I'd like to just introduce you to a company that'll probably be new to you. It's called Quince Therapeutics. I'm the CEO and the CMO of the company, and we're a public c ompany, so I will be making some forward-looking statements. We're a new company in that we previously at this conference, this company was known as Cortexyme, which was a company working in Alzheimer's disease that had a phase III failure. To make a long story short, we reverse merged into them, and then went shopping for a new asset to forward integrate the company, and over the summer, we identified and acquired the company. It's an Italian company called EryDel, and now we're collectively called Quince.
We just recently closed the transaction in October, and what we're working on is a lead product for the indication of ataxia-telangiectasia, which is a rare genetic disease in children, devastating disease that leads to neurological dysfunction and early death. We have a phase III asset, which I'll describe to you on the next slide, and we're targeting our first patient for enrollment in that phase III study in April. Very importantly, one of the key reasons, one of the key advantages of the EryDel opportunity is that we have sufficient cash on the balance sheet to finish our single pivotal phase III trial, and that phase III trial is agreed under a Special Protocol Assessment with the FDA, so if positive, will be sufficient for approval. This is the centerpiece of our technology.
It's a machine. It's about the size of an old-fashioned desktop computer, and what we do is we take 50 ml, so about a, about a double shot of espresso worth of blood from the patient, and we run it through this machine. Takes about 90 minutes. The machine encapsulates a molecule of interest. We can encapsulate small molecules, large molecules, proteins. Then we isolate the cells that now have the molecule of interest captured inside of them, wash them, isolate them, and reinfuse them back into the patient. So it's the patient's own cells, but now encapsulated with a therapeutic, and it's an interesting technology that has a CE mark for the machine in Europe already.
EryDel put 20 years of work and about $100 million worth of research into this machine, so it's really been validated to show that you can encapsulate all kinds of molecules within the red blood cell and not change significantly the physiology of the red blood cell. So what we're doing with this initially, we call it autologous intracellular drug encapsulation, or AIDE. What we're doing with it initially is to take dexamethasone sodium phosphate, which is a prodrug of dexamethasone, it's a polar molecule, and we encapsulate that within the red blood cell. We're using that to treat ataxia-telangiectasia, and what it results in is a very interesting pharmacokinetic profile, with a initial peak of drug concentration, and then a slow decline in drug concentration over time over the course of a month.
And that's extremely critical to the value proposition for, for giving a steroid, because for steroids to work, for them to be efficacious, you first need a high concentration to saturate corticosteroid receptors, and then you need consistent receptor occupation over time. You can get that with daily dosing of a corticosteroid, and you see that with the red squiggly line here, or you can get it using the EryDex product, which is giving it once over the course of a month. So in either case, you can achieve efficacy with corticosteroids, but when you give it daily, what you see is you, that you have peaks and troughs with the daily dosing, and those peaks consistently trigger toxicity thresholds that lead to lots of safety issues when given over time.
So the biggest, of course, is the suppression of the hypothalamic pituitary axis, but you get, you get problems with glucose homeostasis, and you get problems with immunosuppression, of course, as well, and when given daily, you'll start to have these problems after mere days. Whereas with this EryDex system, after about the first four or five days, you remain below the toxicity threshold for chronic steroid, steroid toxicity for the entire month. So that's absolutely critical to the value here, because what it means is you can give steroids for years and achieve efficacy while avoiding the chronic safety problems. And there have been 50 children on this product now for three years without any evidence of chronic side effects from steroid therapy, which is pretty phenomenal.
The kids we're treating that have been on it, three of them have actually been on it for 10 years without safety issues. These kids have this particular disease, ataxia-telangiectasia. It's an autosomal recessive genetic disease, about 10,000 kids between the U.S. and Europe with this terrible disease. It's autosomal recessive mutations in what's called the ATM gene, and the ATM gene controls lots of different cellular processes, including DNA double-stranded repair. What happens to the kids is, initially, they have neurological degeneration starting at a young age, maybe around three or four years old. And then a little later in life, they start to get repeated infections, and then they get cancers, and their lifespan is typically in the mid-20s.
There's nothing approved for this disease, and the only thing used are supportive therapies to help the kids with their infections or their orthopedic problems and their neurological problems. EryDel had previously performed a study in kids of all ages six and above, and in the six- nine-year-old age group, they had very compelling data, and that's what made them of great interest to us. About half the kids enrolled were six- nine, the other half were over the age of 10, and in this disease, you have rapid neurological progression, deterioration between the ages of about five- 10. By the age of 10, you have a large proportion of kids that are already in a wheelchair. By the age of 12, the majority of kids are in a wheelchair.
So at the younger ages, you see a lot of progression, and then it's the progression slows down after the age of 10 or 12. So when they designed their study, they attempted for a broad label and enrolled about half the kids above 10, half under. They weren't able to demonstrate a benefit in the kids over 10 for neurological progression, but when you looked at the kids below the age of 10, the data was quite compelling. And the endpoint used in this particular indication is one of these neurological scoring systems. It's called ICARS. Europe and the FDA like different subsets of the ICARS. Europe likes something called mICARS, the modified ICARS. The FDA likes something called the rescored modified ICARS.
The bottom line is that these are subsets of the ICARS, and the subsets really focus, especially the RmICARS, really focuses more on lower limb neurological function, so it puts a premium on that. But when you look at any of these ICARS, mICARS or RmICARS, the data was statistically significant in that lower age group. So after acquiring them, we're gonna give it another shot, and as I mentioned before, we have enough money to get to pivotal data in this trial. We're launching our phase III trial called the NEAT Trial, and it's pretty simple. It's one dose of EryDex versus placebo in 86 patients. The treatment duration is once a month for 6 months, and the endpoint is the rescored modified ICARS, as requested by the FDA.
As a reminder, this study design is under a Special Protocol Assessment with the FDA, so it's implicitly agreed that if it's positive, the single trial will be sufficient for approval, assuming no safety issues and that the efficacy data is good. A-T, like a lot of neurological diseases, is a good commercial opportunity. A good proxy for this is the Friedreich's ataxia opportunity related to Reata's product. You saw the recent acquisition of Reata for over $7 billion, so this is a very similar market with respect to epidemiology and very likely pricing as well.
And so I think that, you know, the key value proposition for us is that in a very, a very questionable macroeconomic environment in 2024, it's really important that we have sufficient cash to get through this phase III trial to get to pivotal data. We have cash into 2026, and we anticipate pivotal data from this trial in the fourth quarter of 2025. In addition to that, though, along the way, we'll be looking at new indications for EryDex. You can imagine that a steroid given chronically without, without safety disadvantages could be a great drug to use in a lot of different indications. We're first prioritizing rare disease indications, but we're also looking at broader markets as well. And with respect to European partnering, we'll be opportunistic.
As I said, you know, we have, we have the money to get to the ultimate answer of whether this works effectively in this disease, and if it does, we really think we'll have a great opportunity, not just in this disease, but a variety of other rare diseases and even non-rare diseases. So I'll stop there and open it up for questions.