Acumen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:ABOS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Our next question comes from Judah Frommer of Credit Suisse. Your line is open.

Judah Frommer: Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. First, just, Dan, to follow-up on the enrollment commentary around issues from 2021. Is that largely COVID? Is there anything else you’d call out, whether it’s competing against other late-stage trials or publicly available information from those late-stage assets?

Daniel O’Connell: Yeah. Thanks, Judah. I think that it’s — the — the legacy issues in 2021 were certainly COVID mediated in terms of site activation and access to patients and getting stuff standing up that study in the course of the pandemic. I think we’ve tried to get a sense of whether — to the best of our understanding, our sites, we’re not necessarily competing with other studies at sites per se. We are doing a Phase 1 study in patients. So I think the sort of the value proposition and the ask of getting patients enrolled, we refined that messaging in multiple formats. And I think a lot of the steps that we’ve taken, a lot of kind of the ground game that we rolled out over the course of this year has really impacted the current momentum in the study.

So I don’t think we can attribute the current progress, and I know we’re obviously updating with shift to the back half of the year — or second half of the year, but certainly, the progress is a result of lots of little things that we’ve gotten right over the course of this year as we’ve made additions to the team and explore some other avenues towards recruitment. So again, we’re really encouraged with the progress and the operational kind of elements that are in play right now, which is why we’ve elected to guide to the first quarter enrollment.

Judah Frommer: Understood. And then just to follow-up on, what I think is new commentary in the prepared remarks around business development and obviously, you hired a Chief Legal Officer. Anything you could elaborate on regarding your thoughts around business development, would it be assets that would kind of work in conjunction with 193 or is it more than that?

Daniel O’Connell: Yeah. So I think the color I’d add to that, Judah, it’s a great question. Thanks for picking it up there. I mean we did want to make some comment in the script as business pipeline expansion has always been part of our business strategy. I think on the heels of lecanemab success and as Eric noted, kind of the — what we perceive as a higher probability of success for 193, I think that the pipeline expansion criteria and priorities are more aligned with 193 going forward and looking for things that are complementary, supplemental or additive to that asset. So beyond that, we don’t have a specified time frame. I do think as we look at deployment of capital, we’re pretty judicious and I think we are looking for things that are going to be near-term have reasonable capital requirements and also have specified milestones that would be appreciated and valued by shareholders, and potential investors.

Judah Frommer: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question will come from Charlie Yang of Bank of America. And Charlie, your line is open.

Charlie Yang : Hi. This is Charlie on for Jeff. So I guess my first question is regarding how CTAD presentation from lecanemab and gantenerumab like what kind of data, specifically maybe more about what said by you like to see that can help with gaining more confidence with your assets? And the second of all is regarding your computerized cognitive assumption test, are there any kind of beta or publication are you that can correlate that to the CDRs sum ˜ºof boxes will other more of a traditional cognition measurement and which we can use to somewhat kind of extrapolate the data from the Phase 1 results? Thank you.