop. So that’s kind of a mini update on where we are.

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