Mendus AB (publ) (IMMU) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Biotech TV's coverage of Pareto Securities annual healthcare conference from Stockholm, Sweden is brought to you by Pareto Securities, the Nordic's leading independent investment bank.

All right, Biotech TV, it is Wednesday, September 2nd. We are in Stockholm, Sweden for the 17th annual Pareto Securities healthcare conference. And we're meeting with some of the top companies here in the Nordic region and beyond. And right now I'm with a company called Mendis. This is Eric Manting, he's the CEO, and it's an immunotherapy company. Looking forward to hearing about their platform. It's very nice to meet you.

Likewise, Fred. Good to see you.

So your lead therapy is called Viti Dencel, and you're testing it in some blood cancers like AML and CML, also ovarian too. We'll get to that, but let's start with what is it? Tell us what it is.

Sure. Well, it's a cellular immunotherapy. it means it's a whole cell that we have made immunogenic so the immune system can recognize it and because it has a leukemic origin it has all the immunological information the immune system needs to build up an immune response against leukemic antigens we inject the product as a single course into the skin so people get six injections with bi-weekly intervals so the immune system can really pick up the antigens over multiple points in time and after that the immune system is trained to control residual disease so that's in a nutshell the product because we apply it as an intradermal injection it causes a bit of redness when we inject it but that's also the only product related side effect we have observed so it's also a very safe way to train the immune system and this is an off-the-shelf product or it's the patient's own cells well it's a good question because that makes a huge difference when you think about how we manufacture the product and how we can make it at commercial scale it's an the shelf products so it's made from a cell line which is ours it's a proprietary platform and we grow a large quantity of these cells in the end we store them frozen so the cells can be shipped anywhere for treatment and that makes all the difference when you think about cost price but also the way we can make it a product that is very easy to use in clinical practice yeah you've made a lot of progress in aml tell us about that sure well the basic principle that we pursue is the prevention of relapse or recurrence of cancer, and that is actually, when you look at the global scale, the biggest cause for cancer-related deaths. So we have good methods like chemotherapy, radiation, surgery to remove the initial tumor once it's discovered, but we have much less tools to prevent residual cancer cells from growing out again to tumors that are generally also less sensitive to the original treatment. So to prevent recurrence is, I think, where we should put a massive effort. We do that in blood cancers, and AML, for example, is a very deadly blood cancer with very poor long-term survival. And the main reason for that is relapse. So what we're trying to do is to prevent this relapse. And in both phase one and in phase two, we have shown that it's possible to train the immune system to control the disease over longer periods of time. So with a very good five-year survival.

Yeah, I think that's a very smart approach because, you know, we've seen immunotherapies work recently in the adjuvant setting. And I think that's really like the power of the immune system is trying to prevent the cancer from coming back. And one thing that's frustrated me over decades of drugs being tested is everything gets started out in the very late stage metastatic setting. And that's probably not the best setting for most drugs, including immunotherapy. So trying to do what you're doing, preventing the relapse, I think is a very smart approach.

And what you also made as a very relevant remark, Brad, is that we are a first-line treatment. So after the first chemotherapy, we apply our product to prevent the disease from coming And that's very different also from a patient's perspective from having gone through already a lot of treatment and being basically an end-of-life treatment, which is kind of, you know, contradicts you in terminus because you want to be earlier. So I think the relevance of your remark is very large. You have to do it in the beginning.

In addition to AML, you have a CML program, and you're going to have some data for that sometime second half of the year. We're actually in the second half of the year, so it could be any moment. Like, set the table for that.

Yeah. So the concept is the same as with AML. We try to prevent recurrence. The setting in CML is slightly different because unlike AML, it's a chronic disease that you can treat lifelong with a class of drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors or TKIs. So the benefit for patients in CML is that they can stop their TKIs and that's called treatment-free remission or it's functional cure actually. Now if you do that, with most patients, the disease comes back relatively quickly because you've taken the treatment away. So this is where we want to train the immune system to control the residual disease. Now, we're now in a first trial, a phase one trial, in CML with a specific focus on patients that don't have an optimal response to TKIs. The reason to do that is it's an additional way to get better responses in patients, which may make them eligible for TFR. But also because the levels of disease are slightly higher, we can pick up early signals of efficacy. So we're looking at safety tolerability first. That's the data that will now be reported. We have recruited the first stage of the trial, which is the safety tolerability stage. But then we will also start looking for signals that the immune system is being trained to control the residual disease, both on the level of the immune system and on the level of the cancer cells. And that's the level of the kind of data that will come in in the remainder of the year.

And then, of course, those are liquid tumors. You've tested this in ovarian, a solid tumor. You had some data at this year's ASCO. How does this seem to be looking in the solid tumor setting?

Sure. Well, we had a very simple principle, which was we were trying this principle where checkpoint inhibitors don't work. Checkpoint inhibitors like Keytruda, for example, have an effect on a subgroup of patients, but across solid tumors, but not in ovarian cancer, with very poor response rates in ovarian cancer. So we thought, what will happen if we train the immune system in that specific setting where the tumor has been taken out with surgery and patients have undergone chemotherapy? Will we see a relevant training of the immune system with this specific product, and we have seen very encouraging signals. So what we've seen is that out of the 17 patients that we treated in the so-called Allison trial, five patients became long-term progression-free survivors, and those survivals were also associated with the immune responses that we observed after patients were treated with the product. Now, ovarian cancer is very different from blood cancers. There's a tumor microenvironment that you have to deal with, So with this program, we hope to find clinical partnerships so that we can combine it with other treatments to make it as effective as possible in ovarian cancer. So that program is subject to partnering, whereas for the myeloid malignancies, we push on both AML and CML as prioritized indications.

Well, it sounds like a fascinating platform. I know, like, given your experience with the manufacturing process, you believe you can do that for other therapies like TILs and other things. Maybe we'll talk about that some other time. But it's very nice to meet you.

Likewise. Thanks for the interview.