Longboard Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:LBPH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Josh Schimmer: First on 352, would you consider a switch study from patients on Fintepla? And if so, any thoughts on what that might look like? And then for 659, as you’re considering potential indications there, there are a number of indications of S1P modulators already addressed, such as MS and ulcerative colitis. Would you be inclined to pursue those or find new territories and what might your thinking be to identify the best applications of this mechanism?

Kevin Lind: 659, we think that there’s tremendous unmet need beyond MS and ulcerative colitis. Again, the unique characteristics of 659 lend themselves towards these neurological conditions, given the central action that occurs. We do have a license with Pfizer to make sure we don’t compete with them in ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s and some of the areas they’re going after. So that’s not even possible. But we think there’s tremendous unmet need in these orphan neurological conditions where lymphocyte reduction, T cell trafficking, all these things that we’ve seen with these S1Ps over the last 10 to 15 years could be incredibly valuable to patients who have tremendous unmet needs. So, that’s more we’re thinking about for 659. Randall, do you want to take a first cut at the switch study?

Randall Kaye: A switch study from Fintepla over to LP352, so I’m going to answer this as a clinician. I’m not sure you’d need to do that. You have a medication that has one of the most restrictive REMS that are out there in the marketplace in a patient population that is fragile and challenging. So just what might sound simple as doing an echocardiogram prior to treatment and echos throughout, I don’t think you need to do a switch study. I think you will get natural movement over to our compound. It would be intrinsically obvious that LP352 would be safer and would be a right thing to switch without the study. But it’s a provoking question. We’ll think about it a little bit more.

Kevin Lind: Yeah, something we’ve been thinking a lot. And it kind of gets down to how do we want to handle Dravet, given fenfluramine usage there? But as of right now, we’re not seeing a tremendous uptake with fenfluramine in even Dravet alone, let alone in Lennox-Gastaut, such that we think it’s necessary, but it’s something we’ve been kicking around for a while as a potential after we see PACIFIC data.

Josh Schimmer: Do you feel like you’ve got the resources, capital wise, to potentially advance both the programs simultaneously? Or do you feel like you, at some point, may have to choose which to prioritize?

Kevin Lind: We think we are going to be able to have the resources. As Brandi mentioned, this last financing was not about funding the Phase 3s for LP352 and the Phase 2 for LP659. This was really a bunch of folks who could not find volume in our stock wanting to get into the name and so using a financing in a formal setting as opposed to using the ATM. And so, our hope is that we can continue to finance as necessary. And we are going to try to be prudent in how much dilution we want to take along the way, knowing that there has been this movement towards the haves versus the have nots, but we don’t think we need to raise massive amounts of capital to really be still considered to have. Brandi, do you want add anything?

Brandi Roberts: No, I just want to say that I think we’ve really done a great job at building a lot of talent in the organization as well. We’ve grown from just three employees back in 2022 to 33 at the end of 2022, and have bought brought in a lot of people with great epilepsy and neurology experience. And I think we plan to capitalize on that and continue to move these programs forward ourselves.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Charles Duncan from Cantor Fitzgerald.