John Crowley
Analyst · Ritu Baral with Canaccord
Great. Thanks, Sara. Good evening, everybody, and welcome to our first quarter 2012 conference call. I am happy, as always, to lead the call and let me begin by welcoming Chip Baird, who has been with us for nearly a month as our Chief Financial Officer. Chip comes to us after spending the last decade with PTC therapeutics. So great experience in rare disease area and welcome Chip and we will hear shortly from Chip on some of the financials.
After I walk us through some of recent corporate milestones and specifically progress in our February Phase III studies of migalastat as a monotherapy, I will turn it over to Bradley Campbell our Chief Business Officer. Brad will be providing a status update on our Chaperone-ERT combination products. And before I close out the call, Chip again will review the first quarter financials.
So a very exciting quarter for Amicus. As you all know, in March of this year we successfully raised $62 million in net proceeds from a public offering. Due to very strong demand and broad participation, we saw several important new shareholders come into Amicus as long-term investors. We hope and also we saw some of our long-term shareholders also continue buying shares in Amicus through this offering. And I would like to welcome any of you to today’s call. We began the year in January at the JPMorgan conference outlining our corporate strategy, our current portfolio and some very important positive preliminary results from the Phase II study of our pharmacological Chaperone migalastat co-administrated with enzyme replacement therapy, or Fabrazyme for Fabry disease known as our Study 013, a very important milestone for the company.
And since that time we've made terrific progress executing against that business strategy and our business plan, and we’ve done that against a backdrop of continued momentum in the rare and orphan disease area. I will tell you having been in the field for a long time, it was very exciting to see the interim results that Vertex announced this week that molecule, a chaperone against a misfolded protein target in a rare genetic diseases CF.
So we think yet another example of the potential for chaperone therapy and again a very significant development broadly within the rare and orphan disease field. So the great momentum continues. Let me highlight a couple of key corporate milestones before I get into some more of the detailed review of the Fabry programs. So again solid momentum in all of our ongoing studies.
Very importantly and hopefully you've got the press release in front of you. You will see first a terrific momentum in the enrollment of our Phase III Study 012. That's our second Phase III study. We’ve announced that we now have a majority of patients already enrolled that Phase III Study 012. Again, that’s our second Phase III study of migalastat as a monotherapy for Fabry disease, and we have achieved this against the heightened global interest for the switching study since the first of the year. So a very, very welcome advancement for the company and for that program.
Secondly, we have continued to make good progress in our Phase II Study 013, our study of migalastat co-administered with ERTs for Fabry disease. Our current enrollment in study now includes both patients on Fabrazyme as well as Replagal patients we are treating. Third we have now seen two out of four dose cohort groups that have completed enrollment in our Phase II Study 010 as we sit here today. And again that’s our second Chaperone ERT combination study investigating AT2220 co-administered with the ERT for Pompe disease.
And finally we are currently evaluating the potential for that molecule AT2220, the Pompe Chaperone, to mitigate the ERT mitigated immunogenicity through our ongoing work to define the relative immunogenicity of Lumizyme with and without our Chaperone. So those are some very high-level overviews. We are fortunate to have a very strong cash position as we work toward to the completion of our ongoing studies. We do continue to plan late-stage Chaperone ERT studies, which is very important for how we think about the next stage of development for that important aspect of the technology. And we also continue to work closely alongside our partners at GSK on the necessary activities to prepare the NDA from migalastat as a monotherapy for Fabry disease.
The proceeds from our recent offerings strengthen our balance sheet considerably and will support it as we move along the continuum of innovation with the goal of delivering constant advancements to the patient community and the rare and orphan diseases and in particular as we advance closer toward becoming a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company. There are, of course, many expected milestones to look forward throughout 2012 for Amicus. We look forward to the consistent strength and patient disposition, especially from our Study 011, and I'll have an update here shortly on where we stand with the patient disposition in that study currently. Also, significant progress with Study 012 enrollment that we can see right now, continuing to support our confidence in migalastat as a potential monotherapy for Fabry disease and to demonstrate the strength of our collaboration with GSK.
So if we can, let's spend just a few minutes talking about our two separate Phase III registration studies for migalastat as a monotherapy study, studies we refer to as Study 011 and Study 012 respectively, both of which are being conducted with GSK. Both of these studies are investigating migalastat at an oral dose of 150 milligrams administered every other day to Fabry patients, identified as having alpha-Gal mutations amenable to migalastat as a monotherapy.
So for Study 011, or what we refer to as our FACETS Study, again a U.S. registration study of migalastat at the oral dose of 150 milligrams every other day. This is a six-month randomized placebo-controlled study. We had targeted 60 patients enrolled. We enrolled 67. We expect to have the results from this study in the third quarter of this year, reconfirming that guidance previously. We expect that data to support NDA in the United States.
As a reminder, Study 011 will look at a primary surrogate endpoint, a change in interstitial capillary GL-3 at six months. We designed this study based on direct feedback from the FDA to use a placebo arm, and to use the same surrogate endpoint in the same organ and the same cell type that was previously used to support the current conditional approval, the only U.S. approval ever granted for the standard of care ERT in the United States for Fabrazyme.
The agency also informed us that we are eligible for accelerated approval. We are also confident based on other elements of this study, including our strict entry criteria, the fully quantitative histological methodology for reading the kidney biopsies, the low steady drop-out rate, and what we have seen the high conversion of patients into our extension studies from the 011 Study, all of that giving us continued confidence in the success of this study.
We do monitor the progress of patients in the Phases III, and the Phase III extension study is currently underway, as well as our ongoing Phase II extension study. The patient disposition, as we've talked about before, remains impressive in that study. As a reminder, in the Phase II extension study, as we call our Study 205, 17 patients had been receiving migalastat, some now for more than six years as the only therapy to directly treat their Fabry disease.
Approximately half of the patients enrolled in one of our Phase II studies had been previously enrolled on ERT. And the patients in this extension study who are previously enrolled on ERT, not a one of them has elected to switch back to ERT. So we think that gives us a great encouragement for the patient experience in that study. Last quarter I reported patient disposition in our Phase III Study 011 as of January 31, 2012.
I'm pleased to provide an update as of April 30th, 2012, so very recent data. Again, the Study 011 enrolled 67 patients; 24 males, 43 females. As of April 30th, 54 of the 67 patients have completed 6 months primary treatment in that study; a number of patients still ongoing in that first 6-month period. All 54 of those patients who continued in the 6-month treatment extension arm, so of the 54 completed, all 54, 100% conversion now, have completed the initial 6 months of treatment.
40 of these 54 patients have completed Study 011. Again, we have others still ongoing in that study. Now of those 40, 38 continue in the long-term extension study. So when I reported back in January that in that long-term extension study, only 2 patients have withdrawn and both for personal reason, those are still the only 2 people to withdraw from the long-term extension study.
And although we are still blinded to the study, we also remain greatly encouraged by now more than 150 patient years of experience to date. As I mentioned, we expect to announce Phase III results in the third quarter.
Let me turn now to Study 012. That's our ATTRACT Study. It is a registration study of migalastat monotherapy to support approval in the EU, as well as satisfying our U.S.A. Phase IV requirement under Subpart H for accelerated approval. Similar to our FACETS Study, this study will investigate migalastat 150 milligrams given every other day in patients with amenable mutations.
Based on feedback from the EMEA, different from the feedback we received from FDA of course, Study O12 is a randomized open-label study to compare migalastat to ERT, either Fabrazyme or Replagal, and has a primary clinical endpoint. That endpoint is kidney function measured by GFR at 18 months. The objective is to show non-inferiority using descriptive statistics.
The target enrollment in this study is 50 patients with a 1.5 to 1 randomization rate drug to -- migalastat to ERT. So we would expect to have 30 patients who began on ERT to switch to migalastat and 20 patients to remain on ERT. As of April -- as of today as we sit here, a majority of these patients are already enrolled and recruitment is currently underway at 25 clinical sites around the globe.
This reflects a significant uptake in the new sites and the pace of enrollment since the beginning of the year. The study, as you know, got going in the second half of 2011. When we began this year, there were only 10 clinical sites that had been initiated in this 012 study and 2 patients randomized. So tremendous momentum throughout the quarter into this call. We are still guiding toward full enrollment by year-end.
If that changes, of course, we'll update. But right now, that is the current guidance. We are certainly very encouraged by the interest in patients in switching from ERT to migalastat to be in this study. And thankfully, the resolution of the ERT shortage, especially here in the United States, is certainly helping our enrollment.
When we began dosing patients in this study last fall amidst the Fabrazyme supply shortage, we had anticipated that this would be an ex-U.S. study because our entry criteria specifies that the patients be on at least 80% of the labeled dose of ERT, among other inclusion criteria. Since that shortage has resolved and U.S. patients are now returning to full-dose ERT, we do now have patients enrolled and are experiencing increased activity at sites here in the United States.
So this overall activity and enrollment in Study 012 is tremendously encouraging. It is tracking ahead of our expectations, and we are confident in meeting that target to dose the final patient by the end of this year. So just a brief summary before I turn it over to Brad. Our Phase III registration studies are certainly helping to shape the opportunity for migalastat as a monotherapy for Fabry disease. We continue to believe that it will address approximately 40% to 50% of the total Fabry population based on genotype.
For people with Fabry with amenable mutations, migalastat has the potential, we believe, to become a once every-other-day oral alternative to the current standard of care which is a bi-weekly ERT infusion. But our overall goal, of course, is to address the entire Fabry population.
And our Phase II study of migalastat in combination with ERT is an important step towards potential improving ERT outcome for Fabry patients with non-amenable mutations who would need to remain on ERT and who would seek a better treatment.
The use of pharmacological chaperone in combination with ERT may potentially help improve patient outcomes with ERT. The chaperone-ERT therapy also has the potential to address some of the limitations that exist with the current standard of care, the ERTs for all LSDs, issues including protein instability and immunogenicity specifically.
We are examining this right now in our ongoing Phase II studies in both Fabry and Pompe. We believe we have the potential to apply the same next-generation treatment approach with additional chaperone-ERT combinations for other lysosomal storage disorders.
We seek to do that along this continuum of innovation that we have described for several months now, where our goal that every point along that continuum is to strive to improve upon the current treatment paradigm in order to make these patients’ lives better.
So with that, let me hand the call over to Bradley to talk more about our chaperone-ERT combinations program and the important aspects of our pipeline and technology.