Vir Bio's Cancer Treatment Progress Driving Shares Hight

0:28They told us to expect change. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. If you follow markets, you know the value of long-term thinking. You plan, you diversify, you prepare for volatility.

1:08But even the best strategies can't prevent every bad day. For more than 75 years, Cincinnati Insurance has helped individuals and businesses navigate tough moments with expertise, personal attention, and independent agents who focus on relationships, not transactions. The Cincinnati Insurance Companies. Let them make your bad day better. Find an agent at c-i-n-f-i-n dot com. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Mayor Mamdani saying in a tweet, I just got off the phone with President Trump in our meeting earlier.

1:55I shared my concerns about Columbia student Elena Aghajeva, who was detained by ICE this morning. He has just informed me that she will be released imminently. All right. And he sent a New York Times story that says immigration agents arrested a Columbia University student after misrepresented themselves to access a building, the school said. All right. So certainly some actions there coming off of that meeting or those conversations. Okay. And we'll monitor in case there's any other headlines that cross folks. In the meantime, we want to kind of get to some stuff that's been going on in the biotech space.

2:27There's actually a lot going on, I feel like. And when you think about the big pharmaceutical companies constantly watching that space, looking to maybe beef up their own pipelines, one company we want to talk about is Vera Biotechnology. Shares closing higher by 20 % on Tuesday after the drug developer gave updated data from an earlier stage trial for its investigative therapy for prostate cancer and said it is collaborating with Estellas Pharma on that same asset. I want to bring in Marianne DeBacker, CEO of the$1.2 billion market cap Veer Biotechnology, ticker VIR. The stock up more than 50 % this year.

3:01It's up about 11.6 % of the float is shorted. She joins us once again from San Francisco. It's been about a month since we last connected. It was during the JP Morgan Health Conference and a lot of news from your company since then. Some additional information. You guys gave updated phase one data showing that PSMA targeting T-cell engager VIR 5500 demonstrated positive anti-tumor activity and favorable safety profile in patients with metastatic prostate cancer. This is phase one data. What still has to be proven? What still has to be shown? Hey, Tim. Hi, Carol. Glad to be back. Yes, this was a very big week for us at VIR Biotechnology.

3:42As you mentioned, we released new data for our prostate cancer drug. We announced a landmark deal with Astellas. And also yesterday, we announced actually an equity raise of$150 million. So it has been a busy week. Now, getting to your question, yes, this is an early trial. We have actually tested our drug, V5500, which is a mask T-cell engager, in 58 patients. And what we have seen in a subset of those patients, about 22 patients that were at efficacious dose, is very impressive efficacy. So really 82 % of the patients showing PSA 50 declines. PSA is a biomarker in prostate cancer, you probably know.

4:27And 53 % PSA 90. So, you know, significant impact from an efficacy perspective. We also had quite a number of patients where we could actually measure the tumor. So and, you know, I don't know if you have seen some of the patient cases that we released on Monday, but really impressive cases where you have patients who have really exhausted all lines of therapy. You know, sometimes five, six prior lines of therapy. Everything has, you know, worked for a while, but then didn't work anymore. more patients relapsed, and they're really littered with metastasis, you know, to the lungs, to the liver.

5:08And prognosis for these patients where, you know, really the tumor has metastasized to the liver, for example, is really, really very bad. And even in those patients, we could see quite dramatic results. Sometimes even only after nine weeks of treatment, you could see that all those lesions were really disappearing. And so early data, but very promising efficacy combined with a very, very promising tolerability and safety profile. Because as you probably know, in prostate cancer, there's quite a bit of therapeutics available, but a lot of them have, you know, tolerability issues. Yeah, absolutely.

5:47Maren, we're actually showing some folks for who are watching on our YouTube channel and on our streaming Bloomberg Original service. For those on radio, there's two shots and it's obviously one shot that's an x-ray and showing a lot of dark spots, which I would assume is all indications of cancer. And then you're showing, I'm assuming the second shot is greatly reduced in terms of the black imaging. And I'm assuming that's after using this drug. Is that a fair assessment? Yes, exactly. So this is a Seems pretty dramatic. Yeah. Yeah, it's really, I mean, it really gave us chills when we saw this.

6:28And we have a number of these pictures from patients. And again, these are patients that have, you know, this patient specifically, 63-year-old patient had had five prior lines of therapy. You know, nothing worked anymore. The tumor had metastasized to a lot of soft tissues, to lungs, liver. He had 14 lesions in the liver alone. So, you know, prognosis being very, very bad for this patient. And after nine weeks of treatment with our drug, fear 5500, you can see here that he had a PSA decline, so the biomarker for prostate cancer with 99%. And as you can see, I mean, a picture says more than a thousand words, right?

7:08You see all these liver lesions and other tumor lesions really disappearing. And the way this works is really, We are trying to activate the patient's own immune system to fight the cancer. That's what the T-cell engagement really does. So is this the idea of the therapy if and when it is approved, is it a therapy of last resort? Or would you use this for different types of prostate cancer, maybe even identified early? Cancers where surgery and radiation, or maybe just radiation, are the options. or maybe just surgery is what's been done. Right. No, as is typical for these kind of clinical trials, you sort of start out with, you know, late Lyme patients and you show your efficacy in those patients.

7:59But then gradually, you know, depending on your profile, you can move to earlier Lyme patients. And we are actually going to start three expansion cohorts already in the next quarter. One will be looking at these kind of patients, which are late Lyme, have tried everything, you know, trying to, with the monotherapy of our drugs, see what we can do there. But to your point, then we're also starting two additional trials. One is in early line patients that will get the combination of your 5500 together with enzalutamide. And we're also going to test that in metastatic hormone sensitive patients that are early line.

8:39So there's certainly an opportunity because of the profile of the drug, a combination of being efficacious and safe that allows us to expand, you know, and see, could this be actually beneficial to a much broader set of patients? You know, I'm always kind of blown away by immunotherapy and especially when it comes to cancer treatment, Dr. DeBacker. And I'm just curious in terms of the more we learn about this, and especially when it comes to things like cancer or any treatment, but cancer in particular, Does it become much more specialized? Each patient is different in terms of how they're going to react to different things, including immunotherapy.

9:18So this might work really well for someone who's a late-line patient, but it might not for somebody else? Or are you guys starting to see that we can start to make much more blanket statements? Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's, of course, a little bit predictable depending on the patients. And again, these are very, very sick patients, right? But we haven't seen, you know, determinants of patients that would respond versus not respond. That's, you know, not what we're seeing in our data. We see generally, you know, patients responding very well. And in our subset of our efficacious dose, as I mentioned, we have, you know, 82 % of the patients that can achieve a PSA 50 so that are really responding to the drug.

10:02But it remains, you know, it remains really remarkable to see this because remember, this is not taking T cells out of a patient. You know, it's not a personalized treatment. We're not taking T cells, modifying them and placing them back. We're really just activating the T cells that are already there in the tumor of the patient. And Marianne, as Carol mentioned, one of the reasons we like talking to companies like yours is because a lot of times the larger pharmaceutical companies end up making acquisitions rather than developing the technology themselves. And I'm wondering how would you how would you characterize at this point takeover interest from other companies?

10:41Has anyone approached you? yes so what we started doing last year once we were sort of seeing that we're 5500 had this very promising profile is we realized that as a small biotech company with no commercial footprint yet and in a space where speed is really of the essence that we would really benefit from a partner and we were not looking for an acquisition partner we were looking for a partner that could help us accelerating bringing these drugs you know this drug to patients so accelerating us in expansion trials go much broader because these are very expensive trials go doing more things in parallel and so we ran a strategic process in the course of last year we had a lot of companies coming in and as you have seen we have eventually chosen astellas as you know they're the number one prostate cancer company with$6 billion in revenue for Xtendi in 2024.

11:38So we ended up choosing Astellas because they have a lot of experience with the type of partnership we were looking for, which is a 50-50 profit split. They have done the same with CGen and also they've done the same with Medivation. So we thought that was a good structure. We were, you know, again, we're really very, very enthusiastic about our early data. And this is not just, you know, a reflection of one asset because we use the same technology across our portfolio. So we are really motivated to grow the company. I need to squeeze in just before you go 20 seconds, first phase. But there you've got to go through four phase trials.

12:18So what are we talking still a couple years in terms of the process just very quickly. Just a few seconds here. Yes. So we are starting expansion trials, as I said, early line, late line already in the next quarter. And our plans is to go into registrational trials next year. Ah, okay. So a very big year ahead of you guys. Miriam DeBacker, she's chief executive officer of Veer Biotechnology, joining us from the West Coast. This is Bloomberg.

13:13Here's a paradox. That's where My Policy Advocate comes in. For just 27 cents a day, their platform reads your policies and shows you in plain language where you're vulnerable. They're not selling insurance. They don't do that. It's about transparency, giving ordinary people the same understanding insurance companies have had for decades. Because when you know what's really in your policy, you can plan, protect, and avoid surprises. Before you trust your policy to protect you, let My Policy Advocate tell you what it really says. Visit MyPolicyAdvocate.com today. Peace of mind starts with knowing the truth.

13:48MyPolicyAdvocate.com These days, it seems like AI agents are just about everywhere you turn, every field and every function. But without identity, you can't trust they'll serve your business instead of jeopardizing it. Fortunately, Okta helps you get identity right by securing your AI agent's identities, giving you a single layer of control, a single standard of trust. So whether an AI agent supports a single user or your entire enterprise, with Okta, you'll turn risk into opportunity. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Okta secures AI. This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the smarter way to manage your money internationally.

14:25If you're getting a headache from juggling different currencies and different bank accounts in different countries, there's a better way to receive money in the currency you need, without the slow transfer times or hidden fees. meet wise the savvy way to handle your money internationally hold balances in up to 40 currencies with the mid-market exchange rate on every conversion whether you're receiving payments from tenants abroad earning as a digital nomad or converting dividends from your international investments the wise multi-currency account is for you be smart get wise download the wise app today or visit wise.com terms and conditions apply