Transcript

Hi, my name is Tim Hunt. I'm the CEO at the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine. And today I am here with Sam Semico, who's a one of the leading analysts, well, Wall Street analysts in the field with City. So Sam, welcome to ARM Studios and the meeting on the Mesa. Thanks for coming in. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. You've been around the conference a little bit yesterday and today, like just at a very high level. What are your kind of key takeaways from both of those events? Yeah. So you know, I was fortunate enough to participate in the analyst panel. At the start of the conference, I'd say, you know, listening to the other analysts on the stage in addition to some of the things that I said with some investors on stage in their own panel as well as CEOs. You know, big take away is that we all I think really want to see this field move forward and you sharing sort of the perspectives from each of our individual like seats. So mind being the analysts, CEO's and also the investors that that help seed some of these early stage companies. You know, we all want to share our experience. Really help the field move forward. I would say from an analyst perspective, you know, investors are not at the engagement isn't as high as it has been in the past, but it is still there. And I think it's definitely focused on a indication by indication accompanied by company perspective right now. And I think that, you know, with some wins in the space that could maybe translate into a more broader sort of acceptance of what the the field is moving forward, particularly because there is a lot of. Really good innovation happening here. Timelines do take some time to move these therapies forward. But from from my perspective, we are starting to see some really decent data coming out of many of the original gene editing companies. Cell therapy is working really well and autoimmune in particular. So I do think that there's a lot to be excited about. Well, just just building on that, tell us we're just focusing on cell therapy for a moment. Tell us more like what gives you optimism about the field of. Yeah. So I think we have a lot of engagement for many, many companies and what's great across the board particularly for autologous CARTI and the autoimmune space is that it's working really well. We see these patients having permissions, drug free remissions out to 3-4 years for some of the earlier patients that have been dosed. And I think you can, you know envision a world where you know there is a treatment for some of these very severe patients that are refractory from everything. Was available, you know sort of the counter to that and the autoimmune cell therapy space specifically is there is a lot of competition and and I think you know dealing from an investment perspective trying to figure out which of these parties is going to be the one that is going to you know be successful commercially. It is a challenge right now. But what's interesting is we also have a bunch of modalities outside of the traditional CAR T we have some buy specifics that are coming down the pipeline. We have in vivo cart. That is just getting started and in a lot of ways. So there's a ton of innovation here and it's an exciting space when you kind of step back. And either with your investor hat on or just thinking about the selling gene therapy field broadly, what do you think the kind of what is sort of missing from the popular narrative that could be improved? Maybe advice you'd give to me or other people in the field? One thing I hear from investors is that the severe population for autoimmune diseases is, is probably too small to support a business model. I don't think anybody knows fully what that population size is. And obviously it's going to be different. And indication, indication, but I do think that there's severity of these autoimmune patients is a real problem that does deserve to be treated by a novel mechanism like this. There are some patients that unfortunately, you know, the mortality rate is higher in these indications. And there's a huge quality of life aspect too. Some patients are cycled through all these therapies and yet nothing has worked. And they they're unable to work and they're unable to do like a lot of the daily tasks of living. So, you know. The population that could be helped by these therapies, I don't want to say that it's too small to support a commercial of activity, although it might be too small to support multiple players in it. Now I mentioned from earlier the lympho depletion piece, if we could remove some of that and expands the populations that could be targeted with these therapies. So I just think that as we iterate over the coming years on what these therapies can do, how to make the most accessible, we'll start to see that. Market evolving with that. Great. Perfect. That'll be the last word. Thank you, Sam very much for coming in, for spending some time with us here at our meeting on the Mesa and at Arms Studios. Thank you so much for having me.