Alaunos Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:TCRT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Kevin Boyle Senior: Good morning, Yale. Yeah. It’s a great question. Thanks for the question. We’re very excited about what we’re seeing in the translational assessments. And then specifically in regards to the cells that are persisting in the blood of our patients that have been treated are showing limited exhaustion. We’re seeing team memory stem cells. And then within the tumor biopsies that have happened post treatment, we’ve seen retention of DHLA and the mutation by the tumor and T-cells that we’ve grown from those tumor subtills have had TCRT cells and those are indeed functional against the driver mutation. So really encouraged that our cells are getting there. They look to be functional and they look to have limited exhaustion.

Yale Jen: Okay. Great. That’s very helpful. Maybe a follow-up here, which is that giving you guys start to progress a little bit more into more patients and goes (ph). Are you guys thinking about any potential business development opportunities? And if so, how would those things could be define or characterize that you will still retain a good portion of the assets in house?

Kevin Boyle Senior: Sure, Yale. Like all biotechs, we’re always in active discussion with potential partners and business development opportunities. We’re very excited about the interest that our TCR-T platform targeting driver mutation has generated within discussions with other folks and we’re also very motivated by the potential of our Hunter platform. We really believe that is quite interesting and novel because we can develop through this very high put — throughput of single cell sequencing that Drew has mentioned, identify novel targets with proprietary IP, so a very strong patent position both to bolster our own TCR library of KRAS, TP53and EGFR mutations. But at the same time, Hunter identifies and has the capability of identifying other novel targets that would be of interest to potential partners. So we really have something special here and I believe strongly that others see that very opportunity and potential as well.

Yale Jen: Okay. Great. That’s very, very helpful. Maybe just squeezing one more. You currently assume you have a certain level of debt. How would — what’s your thought in managing that and thanks.

Mike Wong: Thanks for the question. As of year-end, our outstanding debt balance was approximately $16.7 million. We started principal repayments in September of 20 22 and we expect to have that fully repaid by August of this year.

Yale Jen: Okay. Great. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.

Operator: Thank you. And one moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Thomas Flaten with Lake Street. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thomas Flaten: All right. Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Kevin, I was wondering if you could expand a little bit more on what qualifies you as Phase 2 ready aside from the patient number? Any other things we should be looking for there?

Kevin Boyle Senior: Thomas, good morning. When we look towards what we want to accomplish in the Phase 1, first and foremost, it’s about safety. It’s identifying a maximum tolerated dose and then it’s also identifying the recommended Phase 2 dose. So those are going to be the three items that we look for, safety, maximum tolerated dose, recommended Phase 2 dose. And what’s really nice is this patient design allows us to accelerate achieving this objective and that is why a relatively low patient number in Phase 1 is all that’s required to achieve these objectives. So as you may recall, Thomas, we only had to dose one patient at the first dose level and because of the favorable safety profile that we’ve seen, we were able to accelerate that to the second dose level.