Everyone, to this AGM, we have a quorum, and I declare the meeting open. My name is Paul Hopper, and I'm the Executive Chairman of Imugene, and I'll be the Chair for today's meeting. On behalf of the Board, I'd like to welcome you to this Annual General Meeting. Before we commence, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to the elders past, present, and emerging. I also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the various lands on which you're joining me from today, and any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders participating in this meeting. There is a quorum, as I said, and I declare the meeting open.
We have determined to hold this AGM as a hybrid meeting, in a manner which is consistent with the requirements of the Corporations Act 2001 and also our Constitution. I'd like to start by introducing our team. Leslie, who you all know, is the CEO; Jakob Dupont, Non-Executive Director in the U.S.; Kim Drapkin, Non-Executive Director in the U.S.; Lesley Russell, Non-Executive Director in the U.S.; and we have Darren, our CFO and Company Secretary, here with us; and Adrienne Atkinson from the Automic Group, and she'll be the Returning Officer for today's meeting. The virtual component of this meeting is being held via our Automic's online meeting platform, and this enables you and proxy holders to participate in the meeting live. You can ask questions, and you can submit your votes. You can submit questions at any time, and how you do this is shown on the screen there.
You can submit from now on, and I won't address questions until the relevant time of the meeting. With each resolution, questions relating to that and other ones will be answered. There'll be an opportunity later on to raise other questions which may arise from Leslie's presentation. When you ask a question, please include the resolution number to which your question relates. Could you keep them short and to the point so that as many people can ask a question? When we reach the formal part of the business shortly, voting on all resolutions will be done via poll, and shareholders attending and wishing to vote on the resolutions being put to the meeting can do so through the Automic Investor Portal. If you're not already logged in, instructions on how to do so can be seen on the screen as well.
I'm going to declare the poll open now to allow you to vote and log in. The online voting is open, and it will remain so until I declare it closed at the end of the formal business. You have to get your votes in prior to the portal being closed for them to count, so I'd encourage you to do that immediately. The agenda today will be we'll proceed to the formal matters to be considered at the AGM. You'll have the chance to ask questions relating specifically to each of those resolutions. Leslie will give a short presentation, and after that, we'll open it up for questions of a general nature. Without further ado, let's move into the formal part of the meeting as set out in the notice of meeting.
The notice of Annual General Meeting, or AGM, was distributed to all members on the 21st of July and is to be taken as read. For the purposes of the poll today, I appoint Adrienne Atkinson of Automic Group to act as the Returning Officer and to conduct the poll. You've already had instructions on how to vote virtually, and at the appropriate time, I'll ask that you mark your vote for the resolution on the yellow voting card. If you are a shareholder and wish to cast all your votes for a resolution, please place a mark in either the for, against, or abstain boxes which are next to the resolution. If you are a proxy holder, a summary of the votes to which you are entitled has been attached to the voting card.
If the summary of votes includes discretionary votes, these are yours to cast at your discretion. If you wish to cast the discretionary votes, please place a mark in the corresponding for, against, and abstain boxes. If your summary of votes does not have any discretionary votes, you do not need to mark your voting card and will simply need to hand it to the returning officer at the end of the resolutions. After all the resolutions have been read and after they've been voted on, please place it in one of the ballot boxes that will be circulating in the room. Matt or Darren, are there any questions in relation to the voting, et cetera?
My question's online.
All right, proxies have been inspected and all those validly lodged have been accepted. Proxies have been received, representing 23.7 million votes, or 8% of the issued capital of the company. All undirected proxies or open votes that have nominated the Chair of the Meeting, being me, as their proxy, will be cast in favor of each resolution in the notice of meeting. Let's now proceed to the resolutions set out in the notice. The first one, Resolution 1, is the ratification of the prior issue of placement shares to placement subscribers. To consider, and if favored, pass the following resolution: ratification of the prior issue of placement shares to placement subscribers as an ordinary resolution.
For the purposes of ASX Listing Rule 7.4 and all other purposes, shareholders ratify the issue of 68.2 million placement shares previously issued under the Listing Rule 7.1 placement capacity to the placement subscribers under the placement offer as detailed and on the terms of the explanatory memorandum. Darren or Matt, are there any questions in relation to this resolution?
No.
All right. The proxies in relation to this resolution are on the screen. You can see there are 21.9 million in favor, 1.4 million against, and 7.6 million abstaining. The vote in favor is 92.3%. In the absence of any other votes coming in, it would appear this has been overwhelmingly carried. I now can put the motion, which I've done, and for those of you attending in person, please mark your yellow voting cards. For those who are not here in person, attending virtually, please submit your vote via the online portal now. Let us now move to Resolution 2, which is the approval to issue placement attaching options under the placement offer.
This is to consider, and if in favor, pass the resolution that for the purposes of ASX Listing Rule 7.1 and for all other purposes, shareholders approve the issue of up to 51.1 million placement attaching options at an exercise price of AUD 0.43 per placement attaching option, with three placement attaching options provided for every four new shares subscribed under the placement offer, expiring on March 30, 2026, to placement subscribers under the placement offer as detailed and on the terms set out in the explanatory memorandum. Let's move to the proxies on the screen. As you can see, for Resolution 2, there are 27.7 million in favor, 1.6 million against, and 7.6 million abstained. 91.6% in favor, it would appear subject to any other votes coming in that this resolution has been overwhelmingly carried. For those of you attending in person, please mark your yellow voting cards.
For those not in person, please submit your vote on the online portal. Let us now go to Resolution 3, which is the resolution to approve the issue of new shares and SPP attaching options under the SPP offer, which is currently open. For the purposes of ASX Listing Rule 7.1 and for all other purposes, shareholders approve the issue of (A) up to 45.4 million shares at a price of AUD 0.33 per share, including any oversubscription up to an aggregate cap of AUD 15 million, and (B) up to 34 million attaching options at an exercise price of AUD 0.43 per SPP attaching option, with three SPP attaching options provided for every four new shares subscribed for under the SPP offer and which expire on March 30th, 2026, to eligible shareholders under the SPP offer as detailed and on the terms set out in the explanatory memorandum.
Matt or Darren, are there any questions in relation to this resolution?
No questions online.
Thank you. These are the votes here. Resolution 3, 19.5 million in favor, 1.5 million against, 18,000 abstain. It looks like it is overall, subject to any other votes that come in. It looks like it has been overwhelmingly carried with 91.35% of the vote. For those attending in person, please mark your yellow card. For those attending virtually, please submit your poll via the online portal. That is the end of the formal part today, being the three resolutions. I'd ask everyone now to vote quickly to ensure that they have their votes in. I will allow another minute or so before the poll is closed. If you have any questions in relation to the submission of votes, please send them now immediately and we'll respond to that. For those attending in the boardroom, I'll invite the staff of Automic to collect any voting cards that are there.
Perhaps the Automic people can tell me if there are any to be received or whether it's completed.
Completed, Paul.
Thank you very much. I'll just give it another half a minute before we close the poll. I will now declare the poll closed, and the Automic Group people will process the poll, and the results will be announced to the ASX once those are available. What I'd like to do now is to hand over to Leslie to give us a short presentation. Following that, we'll open up to any general questions. Leslie, over to you.
Thank you so much. Next slide, please. Those are my disclaimers. Just to reiterate, Imugene is a clinical stage. All of our programs are in cancer patients. We've been that valuable data. We're a clinical -stage cancer company developing three drug classes, one in CAR-T and two in oncolytic viruses. In the interest of time, I'm going to focus on our prioritized program, our allogeneic CAR T -cell therapy. This is a CD19 off-the-shelf, on-demand allogeneic CAR-T targeting certain kinds of blood cancers. In this case, we're looking at progressed or relapsed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, as well as CAR-T naïve patients in this particular deadly blood cancer space. We were very proud to announce that we have a 79% best overall response rate with some of the patients going living cancer-free for over now 16 months.
This trend seems to be continuing with a few patients at 12 months and 8 months and still ongoing. We are also anticipating to initiate our pivotal phase II/III registrational study in the calendar year of 2026 after we meet with the FDA at the end of this calendar year. Our oncolytic viruses are still ongoing. Some things that we continue to proceed with at Imugene is to cut cost. We were able to out-license our manufacturing to a well-known CDMO called Kincell, along with our CAR-T expert engineers to offset our cost and headcount. Headcount reduction is continuing. It's hard to believe that we used to be around 100 or so people, but now we're roughly around the low 20. We've prioritized our programs for that value-impacting studies.
We continue to do a heavy lifting on the business and development with attendance at JPMorgan, BioSingapore, BioHong Kong, meeting at the MESA, and other meaningful partnering out-licensing activities. We continue to showcase our great data across many of the major scientific conferences like ASH and ASCO. Next slide, please. This is a very pictorial depiction of what's happening on our Azer-cel study with 79% overall response rate. This is 11 out of 14 patients reaping some benefit. These patient populations are quite sick, unfortunately. They have relapsed or failed on autologous CAR-T. Some patients are going on their third, fourth, fifth, sixth line of therapy prior to coming onto our study. I'm very proud to offer them almost 80% of hope and response rates here.
We continue to enroll in the DLBCL space and also our CAR-T naïve blood cancer types where we can possibly move up a few lines. It's prior to any auto CAR-T. Next slide, please. Expected upcoming milestones are pretty heavy in that we will continue to release data across our phase I- B, including the CAR-T naïve . We continue to apply and submit for various different FDA designations that will get us a rapid study or a pivotal study. In Q4, at the end of this year, we plan on meeting with the FDA to strategize about our pivotal study. Of course, 2026 will be pretty heavy in all of the various different FDA designations to get us to a faster pivotal study, as well as announcing on phase I- B outcomes and continuing the CAR-T naïve space.
Oncolytic virus programs and Vaccinia will provide status across those programs and also any partnering and out-licensing opportunities and the conference presentations. Thank you. I think that's the end of my presentation.
Thank you, Leslie. That brings us towards the end of the meeting. Matt or Darren, do we have any questions from shareholders, proxy holders?
None from the room.
There's no questions online.
All right, thank you very much. That concludes the meeting today. For those of you who have been here, we appreciate your interest and support. As announced earlier, the results of the poll will be sent to the ASX once they are available. With that, I'll close the meeting. Thank you very much.