Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

INFIQ
Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc.US flagOther OTC
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9,076.00Market Cap

Q3 FY2022 · Earnings Call TranscriptNovember 14, 2022

APIChatGPT

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Infinity Pharmaceuticals conference call to discuss the company's Third Quarter 2022 Financial Results and Business Update.

My name is Michelle, and I will be your operator for today's call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised this call is being recorded at Infinity's request.

Now I would like to introduce your host for today's call, Jayne Kauffman. Please go ahead.

Jayne Kauffman

Thank you, Michelle, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to today's call to discuss our third quarter 2022 financial results and the MARIO-3 data update that we announced in a separate press release earlier this morning.

Both press releases are available on our website at infi.com. On the call with me today are Adelene Perkins, Chief Executive Officer and Chair; Larry Bloch, President; and Robert Ilaria, Jr., Chief Medical Officer.

We will open up the call for Q&A following our remarks. Please note that during this call, we may make forward-looking statements about our future expectations and plans, including clinical development objectives, the therapeutic potential of our product candidates, our strategic plans and financial projections.

Our actual results may differ materially from what we project today due to a number of important factors, including the considerations described in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for 2021 and in other filings we make with the SEC. These forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today and we caution you that we may not update them in the future, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Adelene.

Adelene Perkins

Thanks, Jayne, and thank to everyone for joining us to review Infinity's third quarter 2022 business update. Today we are pleased to provide encouraging updated data from our single arm MARIO-3 Phase II trial evaluating eganelisib in combination with atezolizumab and nab-paclitaxel in patients with front-line metastatic triple negative breast cancer or TNBC.

We are encouraged by the updated results, which continued to show durable long-term clinical benefit for patients, which we will review shortly. As we disclosed on our second quarter earnings call, we have made entering into a strategic partnership to advance eganelisib development and pave the way to eventual approval, our top priority.

We plan to initiate additional studies of eganelisib after putting a partnership in place to ensure that we and our partners are aligned on eganelisib's future development. Let me bring you up to date on our progress.

Our business development discussions are directed towards an initial focused development plan in a randomized controlled setting. The benefit seen across a broad array of solid tumors in which eganelisib has been studied to date, including breast, urothelial, head and neck, ovarian and melanoma cancers, providing multiple potential future development path.

It is our goal to announce a partnership and the focus of the prioritized clinical development plan for eganelisib in the third quarter of 2023. Turning to the MARIO-3 data.

With an additional year of data maturity since our last update at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in December 2021, there is encouraging evidence of a long-term benefit for patients relative to the IMpassion130 benchmark study. We are now able to report the 1-year progression-free survival rate for patients with both PD-L1 positive and PD-L1 negative tumors, which were promising for all patients regardless of PD-L1 status.

This long-term benefit in patients with TNBC is consistent with the long-term benefits seen in other indications in which eganelisib has been studied. Additionally, there were no new safety signals during the extended period of treatment.

We were also pleased to report positive updated results from the randomized control MARIO-275 Phase II clinical study evaluating eganelisib plus nivolumab versus nivolumab in patients with second line platinum-resistant metastatic urothelial cancer during the third quarter. As we previously reported, the eganelisib combination showed approximately a doubling of patient overall survival at the 2-year landmark analysis compared to standard of care nivolumab monotherapy.

Eganelisib has demonstrated promising clinical results across five oncology indications and treatment settings to date. The continued strength of our data across multiple indications provides solid evidence that eganelisib has the potential to be a transformative therapy in immuno-oncology for three key reasons.

First, we have a first-in-class therapy with potent and specific on-target activity and translational data showing that target inhibition with eganelisib reprograms macrophages in the tumor micro environment reduces immune suppression and activate an anticancer immune response. Second, the clinical data with eganelisib have demonstrated prolonged progression-free survival in multiple indications and extended overall survival over current standards of care in a randomized controlled trial that allowed us to see the distinct contribution of eganelisib over its combination drug partners.

Third, and very importantly, eganelisib has been shown to have an acceptable and manageable safety profile in combination with other drugs, including in 2 and 3 drug combination regimen. At this time, I'd now like to turn the call over to Dr.

Ilaria to review our recent encouraging eganelisib data. Rob?

Robert Ilaria

Thank you, Adelene, and good morning. The objective of our MARIO-3 TNBC Phase II study was to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the addition of eganelisib to atezolizumab and nab-paclitaxel in frontline metastatic TNBC patients.

Patients were enrolled in either PD-L1 positive or PD-1 negative tumor cohorts. The [ alogipitic ] criteria for MARIO-3 were designed to mirror the IMpassion130 study to facilitate benchmarking.

It's important to note that the approval of immune checkpoint inhibitors in combination with chemotherapy in frontline metastatic TNBC have been limited to PD-L1 positive tumors. There are no immune checkpoint inhibitor regimens approved for patients with metastatic PD-L1 negative tumors, which represent approximately 2/3 of TNBC patients.

As of October 8, 2022, 62 TNBC patients were enrolled and evaluable for safety, and 57 patients were evaluable for efficacy in MARIO-3 with a median duration of follow-up of 10 months. In the efficacy data set, 35 patients had PD-L1 negative tumors, 18 patients had PD-L1 positive tumors and 8 patients had tumors of undetermined PD-L1 status.

We're pleased to share that we continue to see very encouraging and durable evidence of a progression-free survival benefit in this study. In patients with PD-L1 negative tumors, we continue to see an improvement in median PFS, with a median PFS of 7.3 months in MARIO-3 compared to 5.6 months in IMpassion130, a 30% relative improvement.

Even more importantly, we're also seeing evidence of potential long-term benefit with a 1-year PFS rate of 34.7%, although the 1-year PFS rate was not disclosed for the IMpassion130 PD-L1-negative population, it should be noted that the 1-year PFS rate in MARIO-3 PD-L1 negative tumors, a subgroup with inferior outcomes with immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, exceeds the 23.7 1-year PFS rate for the IMpassion130 ITT, which of course, included patients with PD-L1 positive and negative tumors. In patients with PD-L1 positive tumors, we also observed evidence of potential long-term benefit with a 1-year PFS rate of 37.5% compared to 29.1% in IMpassion130, a 29% relative improvement.

In addition to the encouraging 1-year PFS rate, we observed further evidence of antitumor activity of the eganelisib triplet in patients with PD-L1 positive tumors. The objective response rate was 66.7% compared to 58.9% in IMpassion130 largely driven by a higher complete response rate in MARIO-3 patients with PD-L1 positive tumors, 16.7% versus 10.3% of patients in IMpassion130.

Lastly, the median duration of response was 11.7 months compared to 8.5 months in IMpassion130, a 38% relative improvement. We did not continue to see improvement in the median PFS and of the MARIO-3 PD-L1 positive population with a median PFS of 6.4 months compared to 7.5 months on IMpassion130.

With the approval of pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy in patients with PD-1 positive tumors, this proved to be a challenging patient population to enroll, which provided us with a less robust sample size to characterize the median PFS compared to our PD-L1 negative patient cohort. Nonetheless, the 1-year PFS rate, an indicator of potential long-term benefit was very consistent across PD-L1 tumor status in MARIO-3, 37.5% in PD-L1 positive tumors, and 34.7% in PD-L1 negative tumors.

These combined for a 1-year PFS rate of 36% in the MARIO-3 ITT, a 52% relative improvement over the 1-year PFS rate of 23.7% reported in the entire IMpassion130 population. The updated safety analysis of the MARIO-3 TNBC triplet regimen remains consistent with expectations for the three component drugs and no new safety signals were observed during the extended time on treatment.

The most common grade 3 or higher treatment-related adverse events were hepatic AEs at 24.2%, neutropenia AEs at 14.5% and skin and peripheral neuropathy adverse events, each at 11.3%. 25.8% patients discontinued treatment for treatment-related AEs, which for a triplet regimen compares favorably to the 19.1% reported in IMpassion130 for the atezolizumab and nab-paclitaxel doublet.

While hepatic AEs remain the most common grade 3 or higher treatment-related adverse events, when eganelisib is combined with an immune checkpoint inhibitor, they continue to be reversible within a relatively short amount of time often without corticosteroids. Bilirubin elevations was infrequent and we saw no evidence of Hy's law.

In summary, the almost 1-year greater data maturity in MARIO-3 TNBC has provided us a new opportunity to gain insight into potential long-term benefit of the triplet regimen of eganelisib combined with atezolizumab and nab-paclitaxel with encouraging 1-year progression-free survival rates across tumor PD-L1 status. These findings build on the promising 2-year landmark overall survival data, Adelene described from our MARIO-275 randomized trial in second line platinum-resistant urothelial cancer.

Data from our Phase II studies are consistent with and built upon findings in our MARIO-1 Phase Ib study, where we demonstrated the potential for eganelisib to benefit patients refractory to immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as patients with squamous cell cancer of the head and neck. The totality of the eganelisib data across multiple tumor types supports important next steps in a robust, randomized clinical trial setting.

Now I'll turn the call over to Larry to review our third quarter financial results. Larry?

Lawrence Bloch

Thank you, Rob. During the third quarter, we continued to pursue a disciplined prudent approach to capital allocation.

So at the end of the third quarter of 2022, Infinity had total cash of $47.2 million compared to $80.7 million at December 31, 2021. Research and development expenses for the third quarter 2022 were $7.7 million compared to $7.1 million at the same period in 2021.

And this increase is primarily related to higher compensation expense due to additional staff to support the future development of eganelisib. General and administrative expense was $3.5 million for the third quarter of 2022 as compared to $3.8 million in the same period in 2021.

This increase was primarily due to a decrease in professional services. Net loss for the third quarter of 2022 was $10.7 million or a basic and diluted loss per common share of $0.12 compared to a net loss of $10.7 million or basic and diluted loss per common share of $0.12 in the same period in 2021.

Infinity's financial guidance for 2022 remains unchanged. We continue to expect net loss for 2022 to range from between $40 million and $50 million.

And 2022 year-end cash to range from between $35 million and $45 million. These finance guidance does not include additional financing or business development activities even as our goal is to execute on eganelisib strategic analyst partnership to be announced in the first quarter of 2023.

At this time, we can open up the call for questions.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Edward Tenthoff with Piper Sandler.

Edward Tenthoff

Great. Thanks for the update on the MARIO data today.

Should we be expecting a presentation at San Antonio Breast? Will you be presenting there?

Or is this sort of the update for this year? And appreciate that and all the other guidance to that.

Adelene Perkins

Thank you, Ted, for the question. We -- this is the data update for MARIO-3.

As you know, we have presented at San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium for the last two years. And so we chose this year to present the data on this call so that we could have the most recent data cut to get the data out more quickly.

As you know, there's a longer lead time toward that medical meeting.

Edward Tenthoff

Yes, make a lot of sense. I appreciate it.

And congrats on the data. It looks great.

Adelene Perkins

Thank you.

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Soumit Roy with JonesTrading.

Soumit Roy

Just trying to understand the new 13 patients versus previous update. Is anything particular about these patients that pulled back the median PFS number?

Or did the PD-L1 expression levels go up more than expected? Any color would be appreciated.

Adelene Perkins

Thanks, Soumit. The most important update in this data is that it's more mature.

And so that was what we were really focused on and are pleased to see the 1-year PFS rate, which we think is a most meaningful reflection of long-term benefit. But perhaps, Rob, you can elaborate a little bit further on the median PFS.

Robert Ilaria

Sure. Last year, when we provided the data, we were updating data from almost a year ago.

And one of the challenges in the median PFS, of course, is that's the middle value of whatever list of number of patients you have. And one of the challenging things that we had is that the PD-L1 positive patient population improved a bit more challenging to enroll.

Once pembro chemo got approved, I think a lot of those patients were seeing in the community and not in a lot of the research centers. So as a result, we weren't able to get as many patients in the PD-L1 positive group is negative.

And as a result, that midpoint can really fluctuate a lot. And so last year, there were some patients who hadn't had even their first scan yet.

So I think the challenge is a median PFS can really be variable when you have a smaller sample set compared to, for example, our PD-L1 negative side was almost twice what the positives were.

Operator

And our last question comes from the line of Kalpit Patel with B. Riley.

Unknown Analyst

This is Malcolm for Kalpit. So maybe focusing on your partnership discussions that are ongoing for UC versus TNBC, has there been any interest relatively higher in one indication versus the other?

And maybe which do you anticipate being the first to advance to the next stage? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Adelene Perkins

Okay. Thank you for the question.

Well, we're not in a position today to describe the specifics on the future of eganelisib's development plan until we put the partnership in place. We can tell you a few things that you might expect to see in the future development.

First is that it will be leveraging some of the encouraging data that we generated with eganelisib to date in one or more indications. The focus of the development will be in a randomized controlled setting so that we can very clearly show the contribution of eganelisib over its contribution regimen over standard of care.

And three, it will be in a patient setting where there's a high unmet need. So we've seen the benefit of eganelisib across a broad ray of solid tumors.

It gives us many potential development path, as you mentioned, breast, urothelial, head and neck, ovarian melanoma. And so we're going to -- we're prioritizing that with a prospective partner and we look forward to announcing the details of the partnership and the first next trial and potential subsequent trials in the first quarter of 2023.

Unknown Analyst

And just a kind of related follow-up. In the discussions and your own with KOLs and also coming away from the SITC conference over the weekend, any thoughts on what a registration study could look like in the context of PD-L1 status positive or negative?

And if there's an opportunity to lump them together also as a kind of a novel trial design. Could you comment on that?

Would be helpful.

Adelene Perkins

Sure. I'll turn it over to Rob and just highlight that we have seen benefit with eganelisib in patients across multiple different tumor types, regardless of PD-L1 status.

Of course, a registrational trial will depend on what is the approved standard of care in those different patient populations? And maybe, Rob, you can elaborate further.

Robert Ilaria

Sure. And also, I mean, regarding the TNBC question specifically, it's true, we are seeing pretty consistent 1-year PFS rates across B1 negative and positive tumors, which certainly is very encouraging.

They're -- certainly, in thinking about pass for TNBC. One could be going for both patient populations, although now that there's a different standard of care for those two populations, it does make it a complex and probably large trial because of the two different control arms, the PD-L1 negative is certainly a great story.

Though checkpoint inhibitors haven't been successful there. So certainly, you could argue that the great unmet need is in that PD-L1 negative group.

So that's certainly also a very attractive path. And as Adelene mentioned, we believe the TNBC data kind of adds to totality of the data.

So I think which way you decide to go, which tumor, which indication within a tumor, I think will be very much influenced by who our partner is and their preferences as well.

Operator

And I'm showing no further questions at this time. And I'd like to turn the conference back over to Adelene for any further remarks.

Adelene Perkins

Thank you, Michelle, and thank you all for joining us today. We are really enthusiastic about the data that we have generated and the progress of advancing eganelisib for the potential treatment of patients with cancers who are in dire need of improved therapy.

So we look forward to updating you on our business development efforts and the focus of the next study for eganelisib within the coming months. Thank you for your continued support.

Operator

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference.

You may all disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.