Thank you for joining us today for the business update from Avacta as part of our annual general meeting of our shareholders. Avacta is evolving in response to our recent successes. We have a singular focus on our delivery of novel therapeutics. We have a reshaped board of directors and our new executive management team that we would like to introduce today. Among our board and our management team, we have the right credentials to take this innovative portfolio forward for driving value for both patients and shareholders alike. We take a revolutionary approach. We have in our pipeline peptide drug conjugates leveraging a key protease in the tumor microenvironment known as Fibroblast Activation Protein alpha.
These FAP-enabled drug release mechanisms allow us to implement in both a peptide drug conjugate and our first lead compound, AVA6000, is in the clinic, and we recently published our first clinical data in April of 2024. We can also implement this in other ways in the pipeline in both Affimer drug conjugates as well as antibody drug conjugates. We'll introduce you to our innovative R&D team, the executive management team that will be taking this forward. At our general meeting of shareholders, you can see our agenda here. We will start with the updates on our board of directors and the management team evolution. We will review our financial planning and evolution here. We will also provide a business update: our therapeutic strategy, progressing AVA6000 into the clinic, our therapeutics pipeline evolution, as well as our catalysts and milestones.
And then in the room, we will finish with our questions and answers. Our first announcement was to bring in a new director, a non-executive director, to the board of directors. Darlene Deptula-Hicks joins us. Darlene has extensive financial experience globally and brings a great U.S. presence, ability to fundraise, and the ability to help us, again, on the commercial side as well as in the financial sides. We're thrilled to welcome Darlene to the board of directors. Darlene will join our new chairman, Shaun Chilton, myself, and our other directors. Let me take just a moment to remind you and to introduce some new roles in the board of directors. First, our chairman, Shaun Chilton, who took over not too long ago. Myself, the CEO, took over at the end of April.
Paul Fry has been on our board with deep financial experience and has been the chair of the audit committee. Trevor Nicholls remains and stays on as our chair of the Remcom. Mark Goldberg, physician, oncologist, and scientist by training, is the chair of our science and technology committee. And our new non-executive director, Darlene Deptula-Hicks, as I introduced. I also want to take just a moment to introduce the Avacta executive management team, led by myself, Christina Coughlin, again, new CEO as of the end of April 1st. I will remain as the head of research and development leading this fantastic team. Simon Bennett is our Chief Business Officer who brings deep deal experience to the table to help us with our business development aspects.
Karen Harrison is our Chief Operating Officer who has experience in both academia as well as in pharma in terms of running teams, managing teams, and is really boots on the ground here in London with us. And then let me introduce you to our scientific team. David Jones is our Head of Cancer Biology, and Francis Wilson is our Head of Chemistry. Together, they are prosecuting this very innovative pipeline, and we look forward to the pipeline update a bit later this year. We are also today announcing our scientific advisory board, and you can see the membership here. We're thrilled to welcome this group of really key opinion leaders, fantastic scientists and clinicians who are joining us to not only help move AVA6000 through its clinical program, but as well to help on the pipeline.
Many of them have actually participated in the trial and are working with us on moving AVA6000 in the clinic. We are bringing together a group of experts from head and neck oncology, sarcoma oncology, as well as cardio-oncology to help us with both AVA6000 as well as our pipeline. It was important to us to have both U.K., Europe presence, as well as U.S. presence, as these are the geographies that we are taking AVA6000 and our pipeline forward. An important aspect, if we think back to our prelims presentation at the end of April, one of the key goals was for the board and myself to be working together on a funding strategy. Here, just to review with you, the global funding environment in biotech does continue to be difficult. Our rights raise was necessary at the time and was funding both therapeutics and diagnostics.
Recall, this was before we had the exciting data from AVA6000. The U.K. does continue to be somewhat difficult for companies at Avacta's stage. We are seeing some recovery, but the U.S. has typically been a bit more supportive of companies at Avacta's stage of development. We will continue with our innovative pipeline to have significant funding requirement going forward, but we are looking across opportunities there on the strategic financing. AVA6000 is entering the next stage of development through the expansion cohorts, and larger Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials will be more expensive, and they will need global approaches. We also have a new exciting pipeline that we're looking forward to updating later this year, and so that will require additional funds. The management and the board are focusing on bridging that funding gap.
We have two non-dilutive capital sources in the short term that we will be looking at. The first is to realize the value for our diagnostics assets through the process that we have entered. The second is the business development strategy is underway. As you'll recall, as we talked about a couple of months ago, deal-making in the preclinical setting as opposed to with clinical proof of concept and clinical proof of mechanism data as we presented at AACR, these are two very different strategies. Based on the data that we published in April of 2024 at AACR, we are in a different deal-making strategy. Simon, our Chief Business Officer, and myself have been working hard on this strategy, and we look forward to bringing you the results here soon. Our management focus has also been on bringing in additional institutional investors into the story.
We have been working with many funds out there and meeting with them for both medium and long-term capital needs. The clinical data are really key to building this unique equity story as well as bringing in those commercial deals. Our management team has been focusing on key global conferences as well as individual investor meetings. The board and the executive team have the credibility to bring in such institutional investors, and we look forward to updating you on our progress here. Moving now into an update and looking at some of what we think are some of the exciting parts of the Avacta pipeline going forward in the business update. As you know, Avacta has two key innovations in the pipeline that are coming together now for a truly unique new drug development class that we are looking at.
On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see our precision technology, of which our first drug in the clinic, AVA6000, is the first entry here. What you can see is that we have a precision peptide that is linked to a warhead. The precision peptide is key to essentially creating an inert warhead that remains inert until that peptide is cleaved, specifically by the FAP in the tumor that is expressed in the tumor microenvironment. If we combine that precision-enabled warhead with our second key technology, which is the Affimer, Affimers have several unique advantages that we think make them better than antibodies for this drug conjugate class. And together, these two innovations create a novel drug class known as the Affimer drug conjugate.
What's important to note also is that the precision-enabled warhead, because of its ability to conjugate to a biologic, can also be used in an ADC format as well. Here we see our mechanism of action, and this really depicts how the precision technology works. What you can see here on the left side is, again, what a precision warhead will look like: the precision peptide that is linked to that key warhead, unable to enter the cells, so rendered inert. It's inert until it encounters FAP, membrane-bound FAP, which you'll recall is specifically located in the tumor. Within the tumor microenvironment, outside of the cells, the warhead is released from the peptide, essentially creating an active warhead now that is able to migrate into either a FAP-positive, so a CAF, or a FAP-negative tumor cell, key to the mechanism of action here of the precision pipeline.
The summary slide from our clinical trial data, three key observations that we published at AACR in April of this year. First, AVA6000 delivers high concentrations of doxorubicin to the tumor microenvironment, and that is compared to the plasma. This resulted in significant anti-tumor activity, our early signs of efficacy in patients who have overexpression of FAP. Our exposure response, or our PKPD modeling, suggests that released doxorubicin is created specifically in the tumor microenvironment, cleavage in the TME, which is critical to the mechanism of action and leads to a highly reduced exposure in the plasma, which translates into the favorable safety profile. And together, these precision-enabled peptide drug conjugates, doxorubicin, result in a robust widening of the therapeutic index. So essentially comparing where we see efficacy and safety concerns, which are quite close to each other with standard-dose doxorubicin, but we pull those apart with precision-enabled.
One of the key figures here, which provides that proof of mechanism data that I mentioned, so critical for business development deal-making, is the support now for the precision platform. We know that AVA6000 was capable of shrinking tumors. We looked at that together. What's important here is that the platform, meaning the precision peptide, works as intended. The precision peptide on the warhead is designed to essentially concentrate the warhead in the tumor microenvironment relative to the plasma, allowing us to precision-enable even more potent warheads. These data, as we looked at together in the R&D spotlight, show a 2-log difference between the tumor concentration and the plasma concentration. This was regardless of the FAP level of expression.
Critically important because this provides the evidence that the precision platform is functioning in patients exactly as it was designed and almost better than would have been predicted by our animal models. Let's talk very briefly about the AVA6000 strategy as it is coming together. What you can see here is that we are in the Phase 1 part of the trial. We started with an every three-week dose escalation, and as we announced this morning, we are now progressing quickly through our every two weeks dose escalation, and we are 100% on track to achieve our goal of moving into the expansion cohorts. These are part of the Phase 1 trial, and they are designed to allow us to look at multiple different cancer indications before choosing one indication to move on to a Phase 2 trial.
You can see there our Phase 1 dose escalation data release is on track for the second half of 2024, a key second goal that we announced at our prelims presentation at the end of April. You can also see there penciled in is our Phase 2 trial. Now, the timing of this and the design will very much be based on the data that we are collecting through those expansion cohorts, and we are poised to make a decision as soon as we have the data to de-risk, essentially, that Phase 2 trial. In an ideal world, we may be able to use that Phase 2 trial for an approval strategy called an accelerated approval that will be in the United States. One key aspect of the accelerated approval strategy in the U.S. is that the Phase 3 trial must be ongoing at the time of that submission.
All of these pieces are being planned, but realize it's important for us to collect the next set of data to de-risk the further parts of the AVA6000 development program. That next key data set will be in the expansion cohorts, which, again, on track to start in the second half of 2024. Let's look again at the goals that we have set for ourselves at the end of the second half of 2024 coming up. First, initiate the expansion cohorts. That involves selecting the dose for expansion and moving into those expansion cohorts. Collecting that data is what de-risks our Phase 2 strategy. We are still 100% on track to achieve this milestone. Second, update the AVA6000 clinical data. Also, 100% on track to achieve this goal. This may be at a major medical meeting or, as we did in December, an investor meet.
As we understand better what that format will be, we will be updating everyone on when those data will be presented. And third, exciting release our pipeline update. As I mentioned, the data that were collected in the AVA6000, the proof of mechanism data show us that the precision platform is working exactly as it was designed. And so we look forward to sharing with you the new updated pipeline, which will be in the second half of 2024. And then a new goal setting for ourselves today. As we communicate those innovations in the pipeline update, we will be hosting an R&D spotlight meeting around that novel pipeline in order to explain all of the exciting innovation coming. And that will be, again, in the second half of 2024. And we look forward to updating you on all of our goals. Again, 100% on track to achieve our milestones.
Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your time.