Emily Le:

Hi, everyone. My name is Emily Le from Bispecific Antibody Pipeline Congress. I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to speak with Doctor John Haurum, CEO of F-star Biotechnology. He will be giving a presentation at the Bispecific Antibody Case Studies & Clinical Relevance track as part of the inaugural Bispecific Antibody Pipeline Congress on Wednesday August 22nd in Washington D.C.

John, thank you for joining us.

John Haurum:

Thank you.

Emily Le:

What is the topic of your talk and its significance.

John Haurum:

We will be talking about F-star's work on checkpoint targeting bispecific antibodies, where we have a novel format for making bispecific antibodies that binds two copies of both antigens. So,it is bivalently bispecific and our work in the IO space is focused on a couple of different aspects. One is dual checkpoint modulators and another part of our work is on targeted checkpoint modulation, where one of the specificities is targeting the tumor microenvironment.

Emily Le:

All right. So, in your experience, John, can you share with us some of the common myths about immune system activation using bispecifics?

John Haurum:

A question we are often met with is how we are dealing with the dosing of two different antibodies in the same molecule and how we adjust the dosing of the two different specificities; and it kind of exemplifies perhaps a misunderstanding of what you are trying to achieve with a bispecific.

We don't see a bispecific as a combination of two drugs. We see it as a new drug in its own right that in most cases, in our hands, has its own unique biology that is predicated from the binding of the components in the same drug. Therefore, it's not really a relevant question from the point of view of our candidate selection decisions. We basically look for a drug where through the two specificities we have a new clinically meaningful and groundbreaking, new mechanism of action in the compound.

Emily Le:

What is your vision for the bispecific antibody field in the next five years?

John Haurum:

I think it's going to be one of the important cornerstones of immunotherapy in cancer. Through the advent of novel bispecifics, we have a potential to go beyond combinations of individual drugs and essentially develop therapies that end up with situations, where it's not just one plus one equals two but it equals three, or even more than that, through these novel mechanisms that we can elicit.

And we also hope that through that, we can improve the efficacy profiles and we can improve on the safety profiles of the compounds and also that we can potentially expand on the number of patients that will benefit from immunotherapy. Both in terms of the proportion of patients that are responding, that should increase but also through the duration of the responses. That they should hopefully be lengthened by these more powerful agents.

Emily Le:

So, what presentation and sessions are you looking forward to the most at the Bispecific Antibody Pipeline Congress meeting?

John Haurum:

I really look forward to hearing Janice Reichert giving her overview of the trends in the space and I also always enjoy Roland Kontermann's presentations on the different platforms that we have and that he's working on.

I'm also very interested in some of the novel compounds that are being presented. For example the OX40/CTLA-4 presentation from Alligator; it is a very interesting concept to combine those. I'm curious to hear about the safety profile and the biological benefits of that.

Then obviously, there's the area outside of IO. F-star as a company have a focus for our proprietary pipeline inside IO but we're also working outside in collaborations, for example, with Denali and the blood brain barrier space. So, I'm looking forward for some of the new data. For example Sanofi's presentation on HIV and neutralizing trispecific antibodies.

Emily Le:

Wonderful. John, thank you for your time and insights today.

John Haurum:

Thank you very much. I look forward to the meeting.

Emily Le:

That was John Haurum, CEO of F-star Biotechnology. He will be speaking at the Bispecific Antibody Case Studies & Clinical Relevance track as part of the Bispecific Antibody Pipeline Congress in Washington D.C.

If you'd like to hear him in person, go to www.BispecificAntibodyCongress.com for registration information and enter the key code PODCAST.

I'm Emily Le. Thank you for listening.