Medicenna Therapeutics With Founder, Chairman, President & CEO, Dr. Fahar Merchant

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The Market Online speaks with Medicenna Therapeutics Founder, Chairman, President & CEO, Dr. Fahar Merchant as Medicenna Presents Promising Preclinical Data on Targeted Anti-PD-1-IL-2 Superkine at AACR 2025.

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00:00Welcome to the Watchlist. I'm Lindsay Melchak. Medicina Therapeutics has presented promising

00:11preclinical data from its first-in-class tumor-targeted and conditionally-activated

00:15anti-PD-1 IL-2 bifunctional superkind. Now that's a lot to say and that's a lot to uncover,

00:22and that's why we have Dr. Fahar Merchant, founder, chairman, president and CEO of Medicina

00:28here with us today. So welcome Dr. Fahar. It's great to have you with us. Nice to be with you

00:33as well. Love to be on this brief interview, so thank you. Absolutely. Now given the recent

00:40advancements in your superkind platform, which asset in your clinical pipeline do you believe

00:46holds the most near-term value inflection potential? So for that it would be our drug Mgna11. I think

00:54you might have seen at the same time just a couple of weeks ago, we put out a press release

00:59on really exciting data we've generated. We presented this data at one of the world's largest

01:05cancer conferences in Chicago, and the data is really outstanding in the sense that

01:11the reason we are really excited about is the fact that we have treated patients who have failed

01:20the blockbuster drugs, including these what we call checkpoint inhibitors. Currently annually about

01:2842 billion in cells, so they're sort of the number one drug in the world, and these patients have

01:35failed those therapies. And what we've been able to show with our drug on its own in these end-stage

01:42patients with anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the patients responding to the drug, with our drug

01:50on its own. So that's really exciting. And this is the drug that we feel has the nearest near-term

01:56potential for partnering, commercialization, et cetera.

02:03So how is Medicina strategically positioning its lead candidates to differentiate in an increasingly

02:10competitive immuno-oncology landscape?

02:14Yes. And this is, again, very interesting because what we've been able to demonstrate with our

02:21mRNA-11 drug is that, you know, it's been able to demonstrate patients responding with a wide variety

02:31of tumors. And these would be tumors such as skin cancer, which is something that we were expecting

02:38for it to work. But we were not expecting that the drug would work in patients with pancreatic cancer

02:44or colorectal cancer or anal cancer, et cetera. And therefore, we are really excited. And what we did find

02:52was some of these cancers were given by very specific biomarkers. And therefore, our approach has been

03:02to, you know, where are we likely to get the drug approved in a relatively short time.

03:10And we've identified three different tumor types that we feel that there is an opportunity

03:15for us to get the drug approved from a Phase II registration trial, which is usually a smaller

03:22study, less expensive, without the complications of a large Phase III clinical trial. And those are

03:29patients with melanoma, patients with tumors we call MSI high, so it's a biomarker, and patients with

03:38another biomarker called a TMB high. So those three different tumor types, we believe, have the

03:45opportunity for rather rapid approval based on Phase II clinical trials, where at the moment we're seeing

03:53response rates in the 30% to 50% range on its own. So that's really exciting.

03:58And the other thing we're also doing with these same tumors is to combine our drug with

04:04Keytruda. Keytruda is the world's number one selling drug with sales of, what, 30 billion a year.

04:11And that combination, we have a clinical collaboration with Merck on that particular study.

04:18So that, we think, would likely give us even better data when we combine the two drugs together.

04:24So, really exciting. These data are all going to be in the forefront in the coming two quarters. So the

04:33second half of this year is really exciting, where we'll have data in dozens of patients with those

04:39three different tumor types.

04:41Well, I mean, this is all the time we have now. However, this is some exciting news, and Fahar, we cannot

04:46wait to have you back to hear more soon.

04:49Happy to do so again. Thank you.

04:50Again, that was Dr. Fahar, Merchant, founder, chairman, president, and CEO of Medicina. Now,

04:56you can learn more about them on their website at medicina.com. And be sure to bookmark

05:02stockhouse.com for all of your market news. I'm Lindsay Melchick. Thank you for watching.

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