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JPMorgan Healthcare Conference

Jan 9, 2023

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

Good afternoon. I'm Eric Joseph, Senior Biotech Analyst with JPMorgan, and our next presenting company is Rocket Pharmaceuticals. It's my pleasure to welcome and introduce CEO Gaurav Shah to take us through the story. Oh, there will be a Q&A in the room after the presentation. There'll be mics circulating, and also feel free to submit any questions via the web portal for those that are tuning in online. With that.

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Hello. Thanks, Eric. Thanks JPMorgan for having us this year. Happy New Year. Let's start with this. How many folks in the room or who are listening online know somebody or know of somebody with a rare disease? The thing is that each rare disease may be rare, but rare disease is not rare. I think 2023 is gonna be a transformative year for gene therapy in rare disease and for Rocket Pharma. There's three things that we'll focus on today. One is, our clinical pipeline is growing by leaps and bounds. About an hour ago, we just announced a new cardiovascular gene therapy asset. We like to call it Pegasus, but it's PKP2 arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. That sits on top of Danon disease, which is moving forward into pivotal trials in the second quarter of this year.

On top of BAG3, which we acquired through a merger with Renovacor last year. Point number one is clinical. Point number two is that this is the year that we will be transitioning from a clinical to a commercial stage company with our two regulatory filings in the hematology portfolio, LAD-I in Q2 and Fanconi Anemia in Q4. Third, I'm very happy that after six or so years, we have the perfect team and resources cash-wise to really execute on these goals confidently. Some of them are sitting here. Thank you. Here. I will be making some forward-looking statements. Take them as you may. Our values are aspirational, and they're really what anchors us in what we do day to day. Trust, curiosity, generosity, and elevate. The word gene and generosity have the same Proto-Indo-European root from thousands of years ago.

Genes and generosity flow together as one. They're integrated. You can't do gene therapy without generously sharing our knowledge and our experiences with one another. The point of this busy slide is that we have more than $400 million in cash and cash equivalents now, and that's gonna actually now get us through the end of 2024, a little bit of a further extension on our cash runway to execute on the goals that we're gonna talk about today. Here it is, the new pipeline. Six clinical and soon-to-be clinical assets. Now we can actually divide them up into the hematology franchise at the top and the cardiovascular franchise at the bottom.

Hematology franchise is led by Fanconi Anemia and LAD-I, like I said, which will be filed this year and help us become commercial. Soon to be followed by a pyruvate kinase deficiency. The cardiovascular franchise is powered primarily by Danon disease with PKP2 now a newcomer moving into clinic in just a few months and BAG3 dilated cardiomyopathy in the next year or so. We also have Wave 2, which is still undisclosed and more programs in development as we speak, just like PKP2 was for the last two years. The in vivo platform supports cardiology and future therapeutic areas, and the ex-vivo lenti programs supports our hematology bone marrow-derived diseases. I'll go through this in a little bit of detail because it's gonna be of interest for folks in the room and on the line this year.

We have a catalyst rich 2023. I'm very proud to announce that we just completed our first two batches of GMP manufacturing in our Cranbury, New Jersey facility. That will be used to support the phase II Danon program. In the second quarter, a lot of things going on. One, our Danon phase II study will start. Two, we will file our first program in LAD-I. Three, the PKP2-ACM program, we will file an IND in the second quarter. In the third quarter, we'll move Danon into Europe. We've identified several sites and countries that are highly interested and see a lot of Danon patients in Europe to expand our portfolio there. Fourth quarter, another super busy time. Fanconi Anemia will be filed. We will start our PKD pivotal trial. We'll start a Danon female trial which has been of great interest in the recent years.

We'll also expand LAD-I into moderate patients. Next year will be another continuation of the expansion story with BAG3 going into clinic, expansion into lifecycle management for our lenti portfolio, and additional programs in Wave 2 being announced. Danon disease is really the ideal disease to evaluate in cardiovascular gene therapy. Cardiovascular gene therapy is really blossoming now. I think we're gonna see it continue to blossom. Danon disease is so severe that it is a disease in which we believe we can demonstrate benefit relatively rapidly as we have, especially in boys who unfortunately pass away by the age of 20. It's an X-linked disease of autophagy. The total prevalence here has been the largest to date out of our programs, not anymore. 15,000-30,000 individuals afflicted by this disease in the U.S. and in Europe.

This is the only cardiac gene therapy with proof of concept in the clinic so far. More to come. Our phase I study is now complete. We treated seven patients between the age of 12 and 21, and I wanna emphasize that this is an IV formulation with full transgene replacement. It's not partial, it's a full transgene replacement, and that's important as we discuss expression as an endpoint with the FDA. As far as safety, we've really taken the time to learn patient by patient during our phase I and iterate on our learnings so that by the time we started the pediatric cohort, we came up with the ideal immune modulation regimen, which is a combination of pretreatment rituximab, sirolimus, and a rapid steroid taper.

With this new protocol, we've seen minimal complement activation and no drug product related SAEs. We do intend to use the same exact protocol moving forward into our pivotal program. This is new and a key slide. It's an update and one that we just shared with the FDA. We'll go through this in some detail. This is the outcomes, the efficacy outcomes for the phase I trial so far, out to two to three years. The bright green represents improvements. Light green represents stabilization. First thing to note is that there's no red here. These are patients who rapidly progress who have Danon disease, but no one has deteriorated in the study so far. Let's go through each one. Troponin, in the first column, you see dropping massively from beginning of study to current.

BNP likewise drops massively. In the couple cases where it ticks up, I'll come back to that in a couple of slides. Left ventricular mass. Danon disease is a disease of large hearts, massive hearts. The mass has decreased in every single patient. This is updated from HFSA and from AHA. The left ventricular max wall thickness also follows suit. NYHA class, which is a measure of how a patient functions and feels, has improved from Class II to I in every patient who was closely monitored for immune suppression. The one patient who wasn't closely monitored, even that patient had stabilization. Kansas City Cardiomyopathy score, which is a quality-of-life measure in the last column, has now improved in every single patient. What's remarkable here is that in drugs that are approved for heart failure, they're associated with KCCQ score improvements of 5 points or less.

The median here is about 15 points with a couple of patients being above 25 points. We're seeing all six measured parameters stabilizing or in most cases, improving. This is another way to look at BNP and troponin. BNP, as a lot of folks will know, is a direct objective measure of heart failure, while troponin is a measure of cardiac injury. You see both of these parameters dropping to normal or near normal levels. In fact, to clarify, there was a little bit of an uptick in a couple of patients, you can see that those patients were normal or near normal to begin with, so the uptick was not clinically meaningful. Both BNP and troponin which are highly predictive of outcomes in cardiomyopathy, we see improvements here.

This is in stark contrast to a prospective natural history series that we've started, and this is the first time that we're reporting on this. These are age and disease characteristic matched controls compared with the gene therapy patients on the left. Left is gene therapy, right is controls. You can see that even the patients who started high in the control arm move up in BNP over time, and those who started low move up as well, whereas the gene therapy-treated patients normalize or nearly normalize universally and uniformly. Similarly, we've looked at NYHA class through a small prospective series, also the gene therapy treated patients all improve. One stabilized, that one patient who stabilized again was one who was not appropriately monitored for immune suppression.

The patients who were not treated with gene therapy at best are stable, but in many cases, unfortunately worsen toward inexorable heart failure and in some cases, death. This is a little bit more, and I'll leave this for a second. I won't read through this, but this is. These are anecdotes in four patients treated with the therapy. In a disease and at a time when these patients should be deteriorating and moving toward heart failure and/or death, these patients are now going to college, they're going to work. They're walking a 10K. One boy last year during Halloween had to be driven around in a wagon for pumpkin picking. That's Halloween, right? Pumpkin, yeah. Now this year, was able to walk and spent two hours running around collecting pumpkins. This doesn't happen naturally in Danon disease.

It only happens with an intervention that truly works, I think, at the DNA level. There's been some discussion here about the pivotal trial design as we're discussing with the FDA. In December, we received notes and feedback from the FDA, and every time that happens, we are required to share it publicly, which we did. Today, I'm happy to provide some more color and commentary around this feedback. There were some key agreements reached with the FDA, and these are important to note. We agreed on a non-randomized trial on a single arm open label trial, in which we would use a biomarker-based composite endpoint to seek accelerated approval and a natural history which serve as an appropriate comparator.

We also talked about clinical outcomes like six-minute walk test and CPET that are traditionally used in cardiology, but we determined that these are not relevant in Danon disease with FDA agreement. There are some components that are still in discussion, including the details of the composite endpoint, which will include LAMP2 expression as part of it. Trial duration and time to endpoint. I want to note also that for the phase I trial, we had to have staggered enrollment. Some patients had to be enrolled three months apart, and that took a while. The phase II, most of the patients will not have staggered enrollment, and we anticipate relatively rapid enrollment. We've already identified more than enough patients for the phase II trial. We'll also have a two-patient run-in for pediatrics, and otherwise, the study criteria will be similar to the phase I.

We'll exclude patients with extensive fibrosis and advanced disease. We will enroll patients who are eight years and older. This will be supported by a natural history series of more than 200 patients, including a prospective natural history study expanding on what I just showed earlier, and a U.S. and an E.U. retrospective natural history series totaling more than 200 patients. I think I'm gonna go back. I think one slide was skipped here, slide 11. The LAMP2 expression for these patients has been durable for all patients treated so far. It's been supported by positive vector copy numbers. I wanna make a clarification on the vector copy number. These are reported as vectors per diploid nucleus. You can see that their numbers are meaningful and associated with protein expression.

Cardiomyocytes are often multinucleated, so you can have diploid, you can have tetraploid, you can have octoploid, and you can have hexadecaploid, which is 16 N in Greek. Some cardiomyocytes have a lot of nuclei, and therefore, I would say that, for example, for patient 108 at 16 years old, the 0.5 VCN is really a one to two vectors per cardiomyocyte. On the manufacturing side, we are thrilled to announce the completion of two GMP batches that will be utilized for the phase II trial. The material that we're producing in-house is actually superior to the phase I material that came in through CDMO. We have 3 x the number of patients that will be treated per batch produced. We have improved full versus empty viral particles, this will allow for a full transgene dosing with lower total viral particle count.

Products are comparable. FDA has agreed and aligned on our potency assay as well as comparability approach to start the phase II. Our Cranbury facility, at some point, we're going to open our doors and have folks do a tour, and this year, actually. It's a 100,000 sq ft facility in Cranbury, New Jersey. Half of it is geared toward manufacturing, but like for the new program, Pegasus, we're able to discover the vector in-house, develop small-scale production, develop tox scale production, clinical production, and soon commercial production in this facility. Rocket is really moving forward toward being an integrated company from discovery through manufacturing through commercialization. Our global registrational phase II study in Danon disease will start soon. Once everything is finalized, we will share this publicly.

I wanna iterate and reiterate that we will have a cadence of readouts over the next few years as this study reads out. It's not gonna be one endpoint, you know, a few, a couple of years down the road where the study reads out. We'll have a cadence of readouts during medical meetings, just like we always do for our other programs. Moving to Fanconi Anemia, this is a special program for us. To quote the words of the mother here, the mother of the child here with Fanconi Anemia on the left, she asked, "Why not try gene therapy in Fanconi Anemia?" Just recently, she asked this. The reason is that gene therapy in Fanconi Anemia does not require conditioning. This is an ex-vivo lenti approach with no conditioning. Why no conditioning?

The gene-corrected cells in the re-renewed bone marrow after gene therapy have a selective advantage over the diseased cells in the bone marrow. Because of the selective advantage, you don't need to wipe out the old disease cells, which normally lead to bone marrow failure, leukemia, and head and neck cancer inevitably in these patients. This is a disease with a prevalence of 5,500-7,000 individuals in the U.S. and Europe. We've already shown these results, but to reiterate these results, we've seen progressive increased genetic correction in the Fanconi Anemia patients in seven out of 10 patients who were followed for one year or more in both the blood and the bone marrow. This was associated with increasing mitomycin C resistance of 20% or greater in six of these 10 patients.

The seventh patient has now also turned positive after three years of therapy. Of note, what we agreed with the FDA was that we would only need five patients to have a positive trial. We announced a positive trial in Fanconi Anemia last year, and we moved rapidly toward filing in Q4. This filing and launch could be associated with the PRV, just as it is potentially for LAD-I. LAD-I is one of the most devastating rare disease out there. It's a disease of neutrophils in which CD18 expression is missing on the surface, so these patients have recurrent infections that are often fatal. Very few children survive past the low single-digit years. Really a devastating disease.

Using an ex-vivo lenti approach here as well, we've restored CD18 expression in nine out of nine patients to between 20% and 87% of normal. When gene therapy works, it really works, and this is a perfect example of that with 100% survival out to two years and a massive reduction in the incidence of hospitalizations. The development plan for LAD-I, this is the most advanced program in many ways. We'll be filing our BLA in the second quarter. Lot of work coming up ahead and also associated with the PRV. This, along with Fanconi again, will help transition us from a clinical stage company to a commercial stage company. The last in the hematology portfolio is pyruvate kinase deficiency. This is our dark horse.

No one really ever talks or asks about it, but it is the largest lenti opportunity, and it's gonna follow shortly on the heels of Fanconi Anemia and LAD-I. Here also, when gene therapy works, it really works. We see a doubling of hemoglobin from 7 g/dL to 13 g/dL to 14 g/dL in two adult patients who have now been followed out to two years. These patients are now transfusion-independent and resuming normal or near normal lives. Pyruvate kinase deficiency program will also move into pivotal phase II trial at the end of this year. We're in the process of completing our phase I. The future, this is all things that I think people already know. The future, we continue to build our pipeline based on our philosophical tenets of asset selection, which includes trying to be first, best, and where possible, only in class.

On target mechanism of action with clear clinical endpoints like we've demonstrated in the prior programs. We're looking for sizable markets, increasing in size over time so that we can build a business that treats hundreds and thousands of patients. We've disclosed two therapeutic areas, cardiovascular and hematology. We are also developing a third, which is undisclosed so far and will be down the road. To reiterate the importance and excitement that we have around BAG3 dilated cardiomyopathy. BAG3 is a protein that regulates the functions, several functions inside of cardiomyocytes, some of which are shown here. This was inherited through our exciting acquisition and merger with Renovacor. A haploinsufficient mouse model from Temple University demonstrated that we could preserve ejection fraction in appropriately treated mice, and pretty remarkably so versus control mice.

This is important because dilated cardiomyopathy is a disease of systolic dysfunction. Ejection fraction could be a very relevant clinical endpoint to measure in our trials, and we anticipate moving this forward into the clinic over the next one year. Going back to the Greeks. The ancient Greeks loved curiosity. They looked up at the night sky, and they had a sense of wonder. Normally, we look up in a summer sky. You see this square of stars that are four stars in a box around the star Vega. You just think it's a box or a square in the sky. The Greeks saw Pegasus. Pegasus is a winged horse, a mythological figure. We called our new program PKP2. We called it Pegasus until this very moment, now that people even inside the company know what Pegasus stands for. It's PKP2-ACM.

PKP2-ACM, also known as ARVC, is caused by mutations in PKP2. It's a component of the gap junction, and these patients present in their 30s. It really affects adults in the prime of their life. Patients with symptoms have 100% risk of lifetime ventricular arrhythmias and also other longer-term ventricular abnormalities. The standard of care does not modify disease progression at all, so a DNA-based gene therapy approach is gonna be pretty promising. Wanna note something about the prevalence here. We use a conservative methodology of determining prevalence for all of our programs. If you add up the population of U.S. and Europe conservatively, it's about 750 million. The prevalence of ACM is between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 5,000.

Divide 750 million by 5,000, MIT, the answer is about 150,000. 150,000 cases of ACM. O ne-third of those are described clearly and widely in the literature to be caused by PKP2. 50,000 patients with PKP2-ACM, at least in the U.S. and Europe. If you actually incorporate the less conservative prevalence, it could be well over 100,000. We've now been working well over two years with a group from NYU, Dr. Delmar and Dr. Cerrone, using a translationally relevant mouse model. It's a conditional knockout model. During this time, we've been able to select a lead vector. I'm happy to announce today that the lead vector is based on a serotype of rh74 using a cardioselective promoter.

The mouse model itself is very well characterized with published animal based studies inducing an inducible Cre-loxP system. The induction is done through tamoxifen. The phenotype does recapitulate the hallmarks of ACM, including arrhythmias and also showing ventricular dysfunction uniformly. Here we show that the mice who are knockout mice have reduced survival. All the mice die by about 50 days. They have reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, and they have massively increased right ventricular area. These are the preclinical results that are supporting our IND. We work with two models, a seven-day model and a 14-day model. In other words, the seven-day model administers gene therapy seven days after tamoxifen induction of knockout, and the 14- day is 14 days after. The 14-day model, as you can understand, is gonna represent a more advanced disease.

On the top left, we see survival increases in the treated mice versus knockout mice. Knockout mice die by Day 50. Treated mice are all alive out to five months and longer now. On the upper right, we've also measured LVEF and RV area, and at both 28 days and at five months, we see preservation of ejection fraction and preservation of right ventricular area. The top curves and graphs are using a low dose of 6.7 e13 vg/kg, which is a dose that we're moving forward in Danon disease as well, as you know. On the bottom right, we tested isoproterenol-induced arrhythmia comparison between knockout mice and gene therapy-treated mice, and we see a massive reduction in PVCs and other arrhythmias here. This is important because PVCs in this disease predict life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias uniformly.

All these results have been demonstrated using both the low dose of 6.7 e13 vg/kg and a high dose that's about 3 x higher. We'll move forward closer to the lower dose into the clinic. We've also done toxicology work that is IND-enabling up to 3e 14 vg/kg, and so far we've seen no safety concerns supporting the IND movement soon. In summary, we feel that this is the optimal capsid and the optimal gene therapy for PKP2-ACM, and we anticipate that we could be first and best in class with IND filing in second quarter of this year. The rh74, as a reminder, is a serotype that's been associated with a favorable safety profile in Duchenne and other diseases, and therefore has the potential for safe administration at optimal doses, even in the e14 range if needed for adult ACM patients.

The development plan here, we've completed our GMP drug product manufacturing. It's ready to go. We've completed our pharmacology and toxicology studies. We've completed a potency assay development. We're putting together a scientific advisory board to fine-tune the final clinical trial, and we anticipate IND submission, like I said, in the second quarter. The study will be supported by natural history study, which is already starting in parallel as well. In summary, coming back to the three key points, we're moving in with leaps and bounds into the clinic, expanding our pipeline now with Danon going to pivotal and PKP2 going into the clinic. We're transitioning from a clinical stage to a commercial stage company, and we believe we have the right resources, certainly the right team, and the right cash to conduct these therapies and bring them to patients effectively.

Going back to the ancient Greeks and the sense of wonder near Pegasus, the winged horse in the northern sky is another star, and that star is called Polaris, the North Star. Patients are our North Star. Just like the whole sky revolves around Polaris, around the North Star, all the work that we do revolves around the betterment of patients. Here's to bringing a sense of magic into the real world through gene therapy. Thank you very much. I have Jonathan and Kinnari as well to help support any Q&A. I think we have 12, 11, 12 minutes.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

Oh, thanks, Gaurav. I mean, so many places to, where directions could be... Sorry, questions could be d irected. That being said, I think I might still start with Danon disease, really just kind of picking up on the regulatory update that you provided toward the end of last year. Really just trying to put a finer point on the composite biomarker endpoint that you discussed with the agency. Is it... I guess, can you just sort of clarify which measures in addition to LAMP2 expression is, you know, which should support accelerated approval, not only identity, but also sort of the magnitude of benefit and... Sorry, the magnitude of change in LAMP2 expression and perhaps also BNP?

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

This is in discussion. I would say that the composite endpoint, we have several to choose from, and as we demonstrated on a prior slide, every single parameter is moving in the right direction. In some ways, we have an issue of too many options. Having said that, we've selected the ones that we think will make for the leanest trial design that is the most de-risked and likely to succeed. Expression is definitely part of it, and I think we'll hold off on disclosing the full composite until we have the FDA final alignment.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

Maybe just one follow-up on expression, however. Just given the variability of LAMP2 distribution in the cardiomyocytes, I guess, any additional sort of refinements in how biopsies are gonna be collected in the, in the pivotal program and sort of what the agency is looking for in terms of consistency of expression across tissue?

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Jonathan?

Jonathan Schwartz
Chief Medical Officer, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

When we've seen LAMP2 expression in the, in the phase I patients, for the most part it's been fairly diffuse and well distributed, especially when one is assessing at time points beyond six months after therapy. Our concern has not been that we see sporadic or inconsistent expression for the most part. Anytime you're taking a very small piece of heart tissue from the septum, you have some potential to miss or just get in a non-representative area. That's why having sequential assessments is so important. That's why we did it at three months, six months, 12 months, 24 months in the phase I study. To make sure that we were guarding against any sort of aberrant assessments that didn't really reflect what was going on in the heart.

Although I think we'll likely be a little bit more selective in terms of the timing of the assessments in phase II. We'll continue to do these endomyocardial biopsies of the septum. By and large, much of the data that we've seen to date has been replicable.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

Several questions come to mind related to Pegasus and the ACM program. At first, I guess really just in terms of the epidemiology of the disease, I guess, is there any variability, variation in the severity of disease by genotype. The type of dominant negative PKP2 mutations that emerge?

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

This is something that we'll study extensively through our natural history as well as in our phase I study that will inform our selection of endpoints. There are... for example, the homozygous patients tend to have very severe disease and may not be the first population that we go for. We may start with the heterozygous patients and some of them who are advanced enough where we can show improvements, but also not so far advanced, just like in Danon disease, that it's probably too late. TBD and more details to come.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

In terms of how you're intervening rather with the gene therapy, I mean, you're not sort of augmenting the underlying, sort of misexpressed dominant negative protein, right? I guess, how do you circumvent any suppression I guess, from the existing dominant negative mutation?

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Well, it's autosomal dominant. I don't know if you wanna sort of.

Jonathan Schwartz
Chief Medical Officer, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Right. I think your question is that in other words, there'll still be aberrant protein. How, whether or not the presence of the correct protein will ameliorate that?

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

Thank you.

Jonathan Schwartz
Chief Medical Officer, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Certainly, the preclinical model that we've seen so far suggests that should not be an issue. That preclinical model is actually a more aggressive model than what we see in most patients. Certainly, this is why having good transduction will be important so that there's not a lot of competitive pressure. Additionally, many of these mutations may in fact result in a null protein or, you know, RNA that just can't translate into protein or a very short-lived protein. I don't think it's gonna be necessarily a question of too much structure that's gonna be abnormal, that can't be rectified by the presence of a correct protein.

These are very dynamic systems, so that once there is a correct protein in the intercalated disc that's helping all these cardiomyocytes communicate with one another and function as a unit, that's likely to remain in place, whereas the aberrant protein is probably not going to do so.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

Yes. Oh, just wait. Tom, microphone, please.

Speaker 5

Oh, thank you. Yeah. For this one, right now, are they receiving standard arrhythmia treatments? Are people dragging electrodes across the heart? If you put this gene therapy in, how do you kind of contrast versus kind of the standard of care that isn't curative but does halt the arrhythmia?

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

We're in the process of figuring out the optimal endpoint. Obviously, the phase I will be safety oriented, but we will have several secondary and exploratory endpoints. These patients who are on antiarrhythmics and beta blockers, and even those who have ICDs, will still have PVCs. Many of them will still have impaired heart function, especially those with advanced disease. There's several parameters that we'll be measuring just to put some of them out there, not to anchor any of the thinking. Certainly PVCs, other arrhythmias, BNP and troponin, just like we are in Danon, and also expression will be important secondary and exploratory endpoints that we'll look at.

Speaker 5

Okay.

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Even when patients have an ICD, you still can see improvements in those.

Jonathan Schwartz
Chief Medical Officer, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Yeah. Additionally, I think it's important to note that for many of the patients, placement of an ICD, it is a very important component of the therapy. Although that is life-saving for many patients, if you've ever spoken to anyone who has an ICD in place and got a shock, that's something that you would rather live your life with very few or ideally none of those. There's quite a number of subsets of patients that are well-defined, where once that ICD is in, there's a very high probability that it's gonna go off at some point over the course of one, two or three years. So that's a parameter that we can hopefully measure and hopefully improve.

Speaker 5

Okay. Then for the way your rh74 vector that you're using, does it distribute equally across the heart? Or does it get to kind of that, often that outer layer of the heart that drives the electrical rhythm?

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

We've seen transmural transduction in our toxicology studies for all the vectors that we studied, including rh74.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

Is it possible to sort of compare and contrast the transduction expression efficiency with this rh74 construct versus a LAMP2 with Danon?

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Absolutely. It's definitely possible, and we've done that. We've determined that rh74 has the best profile to move forward. I'll also say that every vector is made differently, right? The regulatory elements of the vector, the promoter, whether you have a Kozak sequence or not, these tiny tweaks have as much influence as the capsid itself. It's a little bit. There's an art to it as well. But the current vector design with rh74 we feel most confident about out of all the ones that we looked at.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

Yeah. Partly, you know, part of the reasoning behind that question is just, you know, anticipated dosing as you go into patients. Obviously, there was a bit of a window that you had to navigate with 501. Any sort of expectations here, and would you expect to use a similar type of conditioning regimen-

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Yeah.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

... as part of the administration regimen?

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

What do you think, Kinnari, moving forward?

Kinnari Patel
President, COO, and Head of Development, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

I think what we've learned from Sarepta and others, right, rh74 tends to be safer, and you could get to a higher dose if needed. I think preclinical activities have shown that what we wanna do from even the first patient or dose escalation study is have it where if these patients can only have therapy once, we wanna make sure there's a chance of efficacy and the benefit risk is positive. We're gonna navigate that through tox data that we have, but certainly also from the clinical aspects of efficacy parameters we are exploring.

Eric Joseph
Senior Biotech Analyst, JPMorgan

All right. I think we'll have to leave it there for time. Yes, I wanna thank Gaurav and the Rocket team for joining us this afternoon.

Gaurav Shah
CEO, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Thank you, Eric. Thank you, everybody.

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