Coherus at Jefferies Conference: Strategic Growth and Pipeline Focus

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, Coherus BioSciences (NASDAQ:CHRS) presented at the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference 2025, outlining a strategic path forward that highlights both opportunities and challenges. The company, led by CEO Denny Lanphier, emphasized its focus on oncology, asset divestitures, and a robust pipeline, alongside significant financial maneuvers aimed at sustaining operations and driving growth.

Key Takeaways

• Coherus aims to accelerate growth of its PD-1 inhibitor, Loktorzi, in 2025 with expected revenues of $40-50 million.
• The company reduced its debt to $38.7 million and bolstered its cash position with $250 million from asset divestitures.
• A streamlined workforce reduction from 225 to 50 employees is projected to save $25 million.
• Pipeline advancements include promising data for CHS-114 and Casdozo Ketog, with significant readouts expected in 2026.
• Coherus seeks partnerships for ex-U.S. commercialization of its pipeline assets.

Financial Results

• Coherus ended Q1 2025 with $82 million in cash.
• The company divested $800 million in assets, including $483.4 million from the UDENYCA franchise.
• Debt was reduced to $38.7 million, significantly strengthening the balance sheet with an additional $250 million.
• Workforce reduction to a target of 50 employees aims to save $25 million annually.

Operational Updates

• Loktorzi, a PD-1 inhibitor, is positioned for growth in the nasopharyngeal cancer market, with a focus on combination therapies.
• Coherus plans to expand Loktorzi’s application beyond its current preferred line status in nasopharyngeal cancer.
• Despite flat Q1 sales, demand for Loktorzi increased by 15% from the previous quarter.

Future Outlook

• CHS-114, targeting T regulatory cells, is progressing with no dose-limiting toxicity observed and promising patient responses.
• Casdozo Ketog, an IL-27 antagonist, showed an 18% complete response rate in hepatic cellular carcinoma, with further trials planned.
• Coherus estimates its addressable market, including pipeline drugs and Loktorzi, to be over $15 billion.

Commercial Strategy

• Coherus is prioritizing the U.S. market for its internal development and commercialization efforts.
• The company is actively seeking partnerships for the commercialization of Casdozo Ketog and CHS-114 outside the U.S.

In conclusion, Coherus BioSciences is strategically positioned for growth and innovation, supported by a solid financial foundation. For more detailed insights, refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Ryan Delaney, Jefferies Investment Banking, Jefferies: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference. My name is Ryan Delaney with the Jefferies Investment Banking team. It’s my pleasure to introduce Denny Lanphier, CEO of Coherus Biosciences.

Denny Lanphier, CEO, Coherus Biosciences: Thank you. Thank you, Ryan, and thank you to the bank for your kind invitation to this year’s conference. I also wanna thank the bank for your kind assistance with respect to closing out of our $230,000,000 convertible debt instrument over the last month, which was you did an excellent job on. Coherus Oncology is working on a number of very interesting things. We have a proprietary PD one, some very interesting assets in the pipeline.

However, let me first surprise you to the forward looking statements and direct you to the company’s SEC filings with respect to all of these products. Now I’ll first provide you a corporate summary of our pipeline in a few key facts. You know, I’ll then talk about Lactorsi, our proprietary PD one, which is on the market in nasopharyngeal cancer, which is our foundational asset. I’ll then turn it over to Doctor. Teresa Lovalli, our Chief Scientific and Development Officer.

And doctor Lovale will talk to you about some of our combination work with our pipeline, our two pipeline assets, as well as work with expanding the label of Lactorsi in conjunction with our partners. I’ll then finish up talking about the commercial opportunity for the products and the pipeline before giving you the results and the outlook. So Coherus Oncology is focused in three key areas. The first, of course, is Loktorzi, our foundational PD one asset. This is now on the market for nasopharyngeal cancer.

I’ll talk to you about that in just a moment. This product has achieved the only preferred line in both first line and follow on lines in nasopharyngeal cancer. And using this asset as a key part of our combinations was a critical part of our overarching strategy. During the during 2025, we’ll continue accelerating our growth for the product. This product was launched in 2024.

Our pipeline is comprised primarily of two key assets. One is CHS one one four, which is an anti CCR eight, a cytolytic antibody. This is an emerging class of Treg depleters. We will discuss that with you with interesting data readouts in the first half of twenty twenty six, as well as casdozo ketog, which is a first in class IL twenty seven antagonist, which is working its way through HCC. These products together with Lartorzib combined to address a potential market of over $15,000,000,000 together.

The company, as you know, recently completed divestiture of some other assets and in doing so has greatly reduced its debt burden down to about $38,700,000 a year and put $250,000,000 on the balance sheet post close of that transaction. This cash runway is sufficient to take us through key data readouts in 2026 and beyond. Luctorzi and Casdozo, key to, again, one one four comprise our pipeline. In here you see, for example, first line NPC, which is an indication that we are pursuing commercially, as well as second line both in monotherapy. And as you see, we are also pursuing Lactorsi with some additional combination indications.

The CCR eight antibody is in, first of all, second line head and neck cancer, secondarily gastric and other cancers as Teresa will talk to you about with readouts in the first half of twenty twenty six. And casdozo ketog, which is looking very good in hepatic cellular carcinoma where an eighteen percent response rate was seen complete response rate was seen in a in a key study and is also moving into squamous non squamous cell cancer. Now Lactorsi is a very interesting molecule. And here I’ll just spend a moment on the biology of it. This molecule’s approach to binding the p d one site on T cells was conceived by Leipeng Chen.

Leipeng Chen is best known for first faring out the role of p d l one on tumor cells and its relationship to p d one and the interruption of that particular interaction as a way to bring therapeutic benefit to cancer patients. Leipeng Chen was at Johns Hopkins when he conceived of this approach, and it was to selectively bind the FG loop with very, high affinity, which was selectively done. This is different than the approach taken with other PD ones, which bind, for example, the CD loop and simply block. What happens with Toripalumab, which is quite interesting, is this particular binding site results in the internalization of the PD one receptor off the surface of the T cell and much more potent signaling within the T cell, which is the subject of various publications. This mechanistic differentiation of Loktorzi is also manifest clinically, particularly in the low PD L1 state as you see here, in which you can see our JUPITER six study, which is in esophageal cancer where the hazard ratio was preserved from low PD L1 to high PD L1 states, unlike Keytruda, which only showed efficacy in the high PD L1 states.

This makes Lactorsi an ideal candidate for combination therapy with other agents, and Doctor. Villavalli will talk to you about some of the collaborations that we have subsequently put in place. Lactorsi is the new standard of care in nasopharyngeal cancer. This is about two thousand patients per year. This is about a hundred 50 to $200,000,000 market space.

Again, as I said, we launched into last year. We’re marching this product up. We’re a little flat in q one as you can see, although overall demand was up 15% from the previous quarter. However, we are the only NCCN preferred category one IO treatment for both first line and second line. And we expect during 2025 that this product will do probably about 40 to 50,000,000 top line in that period of time.

So with that, let me let Doctor. Levali talk to you about our label expansion strategy for lactorzine combination. Theresa.

Teresa Lovalli, Chief Scientific and Development Officer, Coherus Biosciences: Thank you, Denny. So on the right side of this slide, you’ll see that the number of positive studies that our partner Junxi has delivered, really showing the potency of this molecule resulting in clinically meaningful benefit across a number of solid tumors. And these reference data sets that come out of China can be used in The U. S. For contribution of component.

Having the approval in the two indications in nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a rare subset of head and neck cancer, we’re looking to continue to develop Loktorzi, but now in combination to really advance patient care beyond PD-one inhibitors to add more to the survival for these patients. And so using these foundational studies, we’re looking both internally to develop the molecule with our proprietary assets, which I’ll talk about in-depth in a couple of slides. And in those cases, we’re looking at getting two drugs approved. So for the development we’re focused on, we’ll end up getting both Lactorsi and our novel agents approved. In addition, we look to expand Loktorzi with partners.

So as a small biotech company that has prioritized this molecule, we’re nimble and collaborative working with small biotech with that have very interesting mechanisms and clinical data to look at combination studies with PD-one. And we’ve announced three of these. The most recent is with Storm Therapeutics, or yes, Storm Therapeutics, with their STC15, which is an RNA methyltransferase inhibitor. And they have really nice phase one data showing monotherapy responses. And now we’re looking at combinations with Loktorzi in head and neck cancer and lung cancer.

Importantly, we’ve prioritized head and neck cancer for a lot of these combinations, such as the pivotal study that Inovio has to do as we get more and more head and neck doctors familiar with the drug and see how well it works and continue to advance it. This also has synergies with our commercial team looking at the MPC commercialization for Lactorsi. So next I’ll talk to you about our CCR8 cytolytic antibody, CHS-one 14. So people have attempted to target T regulatory cells for decades. And really the challenge has been trying to find selective depletion in the tumor because broad depletion of T regs leads to autoimmunity.

So we say that this is the missing puzzle piece. Through single cell sequencing analysis of tumor resident T regs, CCR8 was identified as a marker on T regulatory cells that is highly upregulated preferentially in the tumor. So this is a targeted therapy. The molecule is a bind and kill. And the idea is by removing the immuno immunosuppressive cell, you open up the tumor microenvironment to now allow T cells in, turning cold tumors immunologically hot.

And since it’s a targeted therapy, I’ll walk you through how we’re identifying patient populations by characterizing where the target is abundant. And what’s exciting about this is that while we see a high abundance in many hot tumors, we also see a high expression of CCR8 positive Treg cells in tumors that have been woefully underserved by immunotherapy such as colorectal cancer. Alexander Radinsky, one of the founders of Tregs, really characterized FOXP3 and made the cell type well understood in the field, is on our scientific advisory board and works very closely with us and sees this as an incredibly compelling approach terms of looking at a way to bring therapeutics to cancer patients. In the middle, we’re looking at the prognostic association of T regulatory cells across patient outcomes in different solid tumors. So it’s well understood that a high level of T regulatory cells has a poor outcome for cancer patients broadly.

And what isn’t well understood is what brings T regs into the tumor while they’re present at diagnosis. But things like wound healing, immune responses, anti angiogenic responses, so things like chemotherapy, radiation, immune checkpoint inhibitors, VEGF inhibitors will all upregulate T regulatory cells. So we see this as a real marker of resistance across multiple modalities. And so while our development is focused on combination with Lactorsi PD-one inhibition, we see this could have broad potential with multiple modalities. And I’ll show you some data to support that.

Given the excitement and the data that are emerging, a number of players are in the field. And for our molecule, CHS-one 14, we will walk through how we see that being differentiated. So the overall expression characterizing, as I said, this is a targeted therapy. So who to treat, the way that we’re approaching it is characterizing the density of CCR8 positive cells in the tumors. And you can see I mean, if you think about 25 cells per millimeter squared, that’s a really good density.

So there is a high, a large number of solid tumors, including bladder cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, breast, that have a high density. The highest density is in head and neck, gastric, and cervical. Additionally, the next question is not all Tregs express CCRE, so what’s the prevalence? Because clearly if it’s ten percent, is removing ten percent of the suppressor cells sufficient? And you can see that all of these tumors, except for renal cell carcinoma in our analysis, have a high percentage of Tregs that express CCR8.

And again, the highest expression is in gastric, head and neck, and cervical. So we were thrilled last year at ASCO when Lenovo Medicines presented their data in gastric cancer showing a very high response rate when they combined their CCR8 antibody with Torapalumab in gastric cancer, really giving that proof of principle that high density and prevalence is the primary mechanism of PD-one resistance. At this ASCO, we saw data in colorectal cancer, both monotherapy and combination activity with a naked IgG1 from Shinobi and also some data in pancreatic cancer really showing that there’s broad activity across solid tumors for this agent. Our molecule is CHS-one 14. So the target CCR8 is a G protein coupled receptor, which has notoriously been difficult to develop antibodies against.

A third of the drugs approved by FDA target GPCRs, yet there’s only about five antibodies approved. And the problem with for antibodies is getting selectivity because there’s not a lot of protein real estate to get bind selectively and not have off target binding. So when we did our antibody discovery screen, we found one and only one antibody in lead identification that exclusively bound CCR8. That is highly unusual in an antibody discovery screen. We have characterized some of the competitor molecules, and all of them that we’ve characterized have off target binding, including J chain.

And so when I see something binding J chain, a protein that’s highly expressed in the gut, important in secretions, I would worry about GI toxicity. So I think as we see data emerging from other programs and the toxicity profile, we’ll have to think about is this target mediated or off target mediated. We’ve presented data on the first two parts of our phase one clinical study. And I’m pleased to report last year from ASCO when we showed the dose escalation up to twelve hundred milligrams. We had no dose limiting toxicity, really proving that this higher expression in the tumor did not lead to autoimmunity.

So we did not see broad depletion of T regulatory cells. We saw selective depletion of CCR8 positive Tregs. Nice pharmacokinetics and proof of mechanism in the blood. Last month at AACR, we presented data on the monotherapy expansion at the pharmacologically active doses, two doses, as well as the initial safety cohort with Torapalumab in head and neck cancer specifically. We are currently enrolling in a randomized dose expansion at two doses to address Project Optimus and come up with a recommended phase two dose hopefully early next year in combination with Torapalumab.

We have had an FDA meeting and presented them with the data package we’re generating and have alignment on our approach. So the data that we showed at AACR is very exciting and shows that these are both pharmacologically active doses and that the drug does exactly what it’s intended to do. So we saw marked TCRE positive Treg depletion in tumors from fifty two to ninety seven percent. So the immunofluorescence plot on the right, the green, the top panels are the pretreatment. The bottom panels are the on treatment biopsies.

The green does show a marked decrease from the top to the bottom showing the depletion pictorially. The part that was the surprise and has us super excited is the CD8 T cells. Seeing that high degree of infiltration in the tumor really shows that we’ve turned these tumors immunologically hot. And so this is super exciting for PD-one combination. And we were equally thrilled to see in the safety cohort with three patients at two different dose levels with Torapalumab to see a partial response in a fourth line head and neck cancer patient that had progressed previously on PD-one.

So this has us very excited. This patient had symptomatic relief. In fact, he told the physician, Doctor. Atkins, as he went in for his scan that he knew the tumor was shrinking. And that’s always great with these horrible tumors that are infecting their ability to swallow.

And we had a forty percent decrease in target lesions, but we also had tumor observed tumor shrinkage in non target lesions. So we’re excited to further enroll that dose expansion cohort and read out the data early next year. We additionally have a study enrolling in gastric cancer to really establish the proof of concept for this molecule. And esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, as Denny showed you the difference in the PD L1 high and low activity We think this could be a very exciting opportunity to really bring treatment to PD L1 low esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients, which the FDA has said that they will not approve drugs in the PD L1 low, we saw that in their recent ODAC where they looked at pembro, nivo, and tislelizumab showing a lack of clinical benefit.

So this is a differentiated tumor type for us and an exciting development. Our other pipeline asset that is also very exciting is casdozeketug. It’s an IL-twenty seven antagonist antibody. While it’s well understood that inhibiting a cytokine can rebalance the immune system in inflammatory diseases, this is the first demonstration in cancer patients that inhibiting a single cytokine can lead to immune activation, has a very nice safety profile lending itself to combination, and importantly, monotherapy responses and tumor types that the preclinical models told us should work, lung cancer. And now we’ll also show you activity in liver cancer.

So the mechanism that IL-twenty seven turns off the immune system is this immune regulatory cytokine will upregulate checkpoint inhibitors, receptors on T cells, LAG-three, TIM-three, TIGIT, PD L1, all turns off the T cell. It dampens the immune cytokines, interferon TNF, from T cells and turns off the cytolytic activity of NK cells. So it essentially shuts down the killing mechanism of the immune system against the tumor. So by inhibiting it, we activate T and NK cells. In the clinic, we showed this robustly in dose dependent fashion.

So the heat map at the top shows you in the first row at IL-twenty seven signaling signature that at three mgs per kg, the red indicates that the IL-twenty seven signaling is active, and we don’t see immune activation of T and NK cells as indicated by blue color. At ten and twenty mgs per kg, you can see we’ve completely shut down IL-twenty seven signaling and activated T and NK cells. The HCC study that was initially done was casdozikitug atezobev as standard of care in the first line. This is in the first line HCC patient population, and we just presented the final data set at ASCO GI this year, showing a very nice response rate as well as PFS. Building on the phase three study and approval in China of ToriBev showing similar activity, We have a randomized study going on, a global study, evaluating Toribev versus casdoza Toribev.

And this study should enroll this year with a look to data reading out next year. So to really show you the data that has us excited and is differentiated in this tumor type, as I mentioned, it has a thirty eight percent overall response rate across viral etiologies. So this is important. Non viral HPV and HCV patients responded. There’s durability with these responses.

And the most notable part of this is the seventeen percent CR rate. So shown in this graph, looking at several phase three studies with active agents in the disease, you can see the thirty eight percent response rate is higher than the others reported. But really what stands out as differentiated is the depth of response. That seventeen percent is much higher than the best reported eight percent in any other study. So we continue to advance the development in liver cancer and really see some nice activity with Torapalumab across this disease.

Later this year, June, she will be reporting out data on Jupiter 11, which is a ToriLimatinib study in the frontline. And pending a positive signal there, we could also look at developing cas cascodosatecag with its nice safety profile and not adding any new toxicity to atezobev. So I think we’re super excited to have agents that can help this underserved patient population and continue to advance treatment. And with that, I’ll turn it back to Denny to talk about the commercial.

Denny Lanphier, CEO, Coherus Biosciences: Thank you, Theresa. With respect to the commercial opportunity, as Doctor. Lavalle has just outlined, across the portfolio in combination with Torobelmab, these assets add up to over a $15,000,000,000 market opportunity just for the indications that we contemplate now. Certainly, what we really appreciate about CHS one one four, the Treg depleter, is that there is a plethora of larger indications that are available to us as we move forward, CRC and some other key ones. The the partner indications are being developed very elegantly, I I think, without significant cost to the company.

We simply do supply agreements with those. And we also have the ability, I should say, to out license the pipeline assets ex US. We intend on focusing only in The US for these, but we have global rights. And so we are seeking partners for Casdozo, Ketug ex US, as well as CHS one one four, the t reg depleter ex US. So let me just finish up here with a few reviews of our financial outlook and results.

We ended q one twenty twenty five with some $82,000,000 in cash. I think, as you all know, we completed our divestitures in the start of q two this year. We divested some $800,000,000 worth of assets over the twelve last twelve to fourteen months, including a $483,400,000 upfront for the UDENYCA franchise. We are able with that then to reduce our debt significantly, including our $230,000,000 convertible loan. We then dropped almost 250,000,000 about $250,000,000 to the balance sheet upon closing of that transaction.

And meanwhile, we are reducing the size of the organization from about two twenty five employees earlier this year, targeted to about a 50 employees later this year by the end of the year, and thereby yielding about $25,000,000 in savings during that period of time. So just to finish up on the value proposition here, first of all, a next generation PD one with a unique binding epitope demonstrated higher activity and including activity in low PD L one states. For example, I would add that Lok Torzi is licensed in Europe for low PDL one states in esophageal cancer. This puts us in great position for combination studies both with our own assets, but also those of partners. A very robust clinical development program yielding results in the first half and beyond in 2026 with both of our assets in large indications where we are approaching multibillion dollar markets.

And lastly, our fiscal responsibility and our strong executions left us with a lot of money on the balance sheet, to bring all these forward over $250,000,000 as we look forward into 2026. Thank you today. Thank you for your attention today, and thank you for listening to Coherus Oncology.

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