That's just, that's just what we're doing.
Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us here on our first day of BofA's 2025 Healthcare Conference. My name is Jason Zemansky. I'm one of the mid-cap analysts here at the bank, and very pleased and privileged to have with me on stage Gavin MacBeath, CEO of TScan Therapeutics.
Thank you for having me.
Maybe let's start broadly, especially for those newer to the story. Go back to another point you brought up. I mean, the combination potential here, you know, does it make sense to combine IL-23 with IL-17?
Yeah, we have a program. We call it ORKA- 21 because it's a sequential combination moving from ORKA- 2 to ORKA- 1. And the logic for this is that IL-17s act fast and they're very potent in terms of how they clear the skin. They do come with some sort of nuisance level tolerability effects. The main one you see is oral candidiasis that you would rather avoid. It's easily managed, but it causes people to gravitate towards an IL-23 if that'll work for them.
The concept here is, and we've gotten a lot of excitement from physicians on this, is to induce with an IL-17, so ORKA- 2, and then we'll clear the skin fast and very potently. And then once people are cleared, transition them to an IL-23 for maintenance, the sort of ideal, very clean maintenance profile. So that we call that ORKA- 21. We see this as another way to win in this market. We want to have the best biologics in psoriasis going forward. We think we're very well positioned to do that. And ORKA- 21 is another creative way to potentially achieve that with our portfolio, something we could easily test in parallel to our existing programs in Phase II.
Got it. Well, in the time we have left, can you walk investors through your timelines? I mean, what are the kind of key upcoming events that they should be focused on?
Yeah, so we're, like I said, we're in the clinic in a Phase I with ORKA-00 1. That is scheduled to read out in the second half of this year. And then we'll move into a Phase II study, which will also start the second half of this year in psoriasis for that program, which will read out next year. So by next year, we'll have a psoriasis readout. I think importantly, psoriasis data is very reproducible from Phase to Phase. We think that could be a very, very important inflection point for us. Our second program will move into the clinic soon. The guidance is third quarter of this year, and we'll have PK data on that in the first half of next year.
Importantly, we're funded through everything I just talked through, plus a year of runway beyond that. So we were fortunate to raise over $475 million last year, which puts us in a position where we don't need to raise additional capital through all three of those clinical readouts that I just talked through.
Got it. Any benchmarks that you'd highlight in terms of next steps here? I mean, especially in terms of the upcoming PK data? In terms of what we're looking for in that data?
Yeah, absolutely. So we think we need the key readout from that. There'll be a few, but the key readout is the half-life of the molecule. That's where what we leverage to achieve differentiation. We think to achieve six-monthly dosing, we need a 50-day half-life. We think to achieve once-a-year dosing, which we think would be viewed as really game-changing in this indication, we need around a 75-day half-life. So that'll be the primary number we're looking at, as well as some associated data. Well, perfect. Well, I just thank you so much for joining us. It's been a privilege.