Kymera Therapeutics, Inc. (KYMR) September 2026 Conference Transcript

All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the H.C. Wainwright 20th Annual Global Investment Conference. I'm Dr. Catherine Dagan. I'll be your moderator for this session. We are very pleased to welcome Bruce Jacobs, CFO of Chimera Therapeutics. Go ahead.

Great. Thanks for the introduction. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thanks to those that are listening online. Probably going to take just about the next 10 to 15 minutes to give you a quick overview of Chimera, where we've been, and probably more importantly, where we're going. So hopefully I can get these slides to work, which looks like I can. So it's a great time to be here talking about the company. It actually, this year, was the 10-year anniversary of Chimera's founding. So the company started back in 2016 with a mission to develop drugs against some of the more intractable challenges in the biotech industry, and it was founded around a modality called targeted protein degradation, or TPD, and what made TPD an interesting modality for us was that it had the ability, we thought, to address targets that historically had been undrugged or had been inadequately drugged, and we thought it had great potential across a number of large important disease areas. We built the company from the beginning with a very strict target selection approach. We were focused really on, as I said, targets that were inaccessible or poorly drugged with conventional technologies for which we thought TPD would be either the best or the only solution. So it was, I'd say, an area of focus and target selection that has stayed true to the day. Ten years later, we've built a company that we believe has executed well. We've taken a number of programs in the clinic. I'll talk to you about that. And I think are well positioned to achieve the mission on which we were founded a decade ago. Moving on to the next slide, I just wanted to spend a minute talking about some of the key capabilities that Chimera has built over the years. One of the areas where we've, I think, become particularly adept and has become an important differentiator for us is in the area of target selection and hit finding in particular. We have developed what I think is a very strong, I guess I can't say unmatched, but certainly strong capability to find ligands to previously undrugged targets. And we've done that a number of times. Obviously, our STAT6 program that we'll talk about, we believe we were the first to drug that. IRF5 is another, and the list goes on. So we've become, I think, quite adept at finding ligands to hard-to-reach targets. And then the next step, once you've done that, is to optimize that hit into an advanceable molecule. And I think that skill set in lead optimization is something that has become important capability at Chimera, our ability to quickly turn these hits into drugs that can ultimately be development candidates. We've also seen over the years, I think, very strong translation between the preclinical work we've done and taking these drugs into the clinic. That's obviously important. You want to be able to reproduce what you see preclinically, and I think we've done that to a great degree. And the result has been a very high level of productivity at Chimera. I think we've been one of the more innovative and productive companies. In biotech, we've taken targets like STAT6, IRF5, and IREC4 into the clinic, in total seven molecules, including some earlier entrants in the oncology industry. And we have today what we think is a research engine capable of delivering one new DC annually. So really, Foundation has been a very productive research engine. We've lately spent our time building the development organization to prosecute on these opportunities. No presentation would probably be complete without a pipeline swim chart, so this is where we stand today. The top two programs, STAT6 and IRF5, are two wholly owned programs, and I'll spend the bulk of the presentation today talking about those in particular about STAT6. We've also leveraged partnerships in certain instances. We have a partnership with Sanofi around our IRAC4 program that has a molecule that is currently in phase one studies, both in healthy volunteers and then a group of HS patients. And we have a partnership with Gilead as well around a CDK2 molecular glue, which we think has great opportunity in certain oncology settings. I wanted to spend a little more time on our two lead wholly-owned programs, STAT6 and IRF5. This is, I guess, a bit of a teaser slide. I won't spend too much time here on Stat 6 because it'll be the focus of our conversation today, but we do believe this is one of the more exciting targets in biotech. It's a highly validated pathway, really enormous, and I would say untapped market opportunity, and we have a great opportunity to lead the development of this really kind of once-in-a-generation program. But I'll get much more into that as we move through the presentation. IRF5, this will be just the one slide on this before we get to the slide at the end. This is a very exciting program as well. IRF5 is also one of the long-sought-after targets in immunology. It's a bit of a master regulator of immune response, and we think degrading this target has the ability to impact many very important pathways, type 1 interferons, B-cell antibodies, and inflammatory cytokines, And there's very strong genetic association between this target and some very important and underserved autoimmune diseases like lupus, like IBD, RA, and others. This program right now is just finishing up our first healthy volunteer study, first, hopefully, and only healthy volunteer study with IR5, KT579. And our plan is to move that into a lupus study, a phase 1b lupus study, which will start shortly after the study, the healthy volunteer study, completes. so i'll come back to that briefly at the end but i wanted to really focus our time on the on the stat 6 program as i mentioned stat skip set 6 is a long sat after probably one of the highly most highly attractive targets in immunology it's the specific transition transcription factor excuse me that's responsible for signaling of the il4 and il13 pathway which of course is a target of the very, very successful drug dupilumab. That pathway has been validated both scientifically and commercially by Sanofi and Regeneron with dupilumab. And you can see a list of some of the indications in which Dupi is approved, AD, asthma, COPD, EOE, and others. We also have some human biology that gives us additional encouragement about STAT-6. Patients who have been identified that have gain of function tend to have basically an allergic disposition or phenotype. And there are some loss-of-function, heterozygous loss-of-function patients out there who tend to be protected from allergic conditions as well. So good human biology supporting the target, but again, most importantly, what we know from DUPI, the importance of this pathway, the safety of this pathway, and the efficacy all gave us great enthusiasm when we started this program, and that has only grown with time. So one of the reasons we're particularly excited about STAT-6 is the market opportunity. I mentioned that Doobie is approved, and I didn't mention all of them, but it's eight or nine indications. Taking just one as an example of the opportunity for our STAT-6 program, atopic dermatitis, which is obviously can be a chronic debilitating condition for many people, we believe, and based on the literature, there's somewhere between six and nine million moderate to severe patients in the United States. Surprisingly, though, only about 400,000 of them are on advanced systemic therapies, which is a surprisingly low penetration rate, both in light of the total number of patients and in light of the fact that DUPI itself is in excess of a $20 billion drug. And so what that means is of that 6 to 9 million patient population, there is a large number of patients who are either on topicals or they're completely untreated. And really, that's an enormous opportunity if we can be successful in developing a safe and effective oral medication. So why is penetration not greater? I think it depends on the modality, but there's different reasons. Local therapies, as I mentioned, topicals, they can work in some cases, but they typically don't address the underlying cause of the disease. They also can be messy and really a pain to deal with. There are some oral therapies. You all are probably familiar with JAKs, JAK inhibitors, but those come with, despite the oral convenience, some safety baggage, including black box warnings. So that has limited their adoption. And then, of course, there's injectables like DUPI, incredibly efficacious drugs, very safe, but they are injectables, and they require as frequent as once a week or once every other week injections. For some patients who are phobic about needles, they may not want to do that. They require cold storage. It is also can be a very painful injection as well. And I think most importantly from the research we've done, it requires a patient to accept that they have a very severe disease, which some just don't want to accept. And in some cases, taking an injection is that acknowledgement. So we think there's just an enormous opportunity here, even if we're not competing, even if we don't take one patient away from biologics to treat this big group of uh undertreated or untreated patients that are in the middle of this this big uh this big donut here so what what does the data look like for uh for stat 6 for our program kt621 apologies for what is a little bit of a busy slide but we shared a bunch of data last year including a healthy volunteer study and then a patient study which we shared later in the year the healthy volunteer study was largely about degradation and safety. Both were very encouraging. We also saw some encouraging biomarker data. This is a summary of some of the data that we shared late last year in a small cohort, about 22 patients of AD, atopic dermatitis patients, that were treated for four weeks. First of all, degradation was very robust. We had eliminated STAT-6 in the order of 95 plus percent, 95 to 98 percent, depending on if you were looking in blood or skin. We had strong impact on biomarkers as well. Biomarkers like TARC, which is shown here, are a good predictor of clinical efficacy. And those patients that had elevated TARC, we reduced that similar to the levels seen in some earlier DUPI studies. And then the clinical endpoints, again, understanding it It was a small study, 22 patients, just out to four weeks. We saw a nice reduction in EZ scores, nice reduction in pruritus, NRS, or itch. And we also, interestingly and somewhat excitingly, we saw some data in comorbid asthma patients that gave us positive views and potential for what this drug might be able to deliver and that indication as well. So across the measures that we tracked, it was very encouraging, frankly, at or above our best expectations safety as well was very benign I'd say placebo-like in its nature no SAEs or severe AEs and I think what was perhaps most encouraging was the concordance across all the data points really everything was in line it wasn't as if you can pick one thing that looked good and one didn't look good everything was generally in line in most cases is comparable, if not numerically, superior to what DUPI has shown. Now, obviously, there's limitations in cross-trial comparisons, and it's a small number, as I said, 22 patients. But it was very encouraging to us in terms of the potential for this drug in both AD and some of the other type 2 inflammatory conditions. So with the study behind us, it gave us the encouragement and confidence to move into a phase 2 study, actually two phase 2 studies, in two disease areas, atopic dermatitis and in asthma. And importantly, we believe we've developed a regulatory strategy which will enable further development in other type 2 indications beyond just AD and asthma. So up top, you see the BROADN-2 trial. That's in atopic dermatitis. We completed and announced we completed enrollment in that study in June of 2026, June of this year. And we'll share the data before year-end. And there's obviously many eyes on that study. Subsequent to the results, if the data supports and if the FDA allows, we'll move into a phase three study in atopic dermatitis. We're well on our way in planning, and we think and believe that we have the potential to move into other dermatology conditions as well on the back of that phase two study. The second trial here shown is the BREATH trial. That's a phase two B study in asthma. That trial is ongoing. It started a little later than the AD study and will take longer to enroll, but we're optimistic and excited about the potential in asthma as well. I mentioned about some of the comorbidity data we had. That trial's enrolling, and we expect to have the data before the end of next year. So we've so far committed to at least one phase three in AD that'll start by middle of next year, but we have ambitions to take this program well beyond the indications that we're starting in in phase two, hopefully to many of these other phase three indications as well so that's what I wanted to cover in terms of the prepared content just to to wrap up you know we we could not be more excited about the opportunity with KT 621 I mentioned it being really once in a generation type biotech market opportunity as I mentioned the phase 2b broaden to study complete enrollment this year we'll have the data before the end of the year. And we hope to have a profile that supports advancing that program into phase three and serving what I think is a very underserved patient population. Asthma, as I said, is behind AD, but should read out next year and allow a phase three study start in that indication. I mentioned IRF5, just to go back to that briefly, we'll have healthy volunteer data this year and we'll start a phase 1B in lupus shortly thereafter. And then our partner programs continue to move apace i mentioned them earlier so i won't repeat it here both those programs are run by our partners financed by our partners so we're eligible for almost 2 billion in potential milestones between those two programs and we're excited and enthused to watch the the progress there as i mentioned we have a productive research engine we have a goal as a company to have at least one new program reach development candidate every year so we have one as well this year that we're shooting. We're probably going to push out that announcement into the early part of 2027, given all we have going on this year with the two data readouts, but excited about the productivity that we have coming out of our research engine. So I hope that gives you a sense of what we've both accomplished and where Chimera is going. We have a little bit of time for questions. I'd be happy to take one if there are any, otherwise we can catch up offline after the time's up. Thank you.

Thank you. Are there any questions?