Welcome to the annual meeting for Galectin Therapeutics Inc. Our host for today's call is Kevin Freeman, Vice Chairman. At this time, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to your host. Mr. Freeman, you may begin, sir.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. My name is Kevin Freeman. I'm the Vice Chairman of the Board of Galectin Therapeutics Inc. I will act as the chair of this meeting, and Mr. Jack Callicutt, our Chief Financial Officer and Corporate Secretary, will act as secretary. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we are holding this year's annual meeting as a virtual meeting. Stockholders who require technical assistance during the meeting can call Broadridge's technical support line at the number listed on our virtual meeting website. Thank you. I hereby call the 2021 annual meeting for Galectin Therapeutics Inc. to order. At this time, I would like to introduce the current members of the board of directors. Dr. Gilbert Amelio, director, member of the Compensation Committee and chair of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. Jim Czirr, director and chair of the IR/PR Committee.
Kary Eldred, Director and member of the Audit Committee. I am a Director, member of the Audit Committee, the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, and the Compensation Committee. Joel Lewis is Director, also President and Chief Executive Officer of Galectin Therapeutics. Dr. Gil Omenn, Director and Chair of the Compensation Committee. Dr. Marc Rubin, Director and member of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. Dr. Elissa Schwartz, Director. Dr. Harold Shlevin, Director and former President and Chief Executive Officer. Richard "Dick" Uihlein, Chairman of the Board. Richard Zordani, Director and Chair of the Audit Committee. Other members of the Galectin Therapeutics team present today consist of Dr. Pol Boudes, Chief Medical Officer. Jack W. Callicutt, Chief Financial Officer, Corporate Treasurer, and Corporate Secretary. Dr. Ezra Lowe, Executive Director, Clinical and Preclinical Pharmacology. Dakshina Reddy, Executive Director of Regulatory Affairs. Dr. Hugh Huang, Vice President, Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls Development.
Marla Mills-Wilson, Executive Director, Clinical Operations. Beth Knowles, Executive Assistant and Office Manager. Mrs. Knowles also serves as the inspector of elections for this meeting. Mrs. Knowles has received a certified report from the transfer agent regarding proxies submitted prior to the meeting. We are also joined by Bob Tritt and Brian Lee of Dentons U.S. LLP. Dentons serves as the company's corporate and securities law counsel. Our accounting team is represented by Matt Urbizo of Cherry Bekaert LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm. The Board of Directors set October 7, 2021, as the record date for this stockholders' meeting. Mr. Callicutt, please proceed with the administrative portion of the meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Vice Chairman. We have provided a meeting agenda. A link to the meeting agenda is available on the virtual meeting website on the bottom right side of the webpage under Meeting Materials. As set forth in the meeting agenda, we will first address the business of the meeting and the results of the stockholder vote, followed by a corporate update from Mr. Joel Lewis, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Dr. Pol Boudes, our Chief Medical Officer. I have a copy of the Notice of Annual Meeting of Stockholders dated October twelfth, twenty twenty-one, which was sent to all stockholders of record as of the close of business on October seventh, twenty twenty-one. The Notice of Annual Meeting is ordered filed with the records of the company.
The first order of business at this meeting is to determine whether the shares represented at the meeting, either in person or by proxy, are sufficient to constitute a quorum for the purpose of transacting business. Mrs. Knowles.
The stockholders' list shows that 59,507,036 votes may be cast at this meeting by the holders of shares of common and preferred stock. According to the tabulation made before the meeting, there are represented, in person or by proxy, at least 43,165,964 shares of stock with common voting rights, or approximately 73% of all of the shares entitled to vote at this meeting. The final report of the meeting will show the final number of shares represented at the meeting in person and by proxy.
Thank you. Because the holders of at least one-third of the shares entitled to vote at this meeting are present in person or by proxy, I declare this meeting to be duly convened for purposes of transacting such business as may properly come before it. The next order of business is a description of the matters to be voted on at today's meeting. The first proposal before the stockholders is a proposal for the election of 11 directors to serve until the next annual meeting and until their respective successors are elected and qualified. The Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of our board of directors has nominated 10 members currently serving on our board to be reelected at this 2021 annual meeting to serve until the 2022 annual meeting of stockholders and until their respective successors are elected and qualified.
All 10 nominees who have been nominated by the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee have agreed to serve on the board if elected. The board has recommended that all of such 10 nominees be elected as directors. The 10 nominees are Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Mr. Kary Eldred, Mr. Kevin D. Freeman, Mr. Joel Lewis, Dr. Gilbert S. Omenn, Dr. Marc Rubin, Dr. Elissa J. Schwartz, Dr. Harold Shlevin, Mr. Richard E. Uihlein, and Mr. Richard Zordani. The eleventh nominee for election to our board of directors, James C. Czirr, has been nominated by 10X Fund L.P. pursuant to certain contractual rights that 10X Fund L.P. holds under common stock purchase warrants held by it. If Mr. Czirr and all 10 nominees recommended by the board and the nominating and corporate governance committee are elected at this 2021 annual meeting, our board of directors will have 11 members.
The second proposal before the stockholders is a proposal to ratify the appointment of Cherry Bekaert LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm to audit the financial statements for fiscal year ending December 31, 2021. The third proposal before the stockholders is a proposal to adopt and approve an amendment to our restated articles of incorporation, increasing the number of authorized common voting shares or common stock from 100 million to 150 million. The fourth proposal before the stockholders is a proposal to approve an amendment to our 2019 Omnibus Equity Incentive Plan to reserve an additional 3 million shares for issuance under the plan.
The fifth proposal before the stockholders is a proposal to authorize and approve, for purposes of complying with Nasdaq Listing Rule 5635, the issuance of up to 7,645,268 shares of our common stock upon conversion, exchange, or otherwise of principal and accrued interest to Richard E. Uihlein, our Chairman of the Board of Directors, pursuant to the terms of certain unsecured convertible notes aggregating $30 million in the related accrued interest. The sixth proposal before the stockholders is a proposal to authorize the adjournment of the annual meeting, if necessary or appropriate, including to solicit additional proxies if there are not sufficient votes at the time of the annual meeting or adjournment or postponement thereof to approve any of the foregoing proposals. The company knows of no other business to be presented. The polls are now open.
If you previously voted by proxy, you do not need to vote today unless you wish to change your vote. All proxies will be voted as the stockholders mark them. Any shareholder of record who has not yet voted may do so at the web portal for the 2021 annual meeting by entering in the 16-digit control number included on your proxy card. I hereby declare the polls closed. We will take a short break in order to tabulate the votes. Mrs. Knowles, as Inspector of Elections, have the votes and proxies been counted?
Yes.
Will the inspector then please report the preliminary results of the voting?
The votes have been counted. Based on favorable votes taken together with the favorable votes filed by proxy, a plurality of the shares of the company entitled to vote and present at this meeting in person or by proxy have been voted in favor of each of the eleven nominees for director. Accordingly, Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Mr. Kary Eldred, Mr. Kevin D. Freeman, Mr. Joel Lewis, Dr. Gilbert S. Omenn, Dr. Marc Rubin, Dr. Elissa J. Schwartz, Dr. Harold Shlevin, Mr. Richard Uihlein, Mr. Richard Zordani, and Mr. James C. Czirr have been elected as directors of the company to hold office until the 2022 annual meeting of stockholders and until their successors are duly elected and qualified.
With respect to proposal 2, the votes cast for exceed the votes cast against the ratification of Cherry Bekaert LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm to audit the financial statements for the 2021 fiscal year. Accordingly, proposal 2 has been duly passed by the stockholders. With respect to proposal 3, the votes cast for exceed a majority of all votes entitled to be cast to adopt and approve an amendment to our restated articles of incorporation, increasing the number of authorized common voting shares or common stock from 100 million to 150 million. Accordingly, proposal 3 has been duly passed by the stockholders. With respect to proposal 4, the votes cast for exceed the votes cast against to approve an amendment to our 2019 Omnibus Equity Incentive Plan to reserve an additional 3 million shares for issuance under the plan.
Accordingly, proposal four has been duly passed by the stockholders. With respect to proposal five, the votes cast for exceed the votes cast against to authorize and approve for the purpose of complying with Nasdaq Listing Rule 5635, the issuance of up to 7,645,268 shares of our common stock upon conversion, exchange or otherwise of principal and accrued interest to Richard E. Uihlein, our Chairman of the Board of Directors, pursuant to the terms of certain unsecured convertible notes aggregating $30 million and the related accrued interest. Accordingly, proposal five has been duly passed by the stockholders.
With respect to proposal six, the votes cast for exceed the votes cast against to authorize the adjournment of the annual meeting, if necessary or appropriate, including to solicit additional proxies if there are not sufficient votes at the time of the annual meeting or adjournment, or postponement thereof, to approve any of the foregoing proposals. Accordingly, proposal six has been duly passed by the stockholders.
Mrs. Knowles, thank you for serving as our Inspector of Elections for this meeting. Please note that the Inspector of Elections will provide a written report of the final voting results after the meeting that will be included with the minutes of this meeting. Mr. Vice Chairman, this concludes the results of the voting. The final results of today's vote will be disclosed in a current report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC within four business days.
Thank you. The formal portion of the 2021 Stockholders Annual Meeting of Galectin Therapeutics is hereby adjourned. I want to thank our stockholders for their continued support and interest in the company. Now, I invite Mr. Joel Lewis, our CEO, to present a corporate update. Joel.
Thanks, Kevin, and thank you to everyone joining us virtually today. Unfortunately, we are still unable to hold our annual meeting in person due to COVID-19. Hopefully, this will not be the case next year. Regardless, I'm grateful that you are listening. Please note that certain statements made today are forward-looking in nature. Please see the forward-looking statements disclaimer attached to the agenda for the annual meeting and at the end of the transcript of this presentation. Before I turn the discussion over to Pol to discuss our drug development programs in more detail, I wanted to share my observations about the company since I spoke to you last year. At that time, I mentioned that our mission is to monetize our intellectual property as quickly as possible by maximizing the use of our limited resources. Without hesitation, that is precisely what we are doing.
Well, while it might not be apparent to the market yet, Galectin Therapeutics has been transformed into a new company compared to a year ago today. Starting with an internal analysis of our goals in contemplating a roadmap for the future of the company, senior management and I resolved to change our corporate culture. Our company was perceived as, and frankly, had been an early-stage company. However, with our global registration NASH cirrhosis trial, along with the potential to move into a phase II oncology program, Galectin Therapeutics, in our view, is better characterized as a late-stage company. To best align our culture to our reality and to establish an environment to realize our potential value, the strategy was straightforward. Expand and strengthen the talent on our team, whether employees or consultants. We referenced potential industry partners in the videos released on our website over the summer.
I touch on it briefly in my presentation, but in part two of our panel discussion, we go into more detail. What I would like investors to understand is that partnerships may actually require a similar level of scrutiny as regulatory approval in what I would describe as an accelerated process. In any due diligence discussion, a potential partner will fully evaluate a company's pathway to approval. Before an investment is made, a potential partner not only looks at data, but also at every potential regulatory hurdle. They contemplate every possible scenario, ranging from bioanalytics to preclinical studies to CMC, and to the company's potential pipeline, just to name the most obvious. To make sure we were prepared for those scenarios, we undertook multiple parallel paths over the past year. Not only did we retain Dr. Ben Carson as a strategic consultant, we hired four executives in key leadership positions.
I encourage you to read their bios on our website. I am confident you will see that we have covered major areas with respect to any due diligence process that will be required by potential partners. Our expanded team possesses large pharma experience, including being part of due diligence and registration teams in their past experiences. Collectively, they possess operational expertise in virtually every aspect of drug development. As I mentioned in my press release, we will continue to look for talent to further enhance our ability and add value to the company. In all the years I've been associated with Galectin Therapeutics, which is over a decade, I do not believe we have ever possessed this level of experience or capability internally.
In the relatively short time I've worked with our new team, I'm pleased to tell you that the level of professionalism has surpassed even my own expectations. Our development programs have continued to progress over the past year. While COVID-19 did present challenges almost everywhere earlier in the year and challenges currently still exist in Europe with NAVIGATE our global adaptive phase IIb/III NASH cirrhosis trial, we are optimistic we will be able to fully enroll our trial. In addition to hiring an executive director of clinical operations, we also added several staff members in clinical operations comprising a full team of experienced professionals. This team has worked together in the past on multiple large NASH trials and has built relationships with staff members at many of our investigational sites.
As we continue to recruit patients, we plan on adding more support for trial participants and investigator sites. In July, we released additional top-line extension data from an investigator-initiated combination immuno-oncology trial in advanced metastatic melanoma and head and neck cancer patients. As we have mentioned in the past, we were encouraged by the results, and at the request of our chairman, Richard Uihlein, as well as the board, we have been exploring potential pathways for company-sponsored cancer trials. We are pleased to announce that we have retained as consultants Dr. Chetan Bettegowda from Johns Hopkins, Dr. Nishant Agrawal and Dr. Ari Rosenberg, both from University of Chicago Medical Center. I will let Pol speak in more detail about our goals and objectives, but I wanted to give a brief overview of our current strategy.
In my remarks last year, I mentioned that our detailed process would focus on areas where we have knowledge and data in order to develop a roadmap to achieve our mission by maximizing our limited resources. With that goal and our desire to optimize value, in our initial discussions with Dr. Bettegowda, we considered the landscape in immuno-oncology. Those discussions caused us to reevaluate both patient populations included in the phase I investigator-initiated trial. After discussions and introductions to Dr. Agrawal and Dr. Rosenberg, our current strategy is to focus primarily on head and neck cancer patients while continuing discussions for other indications conditional on partnership collaboration. This decision is informed by several factors, including current frontline treatments, current active trials, response rates to available therapies, and potential regulatory pathways. After multiple discussions, we believe that this patient population presents the most direct path forward to achieve our mission.
While we still intend on pursuing other oncology indications, at present, our internal resources will be directed towards the most expedient strategy with the highest medical need. We have already had initial discussions on potential protocols, and we will keep you updated on our progress. Before I turn the program over to Pol, I wanted to share one more thought with you. Biotech in general had a difficult year in 2021. Although the company has performed well compared to biotech indices year to date, we were not immune from market pressure. While there is substantial evidence that Galectin-3 plays a role in many disease mechanisms, and there have been numerous scientific papers published underscoring that hypothesis, the company currently has clinical data in hepatology and oncology indications.
Highlighting this fact, I encourage you to read the peer-reviewed oncology articles published this year, as well as the six presentations that we made at AASLD. Senior management and the board are committed to carefully allocating our limited resources to the areas in which the company is in a leadership position and has the best potential. On a personal note, my belief in our company and our technology was only part of my rationale for my compensation package. By taking 80% of my compensation in stock, I also wanted to invest in the company directly, preserving limited resources to enable us to achieve our potential. This is the same position I had previously taken with my board compensation before I became CEO.
A summary of my compensation strategy is listed in a footnote in every Form 4 filed around every pay period and effectively says, "I am purchasing shares equivalent to 80% of my salary, no matter the share price." I want to thank our chairman, Richard Uihlein, for his commitment, including his time and multiple investments this year. Also, I want to thank the entire board for its efforts and, more importantly, for their confidence in me in reshaping our company. I'm extremely proud of senior management and our entire team. We will build on our accomplishments from this year by expanding our internal capabilities and continuing to advance our programs. Now I would like to turn the discussion over to Pol to go into more details on our NASH cirrhosis and oncology programs. Pol?
Thank you, Joel. As a quick reminder, NAVIGATE is a seamless, adaptive phase IIb and III double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, multicenter international study evaluating the efficacy and safety of belapectin for the prevention of esophageal varices in NASH cirrhosis. For the phase IIb part of the NAVIGATE study, we plan to enroll approximately 315 patients. In addition to safety, the main outcome for evaluating efficacy is the incidence of esophageal varices after 18 months of treatment. Esophageal varices are evaluated by a central review of recorded endoscopic videos. We will compare the incidence of varices between two belapectin treatment groups and placebo groups. The trial design is very innovative and is a first for the hepatology community. We believe it represents a significant advance for the treatment of NASH cirrhosis.
As a testimony of this innovation, we were able to present this new study concept at the Congress of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, the premier U.S. hepatology congress a few weeks ago. What is also important to understand is that the target population of NAVIGATE, patients with NASH cirrhosis who do not have yet decompensated their disease but have developed portal hypertension, is a population that is at risk of developing a clinical event such as esophageal varices. The development of an esophageal varices is a very concerning event in the life of a cirrhotic patient because these varices can bleed, and in that case, the bleeding can immediately become life-threatening.
Focusing on the prevention of esophageal varices allows us to evaluate a relevant clinical outcome without having to perform liver biopsy, which now, if you closely follow NASH clinical developments, is a very controversial and problematic way to evaluate NASH drugs. It is also important to understand that esophageal endoscopies, contrary to liver biopsies, are part of the standard clinical surveillance of a cirrhotic patient. Hence, NAVIGATE is not only an innovative trial, it is also a very pragmatic clinical trial. We have now initiated NAVIGATE in all countries we originally selected for participation. As we communicated, the process of country initiation and site startup has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly outside of the U.S. The last country that was originally planned, namely South Korea, is now on board.
In anticipation of this pandemic impact, we made the decision some months ago to initiate additional countries to be able to balance risks should this be necessary. These additional countries are on the verge of being initiated and will very soon contribute to our global recruitment efforts. While the pandemic situation remains challenging, we have made good progress with our recruitment campaign. As could be anticipated for a new design targeting a new population, very different from any other NASH studies, sites had to learn what were the best recruitment practices. Thanks to their feedback and the ongoing analysis of our screening and randomized patients, we have been able to make technical adjustments to the protocol that we are convinced will further improve recruitment.
Based on the feedback we received from our investigators, there is no question in our mind that the study is considered an important milestone for the medical community. NAVIGATE should further trigger the interest of clinical researchers for cirrhosis in general and NASH cirrhosis in particular, something that is also part of our mission at Galectin Therapeutics. As we previously communicated, our objective is now to complete the recruitment of the phase IIb part of the study by the end of June 2022. Now, turning to the oncology program. We have recently conducted a strategic review of the field with our consultants, particularly the immunotherapy of cancer. On one end, we want to continue to build a program on top of the encouraging clinical data we have produced.
On the other end, we have to make sure we are targeting the population that is in the highest need of new treatments. These are two necessary conditions to fulfill our objective, which is to provide access to belapectin as quickly as possible, including a registration as the ultimate goal. This is why, as Joel mentioned, we want to prioritize our internal efforts towards the head and neck cancer indication. Thanks to the results of our previous clinical study, we believe Galectin Therapeutics remains the oncology leader for the clinical translation of the anti-Galectin-3 mechanism of action. While we think that the melanoma indication is certainly justified by our positive phase I data, this field is very competitive, particularly for clinical study recruitments, and we would only venture there with the support of a partner for a phase II multicenter study.
Consequently, with the help of our consultants, we are now developing a phase II belapectin protocol for head and neck cancer patients and will provide further information on our operational plans as quickly as possible. I now turn the call back to Joel.
Thanks, Pol. Once again, thank you all for attending this morning. We are looking forward to significant achievements in our development programs in 2022, and we will keep you informed of our progress. Now, I'd like to end the call.