Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Unicure's Virtual Research and Development Day. I'm Maria Kanter, Chief Communications Officer at Unicure. We appreciate you taking time to be with us today. Before we get started, please know that we'll be making a number of forward looking statements this morning. We suggest that you take a moment to review this slide, which contains our forward looking statements.
These statements involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Unicur's control, and actual results could differ materially from those that are in these statements. For a detailed description of these risks and uncertainties, we encourage you to review the company's most recent Form 10 Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the company's other SEC filings. Regarding our agenda this morning, we will begin by reflecting on Unicure's long history of leadership in gene therapy and presenting our vision and strategy for the company over the next several years. We'll provide a program update on AMT-one hundred thirty in Huntington's disease and then have a fifteen minute Q and A session. We'll follow this with a short ten minute break and return for a presentation on the expansion of our research pipeline.
We'll have another fifteen minute Q and A session and transition to an update on our hemophilia B program. After this presentation, we'll have a Q and A session before concluding remarks. For our research analysts, if you would like to submit a question, please use the ask a question box. We will answer as many questions as time allows. We also note that biographies on each of our presenters are available for your convenience.
Now it's my pleasure to introduce Matt Capista, our CEO.
Thank you, Maria. And on behalf of the UniCure team, I'd like to thank you all for joining us here at UniCure's twenty twenty one Virtual R and D Day. To start our presentation, I'd like to go back to the beginning, UniCure's mission and purpose. Twenty three years ago in 1998, UniCure was founded with a singular mission of delivering curative, one time administered genomic medicines with the potential to transform patients' lives. We're not seeking to modify symptoms, and we're not looking for marginal improvements.
Our quest is to reimagine health care and to truly transform lives by harnessing the power of genetics. While a lot has changed during the two decades since the founding of Unicure, our mission has remained constant. And in the nearly seven years I've been at Unicure, I've truly never been more excited than I am now about our future and our potential to deliver on our mission. During the next three hours, we'll be covering a lot of ground with a focus on defining UniCure strategy for transforming patients' lives as well as for building value for our shareholders. This strategy includes not only the reimagination of our pipeline after our recently closed transaction with CSL Behring, but also the reimagine of how and where we deliver genomic material, what genomic cargo can be delivered and how gene therapies can be manufactured in a reliable and cost effective manner.
One of the blessings at Unicure is that we have developed over many years a highly valuable and unique platform that serves as a powerful engine for developing transformative medicines. This engine has very broad applicability. And as such, we have defined core areas on which we're focused, including CNS diseases, liver directed disorders and cardiovascular muscle diseases. In each of these areas, we have dedicated years of painstaking research to understand the clinical unmet needs of patients suffering from these disorders and how we can optimize our gene therapies to address their specific diseases. Core to our strategy is to continue to leverage this powerful AAV engine and the technology platforms that we've established to develop innovative genomic medicines within these key focus areas.
With hundreds of gene therapy companies and more popping up seemingly every day, I'm often asked what makes Unicure different? The answer is our people and our heritage of innovation and ingenuity. Innovation and ingenuity are not just words at Unicure. They are imprinted in the DNA of every single one of our employees. For more than two decades, Unicure has been demonstrating ingenuity as a pioneer in the field of gene therapy, helping to usher in a renaissance in the field.
We were the first company in the world to achieve regulatory approval of AAV gene therapy. We were the first to have a commercially licensed AAV manufacturing facility. Our Huntington's program was the first one time administer gene therapy to enter into clinical testing. And we are the first company to clinically demonstrate with our AAV5 gene therapy the ability to achieve positive clinical outcomes in patients with preexisting neutralizing antibodies. Unicure's capabilities are also unparalleled within the field.
For over fifteen years, we've been developing and optimizing our ability to produce cGMP grade gene therapies at commercial scale. This includes gene therapies that have been used across eight different clinical studies in more than 100 patients. Many of our talented scientists and techs have been at Unicure for ten to fifteen years or more and have helped us establish strong IP and know how covering our manufacturing processes and methods as well as novel tools and enabling technologies. Nowhere was this ingenuity more evident than our recent successes within hemophilia B, was a program that as recently as 2017 was written off as dead. However, the UniCare team never gave up and truly believed an AAV5 gene therapy could be best in class.
So in 2017, we endeavored to engineer a next gen product combining a variant transgene with the virtues of AAV5. And we were able to convince regulators that it was highly comparable, allowing us to move directly into a pivotal study, something that had never been accomplished previously. This reengineering simply would not have been possible without our strength in product development and manufacturing. Within eight months of unveiling the program in 2017, we initiated two clinical studies, including our HOPE pivotal trial. Today, we are announcing one year follow-up data on all 54 patients in the study.
Perhaps most importantly, earlier this quarter, we announced the closing of a $2,000,000,000 license and commercialization agreement with CSL Behring, a global leader in hematology with commercial operations in more than 80 countries around the world. This transaction represents one of the largest single product deals in the space to date with an upfront payment greater than Unicure's entire market cap back in the days of 2017. Our Huntington's program is also emblematic of Unicure's innovative approach. We spent more than six years designing and developing MiCure, our proprietary gene silencing technology. And we're the first AAV gene therapy to enter clinical testing for Huntington's, a disease which affects up to one hundred thousand people in The U.
S. And EU alone. We also incorporated an innovative Phase onetwo trial protocol, including a double blinded sham control design, which was strongly endorsed by the FDA and has the potential to expedite our path to registration. We expect to have initial safety and biomarker data from this U. S.
Study later this year, which combined with the data from our EU Phase onetwo study is expected to generate multiple additional data readouts over the next two years. No doubt, while we're very proud of our accomplishments to date with hemophilia B in Huntington's disease, what I'm really most excited about is the reimagination of our future pipeline. With the CSL deal behind us, we now believe we have the financial resources to aggressively expand our pipeline. Specifically, today, have approximately $700,000,000 of cash on hand that we expect will be sufficient to fund operations into the 2024. We're also eligible to receive more than $300,000,000 in near term, higher probability milestones related to regulatory submissions and first commercial sales, which would extend the cash runway through 2025.
And finally, we're eligible to receive royalties up to the low 20% of net sales and another $1,300,000,000 in additional commercial milestones that have the potential to extend our cash runway beyond five years. Leveraging this strong financial position, we are highly focused on expanding our pipeline and in particular transforming our portfolio of clinical stage programs. Today, have two exciting programs in the clinic that we believe can continue to drive value for patients and shareholders. But by 2026, our goal is to have eight to 12 clinical commercial programs, plus a roster of next gen preclinical programs. We recognize this is really ambitious, but believe it's achievable given the strength of our platform, our people and financial resources.
We also recognize every project may not succeed, but we are taking strides to improve our R and D efficiency and effectiveness by doing two things: one, working to reduce our timelines to the clinic by leveraging a more modular product development process and platform and two, selecting future programs that have balanced risk reward profiles. In terms of balancing risk and reward, there are several criteria we use at Unicure. First and perhaps most importantly, we want each pipeline candidate to have a line of sight to being best and or first in class. If we can't envision a path to best and or first in class, we won't waste time and money. Or if the data generated doesn't support this thesis or if the competitive landscape changes, we will have the courage to cut bait or find a different approach.
Our past decisions around hemophilia A and B are examples of this. Second, we want each of our target staff human validation. We're not in the target discovery business, and it's important that biology we target is well characterized. Third, where at all possible, we want to be able to leverage validated platforms to derisk our programs. And this is why AAV5 has been such a workhorse for Unicure.
And lastly, we want to have greater emphasis on larger indications. Not only can we maximize our impact on the greatest number of patients, but we can also maximize the commercial opportunity of our successes. As I mentioned, enabling technology platforms are an essential part of our strategy. We think of these technologies in two broad categories, with the first being how and where we deliver DNA material. When I first joined Unicure, the focus of the gene therapy field was largely on first generation AAVs with relatively crude administration techniques.
Today at Unicure, we've established and continue to develop novel AAVs, potent specific promoters, improved formulations, and optimized administration techniques in order to solve some very important questions, including how can we increase expression to improve efficacy? How can we target delivery to specific cells to improve biodistribution and safety? How can we achieve broader transduction of an entire organ? And very importantly, how can we achieve redosing to enable dose titration and durable efficacy for pediatric populations? The second category of enabling technology addresses what DNA constructs we are delivering and for what purpose.
Most gene therapy companies focus exclusively on replacing missing proteins or enzymes. But at Unicure, we're constantly thinking about how to broaden the applicability of gene therapy to more patients and more diseases. After years of research, we believe we've established the leading one time gene silencing technology that we call MiCure. And we're applying these learnings to establish a knockdown and replace platform that we call GoCure, as well as an exciting vectorized antibody platform called AbCure. Each of these platforms significantly broaden the applicability of gene therapy, and Ricardo will discuss later in the presentation how we are mapping them to our product development efforts.
The final part of our strategy relates to the manufacturing of AAV gene therapies. Manufacturing has always been important within the pharma industry, but for gene therapy, it's existential. First, the manufacturing process and methods are inextricably intertwined with the product itself. Second, it's very expensive to manufacture gene therapies. And quite frankly, the industry today is not capable of addressing large indications in a cost effective manner.
And lastly, it's really, really hard to manufacture gene therapies as biological platforms are inherently variable, difficult to scale and challenging to characterize. At Unicure, we spent fifteen years developing a robust, highly optimized manufacturing platform that can be modularly applied across programs and scaled efficiently. We use this same platform from the earliest stages of research all the way through commercialization to maximize consistency and comparability throughout the development process. And in order to support larger patient populations, we're now working on plans to scale our process even further into bioreactors that are capable of producing thousands of liters of drug substance in a more cost effective manner. In order to maintain our leadership position, support CSL's commercialization in hemophilia B, as well as expand our pipeline, we will continue to invest in our capabilities and infrastructure.
And so today, we're announcing the construction of a second manufacturing site in Amsterdam that is already underway and will be capable of producing cGMP material in 500 liter bioreactors by 2022. We're also constructing a pilot plant in Lexington to complement our manufacturing capabilities and make tech transfers and scallops easier and more efficient. And finally, we're establishing new research capabilities in Lexington that will work seamlessly with our Amsterdam colleagues to support pipeline expansion. We'll be going through a lot of material in today's program, so I want to call out some new information that we'll be covering. First, we'll be presenting new 52 data from our Hopi pivotal study on all 54 patients and providing a regulatory update.
At a high level, the fifty two week data demonstrates sustained increases in fixed activity across all patients in the study, continued reduction of bleeding, and no correlation of clinical outcomes with neutralizing antibodies up to seven hundred, which we believe will cover ninety three percent of all patients. Regarding our Huntington's disease program, we announced last week the commencement of dosing of our second higher dose cohort and now have 12 patients enrolled in the study. Also, we continue to expect to initiate dosing of our European Phase III open label study in the 2021. We've received CTA clearance in The United Kingdom and expect clearances in Germany and Poland in the third quarter. We will also be unveiling four new research programs today, including a very exciting acquisition that we'll discuss later in the program.
Additionally, we'll be providing updates on our Fabry and SCAT3 programs, including some new preclinical data. And finally, we'll be announcing several new enabling technology platforms and how we plan to leverage them to support our pipeline strategy. As I mentioned, our people at Unicure are our most valuable resource. And presenting today will be a group of talented and esteemed speakers from Unicure's R and D organization in Lexington and Amsterdam, including Ricardo Dolmetsch, our President of R and D David Cooper, Vice President of Clinical Development Melvin Evers, Vice President of Research Paula Miranda, Senior Scientist in our Liver Group Ying Poi Lu, associate director in our adult neurology group and Astrid Valis Sanchez, who's an associate director in our adult neurology group as well. So without further delay, I'd like to hand the floor to Ricardo, who'll be providing more details on our R and D strategy.
Thank you, Matt. So as Matt said, our company is focused on diseases of the central nervous system, the liver, heart and muscle, and underlying all of these is our AAV technology engine. Before I unveil our new pipeline, I want to take you through some of the new developments we've made as part of this technology engine. So the technologies that we're developing at UniCure are designed to address some of the major challenges in AAV gene therapy. So one of the main challenges has been how to deliver AAVs, how to deliver them to the right cells, how to get enough cells transduced, how to dose through preexisting neutralizing antibodies, how to redose if patients don't respond appropriately, and how to dose in a way that is noninvasive.
We're also so we've developed technologies to address these major issues, and I'll get to them in one moment. We are also focused on developing the next generation of cargoes. The cargoes, of course, are the guts of a gene therapy. They're necessary for effective gene knockdown, the efficient delivery of genes, for the replacement and editing of the genome, as well as for the effective delivery of biologics, and we have some exciting developments there as well. And then finally, the third pillar of technology strategy deals with the challenges of manufacturing.
And as Matt said, gene therapy is in the early stages of developing its sort of manufacturing technologies, and we are the leaders in this. And our ambition is to develop new technologies that increase the robustness and reliability manufacturing, decrease the cost of goods so we can bring our gene therapies to much larger populations. So I'll focus today, on our delivery and cargo technologies. And, let me start by telling you a little bit about some of the delivery technologies I'll be talking about today. So I'll talk about three technologies, CureDose, which is our set of technologies for dosing through neutralizing antibodies and redosing.
And I'll tell you some proof of some exciting proof of concept experiments, that are enabling us to try, to redose in the clinic. I'll tell you about our new generation of capsids, which we call SMART AAV. These are antibody enabled capsids that can go to specific tissues and specific cells and across the blood brain barrier. And then I'll tell you a bit about Cure HDL, which is our technology for improving the transduction of the liver by taking advantage of high density lipoproteins. So let me start with CureDose.
So the problem of neutralizing antibodies has been an issue in gene therapy since the very beginning. Many patients, as you know, have neutralizing antibodies against many AAV serotypes. And five or six years ago, we discovered that AAV5 was privileged in this regard. And in our hemophilia program, we have been able to dose through preexisting neutralizing antibodies. We are now extending this to be able to redose.
To do this, we have done experiments in which we have administered one dose of a gene therapy in an AAV5 vector, and then we have reduced the neutralizing antibody using plasmapheresis before redosing with a second gene therapy. And this works, and this at least in a nonhuman primate. And so what you see in the graph is that we can actually get beautiful gene expression when we redose. And we think that this establishes proof of concept for being able to try this in humans, which we plan to do in 2022. We think that this enables a wide variety of new applications.
It allows us to precision dose transgenes and to retreat patients with partial responses as well as treating children. It should also improve the bi distribution of our gene therapies and we believe it is truly revolutionary. The next technology I wanted to cover is our new generation of AAV capsids. We call these smart AAVs. So these smart AAV capsids combine the advantages of AAV5 with antibody directed delivery to get cargo across the blood brain barrier and to improve the transduction of cells like microglial cells that are hard to transduce.
We are taking single chain antibodies derived from, camelids like LAMAs, and we have introduced them into not all the CAP proteins, but a subset of the CAP proteins in AAV. And we're using this to direct the transduction or to direct the AAVs into specific cells and into specific compartments which allow the viruses to cross the blood brain barrier. The next technology I wanted to cover focuses on our liver platform. Many AAVs go to the liver and you would think that this was a solved problem. But in fact, we know from our studies as well as the studies of others that AAVs normally transduce just the cells that are around the portal vein.
It is very difficult to get the whole liver transduced. And so we have been working hard to improve the ability of AAV5 to transduce the liver, and we have developed a new capsid. This capsid contains a binding moiety that binds to, high density lipoproteins, which are taken up by liver cells, and it is somewhere between ten and fifteen times better than naked AAV5. And this should have two very tangible effects. One, it should reduce the amount of AAV that we have to give patients.
And secondly, it allows us to transduce the whole liver, which opens up a whole set of, diseases for us to work on. So those are our delivery technologies. Let me tell you a little bit about our cargo technologies. So, again, you've heard about MiCure and, Matt talked about that, which was our ability to deliver microRNA safely and effectively. I'll tell you about three new technologies, LinkCure, AbCure and GoCure.
So LinkCure is the name we've given a new technology, which allows us to deliver multiple microRNAs in a single AAV. Again, we have been working for a long time to optimize the scaffold that allows us to deliver a single microRNA, but we have extended this so that we can now deliver multiple microRNAs. You would think that this would be straightforward, but in fact, there have been many things that we need to optimize. As many of you might know, delivering microRNAs can be toxic if you don't have the right kind of scaffold. And in addition to this, if you use the scaffold over and over, you will not be able to manufacture the gene therapy.
So we have optimized this and this offers a number of advantages. Having multiple microRNAs makes it much easier to knock down a gene. It also allows us to knock down multiple genes in a pathway, which, of course opens up a whole set of new indications. The next technology I wanted to cover is what we call GoCure. And GoCure gives us this ability to actually replace a gene.
So we're combining our MyCure platform to knock down a gene with the ability to express a gene in the CMA AAV. Now, again, the details really matter. In principle, this is a straightforward thing to do. In practice, it is really difficult to get an AAV that efficiently produces an mRNA leading to a protein and also efficiently produces a microRNA. But we have, achieved this.
We have, found ways in which we can do this safely and effectively. And then finally, I want to tell you about AbCure. So AbCure is the technology that allows us to deliver therapeutic antibodies. So we've already shown with our hemophilia B program that we can deliver factor IX, and we want to extend this from the liver. And We want to extend this to delivering therapeutic antibodies.
We think that this offers some major advantages in the sense that it kind of changes the biologics world so that we can do one shot delivery of biologics for serious diseases. And so what you see in the graph is that we have able to generate AAVs that can deliver antibodies efficiently. These antibodies bind to their targets, they're efficiently secreted. And this is true for both liver cells and cells in the central nervous system. So our technology platform, really enables our pipeline.
And today we are unveiling, actually four programs, but I'm only going to tell you about three of them because the last one is a surprise. So you've heard of course about hemophilia and Fabry and Huntington's and spinocerebellar ataxia if you've been following UniCure. And today we're going to tell you about Parkinson's disease, ALS and Alzheimer's. And each one of these takes advantage of our technology platforms to develop these transformative gene therapies. I also want to take a moment to tell you a little bit about how we select our indications because this is a key part of our DNA.
So we are developing gene therapies that are best in class, that maximize our opportunities, but also balance risk. And so we start with indications where there's a large unmet medical need. We work on targets that are validated in humans, either through genetics or through human clinical experience. We make sure that there's a large addressable population. We have a very safe delivery vehicle and we complement that by having very safe targets.
We make sure that we can address the target technically, both preclinically as well as clinically. Of course, want to make sure that we can actually carry out a clinical trial. And finally, we make sure that we're well differentiated from the competition. And as you'll see, that is a characteristic of all of our pipeline. One of the things that we're doing, as Matt mentioned, is we're extending our pipeline to much broader indications.
And of the three new indications you'll hear about today, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and ALS, all of them affect tens of thousands of patients. And so I think this is really the next chapter in gene therapy as we move from ultra orphan and orphan indications to much common diseases. So let me finish by showing you our new pipeline, which is here, And just pointing out the three programs that the three new programs, again, that we will be introducing, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease. So with that, let me give the floor to our Vice President of Clinical Development, David Cooper, who's going to give you an update on our Huntington's program.
Thank you, Ricardo. My pleasure to be talking this morning about the Huntington's disease program at UniCure. By way of background, Huntington's disease is an autosomal dominant inherited disorder, which means you have a fifty percent risk of getting HD if your parent has it. There are about twenty five thousand patients each in The US and EU who have symptomatic HD. It's initially described based upon a characteristic chorea, a movement disorder, Dystonia, incoordination, ataxia, later rigidity, and bradykinesia or slow movements contribute to functional impairment.
But I think what we've learned a lot over the last decades of, longitudinal natural history research is that cognitive and behavioral symptoms may occur early. They could be some of the first subtle signs even before someone has the movement disorder. And this can get back to people in their 20s. It's a progressive course from onset at about age 45 to death over ten to fifteen years, and there are no disease modifying treatments at the moment. So how does the neurodegeneration occur?
So it starts out with this abnormal CAG repeat in the Huntington or httDNA. This ends up causing a repeat that comes in exon one of the mRNA and gets expanded in the protein into this polyglutamine tract in the protein. This abnormal protein then aggregates and causes neuronal degeneration. And I think the important thing for understanding HD and our approach to HD is this does not occur uniformly in the brain. This starts in the striatum, which we're showing here on the right, in the darkest color orange as number one.
It then spreads to the somatosensory and motor cortex, frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe. So we have to think about a treatment in terms of also treating the areas that are the most affected. So how are we doing that? What is AMT-one hundred thirty? This is a replication deficient AAV5 serotype.
It codes for a microRNA that targets the huntingtin mRNA at exon one, and I'll explain in the next slide why this is important. Ultimately, it blocks the expression of the huntingtin protein. We've been working on this for many years. We started out with cultured human neurons. We went to five rodent species, including HD rats, four types of HD mice, and then brought this into large animals to understand how to really administer this through MRI guided stereotactic approaches, both in nonhuman primates and in a large animal model of HD, the transgenic mini pig.
We've had 56 of these stereotactic approaches that have been done in the large animals, the nonhuman primates and the mini pigs to get us ready to go into the clinic class that we did last year. And again, this is a one time injection of AMT-one hundred thirty into the striatum focusing on the caudate nucleus and the putamen. So I mentioned exon one. The HTT or Huntington DNA doesn't just create a full length mRNA and full length protein. It also has these fragments that get formed through aberrant splicing.
One of the most important that's been identified is the exon one fragment, which has been associated as well in human autopsy studies of patients with HD as being very toxic. So because of where our microRNA is blocking the mRNA, we're able to block both the exon one HTT mRNA and the full length HTT mRNA. So we continue to generate, longitudinal long term data now out to thirty six months in the transgenic mini pigs. This shows going from left to right that we're able to get stable expression of the microRNA that we're able to see in the CSF. In terms of the brain regions shown in the middle, we're able to show that we have very consistent knockdown over time.
This shows six and twelve months in the mini pigs, showing that particularly the area we're targeting the most, the striatum, the caudate and the putamen, is knocked down, at that period. And then also on the right, neurofilament, which we know that neurofilament in any patient that has a brain surgical procedure will show a transient spike. But this gives us some idea that this returns to baseline within a period of months, and that we should be able to see that return to baseline as a marker for ultimately tracking their long term baseline neurofilament levels against the natural history. So there's a lot of talk about, you know, total Huntington knockdown versus allele selective knockdown. This is our approach really, we think optimizes the benefit risk trade off.
We're focused on neurosurgical delivery to the most relevant brain regions. We're not targeting 100% knockdown or the entire brain. We're really targeting, as I said, the sources of where HD pathology is going on. In the striatum, we're targeting fifty percent to seventy five percent knockdown, and that's where we're infusing the gene therapy. And in the cortex where we'll have retrograde and anterograde transport, we're targeting twenty five percent to fifty percent knockdown.
So what evidence do we have that suggests that knocking down wild type and mutant is safe? Well, if we look at adult animal studies as shown here, in the first row of the cartoon, you can see that wild type inactivation in adulthood does not really result in any kind of phenotype in a mouse. If you have one wild type gene and one mutant gene, you end up with a Huntington's mouse, which occurs in adulthood. If you have partial reduction in, mutant huntingtin or both wild type mutant huntingtin, what you show is that there's, in adulthood, a slow disease progression and a delayed onset. So in the animal studies, partial reduction of wild type huntingtin in adult rodents and NHPs was generally self safe and well tolerated.
So what do we know about humans? Well, one way is to look at people who have mutations. So if you look at people who have mutations who don't have 100% huntingtin expression, what does that tell us? So there's one woman who's been characterized who has one normal gene and one disrupted gene. So presumably no more than 50% normal level.
She developed normally. She's 46 at the time of last publication. She has not had an abnormal phenotype. She has a child who has the exact same abnormality and also remains asymptomatic. So what do we know about whether this mutant huntingtin expression is actually creating some functional, huntingtin activity?
Children who have heterozygous variations and very significantly decreased huntingtin function show early neurodevelopmental disorders such as Rett like syndromes, but don't get a Huntington phenotype. However, when we look at adults who have homozygous CAG expansions to abnormal genes, they also have normal development until onset of HD. And the age at onset and pre onset symptoms were similar to those who have one wild type gene and one variant allele. So they had normal development and the disease progression is ultimately no different from heterozygous HD. So these findings indicate that variant HTT must have some normal function during development and that the polyglutamate expansion is a toxic gain of function variation.
So that brings us to our Phase III study. So the schematic on the right shows the Phase III study. It's a double blind randomized imitation or sham controlled surgery. We're testing two levels of AMT-one hundred thirty. Cohort one, which we completed this year, has 50% striatal, 25% cortical knockdown.
Cohort 75%, and fifty percent striatal and cortical knockdown. It's administered by a one time bilateral stereotactic neurosurgical procedure. We use MRI guided convection enhancement, which I'll describe in a few slides. The follow-up is twelve months blinded and then five years overall. And we're doing this in 12 centers in The US, including three sites performing surgery.
This shows the key inclusion and exclusion criteria, and I want to highlight a few. This is an early stage HD, and typically that's been a DCL4 or motor manifest HD. But we've actually, with the FDA's advice, been able to expand this to DCL3 or multidimensional. And I mentioned cognitive and behavioral symptoms are important as well as motor. So if patients in the study present at screening and have a combination of motor, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms that suggest that they've had symptom onset, they're eligible to be enrolled.
And this is the first trial to really go into that earlier population. Also important is this is the first trial that has MRI minimum volumes for the putamen and caudate that need to be met. And that's both for surgical, safety, but it's also so that we know that there's enough substrate in those targets that we think that we can exert disease modification. A lot of our exclusion also is very, focused around ensuring that the patient does not have any contraindications to having the surgery. So when we think about the proof of concept endpoints in this Phase III, there are four groups.
The first is biomarkers. I mentioned neurofilament earlier, as well as, mutant huntingtin levels in the CSF. We're also looking at other exploratory markers and have samples of CSF saved for other exploratory analyses later. In terms of imaging, we're definitely looking at MRI, as well as MR spectroscopy. Striatal volume will be key looking for atrophy, but also whole brain, ventricular volumes, etcetera.
In terms of clinical parameters, we're looking at total motor score and total functional capacity as well as composite UHDRS scores and other measures. But we're also taking a quantitative look using QMotor as a quantitative assessment of motor function, which assesses finger, hand, and foot tapping, grasping, and lifting. So we've learned a lot from these surgical procedures that we've done over the last year. This is the first gene therapy infusion that's been done in HD patients. It's also the first gene therapy in the brain that's been done with six infusions, three sets of bilateral infusions, and it's the first convection enhanced infusion into the caudate nucleus.
So a lot of firsts here. We're very thankful to be working with a group of international experts. We have a neurosurgical committee, which actually represents all of our dosing sites in The US and Europe, and actually goes on a combined call every time we do surgeries to do the trajectory planning. And then we do a post op follow-up call to discuss lessons learned. And we very much appreciate their feedback and have adapted the procedure as we've gone to understand best practices.
So these are some images showing what the actual procedure is like. We use this, very, complicated, computer guided software that basically allows us to place these little frames on the head, align them to a very specific trajectory, and put a very thin microcatheter into that very, specific area of the brain, and then use the MRI to guide where we're delivering the gene therapy, how fast we're delivering the gene therapy as well. So I'm going to show you in a video in a second, but really what's the key of this MRI guided convection enhanced delivery is we're controlling the depth of the catheter within the organ, here shown for CAUGI and posterior putamen. We're taking MRI images as the infusion is going on. We can loop and make minutes into seconds and basically condense a set of 20 or 30 MRI images into a single looped video that gives you some idea of how we watch this infusion.
Elliot, if you can show the video, please. Thank you. So that really gives you an idea as to how the surgeon is assessing the depth and the rate of infusion throughout We've made a lot of progress in the last year. We dosed the first two patients just over a year ago.
We're able to dose the next two patients, complying with the FDA's design for three months of data, in October 2020. We then completed enrollment of the first cohort in April, and we were able to proceed to dosing the first two patients in this cohort, in June. We've disclosed that we're also starting an EU study. This is an open label study that we really are designing to augment our ability to detect a signal in Phase onetwo and enable us to find a dose to go to Phase three. So we're including both a low dose and high dose arm in the European study that will augment our ability to compare the two doses as well as compare it to sham.
In total, we'll have 41 patients between the two studies. So what are the expectations? Well, it's always important to say this is a Phase onetwo study. Demonstration of safety is key. Demonstration of safety of administration and safety of both doses.
The patients in The U. S. Study will be unblinded by groups after they've finished their twelve month blinded visits. We'll be following then the patients who received the MT-one hundred thirty for five years. Efficacy and biomarker data will be analyzed after each cohort and study is completed.
I think what's very important, I talked about that this is a group of patients who are unique in that we have to have a minimum volume criteria. So a lot of the natural history that exists is for the larger group of patients who have stage one or two disease. We're working with CHDI and Ixico and other partners to develop a very specific natural history data set to map our expectations for this group of patients who have a certain minimum volume with those clinical characteristics as well. And we believe overall that the Phase onetwo studies will demonstrate disease modification to inform us on proceeding with the Phase III trial. So what are we going to know by the end of this year?
Well, the first four patients will be unblinded by the end of this year. And remember, these are pairs of two in the initial part of the study. So that's one dose, one control. We're just unblinding the first pair that were treated a year ago, and then we'll do the same in the fall. So what will we know?
Again, safety and tolerability is the key. What insights might we also get at that point? So chemistry biomarkers from CSF, neurofilament compared to baseline and control, mutant huntingtin in CSF, markers of inflammation and immunogenicity, volumetric MRI compared to baseline control and natural history, And probably some early ideas about functional MRS imaging, understanding how neuronal function compared to baseline and to control. And with that, we will then move into our first Q and A session of the day.
Thank you, David. And, we now have several questions that came in for our first Q and A session. The first one is from Paul Matias, our analyst with Stifel. And Paul asks, how should we interpret CSF mutant huntingtin data for AMT-one hundred thirty? Should we be looking at the 30% reduction in mini pigs as a benchmark for what we hope to see in humans?
David, do you want to answer that question?
Sure. I'm happy to answer that. I think the short answer is we would expect that that's probably a best case for what we would see. The action of what we're trying to do is in the striatum, and the human brain is a lot bigger and the human CNS system a lot bigger than a mini pig. So that we would anticipate that the signal will probably be less than that in a human.
So it's not one of the key things that we're looking for.
And a follow-up from Paul. For MRI in the Huntington study, are you largely focusing on deep brain structures like the striatum? What would you expect to see in the placebo arm regarding MRI imaging?
So we're going find a whole suite of imaging, and I think this is, very important. We'll be looking at whole brain, we'll be looking at ventricular volume, white matter volume, gray matter volume, striatum. So we're looking very comprehensively at volume. We would expect in the control patients or sham surgery patients to see the same as the natural history. But again, this is why we're also looking at reanalyzing some of the original data from some of these longitudinal studies to be able to understand what that natural history should be in volume loss in patients who start with a certain initial volume with Stage I disease.
So it's important for us to establish what that baseline expectation should be for the control group.
Ricardo, I think this next question is good for you. It comes from Patrick Trucchio with H. C. Wainwright, who asks, Can you discuss further what is meant by larger indications? Would this include larger orphan diseases, or would these include prevalent diseases such as type two diabetes?
Yeah, we are I don't know if you can hear me here. But we are very focused on genetic diseases. And so we start with larger monogenic diseases, but we're moving towards polygenic diseases that have a strong genetic basis. So, you know, perhaps one day we would go for type two diabetes. I think for now, the way in which we're doing things is we're starting with diseases like Huntington's that are clearly monogenic but are quite large indications, and we're moving to diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's that have a strong genetic basis but of course have much larger populations.
Okay. And another question actually, not another question. A first question from our analyst with Truist, Robin Karnauskas, came in. And it is for cure dose. Is there an AAV viral load threshold where this doesn't work?
Can other gene therapies copy this approach?
Yeah. So we have developed a lot of IP around this. We think that there is something unique about AAV5. So it is something that is very difficult to do with other AAV serotypes. AAV5 is somewhat immunologically privileged, but in addition to this, we've had a number of insights that allow us to do this that are going to be quite difficult for other companies to copy.
And Ricardo, I think this is for you as well. Our analyst with Guggenheim, Debjit Chattopadhya, asks a couple of questions. First, thoughts on the relative advantage of plasmapheresis over IgG cleaving enzymes, for example, the simplicity and efficiency, if you can talk about that.
Yeah. The IgG cleaving enzymes are also very interesting, and we have also explored them, and we've explored a few other ideas. In general, we are looking for ways in which we can reduce the neutralizing antibodies. The advantage of plasmapheresis is that it is widely practiced. It is in the clinic today, so it is something that we can do now.
But, as we move forward, we are exploring other ideas, and we have are establishing collaborations with companies that have some of these other technologies that are complementary to ours.
And Debjit also asked if there was a separate promoter associated with the microRNAs in LinCure.
No. There's no. It is a single promoter that drives both the microRNA and the gene.
Another question going back to Huntington's, I think, as a follow-up. And this comes from Joe Thome, our analyst with Cowen. If you expect the Huntington knockdown to be less as you progress away from the injection site, what would a 50% striatal knockout equal in the CSF? David?
I think in terms of where we would think to see the CSF signal, it's probably more going to be in the high dose where we have a 75% reduction. And again, thinking about the size of the brain in a human, and that's where we might be able to see a 25% or 30% reduction with a higher dose. I think with the lower dose, it's going to be challenging to see a reduction that will be over the baseline variation from the assessments.
Yun Zhong, our analyst with BTIG asks, is it known at DCL3 what the percentage of striatal neurons are still surviving?
I'm not aware of any data that specifically has looked at what exactly is the percent of neuron survival at that stage. I think people have definitely thought about the idea that we should be going earlier. And certainly the community has been very focused on disease modifying therapies being at a sufficient point in time that we can actually modify the disease. And I think that's a challenge across a lot of CNS neurodegenerative disorders. But I don't think that we're really very clear as to what the exact striatal neuronal loss is, at that stage.
And there's a new classification system that probably will be, proposed by the community in the coming years that we'll try and focus more on staging as a continuity, that's more representative of that and less on the symptomatic occurrence.
Another question from Paul Matteis at Stifel. What exactly does disease yes, does disease modification look like in the Phase onetwo trial when you think you'll have enough data to really see disease modification regardless of biomarkers?
So I can take that. We think that disease modification really is stabilization of symptoms where they are at the moment at which the patient was dosed. So we don't believe that we will be able to bring back function because there is no bringing back dead neurons. But we do think that we can halt the progression of the disease, and we know that the patients progress significantly over the course of a year or eighteen months. So, again, what we expect is arresting the disease while the, placebo patients continue to decline.
And a follow-up question from Robin Karnauskas at Truist. Can you touch a little bit more on the functional MRI data? What can we really learn and how much follow-up is needed to see an impact?
David, you want to answer that?
Sure. So I think that's similar to what Ricardo just said. I think we're looking at for functional MRI that probably over a twelve to eighteen month period, we would see some evidence of changes. I think the challenge in doing the first gene therapy infusion in HD is that we need to understand the time course of some of the postoperative changes that occur in the brain in those first months after surgery. And when those changes sort of reside as with the neurofilament level towards sort of the base line of that patient again, and we're able to do very accurate imaging, you know, what does the volumetrics look like at 12 and 18?
What does the functional imaging look like at 12 and 18? And how does that differ from what we would expect from the natural history?
We have also shown preclinically that using MR spectroscopy, we can see changes in some of the secondary metabolites in the striatum. So that is also something that we will be looking at with, you know, MRS.
We have two questions related to neurofilament light, one from Gil Blum, an analyst with Needham, and another from Yoon Zhong with BTIG. The first is, is one year from administration a sufficient amount of time for neurofilament levels to come down to normal ahead of the biomarker output? And related to that, do you have any idea how elevated the baseline Nf L level is? Is it elevated enough for a potential meaningful reduction? David?
So I think we need to differentiate what we see in mini pigs where the mini pigs are dosed very early and develop a phenotype later in life. So their neurofilament returns to a baseline that's relatively normal at the time of surgical procedure within several months. In humans, what's been shown in the natural history data is that neurofilament is on a gradual increase trajectory in patients who have stage one disease. And this has been shown recently as well in the Roche observational study. So what we hope is over a period of months after the surgery that the neurofilament returns to that baseline trajectory.
And the hope is, based on the natural history data, that sham patients and the dose patients should start splitting apart at that twelve month point. We'll also be able obviously to follow the neurofilament levels in the patients who are continued to follow-up up to five years. So we can follow the natural history of those patients for well more than a year against their expectations when they're dosed.
And then one other one related again from Debjit. Could you talk to the NFL changes in the plasma versus the CSF, which might be a better marker?
So we're actively monitoring both. I think the we'll see how those correlate ultimately with all of the brain imaging and the clinical outcomes and have the opportunity overlooking at the data in this study to try and understand for a therapy that's directed at the brain itself, which is a better marker in the long term for the patients that improve or have a stabilization compared to the sham group.
Joe Schwartz, our analyst with Leerink, writes in that you've done some very good animal work for AMT-one hundred thirty showing the robust knockdown of toxic microRNA, caused by the DNA repeats. But I believe these were not HD models per se, so I'm wondering how much is known about the damage that the mutant huntingtin wreaks on the brain, and how much can be reversed in patients after it's been set in motion for many years? For instance, are you able to transduce all cell types which could be damaged in patients?
So I can take that. We have tested AMP130 in a wide variety of disease models. Of course, all preclinical models have their limitations, especially when it comes to the, for example, differences in the size of the brain and the differences in lifespan. So Huntington's patients get their disease in their thirties, forties, and fifties, and, you know, mice get their disease much more quickly than that. But, we have been able to reduce the expression of mutant huntingtin.
We have been able to reverse the phenotypes even of quite severe models. And, while the pigs haven't shown a phenotype yet, they will we are still looking at them. And I guess we're cautiously optimistic that they haven't developed a phenotype. So it's not quite true that we haven't tested them in Huntington's models. I think it is, you know, very validated preclinically.
Of course, we have to wait to see what we will see in patients.
Salveen Richter, our analyst with Goldman, writes in that while caveating that this will be informed by the natural history that we're collecting, what difference in the volumetric MRI and functional imaging do you expect would be clinically meaningful between the placebo between the not the placebo and the control, but AMT-one hundred thirty and the control? Will the natural history data be released at the same time as the HD data?
David, do want to answer that?
Sure. So I think it's hard to put clinically meaningful tag on volumetric MRI data. I think it will be a good biomarker, to let us understand specifically what happens in HD, particularly in the subset of patients who have bigger or, smaller initial volumes within stage one and how they progress differently, or whether they progress similarly. So I think that's one of the things that we're looking for in this pilot project. And, we're excited to be collaborating with CHDI and Ixico on this.
It's part of a larger project that CHDI is doing to reanalyze all of the Track HD, Predict HD, Image HD datasets to modern volumetric assessment technologies that we're using in current studies. So really updating the old images to the new analyses. We're committed to sharing that data as soon as we understand what that data looks like and have it analyzed. So probably by the end of this year and beginning of next year, we'll have some information as to what natural history does look like in some sets of patients with stage one disease.
And just the last couple of questions before we go into a break. This comes from Suji Jong, our analyst with Jefferies. Will you be able to measure exon one fragment in the CSF? And again, a follow-up on do you think one year of follow-up will be enough to see changes in the putamen and caudate volume?
I can take the question on the fragment of Huntington. So we have developed an assay. The levels of exon one are very low, so we're not completely sure that we will be able to measure it. But the assay is now at the point at which we're validating it, so that it will be useful in humans. And then the next part of the question, do you want to take that, David?
Sure. I think the challenge is really that we're talking about a very small number of patients, right? So being able to compare even at the first cohort, six patients who were, treated with AMT one hundred thirty versus four patients who weren't at twelve months may not be really a sufficient number to be able to see that difference. However, what we do want to do is be able to compare those four sham patients and overall the 10 sham patients against this new natural history data set that we're working on. And then for the patients who are followed for five years with AMT-one hundred thirty, we certainly have the opportunity well past twelve months at all of the subsequent appointments and visits that are focused in the first year and second year to really understand how that's different than the natural history and how it's different than sham.
And we'll be looking at comparing it in both ways to try and understand what the signal is, particularly given that, I mean, these are still very small Phase onetwo programs. In combination with The U. S. And EU studies, I think we'll have much more ability once we have twelve months data across all of that data set. And then eighteen and twenty four months for the patients who are treated, we'll have a lot more ability to look at how it's different from the natural history.
And this last question really relates to that. This comes from Madika, who is our analyst with Evercore ISI. Do
you
have a sense for the scope of data that will be needed for registrational study for AMT-one hundred thirty, patient numbers, endpoints, etcetera, similar to the antisense Phase III study, or could there be a more rapid path?
I can answer that. So, of course, it depends a lot on the magnitude of the effect that we see in this phase III study. So in principle, if the effect is very dramatic, as it sometimes is with gene therapies, then we might consider a study that is just a little bit larger than this study, or perhaps even some conditional registration with this data, given that there is no treatment for Huntington's disease at the moment. But it's also possible that the effect won't be as dramatic, in which case we will then have to power it based on the signal that we see. We don't expect it to be quite as large as the studies that people have conducted with the ASOs, only because we have we are recruiting a much smaller set of patients and we are taking, whereas they recruited patients that were a much broader population of patients, and we have, you know, many more measurements.
So, yeah, so I don't have a specific answer to you. I can't say, you know, it's gonna be 50 patients or a 100 or 300. But what I can tell you is that it's quite likely to be it's likely to be much smaller than what people have tried to do before because we expect a much larger effect.
Great. So on that note, thank you very much, David, Ricardo, and Matt. We're at our point now where we want to take a quick break. We'd like to return to our program within ten minutes. So by 09:45 a.
M. Eastern Time, we will reconvene. And at that point, we'll be going into details on expanding our research pipeline. So we'll be on a break, and we'll be back to you soon. Thanks.
Welcome back to Unicure's virtual research and development day, everyone. I'm Maria Kanter, Chief Communications Officer. And at this point, we would like to switch over and focus now on the topic of expanding our research pipeline as we move forward. I'd like to introduce Doctor. Melvin Elvers, who is our Vice President of Research, who is going to kick off this section.
Melvin?
Thank you very much, Maria. Welcome back, everyone. I'm excited to give you an update today about our Spinosalabular Ataxia Type three program. So first, a short introduction about the disease. Spinosadilla barre ataxia type three, also known as Marshadow Joseph disease, is the most commonly autosomal dominant inherited ataxia.
It has a prevalence of one to two per one hundred thousand in the total population, which means roughly seven thousand patients in The US and Europe. The disease manifests itself around midlife and gets worse over time and, while severely, impacting the quality of life. The symptom that manifests itself first is ataxia, also described as a drunken sailor's gate, dystonia, muscular atrophy. And when the disease progresses, the patient lose ability to communicate, they get wheelchair bound, and become paralyzed. After this path downhill, the patient will eventually die because of this disease.
So the cause of spinocelebellar taxa type three or SCA three is a CAG3 nucleotide repeat expansion in the ataxin three messenger RNA. This CAG repeat expansion results in a protein that is a translated protein that also has an expanded polyglutamine repeat expansion, similar to Huntington's disease. This expanded attackin free protein acquires toxic functions, gets aggregated and results in neurodegeneration. The neurodegeneration is most prominent starting in the brainstem, upper spinal cord and cerebellum, as can seen here in the MRI picture. As the mechanism of disease is similar to Huntington's disease, also for Spinal Cellular Attachment Type three, we could leverage on the proprietary Micro technology, which is proven to be safe in applications.
And in this case, we use the micro that is engineered to bind to the ATEXN3 messenger RNA and by binding resulting in a degradation of the ATEXN3 messenger RNA and thereby reducing the toxic ATEXN3 protein. To mention is that we do not distinguish between the mutant and wild type allele as knockout of ataxin-three has been shown to be well tolerated and by targeting both alleles, all patients have the target sequence and are thus eligible in essence. So after selecting our lead candidate that was also shown to be efficacious in patient derived neurons, we performed a dose escalation study in a lentiviral model of SCA3. This lentiviral model has the protein aggregates as a hallmark, seen on the left top panel with these black dots. After one time treatment with AMT150, we saw a clear reduction up to prevention of these aggregates, as seen in the ferrous panels as well as in the graft.
Subsequently, we also looked at the neuropathology seen here with these big lesions. So in untreated lentiviral retinal, there are big white lesions. If we dose with AMT150, we see a dose dependent decrease up to alleviation of this neuropathology in this particular lentiviral scattering mouse model. Next, we assess the AMT150 administration by directly administering the cerebrospinal fluid. In this case, we use the cisterna magna approach.
After assessing affected genome copies, microRNA expression, and a taxin free lowering in the brain areas most relevant to the disease being this brainstem and the cerebellum, we move to a transgenic SCAD3 mouse model. This transgenic SCAD3 mouse model that we use is an homozygous acute model and already at conception has a dramatic phenotype, as can be seen here on the right panel, looking at the total motor activity comparing the red, the deceased animal, and the black, the wild type animal. There's a really clear phenotype at birth. AMT-one hundred fifty was injected one time in the cisterna magna at eight weeks of age. And as you can appreciate that although this is a dramatic phenotype, we could still see a partial improvement of the phenotype as was measured again by the total locomotor activity.
Well, to bridge from small rodents to humans, it's usually important for the proper translation to the clinic, that we also look at the larger animals. In this case, make use of non human primers that were administered one time with AMT150 directly
in
the cerebrospinal fluid. We made use of two doses, a low and a high dose in three animals per group. We assessed from different brain structures the genome copies as can be seen on the Y axis. First of all, we saw clear dose dependent response, so the higher the genome copies that were injected, the higher genome copies we found back in the various brain structures. And interestingly, the highest transduction of AMP150 was found in the areas being most affected by the disease, being the brainstem, cerebellum and upper spinal cord.
A small take home message from the update on the AMT150 on the spinosalveolar taxin-three program is that AMT150 is shown to lower taxin-three messenger RNA protein in space derived neurons. That this ataxin-three lowering reduced neuropathology in an identifiable SCA3 mouse model that this causes functional improvement in mice after cisternal MAC administration. Also, in a larger animal, we have shown that cerebrospinal fluid delivery of AMP150 results in transduction of the brain, stem, spinal cord and cerebellum, the areas most affected by spinocerebellar tacheter type three. At the moment, the IND enabling studies are ongoing, which are the last piece of the puzzle to finalize the writing of the IND and to start the clinical development. With that summary, I would like to give the word to Doctor.
Paula Miranda, who will provide you an update about the Fabry program.
Thank you, Melvin. Good morning and good afternoon everyone. I would like indeed to introduce you to Fabry disease and now a program with 191. Fabry disease is a lysosomal storage disease. It is an X linked genetic disorder affecting more severe male patients.
It is a deficiency of alpha galactosidase A standing for GLAAD with a prevalence estimated of one to three thousand seven hundred to eighty thousand live births and a Fabry population of fifteen thousand patients both in The US and in Europe. These patients suffer from a severe variety of symptoms, goes from fatigue to hearing loss, neuropathic pain and cardiac disease, renal failure and are at high risk of stroke. In fact, this is the highest unmet medical need of these patients. The cause of this disease is the deficiency of this enzyme, alpha galactosidase A, which is responsible for the degradation of globotriosylceramine (GB3) and lysoGB3. Since the absence of this enzyme or deficiency of this enzyme, is no degradation of these substrates, you have a systemic accumulation of the substrates within the cells throughout various organs in our body, as for example in the lysosomes of endothelial cells or in the kidney and heart.
As you can see in the bottom right corner of the slide, have histological staining of the Fabry mouse kidney. In the Fabry mouse model, you have an accumulation of GB3 that is depicted here in a brown light stain and inclusion bodies. And this also happens in patients and eventually leads to kidney failure. There is standard care, but unfortunately it is not efficient. It is a suboptimal therapy.
It is a bi weekly enzyme replacement therapy with a recombinant GLA. However, this recombinant GLA has a limited tissue penetration and biodistribution. There is a poor cross correction which hampers the proper substrate clearance. So the disease progresses despite current treatment, which is one of the reasons why we are interested of course of finding an alternative for these patients with such a high unmet medical need. We developed AMT-one 191, which is an AAV5 GLA.
It is AAV5 encoding for alpha galactosidase A, which is a strand gene, and driven by a liver specific promoter, which is proprietary to Unicure. For the development of this therapy, we did several assessments in different preclinical studies and one of the preclinical studies, you can already see the data on the right side of the slide, in which we have a panel of histological staining of the kidney once more. The top panel is actually a wild type, so representing a healthy situation, then Fabry disease model and then Fabry treated the bottom part of the panel. GB3, which is a substrate that eventually you want to get rid of, is indicated by a red staining and hopefully you can see it that is deposited in the Fabry mouse model, both in the cortical and in the medulla region. And if you look into the medulla region, upon treatment, this staining is cleared, meaning that you do not have GB3 presence or accumulation when we treat it with an AB5 GLA.
I am going to guide you through other Fabry studies that we also worked on. In this study, this is actually upon a single administration with systemic administration of dose ranging finding study. And in the top left corner of the slide, you can see that we could deliver with three different doses of vector, we could efficiently deliver that to the liver, vector DNA copies, especially at mid and high dose, which you can see always throughout the presentation as the colorful orange bars. Then just right below you have a serological staining with GLA protein in the liver, which is highly expressed and is with a brown staining throughout the liver. Then on the right side of the plot, can see that in the top part you have a GLA activity in the liver tissue that we could assess and of course relate to the protein expression as well.
And most important of all is that this GLA is not only present in the liver but is also expressed and is secreted into the mouse plasma. This is the graph that you can see in the bottom part of the slide. Achieved acyclical activity with 3,000 fold increase compared with baseline plasma levels. We did not only assess the activity, but we also assessed the amount of protein that is present in a plasma and which correlates very well with our activity. This is very important because of course this will be the GLA that will be reaching the different organs with main afflictions.
So next, of course we wanted to look into if we can reduce the substrates, the ones that are causing the disease. So you will see here the different graphs in which representing the levels of Gb3 and Lyso Gb3 substrates, both in the kidney, that is in the top left corner of the slide and then just below you have the levels in the heart. Throughout, you see that the knockout levels in the diseased animal are really high and they can be significantly reduced already even at a low dose when treated with our AV5LA or AMT one hundred ninety one. We went further and we also looked into potential phenotypical correction, which means that we would be looking into the pain perception. It is known that these mice have less sensitivity to pain perception.
So we perform an experiment that is non ciception, which is in a hot plate, and you lay the animals into this hot plate with increasing temperature. So they will take some time to react, but of course the healthy animal will react faster. This is what you can see in the darker gray bar. Then in the lighter gray bar you can see that they take longer to react and of course we remove the animals. But when we treated it with AAV5LA already at the mid dose, but also at the high dose, but already at the mid dose, we can achieve the same type of reaction as you would have in a healthy control.
So proving that we also have a phenotypical correction improvement in pain perception in these mice. Once again, of course, wanted to go further, so we also looked into large animal models using our AMT one hundred ninety one. And in the top left corner you can see that we can deliver high copies, again with the systemic administration, we can achieve high copies in the liver and this is sustained amount, so for fourteen days and fifty six days. Just below you have another plot that we also assessed the glarg activity and this is four times higher than in the treated animals compared with control naive animals. Then on the next part of the slide, you will see that we also assess the GLA activity in the plasma, which is again high and sustained levels.
We also looked into if they would develop anti GLA antibodies and we did not find any anti GLA antibodies being raised upon treatment. And then the most important part of this slide, so the most important data, is actually from the bottom plot on the middle, which is our cross correction to the heart. So meaning that you can see here is the GLA activity and with the AV5 GLA or MT-one hundred ninety one treatment, you have doubling GLA activity in these animals, in the heart. So this, once more, activity and GLA comes from the liver and can then be cross corrected into the heart, which is again one of the main unmet medical need in these patients and which every Fabry treatment wants to achieve. On the next slide, I am giving a therapeutic overview or landscape of Fabry disease.
I am showing you a table here in which has in the first column the enzymatic replacement therapy approach, which is the current therapy. Then next to it you have AB5 plus so it is AMT-one hundred ninety one. And following the next columns are different gene therapy approaches with different serotypes of AAV and different viral vector. We all are exploring alternative therapies with different AAV serotypes and different promoters, some specific to the liver, others overall. And some therapies actually also did need to have an immune suppression as a co therapy, which is of course something that you want to avoid and in our case we do not need it.
We can do a single treatment, in case, as of course if needed, we also can leverage our platform and do a re dosing. Besides, and most importantly, we also know that our AAV5 has low prevalence of neutralizing antibodies throughout the human population, around ninety two percent of the human population, then ensuring that we will have a larger patient population that we can treat with our AAV5. In summary, AMT191 is shown to be high and sustained GLAB protein and activity levels in the plasma in both small and large animal models. Our AMT191 results in phenotypic correction in the Fabry mice with a pain perception and also that the expression from the liver results in GLA activity both in kidney and heart in mice and non human primates. Once again, one of the main goals of any therapy for Fabry.
As AMT191 key program milestones, we expect to have by the beginning of 2022 a GLP tox study in non human primates and an IND filing in 2023. So now I would like to hand over to Astrid Valis Sanchez and she will be introducing you to Parkinson's disease program. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Paula. So I'm pleased to introduce to you our program targeting alpha synuclein for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer's, affecting between zero point five and one percent of the population aged between 65 and 69 years of age and raising to one to three percent in those aged 80 years or older. With an increased aging population, the prevalence and incidence of the disease are expected to increase even further. Parkinson's disease is clinically diagnosed by the presence of bradykinesia accompanied with resting tremor or rigidity.
Next to motor deficits, Parkinson's is characterized by non motor symptoms which are very debilitating and includes autonomic dysfunction, sleep disturbances, pain, but also psychiatric and cognitive disturbances among many others. The progressive deterioration that the patients experience throughout the disease are very debilitating and have a severe impact on the quality of life and those of their caregivers. At present, there are no disease modifying therapies available. Familial Parkinson's disease represents between five and twenty percent of the disease populations. And many genes have been associated with the disease, most of them corresponding to the PARC family of genes.
PARC one corresponds to SNCA, which is the gene that encodes for alpha synuclein. Mutations, synucleotide polymorphisms, duplications or duplications of this gene have been shown to lead to accelerated pathology and early disease onset. Interestingly, alpha synuclein pathology is not only linked to genetic forms of Parkinson's, but is applicable to the whole population. Alpha synuclein is enriched in the neurons and localizes primarily in person active terminals, where it plays key physiological roles in external transport and neurotransmitter release. Under pathological conditions, alpha synuclein is prone to aggregate misfold and aggregate throughout intermediates like oligomers and fibrils.
And these aggregates lead to toxicity in the cell. Aggregated alpha synuclein is the main component of Lewy bodies, which are present in Parkinson's disease, but also in other alpha synucleopathies, such as multiple system atrophy and Lewy body dementia. This upper synuclein aggregates have the capacity to spread from cell to cell through prion like mechanisms. And this is one of the mechanisms which are believed to be linked to the increased extent of the neuropathology with disease progression. Neurodegeneration in Parkinson's disease affects neurostriatal dopaminergic circuits and other neurotransmitter systems in the brain.
And actually goes very much in parallel with the liver body pathology, which typically starts in the brainstem and extends to midbrain and cortical lesions. At UniCure, we propose complementary approaches to reduce aphosphonuclein toxicity in Parkinson's disease. First, we have designed micro and linkure approaches to deliver artificial microRNAs and reduce expression and production of alpha synuclein, messenger RNA and protein. Second, we are developing an accurate approach to deliver alpha synuclein targeted antibodies in order to block cell to cell transmission of alpha synuclein aggregates. The final goal is to combine the lead microRNA and antibody candidates in a single vector using GoCure in order to maximize the disease modifying potential of our proposed therapy.
The design criteria of our MyCure candidates have been tailored to ensure safety and general applicability to the broad Parkinson's disease population. First, we have designed candidates which target all four alternative free spiced alpha synuclein transcripts present in the brain. We have also avoided targeting beta and gamma synucleins because of their redundant functions and lack of association with the disease. Finally, for general applicability, we have avoided targeting the common mutations or SNPs as indicated on the panel on the right. We also have very stringent criteria for in vitro lead candidate selection, which include correct processing and lack of saturation of the endogenous RNA machinery, potent endogenous alpha synuclein messenger RNA and protein lowering, a lack of target effects in relevant neuronal cell models.
Here on the right, we show the typical results of our screening showing a dose dependent lowering of alpha synuclein for all of our candidates with respect to control treated cells. We have performed initial studies transfusing neurons in which we have shown effective processing of microRNA and expression. This is shown on the left panel for one of our candidates, Candidate number eight, in the inset who have determined the measure microRNA isoforms and also their expression in comparison to endogenous macronase showing that their levels are very well within endogenous macronin levels. And this is again key to show avoidance of separation of the endogenous RNAi machinery. This correct processing and expression leads to efficient loading of fast nuclear messenger RNA in the mid panel and protein in the right panel for, in this case, three of our test candidates with respect to control.
We have also performed initial in vivo studies in several models, which actually support the in vivo target engagement and phenotypic rescue of our approach. On the left panel, we show a first study in a Parkinson's disease right model expressing the A53 mutation, which we show effective lowering of alpha synuclein messenger RNA in target band region using our micro candidates. Remarkably combining two candidates, same time in this case candidates A and B show a synergistic effect, which actually supports the use of LinkCure for this program. We have also evaluated potential phenotypic rescue, in this case in a C. L.
Parkinson's disease model. We evaluated the motor phenotype in this model after treatment with MyCure, showing correction of the phenotype for all the candidates tested and all the three time points tested as shown here on the right graph. For an efficient reduction of Afrocynokin spreading in the brain, we propose an accurate approach to deliver alpha synuclein specific antibodies and block cell to cell transmission of the aggregates in the brain. Our data show high affinity of our lead candidate antibodies as shown in the mid panel with the results of an alpha synuclein binding ELISA. Additionally, our lead candidates show efficient secretion in vitro, spread here in the right panel when comparing two signal peptides with antibody candidate number one.
The high affinity, binding affinity and efficiency accretion support the mechanism of action of this approach moving forward in this program. In sum, we propose two complementary approaches to reduce pathological alpha synuclein expression and spread in Parkinson's disease. First, we have shown that our MyCure and LinkCure link candidates are correctly processed and expressed in vitro and lead to a dose dependent lowering of alpha synuclein messenger RNA and processing. Next, we have tested AbCure candidates in vitro showing high alpha synuclein binding and efficient secretion. Finally, initial studies in view of Parkinson's disease models show target engagement and phenotypic correction.
The next key milestone for our MT210 program for Parkinson's disease targeting alpha synuclein includes the finalization of proof of concept studies in Parkinson's disease rather models, the start of GLP toxicology studies in nonhuman primates in order to complete the clinical package supporting an IND filing. And with this, I would like to hand it over to my colleague, doctor Yim Poi Liu, who will be presenting our program for ALS. Thank you.
Thank you, Astrid. And good morning and good afternoon, everybody. I'm happy to present our program on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, as well as AMT one hundred and sixty one. So first, some words on the disease. ALS is a progressive and ultimately fatal autosomal dominant disorder with the age of onset between 40 and 60, with a median survival from the diagnosis between two to four years.
Yearly, are five thousand new ALS patients being diagnosed in U. S. And Europe with an incidence of two per one hundred thousand people. Approximately ten percent of the ALS cases are familial with C9or72 mutation being the most frequent and accounting for roughly one third of all familial ALS cases. Typically, the patients suffer from symptoms including muscle weakness, atrophy and spasms, language dysfunction, swallowing problems, neuropathic pain.
Eventually, they become paralyzed and often they die because of respiratory failure. So what is the pathology behind C9orf72 induced ALS? The pathology lies in a six nucleotide repeat expansion containing four Gs and two Cs that resides in the C9orf72 gene. And this repeat is also present in healthy individuals, but up to 30 times. However, patients can harbor as much as thousands of these repeats and these repeats are causing a toxic gain of function via two mechanisms.
One is RNA toxicity and the second is toxicity due to production of toxic peptides. And in both these cases, this will result in degeneration of upper and lower motor neurons in the spinal cord, brainstem and motor cortex of the ALS patient. On the right side, you can see a figure where the mutation reside into the C9orf72 gene and resulting in either the RNA toxicity or the D peptide protein toxicity. In case of the RNA toxicity, the C9orf72 RNA with the repeat expansions are being expressed and typically they form atypical secondary structures thereby forming RNA aggregates, called RNA foci, which are toxic to the cells. And in case of the D peptide protein toxicity, the C9orf72 mRNA containing the repeats are being translated into these D peptides in non ATP dependent translation mechanisms.
So at UniCare, we are developing an AAV gene therapy targeting only the C9r72 mRNA harboring these repeat expansions and leveraging on our micro technology. And for the delivery, we will make use of the AAV vector. So upon microRNA expression, we will only degrade the RNA from the C9ORF mutant allele and thereby reduce the RNA foci and the peptide proteins in cell. So first of all, we addressed whether we could in fact deliver the AAV vectors to the right areas that are affected by ALS. And therefore, we have injected two nonhuman primates into the cerebrospinal fluids and look to the vector DNA distribution in these animals, which you can see in the left graph.
On the Y axis, you see the vector DNA levels, whereas on the X axis different brain and spinal cord regions. And we can see that in both animals, widespread spinal cord as well as cortex vector DNA can be found in these animals, which are the key areas where the ALS patients are being affected. And in the middle graph, we can see upon transduction, we clearly also see microRNA expression in these areas of the animals. And at last, the last graph we can see there is a clear correlation between microRNA expression versus vector DNA copies that we detect. And the second question we addressed is how efficacious are our AAV5 micro vectors in disease model?
So we injected intracranially our AAV vectors into transgenic mouse model that encodes the human C9RF72 gene with repeat expansions. And first of all, at micro expression, which you can see on the left graph. And as appreciated, the animals that received the AAV5 micro vectors, they show high micro expression as depicted in the orange and the blue graphs in both the cortex as well as in the striatum. Whereas the animals that received the control AAV5 GFP did not show any micro expression. In the middle graph, we can appreciate that upon micro expression, there is a significant lowering in C9orf72 mRNA compared to the control group.
And most importantly, we also see a significant reduction in these treated animals that overexpressed the microbes, a significant reduction in the RNA foci, which are the pathological markers in this model relative to the GFP expressing animals. So to summarize my talk, AIM T161 targets mutant allele of C9R72 and cerebrospinal fluid delivery of AMT161 results in widespread cortical and spinal cord distribution in nonhuman primates, which are the key areas affected in ALS and administration of AMT161 results in lowering of C9orf72 mRNA. And most importantly, the RNA foci are also reduced in this transgenic model. So the next key milestones for the ALS program will be proof of concept studies in disease models, initiation of GLP toxicology studies in nonhuman primates, and ultimately we would like to have an IND filing. So with that, I give the words to our President, Doctor.
Ricardo Dommetsch, to talk about Alzheimer's disease.
Thank you, Ying Khoi. So Alzheimer's disease, of course, is the pandemic before this pandemic. It's an existential threat to our health care system. At the moment, there are five to six million patients with AD, and it costs us well, it will cost us, you know, more than a trillion dollars to treat by 02/1950. Unfortunately, this has not gotten any better, even with the recently approved treatments.
There has been a revolution in Alzheimer's disease beyond the approval of the first therapeutic, and that is the fact that we have, for the first time, identified modifying mutations. So for a long time, we've known about mutations that cause the disease. So we've known, for example, that the APOE gene and specifically the APOE4 gene predisposes people to get Alzheimer's disease. We know of other mutations like presenilin mutations and mutations in the gene that can lead to the disease. What is new is that we have found that there are alleles in specific genes, and in particular in the APOE gene, that can actually protect you from the disease, even in the presence of other mutations that give you the disease.
These are modifying mutations. So the approach that we're taking for Alzheimer's disease is to target the main genetic cause of Alzheimer's disease or the most common genetic cause, which is APOE4. So APOE4 is the highest genetic risk for late onset Alzheimer's. Forty percent of patients with AD have an E4 allele. The APOE4 allele gives you a ninety five percent chance of getting Alzheimer's disease.
And our approach is to knock down APOE4 and express a protective variant of APOE. And this is made possible by the discovery that not only is APOE2 protective, but they're even more interesting. There are mutations in another variant called APOE3 that together can protect even in the presence of mutations that lead to early onset Alzheimer's disease. So we're very excited about this. Now, one question, of course, is how does ApoE actually work?
And we don't know for sure. What you do know is that it's a key regulator of cholesterol transport and metabolism in the liver and in the brain. We know that it binds to a variety of cell surface receptors. We know that it modifies the inflammatory cascade in the brain, specifically microglial cells, and that by modifying this inflammatory cascade, it has the potential to affect the disease even relatively late. We think that it's likely to be more effective than, for example, removing A beta.
So our approach is to take advantage of our GoCure platform to express protective APOE variants and use MyCure to knock down APOE4, which we know to be deleterious, and then to test this in patients with severe early onset forms of the disease. The next milestone, we're in the process of selecting a lead and conducting proof of concept studies, which we will be doing over the next year. Then we will begin GLP-four pathology studies in non human primates before proceeding to an IND filing. And with that, I will pass the word on to our CEO, Matt, who is going to tell us about an exciting new development for our pipeline.
Thank you, Ricardo. So far during the presentation, we've discussed three new programs that we are internally developing. When we announced our CSL transaction one year ago, we also stated we would be ramping up disciplined business development efforts to explore external innovation. In this regard, today we are extremely excited to announce that Unicure has entered into a purchase agreement to acquire Core Leaf Therapeutics, including their lead gene therapy program to treat temporal lobe epilepsy. Temporal lobe epilepsy, or TLE, is a very, very large clinical unmet need.
It's estimated approximately one point three million people in The United States and Europe are affected by TLA, of which approximately eight hundred thousand people do not respond adequately to anti seizure medication. Together with renowned academic collaborators, including Professor Christophe Moult at the University of Bordeaux and Professor Valerie Propel at INSERM, Corleyn is developing a gene therapy targeting the kinase receptor, which has been demonstrated to play a key role in the pathology of TLE. In important preclinical studies, Korlym has demonstrated strong proof of concept, including suppression of chronic spontaneous epileptic seizures. This highly compelling and strategic transaction expands Unicure's CNS pipeline, strengthens our leadership position within microRNA based gene silencing therapies, and provides us entree into a very large indication with a clear development path, established registrational endpoints, and the potential for very rapid clinical proof of concept. The transaction also provides us a platform to explore additional opportunities within the epilepsy space.
With respect to the terms of the acquisition, Munich Re will make an upfront cash payment of EUR 46,300,000.0 at the closing of the transaction, and CoreLeaf shareholders will be eligible to receive an additional EUR 43,700,000.0 of performance based milestones through Phase onetwo development and €160,000,000 associated with Phase three development and regulatory approvals. Unicure has the sole option to pay up to 25% of future milestones in Unicure stock and expects the transaction to close in the third quarter. Incorporating all uses of cash associated with the transaction, we expect to maintain cash runway into first half twenty twenty four, which represents a change for approximately six months compared to our previous guidance. And with this, I'll hand it back to Ricardo to go through some additional details with respect to Coraleaf.
Thank you, Matt. So as Matt said, TLE is the most common type of focal epilepsy. It's associated with damage to the temporal lobe as well as hyperexcitability to the hippocampus. It's an acquired disease. It's often caused by brain injury or tumors or sometimes a prolonged febrile seizure, and it affects a large number of people.
One point three million people have it. A very significant fraction of these folks are inadequately treated, about four hundred thousand of them with hippocampal sclerosis and another four hundred thousand that don't have any MRI abnormalities. Refractory TLE patients have a very poor quality of life and a significantly reduced lifespan. And the standard of care today is lobectomy or a laser tissue ablation, but only a small fraction of eligible patients actually choose to undergo surgery. Coraleaf has developed an exciting program to target this, targeting a glutamate receptor called the KN8 receptor.
So KN8 receptors are excitatory glutamate receptors that are epileptogenic and are believed to be aberrantly expressed in the hippocampus of refractory TLE patients. They drive the seizures through the recurrent excitation, so they form synapses onto themselves and thus drive the hyperexcitability of the hippocampus. And canid receptor knockout mice are resistant to epilepsy in a preclinical model, a pilocarpine model of TLE, and that is you can see that in the graph on the lower right. So, AMT260 and AMT261, which is a variant, are AAV gene therapies that delivered an engineered microRNA that targets KN8 receptors. They dramatically reduce seizures in a pilocarpine seizure rodent model, which you can see in the graph on the upper right hand panel.
They also interestingly reduce seizures in human brain slices from patients with TLE providing human validation for the approach. So we're excited about this collaboration. We believe that this dramatically increases and enhances our pipeline. The next milestones are going to be a GLP talk study, a pre IND meeting, and an IND filing, which is scheduled for the coming years. So with that, let me bring you back to our new pipeline that now is expanded to include temporal lobe epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease.
We believe that this meaningfully changes the potential impact of Unicure, and we are excited about what this means for the future of the company. So with that, let me give the word to Maria as we have questions as we take questions from the audience.
Thank you, Ricardo. And now I'd also like to welcome John Garron, our Chief Business Officer, to join this Q and A session as John was integral to the execution of the Corleave transaction. We have several questions having to do with our research programs that we just spoke about. The first one comes from Difei Yang with Mizuho, and she asks regarding SCA3, if there are any signs of dose dependent safety signals for SCA3 that we've seen?
So, Melvin, do you want to take that?
Yes. Thanks a lot for the question. And this is a very relevant question. To split it into two, at the moment, we are conducting a GLP toxicology study specifically designed to look at safety. Next to that, in the preclinical setting, we have also done a lot of work on the microRNA processing and the saturation of the endogenous machinery, also looking at safety from that aspect.
There we have not seen any issues with the microRNA. And again, the safety aspects, currently we have a GLP toxicology study up and going.
I should also add that we don't think that there will be target related toxicity because a complete knockout down of ataxin three is well tolerated in animals.
Our next question comes from Yun Zhong with BTIG. Again, regarding SCA3, just a confirmation, is the intracysturna magna injection going to be the route of administration for our program? And what was the delivery method used in the nonhuman primate study?
Melvin, do you want to take that?
Yes. I'll just start off with the latter part. In the nonhuman primates, we have tested both intrathecal as well as intrasyserna MAC administration. There, we found that the cisternam MAC administration results in the most favorable transduction of the brainstem and the cerebellum being most affected. At the moment, we are in the process of the clinical development and this is part of a discussion that we also need to have with the regulatory authorities on how to proceed in the clinic.
Turning now to Fabry disease, a question from Luca Issy, our analyst with RBC asks another company was recently asked by the regulators to run a head to head trial versus Fabrazyme. What is our reaction to that news, and how should investors and analysts think about the implications for our program?
I can take that question. So we have always anticipated that we would have to run a clinical trial against the standard of care, which at the moment is Fabrazyme. So this does not, in fact, affect our clinical plans. I think for this other company, I think the surprise was simply that they had not run their trial against the standard of care, which would require them to redo their clinical development. We're at an earlier stage, so we don't think that that will be an issue.
Okay. We have a question coming in now from, Robin Karnauskas at Truist. What is your take on the failure of some of the other alpha synuclein approaches despite having positive preclinical data? How do you view the ASO approach for ALS versus gene therapy? And lastly, on ALS, given how much variability there is in disease progression, even with the familiar form, how are you thinking about clinical development for ALS?
So first with alpha synuclein and then moving over to ALS.
So let's start with alpha synuclein. So the therapies that have failed in alpha synuclein have largely been biologics. So and that, to be honest, is not a big surprise. The concentration of alpha synuclein in the periphery is extremely high. So if you do if you deliver an antibody IV, the vast majority of it binds to the peripheral alpha synuclein.
Most of these companies proceeded into phase two without any evidence of targeting engagement in the central nervous system. In fact, even preclinically, these anti alpha synuclein antibodies don't actually lower alpha synuclein very effectively in the brain, of an animal. So it's really not a surprise that some of these have failed. However, the genetics is clear. Alpha synuclein mutations cause Parkinson's disease, Lewy bodies contain alpha synuclein.
We firmly believe that by combining, microRNA to reduce the expression of alpha synuclein and an antibody to, prevent diffusion, we are going to have a therapeutic effect. Of course, we don't know, but we are cautiously optimistic that this is a good approach, it will be quite different from having to administer a large biologic peripheral and hoping that, you know, it gets into the central nervous system. So the next question has to do with ALS and what I what we think about the antisense oligonucleotides. Well, I think that the antisense oligonucleotide approach to C9ORF is a reasonable approach. It's a disease of upper and lower motor neurons and ASOs administered intrathecally certainly do reach those targets.
On the other hand, ASOs have to be injected once every two months, sometimes once a month. Intrathecally, you have ever had an intrathecal injection, it's not the sort of thing you want to do again. So I think that a gene therapy that lowers C9ORF is going to be very competitive relative to an antisense oligonucleotide that has to be administered much more frequently with the accompanying adverse events. Now, the next question is, given the variability in the progression of ALS, how are we thinking about this clinically? Again, there is certainly variability in ALS progression.
I think there have been a number of clinical studies and clinical study designs that have actually shown that one can actually measure the progression actually quite effectively in a relatively small number of patients. There is some variability, but I think it should be possible to see a especially a dramatic change in the progression of the disease. So but of course, you know, the details of how we're going to do this will wait until we have our conversations with regulators.
A confirmation question coming in from Debjit. Will AMT210 be administered directly into the putamen, or will this be IV via AbCure?
We still we're still we're in the process of evaluating those two options.
Turning back to Fabre, Dufey at Mizuho asks, Could you share your view on the AAV versus lentiviral approaches, pros and cons for delivery in treating Fabry disease? And how important is it to have expression in the CNS?
Paula, do you want to take that question?
Yes, I can. So indeed, both AAV and lentiviral vectors are very different. As you know, one AAV is not integrative while lenti it is. And in fact, they have an approach that is ex vivo, which is more cumbersome and also increases the chances of having more differentiated treatment between different patients. So they have to isolate hematopoietic stem cells, lentiviral transduction, and then we transplant, which with AAV is only one single administration.
So we see advantages on that. With the CNS, we are looking into, of course. It can be important. It's an important indeed assessment that we are also looking into it. Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah. The one thing I would add to Paula's answer is that the lentiviral approach, of course, requires conditioning of patients. The conditioning regimen is not for the faint of heart. It has somewhere between five and ten percent mortality. So while this is a really severe disease, it you know, I think there is always going to be an advantage to an IV administered one time treatment relative to an ex vivo lentiviral integration, which carries with it, in addition to that, an oncology, sort of an oncogenesis risk and a conditioning risk.
A question from Joe Schwartz with Leerink asks also about Fabry. Can you talk about the transgene that you envision delivering? Will it encode for a wild type protein or fragment? And how will you be titrating the promoter? And what cell types is it being expressed in?
And lastly, does it need to get in in order to clear toxic substrate?
Paula?
Yes. So thank you. We have a wild type GLAB and with the proprietary liver specific promoter that, as shown in different studies, are ready to be very strong promoter. We also have shown in our data, as you could see, that we can assure cross correction with such high levels in the plasma of LA. So I think I hope this covers your question.
But in essence, we have a wild type LA, which is expressed by a very strong promoter. In terms of specific expression, it's in the hepatocytes. So it's restricted expression through the hepatocytes in the liver.
But I just want to make it clear. We express it in the hepatocytes, but we see very strong cross correction in the kidney and in the heart and in other tissues. So obviously, the enzyme that is generated can be efficiently taken up by other cells, which is, by the way, not true of Fabrazyme.
A question came in regarding the Corleave acquisition, and this is from Yun Zhong at BTIG. Does Corleave have its own HEK293 cell manufacturing system? And with the acquisition, do you expect any future programs other than TLE to be based on the mammalian cell system?
John, do you want to answer that?
Certainly. The system that's currently in use by Coraleave is based on their partnership with REGENXBIO. So that's the system that would be continued forward with this program. And at the moment, we would contemplate what the platforms would be for future programs as well, whether it would be Regenexx or others or our own.
Okay. Another question came in from Difei Yang at Mizuho. Most of the newly disclosed programs are in the CNS. Is it fair to assume AAV5 has advantages over other AAVs and CNS? And if so, in what ways?
Yes. AAV5, especially when administered directly, seems to transduce neurons in ways that other AAVs don't do well. It has I think, main advantage actually is immunological, which is that patients don't have neutralizing antibodies or only a very small fraction of patients have neutralizing antibodies, and that the neutralizing antibodies that do exist are relatively low affinity, so we can dose through them. It also has some significant safety advantages relative to AAV9 and AAVrh10. So AAV9 and AAVrh10 are commonly used in the central nervous system.
They transduce neurons relatively well, but they have some toxicity issues at all doses. So we therefore think that there are some advantages to AAV5, particularly in the way in which we've modified it and the way in which we are administering it.
So regarding our new program in TLE, Joe Thome at Cowen asks, When do you expect that AMT260 could enter the clinic for TLE? And do you expect that reductions in the seizure burden should be evident relatively shortly after administration?
Yeah, we think that our TLE program should be in the clinic over the next two years or so. We haven't guided any specific dates yet. This is something that obviously has just happened, and so we have to make sure that we fully, you know, we have conversations with the regulators to understand exactly what is required. One of the attractive parts of this indication is that we think that we can get a clinical readout relatively quickly, and it should be relatively unequivocal. Seizures, of course, are something that we can easily detect.
I should say we're also excited about this because preclinical models of seizures are actually very predictive of success in the clinic. So the fact that this works in this model of TLE is also exciting.
Going over to C9ORF72, a question from Yanan Zhu at Wells Fargo. For this MyCure approach with C9ORF72, how did you achieve the selectivity for the mutant C9ORF72 allele?
Yeah. We haven't disclosed that yet, but we have achieved selectivity.
Okay. And a question from Suji Jong at Jefferies. For Parkinson's disease, is developing GoCure approach the ultimate goal of the program, or do you plan to develop lead candidates from MyCure, LimCure, and GoCure, and then select the final development candidate?
Well, we at the moment, we're excited about the combination of multiple mechanisms. But of course, in the process of development, when we settle on the final lead candidate, we will select the one that is most effective in the broadest set of preclinical models.
Debjit at Guggenheim has a follow-up. At what dose would DRG toxicity be a concern with ICM route of administration?
We haven't seen DRG toxicity with AAV5. That is one of the advantages of AAV5 relative to AAV9 and AAVrh10.
Okay. Another question from Suji Jong at Jefferies. For the Alzheimer's disease program, Given APOE4 is a risk factor and not everyone with APOE4 has the disease, do you think replacing the APOE4 with a protective allele will have therapeutic benefits in patients?
Well, if you have two copies of APOE4, you have a ninety five percent chance of developing Alzheimer's. So I think that if you're a heterozygous, you have somewhat reduced chance, but still a significantly elevated risk. So we will initially develop a therapy for people who are homozygous. There are still tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of those patients. And then we will test it in a broader population.
We do think that this is likely to be efficacious in all patients ultimately based on the genetics.
Patrick Trucchio at H. C. Wainwright asks, Regarding the Fabry program, what, if any, immune system regimen would you anticipate in humans? What learnings, if any, have emerged from other AAV programs in Fabry? And what gives Unicure confidence AMT-one hundred ninety could have best in class characteristics?
So Paula, do you want to take that?
I can take that. So one of the best things that we can say about AMT-one hundred ninety one is using AB5, which is a high or a low, in fact, prevalence of neutralizing antibodies in a general population compared with the other serotypes. Besides, we also have a very strong liver specific promoter and we have shown in our data that we can cross correct afflicted organs such as the kidney and the heart with our treatments. What else can I say in terms of immune suppression? We showed that we do not have neutralizing antibody development against anti GLA, which is indeed the case for other programs with AAV, already nonhuman primates.
So we do not see this with our product. So I think these are the main advantages and what can turn our product into a best in class.
Yeah. There is something sort of subtle here. Of course, patients with that we don't have GLA. So if we introduce GLA in principle, we could develop antibodies. We think that there is a reduced risk of that because if you express something in the liver, that can actually trigger tolerance.
And so we're, again, cautiously optimistic that that will be the case because that seems to be the case in preclinical species.
Okay. We have a few more questions. A question came in asking for the status of the research collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb.
Yeah. So I'll take that one. Yes. So the research collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb continues to move forward, and it continues to move forward nicely. We've designated four programs.
So we have four designated collaboration target programs with a lead program that we expect to move into IND enabling studies. We announced, I guess, earlier this year, the receipt of a $5,000,000 milestone payment regarding BMS's designation of a clinical candidate. So we're very excited about that. And they continue to be very enthusiastic about gene therapy and our collaboration of working together and are very excited to move these targets that are focused on cardiovascular and muscle disorders forward into the clinic.
Okay. And a couple more questions before we move on with our program. From Judah Frommer at Credit Suisse, do you have a sense for the magnitude of the C9orf72 lowering that is believed to convey clinical benefit in ALS? And again, any read throughs on this from other programs?
Sure. So Yingpui, do you want to take this?
I thought maybe you want to take it.
Sure. Absolutely. So yes. So how much how much loss of how much down regulation do we need for clinical efficacy? So for C9orf72, we think that we have to reduce it by around seventy five percent.
This is based on the relative changes associated with alleles that are expressed, that have a lower expression level. Yes. I don't know that there is any read through at the moment from any of the other programs, so of course, we will continue looking at that. I would say one thing that we are excited about is the fact that we can knock down the mutant allele. So in principle, we can, you know, aim for complete knockdown.
That should still be safe and well tolerated. A heterozygous mutation is completely well tolerated in humans and in animals.
Also on ALS, two additional questions, one from Paul Matteis at Stifel, another from Luca Issy at RBC. How confident are we that C9ORF72 is not a loss of function pathology, in which case a knockdown approach may not work? And then why going after C9 ALS and not SOD1 ALS? Just wondering is one of our competitors has Phase III data for SOD1 reading out in the second half of this year.
Yeah. So let me start with the second one. So SOD1 is also interesting, but it's a much, much, much smaller population. So C9ORF is the most common mutation associated with familial ALS. But of course, we would also consider SOD1.
So that's the first one. And the next question is, why do we think that C9ORF is a gain of function versus a loss of function? Well, full knockdown of C9ORF does cause a phenotype, but it doesn't actually cause an ALS phenotype. It causes a different phenotype, and heterozygous knockdown is well tolerated. So we don't think that it's actually a loss of function.
And the fact that we can knock down just a disease allele, I think, is also going to be helpful in that respect.
And the last question from Robin Karnauskas at Truist. Big picture, there's certainly a lot going on. Help folks understand how we plan to balance focus on later stage programs with these various earlier stage programs as we go forward.
Yeah. I mean, I think the, you know, the reality is that they do use different calories, you know, in the organizational apparatus, right? So, yes, there's some crossover with respect to CMC resources, but a number of the programs that we discussed are in the research phase. And we think we have the bandwidth, the capacity to drive these programs forward and to drive them forward quickly. Really, the resources that are required for Huntington's and hemophilia B, those are more on the clinical operational side and we're tapping into the commercial scale CGMP manufacturing capabilities.
So we do believe over the course of the next year or two that we'll be able to drive all these various efforts forward and do them expeditiously.
Okay. So we're going to move on now to the next part of our program. We want to thank everyone in our research group for their participation and their presentations. At this time now, I'd like to, have Doctor. David Cooper rejoin us as he provides an analysis of the HOPE B fifty two week data.
David?
Thank you, Maria. So I'm happy to be able to discuss now the HOPE B fifty two week analysis, as well as the feedback we've received from regulatory authorities. So first, just to remind you about the HOPE B study and its design. This is an open label study of males, adults greater than or equal to 18 years of age with severe or moderately severe hemophilia B, so that's factor IX activities of less than or equal to two percent, who have been on continuous prophylaxis for more than two months. The exclusion is other factors that might affect the efficacy and safety, including a history of factor IX inhibitors, active hepatitis B and C, uncontrolled HIV infection.
We measured anti AAV5 neutralizing antibodies at screening, but we did not use this as an inclusion criteria. We were not using prophylactic immunosuppression. So this study had a screening visit. It had a lead in phase of at least six months where the patients were seen every two months, had phone calls on alternating months. And it's important again that this was at least six month period.
The dosing visit occurred. The patients got a single dose of two times ten to the thirteenth GCs per kilo. They were followed weekly for the first twelve weeks, monthly for the next twelve months, and then every six months. And of note, there's the first visit in that longer term follow-up is at month 18. And that'll be relevant when I discuss the FDA feedback.
So we've been communicating in terms of the study having co primary endpoints. We provided, based on the prior agency feedback, proposal for a statistical analysis plan, in the fall that included these co primary endpoints. The FDA has recently provided feedback on the statistical analysis plan, again, with no review of data, at this point in time. What the FDA has commented now is that they think that it should be a single primary efficacy endpoint instead of co primary endpoints. That the annualized bleeding rate or ABR should be the primary efficacy measure for gene therapies.
ABR should be assessed after all subjects have a stable factor IX expression. And the analysis should count all bleeding episodes reported by the patient, not considering any investigator adjudicated new or true bleeding events. So with this, that would change the primary endpoint to be 52 ABR after stable factor IX expression has been achieved compared to ABR in the lead in period. So this means we will measure this now from week twenty six or month six through month eighteen. And again, the importance of the last slide I showed where the first visit and that six month follow-up, is at month eighteen.
The secondary endpoints would then be Factor IX activity at six, twelve, and eighteen months after dosing. The rates of total spontaneous traumatic and Factor IX treated and untreated bleeding episodes, Factor IX consumption compared with the bleeding period, and the correlation of Factor IX activity levels with preexisting anti AAV5 neutralizing antibody titers. In addition, we'll of course have safety endpoints. So, to remind you, there were seventy five subjects that were screened, sixty seven that entered the lead in phase, and fifty four subjects that were dosed. We have now since hearing from the FDA, closed the fifty two week data set and locked it with preliminary analysis.
So for the fifty four patients, to remind you, their mean age is 41.5 with a range of 19 to 75 years of age. The majority of them, eighty two percent or forty four, have severe factor IX, deficiency, less than one percent levels. And importantly, the prescreening treatment was almost sixty percent of them or thirty one out of the fifty four were on extended half life prophylaxis. Preexisting anti AAV5 neutralizing antibodies were seen in twenty three of the patients or approximately forty three percent. In terms of what we provided previously at twenty six weeks, their factor activity had increased to a mean of 39% at month six, representing a change from baseline of thirty seven point eight percent.
We see at fifty two weeks now, factor activity levels are maintained at 41.5% at month twelve, a change of 40.3% from baseline. You can see in the figure on the right where the mild hemophilia range is from five percent to forty percent, where we were just marginally at that and now the mean is pushed into the non hemophilia factor range. So we're very happy it's showing excellent stability of our data at fifty two weeks. In terms of the neutralizing antibody effect, we haven't seen a clinically significant impact of preexisting neutralizing antibodies on the mean activity. We're now graphing that based on the mean activity of each patient in Factor IX levels between months six and twelve, as opposed to just at the six month data point.
What you can see on the left of this figure is all of the patients who don't have the neutralizing antibodies at baseline. And again, there's a variability in the response that those patients have. And on the right, as you move across are patients with increasing titers of antibodies. Again, you can see, that there's not really a very consistent response and certainly not a clinically meaningful response. The patient with the second highest antibody titer of six seventy eight has a level that's just around 40%.
So certainly the titers themselves are not predicting what someone would have in an activity level. In terms of bleeding, sustained Factor IX levels that we've seen were associated with significantly reduced spontaneous bleeding during the first year of follow-up. And I think it's important to remember here that the FDA new guidance is having to show all bleeding events, even if they've been adjudicated by the investigator not to be a bleed or a continuing bleed. Meaning even if they did an ultrasound and found out that there was no blood in the joint because the patient reported it as a bleed, we need to count it as a bleed. So the bleed numbers are different than they were in prior disclosures.
In terms of looking at that from a lead in month zero to six and month seven to 12 basis, overall there were 136 bleeds in the lead in period versus 29 in the first six months and 26 in the next six months. It's important that I recall I said the lead in was at least six months. The mean period of the lead in is approximately is over seven months, on average. For months zero to six, we also excluded the first three weeks. So that's really only a twenty three week period.
So you really can't compare absolute numbers of bleeds. In terms of Factor IX treated bleeds, there were only 15 Factor IX treated bleeds in the first six months and 14 in the next six months compared to one hundred and eighteen in that lead in period. Spontaneous bleeds treated with Factor IX, again, was significantly dropped even in months zero to six, but again went from six to two in the next six months after that. So a significant reduction in spontaneous treated bleeds as well as all bleeds compared to the pretreatment period. This shows the annualized bleeding rates, which were reduced on treatment compared with the lead in period where they were on state of the art prophylaxis with Factor concentrates.
During this post treatment period, we have up to two years of follow-up in some of the subjects. Thirty percent thirty of the subjects or fifty six percent had no bleeds and thirty nine subjects or seventy two point two percent had no bleeds treated with factor IX. So this shows the ABRs for lead in, the ABRs for the first year of treatment, the percent reduction and the significance. So all bleeds, were reduced by sixty seven percent. Factor IX treated bleeds were reduced by seventy nine point nine percent.
Spontaneous bleeds treated with Factor IX reduced by almost eighty five percent. Dramatic bleeds treated with factor IX reduced by almost eighty three percent, and joint bleeds treated with factor IX reduced by eighty four percent. And all of those are significant to P less than 0.0001, with very low rates in year one for AVRs reflecting the few bleeds that occurred. We also, I said, looked at substantial reductions in Factor IX replacement as an endpoint compared with the lead in period. At fifty two weeks, ninety six percent or fifty two out of the fifty four subjects discontinued routine prophylaxis and remain prophylaxis free.
In terms of Factor IX consumption, we looked at it two ways. One is the IUs per year or how many international units they use, which was reduced 96%, a reduction of some 250,000 IUs per year. We also saw a 96% reduction in the Factor IX rate of infusions per year with an adjusted mean that went from seventy percent 73 infusions per year to three infusions per year. And this includes the prophylaxis two patients who remain on prophylaxis. And again, to P less than 0.001.
In terms of post treatment adverse events, fifty three subjects had four zero eight adverse events, but thirty nine subjects only had 91 adverse events that were thought to be treatment related. The major treatment related adverse events that we've been following are transaminitis. Nine subjects received corticosteroid treatment orally for transaminase elevations. They were all discontinued on steroids prior to week twenty six. Their factor IX levels were preserved in the mild range, eight to thirty nine percent.
Seven subjects had infusion related reactions at the time of dosing. One subject discontinued dosing midway through and received only about ten percent dose. And the infusions were completed successfully in the remaining six. We haven't seen any inhibitors. We also haven't seen any statistical relationship between safety and preexisting neutralizing antibodies.
The adverse events that are treatment related in more than five percent of the population are listed here. They're very similar to what we saw in twenty six weeks with minor changes in the order of frequency. So the conclusions from the very positive fifty two week data that we've just locked and analyzed. Mean Factor IX activity significantly increased to near normal levels of twenty six weeks and was maintained at near normal levels at fifty two weeks. The majority of the subjects in the study did not report bleeding after treatment.
We saw significant reductions in bleeding and improvement in their AVR compared to their routine prophylaxis. Ninety six percent of the subjects discontinued prophylaxis. Ninety six percent reduction we saw both in Factor IX use and in the number of infusions. The most common safety findings were transaminase elevations requiring steroids and infusion reactions supporting a very positive benefit risk of treatment. Based on the FDA's feedback and on the statistical analysis plan, the final analysis will now be planned at eighteen months with this fifty two week period between months six and eighteen to support the marketing authorization applications.
With that, I will, open up the next question and answer session.
Okay. Thank you, David. We do have a few questions that have come in. The first one from Paul Matisse at Stifel. If we could speak to the correlation or any correlation between factor IX expression
We don't necessarily see any, correlation of factor IX levels in steroids. We see a correlation of factor IX levels with, in the patients who've had transaminitis. When the transaminitis is addressed through the steroids, the factor levels stabilize. But we don't see specifically that the corticosteroids are impacting our assessment of factor IX.
Kristen Kluska at Cantor Fitzgerald would like again for reiteration on any correlation to factor activity and reported bleeds across those patients who experienced them. And also in light of the observations at month six and twelve, what are our expectations for eighteen month data?
So I'm happy to take that one also. I think our expectation is that spontaneous bleeds will again be reduced, as we move further out into the follow-up period. I think probably the number of patients, who are dosed with Factor IX IV bleeding episodes will decline over time as patients and their doctors become more familiar with what their factor levels are and whether, every minor trauma, that you and I might experience and have some bruising, whether all of those still need treatment in a patient with hemophilia who now has an average level of forty one percent in the non hemophilia range would need to be treated. In terms of further correlation with factor levels, I think we just would expect that the factor levels will continue stable over the next six months. And then I think overall we'll see either a stable ABR or a declining ABR in the patients that have sufficient levels.
Joe Schwartz from Leerink asks if there can be any commentary on what may have led to the FDA's change in preference for the final analysis to support registration of etranides, if there's a threshold for AVR that they will consider necessary for approval?
So I can take that. So the FDA's change in the final analysis came before they saw any of our data. It seems to be well, it seems to be based on the idea that the best way of measuring the efficacy of gene therapy is to wait until the expression levels of the gene therapy have reached a stable level and that they don't want to include the time or soon after dosing while patients are reaching a steady state. I think that's what we can say. Is there a particular threshold?
No, we don't know. But our assumption is that, you know, we've powered our study based on non inferiority to standard of care. These are patients that are under prophylactic that are getting prophylactic treatment, state of the art, basically the best treatment you can get today, and we're beating that.
Ellie Merle from UBS asks, What is the rationale for the distinction between the investigator assessed versus the patient reported bleeds? And how would we expect these to vary in the bleeds captured, if at all?
David, do you want to take that?
Sure. So the bleeds can be generally captured two ways. The majority of the bleeds are captured in patients with diaries, which is pretty standard in hemophilia trials. The investigators are asked to adjudicate those bleeds and report whether they think that the patient is actually reporting a bleed from their discussion with the patient or review of the materials, and whether that bleed is indeed a new bleed or not the same bleed that's continuing over a period of days. So generally the new and true bleeds, which we've reported before as what we were considering our primary outcome, is a smaller subset that are basically bleeds that are within the patient's bleed logs that have then been discussed, assessed sometimes clinically, sometimes by ultrasound by the investigator and determined as to whether those actually represent events or not.
So it's a smaller subset of the information that the patients are providing for the events.
Well, the total number of bleeds is around fifteen to seventeen percent higher than the new and true bleeds. And the FDA has asked us to, capture all bleeds, not just new and true ones. I think because they want to take the perspective of the patient.
A couple of questions came in regarding BLA submission timelines. Luca Issy, how should we now think about filing timelines? And Yun Zhong, similarly, is it reasonable to expect that the BLA submission will now be in the 2022?
Yeah. The, CSL is obviously going to be, the party that's responsible for submitting the BLA. But after discussing this with with CSL, we believe early twenty twenty two is a reasonable date to expect submission.
Joan Thelm from Cowen asks, Do we expect that the EMA will have a similar requirement?
Very likely. The EMA and the FDA normally exchange information.
A question came in regarding there seeming to be a weak correlation between factor activity and titer of preexisting NABs? If we were to draw a trend line, has the topic of preexisting neutralizing antibodies been included in the discussions with the FDA so far? That's from Yun Zhong with BTIG.
Yeah, I can take that. So yes, we have been talking to the FDA for quite a number of years about the importance of neutralizing antibodies and what requirements it would have. If you were to draw a trend line, there would be a very weak correlation, but the line would fit very poorly if if you just look at it. So, yeah, there there and, you know, there is likely an effect at the very high ranges, but that effect is not straightforward.
A question came in regarding whether we have initiated conversations with the EMA on the final analysis for registration.
We have had a yes. We have we've we've had a meeting with EMA to discuss, you know, what would be required for the submission of EMA.
And going back to the data, as a refresher, a question from Gil Blum with Needham. Are there any specific details that we can provide context regarding the patients who did not have the stronger responses to treatment?
You want to take that?
Yes. I'm happy to take that. So as I said, there are two patients out of the 54 that remain on prophylaxis. One of those patients is the patient who only got a ten percent dose because of the infusion reaction early on. So that patient only received a ten percent dose and that patient's been on routine prophylaxis.
The other outlier patient that remains on routine prophylaxis is the one with the neutralizing titer of 3,212, which is a pretty uncommon and a very high titer, which we would expect to pretty rarely see in the general population based on prevalence studies we've done on anti AAV antibodies.
Yeah. I mean, this is
an important point because the reality is that fifty two out of fifty four patients no longer require prophylaxis. And so, know, really the only two patients that, you know, we would argue have had poor clinical response are the ones that David has mentioned. And so with a mean in a non hemophilia range with the highest patient really at one hundred percent or slightly above one 100% of normal, Even the patients at the lower end of the range, with the exception of those two, are still deriving a meaningful clinical benefit associated with the therapy.
I think to add to that also, Matt, I think it's important to realize that the patient reaction was very early in the study. And the fact that the other patients with infusion reactions were able to be able to successfully be managed and still be able to continue to get the full dose and benefit and be removed from prophylaxis suggests that once approved infusion reactions, we'll have some guidance around how to respond to an infusion reaction and likely that situation can be mitigated in a clinical setting.
We received a couple of questions from Renee Wolters at Kempen. The first is related to the patient who is still on prophylaxis. Do we expect that we would be able to redose that patient when that might become an option? And then the second question, if we could provide any additional color on how the observed frequency of bleeds compares to non affected or non hemophilia patients?
I can take the first question. So we are working very hard on establishing our redosing platform in the clinic, and patients who respond poorly would be good candidates for redosing. And I think that that was going to have a meaningful impact on the commercial prospects for etranides.
Happy to try and take the other part of that. I I think the short answer is we really don't know. There haven't been a lot of studies that have looked at, you know, if you think about what the common bleeding types reported in this treated group now are, it's mostly trauma. And that's, you know, for example, a patient who dropped a log on his foot while out camping with the family. So I mean, there are day to day traumas we all have.
No one counts them. No one's really done an observational study of, you know, how much normally active adults, you know, have minor bumps and scrapes and joint injuries, etcetera. So it's kind of hard to know what the general population is. We know compared to state of the art prophylaxis that our lead in period is very representative in largely EHL extended half life factor IX population, that ABR is very consistent with the rates in the clinical trials of extended half life factor IX products. So our leading group is very representative of the overall hemophilia treated population on routine prophy, And we see a significant reduction from that in the bleeding rates in the patients treated with etranatib.
Another question. Do you think that the FDA guidance now will be applied uniformly across all hemophilia B gene therapy programs with a time to stable factor expression plus the fifty two weeks?
Yeah. We don't know what the FDA intends. I would say yes. It seems as if that is the approach of the FDA, but of course, this is a question for them.
Yeah. I mean, the reality is there's nothing specific at all with our Factor IX kinetics. When you look across various therapies, there's nothing nuanced, you know, that was raised by the agency that would make us believe that, you know, we're the only company that they would be focused on this.
And a couple of questions, just clarifying questions again. Patrick Trocchia, H. C. Wainwright. Just confirming, does the change in the primary endpoint from co primary endpoints to the single primary efficacy endpoint on bleeding impact the powering of the trial at all?
No, It doesn't. The as you saw, based on the fact that the significance was less than peak point zero zero zero one, the trial is very well powered on bleeds. In addition to being, of course, extremely well powered on factor IX levels. So the fact that we now have a single primary and the factor IX is now a secondary as requested by the FDA really does not change the powering of the study.
And the original powering of the study was based on the ABR, non inferiority analysis of the ABR?
Another couple of quick questions as we begin to wrap up. Where do we believe the nearest competitor is with regard to completing their Phase III trials? Or how much of a lead does Unicure believe and CSL believe that we have with our program? And then related is, again, for clarifying, is the approvable endpoint at twelve months or eighteen months?
Approvable endpoint is fifty two weeks from six months, so it's at eighteen months. How far ahead are we? It's difficult to know. We we think that we're, you know, probably six months ahead, but, you know, it's very difficult to know how somebody else's program is going. And Pfizer has not been forthcoming with that information.
And the last question from Ellie Merle. Can we comment on the variability of Factor IX expression at six months versus at twelve months? With expression increasing overall, are you seeing a decrease in variability between patients at twelve months versus six months? Or is the range in factor expression level similar at both time points?
I'm happy to take that one. I think we're very early in this analysis. And certainly in the coming months or so, we'll have more data out. But I think the variability has been, from the six month time period on in all of the monthly data we've been looking at and now that every six month data, it has been very consistent over time.
Okay. And another quick question came in from Luca Issy at RBC. Just to clarify, can you talk about the mechanics of the statistical analysis at eighteen months? Do you just need to show non inferiority versus the lead in period?
That's correct. We need to show non inferiority in ABR versus the lead in period.
And the very last question, from Patrick Trucchio at H. C. Wainwright. Can we discuss the relative importance of the secondary endpoints from a regulatory perspective, also though from the patient clinician and commercial payer perspective of the importance of those secondary endpoints?
David, do you want to take that?
Sure. We've certainly had many interactions with, regulatory authorities over the past several years. We've also had preliminary interactions with other stakeholders mentioned. I think certainly ABR is a primary concern. Factor IX levels are a secondary consideration.
But I think all of the other things, including factor utilization, being off of remaining off of continuous prophylaxis and how that ultimately impacts quality of life will be things that various stakeholders and technology assessments will look at in addition to the primary endpoint of ABR. And I think for the patients, some of those are actually very much their primary concerns as to how their life will change with a potential new therapy.
Thank you, David. Thank you, Ricardo. And now at this time, I'd like to turn the program back over to Matt for our closing remarks.
Thanks, Maria, and a sincere thanks to all of you who stuck with us over the last three hours or so. In closing, I'd like to review some important key messages from today's presentations. First, our focus areas are clear, CNS, liver and heart muscle, and they are supported by what we believe is the leading AAV engine in the field. Now with strong fifty two week data to support our hemophilia B gene therapy, We strongly believe our product has been clinically demonstrated to be best and potentially first in class. And we remain confident that with CSL as a partner, we are poised to truly transform care for patients living with hemophilia B.
Our program in Huntington's represents a very significant opportunity and a potentially best in class approach that will drive strong data flow from two Phase onetwo studies in The U. S. And EU over the next two years, beginning with initial data on four patients at the end of this year. We have a line of sight to $1,000,000,000 of capital and cash runway that enable us to reimagine our pipeline and continue to invest in manufacturing capabilities and our technology platform. We've initiated plans to transform our clinical pipeline, including four new programs with a goal of having one to two new INDs per year and eight to 12 clinicalcommercial programs by 2026.
These programs include larger indications that represent significant unmet needs and commercial opportunities such as Coraleaf's lead program targeting temporal lobe epilepsy, which impacts hundreds of thousands of patients. We have established and are developing novel technology platforms that enable us to optimally address new indications with differentiated approaches such as MyCure, GoCure, and AbCure for vectorized antibodies. And we are significantly expanding our manufacturing capabilities to support commercialization within hemophilia B to expand our pipeline and to facilitate larger indications in a highly cost effective manner with the construction of a second manufacturing facility in Amsterdam underway and expected to come online in 2022. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, I've really never been more excited about the future of Unicure, our ability to drive value for our shareholders and the potential to transform the lives of many thousands of patients. And with that, I want to thank all of you again for your time and attention today.
We very much look forward to providing you further updates on progress in the near future. So long.