Earnings call transcript: Circio Holding Q2 2025 highlights CircVec advances

Circio Holding ASA’s recent earnings call for the second quarter of 2025 showcased significant advancements in its CircVec platform, driving a modest stock price increase of 2.07% to 0.64. According to InvestingPro data, the stock has experienced significant volatility, with a -51.58% return over the past year and currently trades at a P/E ratio of 0.22. The company’s focus on innovation and financial prudence has positioned it well in the evolving gene therapy market, though current analysis suggests the stock may be fairly valued based on comprehensive Fair Value calculations.

Key Takeaways

• Circio Holding reported significant improvements in protein expression through its CircVec platform.
• The company reduced outstanding bonds significantly, enhancing its financial stability.
• Multiple R&D collaborations were established, expanding its innovation network.

Company Performance

Circio Holding has demonstrated a steady performance in Q2 2025, focusing on innovation and financial management. The company’s efforts in reducing outstanding bonds from CHF 35 million to less than CHF 10 million reflect its commitment to financial health, though InvestingPro analysis reveals the company is quickly burning through cash with a negative free cash flow yield of -61%. The development of the CircVec platform, with substantial improvements in protein expression, underscores its competitive edge in the gene therapy sector. For deeper insights into Circio’s financial health and growth prospects, InvestingPro offers 8 additional key tips and comprehensive analysis in their Pro Research Report.

Financial Highlights

• Operating expenses remain stable at less than DKK 4 million per month.
• Outstanding bonds reduced from CHF 35 million to less than CHF 10 million.
• Financing secured through warrant exercises and an Atlas Capital facility.

Outlook & Guidance

Circio Holding aims to initiate therapeutic studies by the end of 2025, focusing on heart and ophthalmology indications. The company is also advancing its CircVec platform to version 4.0 and exploring further partnerships in gene and cell therapy.

Executive Commentary

CEO Erik Dick Van Wicklen highlighted the unique capabilities of the CircVec platform, stating, "We have a platform here in CircVec that delivers unprecedented durability and protein expression advantage." CTO Thomas Hansen emphasized the potential impact of dosing reduction in gene therapy, noting, "If we are able to reduce dosing just by tenfold, let’s say, without losing clinical benefit, that would be a game changer in gene therapy."

Risks and Challenges

• Continued challenges in AAV vector technologies within the gene therapy market.
• The stock’s proximity to its 52-week low indicates potential investor caution.
• The need to maintain competitive advantage amidst rapid industry advancements.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts focused on the company’s cost structure, partnerships in gene therapy, and the unique in vivo CAR approach. The management confirmed the ability to maintain current cost structures and ongoing discussions with AAV gene therapy companies.

Full transcript - Circio Holding ASA (CRNA) Q2 2025:

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: Welcome to Serkeo. My name is Erik Dick Van Wicklen. I am the CEO. Today, we are presenting our first half year results as well as an update on our Circvec R and D program. Together with me, I have CFO, Lu Borgall as well as Thomas Hansen, CTO.

I will begin with a short highlights session as well as an update on relevant market conditions. Importantly, during the first half of the year, we’ve been operating under funds raised in the warrant exercise 2024 as well as the Atlas facility, and this has enabled us to have a stable cash flow into the company. We’ve also extended the financing commitment with Atlas. This secures capital to fund our operations until end of the year with an option for further extensions into 2026. On business development, we have been very active.

We entered seven R and D collaborations during first half of the year, and Lubor will come back to these in his presentation. And importantly, we’ve made substantial progress on our Circvec platform. We have now showed convincing strong proof of concept in vivo, both with our AAV Circvec program as well as in vivo CAR delivering DNA Circvec constructs into the spleen. And Thomas will be covering these programs in his presentation. I’d also like to bring your attention to a publication we had, Nature Reviews Genetics by our scientists in the 2025.

This is a very comprehensive review of the circular RNA space and their therapeutic capital. So anyone interested in circular RNA, I highly recommend you tune in and read that review in nature. In addition, we presented our data at ASGCT in New Orleans in May. This is the preeminent global leading cell and gene therapy conference and an excellent platform for SerQio to showcase our currently quite compelling data. We are, as a lead, focusing on gene therapy with AAVs as our main prioritized program at the moment.

So the first gene therapy was approved in 2017 and already now we have seven approved AAV gene therapies. So when you hear about gene therapy, the AAV vector is really the workhorse of all of these. Now there are some major challenges with AAV. They require really high dose levels because they’re not particularly active or potent when injected into humans. And that high dose level drives up toxicity and it drives up manufacturing costs.

And this is making many of these AAVs struggle commercially for those reasons. And there has been substantial news in this field in this the past few months. There was an issue with the Danone disease AAV program by a company called Rocket Pharmaceuticals, where there was a patient death in a clinical trial, again, probably driven by the high dosage level of the AAV. So it’s an area where the AAV is active, but the toxicity is very severe in the patient. And for that reason, the FDA required a clinical hold, so the trial had to stop.

There has also been substantial discussions around the company called Sarepta. This is one of the leading gene therapy companies in the world, and they had to pause trials in LGMD muscular dystrophy, again for safety reasons. And this is where CirQio comes in, and our CirQvec technology can really help solve some of the key challenges. So we have data now showing that you can improve the activity level of an AAV gene therapy by 10 to 40 fold if you switch to our CirQvec based expression. If you can reduce the dose by tenfold, that would be massive for this space.

It will reduce the toxicity level, probably also reduce the cost, and maybe eliminate the need for co administration of immune suppressant medications. So based on what we’re seeing today, we believe that in the future, every gun is going to switch to circular RNA based expression because it’s looking like it’s simply more potent than the way it is done today. And Thomas will come back to this and explain in more detail. So our lead program, gene therapy enhancing AAV vectors, and we’re looking at multiple disease areas in this space. In parallel, as we’ve communicated before, we’re also pursuing a cell therapy program with the aim of developing an in vivo CAR approach, utilizing circulating DNA vectors.

So in this case, we’re not dealing with viral AAV vectors, we’re dealing with DNA format, which is redosable and enables the possibility of a more durable in vivo CAR cell therapy. So with that, I hand over to Thomas.

Thomas Hansen, CTO, Serkeo: Thank you, Erik. Thank you all for tuning in. I’m a little taller than Erik, as you can see, so I need to step down a bit. Yes, thank you all for tuning in. I’m very pleased to give you this R and D update.

We have some very interesting data to share with you this morning. But before we get to the recent data, I’m just going to bring us up to the same page. So, just to remind you all what we are doing at SerQio, that is we are developing our Circvec platform and that is basically a DNA cassette that when it enters the cell, it uses the whole cell the host cell machinery to produce circular RNA. And those circular RNAs are then designed in a manner that they will engage in cap independent translation and produce your protein of interest. And the reason we believe that this circular intermediate is a good approach is because the circular RNA is extremely stable within cells, much more stable than mRNA and as a consequence you see longer expression, but more importantly in gene therapy you get an accumulation of RNA within cells.

You can sort of imagine you get constant production of siRNA that will hang around for a long time, so the steady state level of the siRNA in the end is much higher than the mRNA and in return you get higher protein expression per DNA copy number basically. So it’s a more effective way of producing proteins in cells. So that cassette we can simply take that and put it into a vector system. And of course we’re working a lot with AAV vectors because that is still the most well described system for gene therapy. So instead of expressing an mRNA from the AAV, put in our circlet cassette and as a consequence the AAV will then produce the circlionein cells and you’ll get those benefits that are just described from the circlionein, namely that enhanced expression of your protein, which will be very important in gene therapy as Eric just mentioned.

You get a better, more effective expression of your therapeutic protein. Now, before summer, we already were very excited about our AAV data. So what we did there was we expressed our CircVec using a heart specific promoter, which stimulates expression in heart specifically, and we compared how would CircVec compare to an MVec, you know, the mRNA, the conventional benchmark in terms of expression. So if you look across the mouse and you measure how much luminescence, so we expressed this reported gene that’s easy to monitor over time, we see a tremendous increase from CIRGVEC ranging from 9x improvement in the high dose to 35x improvement in the low dose, which was a significant improvement. But something that was a little fly in the ointment back then is that we’ve been working on the generation three in vitro and we had we thought that whole that was a promising new design for Circvec expression.

But unfortunately, in this experiment at least, we did not see that benefit in The U. You can see if you compare the Circvec two point zero to three point zero or eight point zero. But we were not ready to give up on the generation three, even though that data did not translate fully from the in vitro to the in vivo data. So we kept modifying the generation three Circvecs and we tried multiple different things and we came up with this CircVex 3.2 as we call it and this is all based on some elements that we positioned at the very end of the cassette, as is depicted to the right. And interestingly, when we then use that in the same setting as before, namely injecting the AAV systemically, monitor the luminescence in mice over time, we see this remarkable increase in expression if you compare the different CircVec generations.

So here we now have 32x improvement over MVEC and 3x improvement over the previous Circvec generation based on the whole body luminescence of the mouse. So that was very exciting data that we were able to gather here over the summer. But it gets even better, because when we sort of monitor the expression in the heart specifically, you can monitor you can take the profile of expression. You can look at the heart region specifically. So you see to the left is basically how the signal the circuit 3.2 is most notably for that vector because it drives up expression so immensely in the heart.

And if you then quantify that area under the curve, you actually reach more than 40x improvement over MVAC in the heart specifically. So I would say that, mildly said, that is a massive improvement that we’re now observing specifically in the heart. And of course, going back to what Erik mentioned with Rocket Pharmaceuticals in Danone disease, that is a disease that is affecting the heart, so that is where you basically want as effective heart expression the missing protein, which in Danner disease is called LAMP2. If we are able to reduce dosing 40 fold in Danner’s disease, I think all those toxicity issues that Rocket Pharmaceuticals is currently facing would probably be less problematic. So, this is something that we are very interested in pursuing in more detail going forward.

So, that’s extremely exciting, but that’s not all. We have also been very interested in characterizing CIRGBEC performance in ophthalmology. So, is sort of in the eye. So, what you can do here is you can actually inject AV vectors intra vitrally as it’s called, so you basically inject it in the eye and then similar to what you saw before you can monitor luminescence over time. And very encouragingly, we also see a substantial increase in ZERGBEC expression in this setting.

And I’ll just point your attention to the fact that this is not even the three 0.2, this is an older ZERGBEC that carries a ubiquitous promoter that allows expression in the eye, but we are definitely pursuing this and could do this further because a 15x improvement with Surgvec two point zero in this setting is very encouraging and there’s a lot of rare diseases where AAV technology would be very suitable in such a setting for different ophthalmology indications. So that is very, very encouraging for the AAV gene therapy using Circvec. So, yeah, that basically brings me to the summary. So what I’ve shown in our is that we’re able to outperform Embex significantly depending on the context and the Circvec cassette. It’s more than tenfold, even more than fortyfold in the heart specifically.

And critically, we see a ZIRGVAC advantage across different settings. So, we not only see that in the heart, but we also see it in the eye and that is basically using different promoters, in this case also using different AAV capsids. So clearly, this not only sort of validates Zirkbeck as a versatile platform, but it also is very encouraging to see that Zirkbeck specifically, but I think also zerglRNA in general is a very promising technology in gene therapy, namely because it can drive up protein expression much more effectively than an mRNA equivalent. Moreover, we’ve seen now that the most recent 3.2 design actually improves expression by roughly threefold in the heart. So that’s very encouraging as well.

So coming back to, for instance, some of the toxicity that’s been currently observed in the AAV field, if we are able to reduce dosing just by tenfold, let’s say, without losing clinical benefit, that would be a game changer in gene therapy, because the safety profile would be different, reduce toxicity, much safer for the patient, and I think that will definitely be a new avenue for AAV gene therapy overall. So I think we are very, very excited about this development at SerQ. So we keep pushing forward. We still, for our gene therapy pipelines, have a huge focus on heart and muscle still, specifically focusing on heart given the current data. We have some ongoing studies in the CNS and in the eye as I just showed you.

So we will of course also deploy the most recent SURFEC designs in those settings and see what improvements do we observe and what benefits are we seeing from the most recent Surgvec designs. And we are gearing up now to start looking into more therapeutic avenues, looking into what specific indication would be a good fit for ZERGVEC. I mentioned Dannon disease where Rocket Pharmaceuticals are struggling, so this seems to be a good fit. So this is something we are looking into in more detail. We are looking at different ophthalmology indication, given the data that we can likely get at least 15x improved expression.

So, there’s a lot of avenues that we are currently evaluating, looking into CROs that have the relevant mouse models and designing the constructs that would be relevant for the given indication. So this is all ongoing and we hope to be able to initiate some of these therapeutic sort of relevant studies by the end of the year. Also, we are not touching much upon that in this webcast, but we also have a program on in vivo CAR. Here we’re looking in this is a non viral approach, so this is not AAV based, but this is where we want to target the spleen or target T cells specifically using some type of delivery technology, likely an LNP that would carry the CircVec vector into the target cells. So, we’re discussing this with multiple different partners and try to identify the best path forward here, because as you’ve seen in the past, we have some very encouraging data with CircVec expression and robust CircVec expression in the spleen.

And then in parallel in the lab here in Stockholm, we are of course also pushing forward towards an even better CircVec cassette. I would be surprised if we’ve reached the ceiling now. I think we can still improve on ZERGVEC. So this is going on in parallel, namely producing ZERGVEC generation four. So exciting times to be employed at Serkio.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this R and D update. And now I’ll like to hand it over to Lubben, who will give you the corporate update.

Lu Borgall, CFO, Serkeo: Thanks, Thomas. Very exciting. So it will be difficult to follow this exciting presentation about interesting results, but I will give you an overview of our financial activities and business development activities over the last six months and our plans going forward. So we started the year in a very good position following the warrant exercise and the private placement in December 2024. As you all know, the warrants were oversubscribed, which showed a strong interest in our technology.

And so we were able to finance the first half year of 2025 on a combination of that warrants exercise plus calling selected tranches from Atlas Capital. And of course, we had ongoing discussions with investors during that, and I will give an update on that later. Very importantly, we were able to extend our runway. The finance commitment with Atlas, which ended in June, was extended and now we are can say that we have safe operation until the end of the 2025. This is, of course, possible because we continue to control our costs tightly, and I will talk a little bit more about the impact in the financial figures on the next slide.

And then very importantly, I think we have to compare ourselves to where we were about twelve months ago, same time last year. We reduced the outstanding bonds from CHF 35,000,000 to less than CHF 10,000,000. So reduced the financial risk. We’re strengthening our cap table with new investors who’ve taken strong positions in Serkio and also, of course, with our some of our major shareholders increasing their position. So we have a much stronger cap table now than last year.

And importantly for us, of course, as you just heard from Thomas, we’ve made great progress with our technology. And now we have a really validated technology in different tissues and different technologies, different aspects. And we’re now very, very confident about the benefit of this technology. So together, we feel like we’re in a much stronger position at Serkior compared to where we were twelve months ago. We have a much stronger data package stronger technical program, and we have a much stronger financial position.

So let me walk you through the numbers of the first half of twenty twenty five. They’re

Thomas Hansen, CTO, Serkeo: very

Lu Borgall, CFO, Serkeo: much in line with the six months periods previously in 2024. As you can see, we continue, of course, to invest in R and D. This is very important. As you can see from the presentation of Thomas, we need to run more experiments to test technology, different aspects of technologies, and we have found a very cost efficient way to do that. So we actually are very productive and can generate a lot of results based on a relatively modest budget.

Also, of course, this is also only possible because we have a very efficient R and D team. Our team are, of course, the leaders in circular RNA. We have the most experienced people who can really apply this technology in the settings and will continue to operate with a small team very efficiently. As we said, we have to control our costs. We’re on the operating expenses, we keep to as low as possible.

There are certain expenses as a public company, of course, that we have to have. And so we’ll continue to operate as small as possible. But as you can see on the total operating expenses, we’ve been very stable compared to the last six months. And you can now say that we’re operating on a budget of less than DKK 4,000,000 per month. And we can continue on this basis going forward.

But of course, we would like increase our activities if possible. On the financial net financial items, just quickly highlighting, the difference in the numbers between 2425% is that in 2024, we recognize the wave of the OnCourse 102 R and D loans that we received much earlier. Otherwise, the operating expenses, like the financial expenses that we have because of the Atlas agreement. And we want to draw, yes, the net cash at the end of the period is quite low, but this is low by design. We, of course, as we said, will call tranches from Atlas only on an as needed basis.

So we on purposely keep the money quite low right now. Okay. What are we doing for in terms of financing? Of course, based on the new data that we just generated, we’re going to go, of course, continue our discussion with investors. We are quite confident that this new data would generate a lot of interest from investors.

But of course, we also need to say that the market conditions remain challenging, I mean, not just for biotech company, but globally. You’re all aware of what’s going on in the world. That also has an impact on the behavior or decisions of investors in biotech companies. And what we have seen, of course, over the last six months is that while we do get quite a lot of interest, we also get in discussion and moving over the goalpost with some of these investors who keep then demanding more and more data. But with the new data package, we’re quite confident that we can address many of those questions.

We’re also, of course, quite happy with our relationship with Atlas. We were able to negotiate a financing commitment until the 2025 based on the strong performance in the first half of this year. We all have a good relationship with Atlas, and we continue to explore different options of working with Atlas and, of course, raising financing. So we are we’re grateful to Atlas for giving us a reliable access to capital during tough market conditions, but of course, we’re looking elsewhere, of course, to generating new funding. Business development, as Eric was already saying, we continue to establish strong technology collaboration, and I will give into more details on the next slide.

We will leverage the new data that Thomas just presented in talking to gene therapy companies, which we then hopefully can be leveraged into early stage technology collaborations. And we continue to monetize our technology in non core or complex areas in collaboration with other companies, and I will give an example on the next slide. So let me give you an update. So we are showing here five business development collaboration, but with the title says seven, That’s because two of them remain confidential. What do you have this technology collaboration in common?

Well, our SilkWet cassette needs to be delivered to the right tissue, to the right cells in the body, and that we need to do with another technology. So we always need to combine our SilkWet cassette with another technology, either with a vector, a virus, or an LNP. And these companies, Entresto, in our new region, they have different product delivery technologies that we need. So we need to do these combinations and need to test which combination works best for us. Some of these collaborations are complementary and some of them are competing with each other.

So meaning, like, we can have different delivery technology to go to different tissues in the body or we just have different formulations of the same class of delivery technologies. So we don’t expect all of these collaborations to work out or we are even if they do work out, we will compare them versus each other and then we will expect to take the best technology forward for the different purposes. So I won’t go too much details here. If there is interest in learning more about them, of course, send us an e mail and we can explain in more details. But we’re just saying, quite exciting about having established so many collaborations in such a short period of time.

I do want to highlight a little bit the collaboration we have with Lonza, which is that one of us says it’s a novel use. As Thomas has said or shown, our technology is extremely efficient in expressing proteins. And expressing proteins, of course, is very important, a lot of the manufacturing of therapeutics of antibodies and other proteins. And what we’re trying to hope with this technology, with this collaboration, Alonso is one of the or maybe the imminent manufacturer of biologics in the world, and they have a proprietary technology or expression system. And we are working together with them and seeing how our technology could benefit in their system.

So we’re quite excited if that leads to positive results. Of course, that could be an additional benefit to leverage our technology in areas where we would not be active ourselves. And then with that, let me wrap up what are the next milestones on BD activities. So as I said, we’re going to we have ongoing discussions with AAV gene therapy companies, but we’re going to go and talk to more companies of trying to get them interested technology and test them in house. We will be pursuing or are pursuing discussions with cell therapy companies that Thomas alluded to before and leverage the technology in that area as well.

And of course, as I said, we are working with the existing companies and delivering the results. We expect to have some results later this year, but we’re not may be not announcing all of these results because sometimes for competitive or IP reason, but also because we may not decide to go forward with certain technologies and then focus on some others. So don’t expect to hear anything soon, but there will be a lot of activities ongoing. And with that, I hand over to Erik.

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: Thank you, Lubor. So to summarize, take home messages. We have a platform here in Circvec that delivers unprecedented durability and protein expression advantage over conventional mRNA based expression system. And this is versatile in that it applies both to viral vectors and nonviral vectors. Focus for us now is deploying that in enhancing AAV gene therapy to enable reduced dosing and more safe gene therapies in the future, and LNP or other delivery technologies to enable DNA delivery to in vivo CAR approaches.

This technology has true platform potential. It’s a first in class industry leading circular RNA expression system. We’re not aware of any other companies or academics that have a circular RNA expression system that perform as well as Circlic does. We have multiple opportunities in several disease areas, and we plan to both be partnering and develop programs in house. So with that, we conclude the presentation part of this report, and we can move to Q and A.

We have received several questions.

Lu Borgall, CFO, Serkeo: And

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: maybe, Lubur, you want to start with finance and business development?

Lu Borgall, CFO, Serkeo: Sure. Happy to.

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: So we received the questions on our cost base. We have operated on NOK 4,000,000 per month as a budget for the past year and a half. Are you able to extend this, and do you expect the same cost basis going forward?

Lu Borgall, CFO, Serkeo: Absolutely. No. We have now a very well established operations. Clearly, we need to operate under the 4,000,000 at the 4,000,000 budget because that’s the the franchise that we can draw from Atlas. But we found a way to be very efficient in our operation, and we can maintain this level for the foreseeable future.

As I said, of course, it does come at a cost. I mean, of course, we cannot do too much. You know, like, we have to operate efficient with a small team. But, of course, if we had more money, we could do more. We could have faster progress.

But, you know what, we can definitely operate at this level going forward. There’s no problem.

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: We received several questions on business development. You mentioned, Lewborg, that there are ongoing discussions on the AAV gene therapy. Could you elaborate on the timeline and what kind of deal you would expect?

Lu Borgall, CFO, Serkeo: Well, I mean, deals don’t happen overnight. You know, sometimes, you know, even when companies are interested in working together, it does take time to negotiate contracts because this collaboration can be quite extensive and complex, contract negotiation can take months, unfortunately. So I mean, we would like to enter this collaboration, of course, as soon as possible, but we have to be cognizant that pharmaceutical companies or other companies take their time in in making these decisions and also in in in negotiating these contracts. So like you said, we have ongoing discussions. We are confident that some of them will lead to a successful completion in this year.

You know? So but, of course, it’d be very difficult for me to predict the month. You know? So But you can be assured that, of course, we’re working as fast as possible to have them signed or established as soon as possible. But, yeah, we’re very confident.

We’re very encouraged by the discussions we have ongoing. We get the right signals, so we’re very confident that this will, you know, happening this year.

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: And fair to say we will now also be going out there and marketing these new results, which I think are substantially stronger than Absolutely. Than what we had in before. The new results will definitely help in our discussions, and

Lu Borgall, CFO, Serkeo: we can already see that in some of the conversations that we’re having. So this definitely will be much better discussion going forward.

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: So we have a few technical questions as well. Maybe I invite Thomas to take those. Sure. On the generation four Serpec, Thomas, what kind of advantage could you expect? And is this in any way delaying or impacting the advancement of the the CIRFEC program in terms of therapeutic programs?

Thomas Hansen, CTO, Serkeo: Yeah. So we are we are currently characterizing the new generation of CIRGreg vectors in the lab. We have a very strong R and D team here in Stockholm working hard to namely build, you know, and optimizing CIRGreg cassettes. And I think now we are I mean, I think it’s too early to say, but I think we hope to see at least a significant improvement on top of 3.2, but let’s see how that translates into a mouse. We can never know with certainty how that looks, but we are very encouraged already now by the four point zero.

But yeah, a little early to say. Regarding then the development of a therapeutic programme, I think this is something that could easily go in parallel. This is not something that necessarily will pause or change the pace by which we develop the Circvec four point zero. A lot of these in vivo experiments are we are not doing that in house. This is in many cases done by either an animal facility here at KI or by other CROs.

That work can definitely go on in parallel, but I think it’s also interesting now with the data at hand. Think we are ready now to embark on some therapeutic proteins and do these mouse models, because that is of course a little bit more expensive. It takes longer time, it’s more complex to interpret the data, but I think now the technology is ready to fully dig in. And I think we will, as mentioned, probably look close at Danone disease and different ophthalmology indication to start with. And hopefully, as I mentioned, we will we aim and hope to initiate some of that this year.

Hope that covers.

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: Thank you, Thomas. We also had some questions around the disease models and timing, but I think you covered that in in your in your answer. Given the data that has been produced, is this impacting your thinking around with these areas to prioritize and what may be your lead indication?

Thomas Hansen, CTO, Serkeo: Yes, of course, we are following the data. And clearly now the strongest data we have is in heart, 44 x improved heart expression from CIRQECT compared to IMVEXX. So clearly, this is something we are looking at. And I think that, you know, given the data, that’s where CIRQECT has the strongest profile. Eye data also looking extremely promising.

So I think these, as mentioned, these two avenues are something we are looking at in more detail and identifying CROs that have the suitable know how and mouse models to help us with these particular mouse models is ongoing work.

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: And just to stress that iDate, of course, is with ZERKVEG generation two. Yes. And the ZERKVEG generation two is actually performing better in I than it did in the heart. So we’re very curious to see how our 3.2 variant will perform in eye when we get around to doing that experiment.

Thomas Hansen, CTO, Serkeo: Yes. And this is something that we are setting up as we speak. Well, yeah. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you.

Erik Dick Van Wicklen, CEO, Serkeo: A couple of more questions we’ve received that I can cover. There is a question around Certus. So this is a collaboration partner we have with an LNP technology that we use to deliver to the spleen. There is some concern we’ve heard that they have done a deal with a company called Emiravax and whether that impacts Circeo. I’d like to stress that Emiravax is doing something completely different to us.

That’s a circular RNA in vitro transcribed circular RNA company. Remember, we are making DNA and viral vectors. So Certus and Emiravax have entered an exclusive relationship when it comes to delivery of circular RNA, but this is different to what we’re doing. So it has no impact whatsoever on our programs, which are DNA delivery when it comes to that collaboration with Certest. There is also interest and questions around the TG program and when we can expect data from that.

This is these are clinical trials. We have two ongoing clinical trials with TG-one, one at Georgetown University in The U. S. And the second one is in Norway. The Norwegian trial, we published data in June, looks which very encouraging.

So that’s a good start. That trial should be fully enrolled, hopefully, by end of the year, and then data will be coming out next year. For Georgetown, we have less insight. These studies are investigator initiated, so it’s not controlled by Cirqueo, how they progress when data is reviewed. But I would expect that during this year, we should be able to get updates and probably presentations at a suitable conference next year.

There is also interest still in Iovaxes and questions around that. I can say that we still have a dialogue with Iovaxes. They are trying to set up clinical studies in China. But due to financial market conditions, they so far have been unable to finance those efforts. Lastly, around our in vivo car program, we received a question that there are many of these programs now in development.

We saw multiple acquisitions by big pharma in the space, but they’re all looking more or less the same. What is the circular differentiation? And I think this is a very important question. As far as we know, most or all of the in vivo CAR programs are either based on delivering mRNA or synthetic circular RNA. And that’s proven very effective in NHBs, so in monkeys.

And the first programs are now moving into clinical trials. So that will be very exciting to see how it progresses. What’s important is that when you use RNA, you get really short expression windows. With mRNA, one to two days and then expression is gone. With a circular RNA, synthetic circular RNA that is extended to maybe one week, but it’s still transient.

What we have shown with our spleen delivery data is that we can express in the spleen, specifically in B and T cells for three months or more. So it’s a completely different temporal window. We can get much more durability because we’re expressing from DNA. That is the fundamental difference. So we believe that we can deliver an unprecedented expression, durability of expression, which would enable less frequent dosing.

And we are now actively going around and discussing the data that we have with in vivo car companies. And the aim would be to try and enter into research collaborations with such companies where we can test delivery of CircVec vectors to T cells, to the spleen, and compare directly with the technology of those companies. So that would certainly be an aim to try and get a head to head benchmark with one or more of the car in vivo car companies. That, I think, what we received in terms of questions. Thank you all for the interest.

And we will sign out from Serko. We’ll keep you posted on progress, and we will plan for another webcast update probably in November. Thanks again, and have a nice day.

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