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We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to improving the lives of patients suffering from debilitating and life-threatening diseases through the discovery, development and commercialization of therapies to degrade disease-causing proteins. We use our proprietary technology platform to engineer proteolysis targeting chimeras, or PROTAC targeted protein degraders, that are designed to harness the body's own natural protein disposal system to selectively remove disease-causing proteins. We believe that our targeted protein degradation approach is a therapeutic modality that may provide distinct advantages over existing modalities, including traditional small molecule therapies and gene-based medicines. Our small-molecule PROTAC technology has the potential to address a broad range of intracellular disease targets, including those representing the up to 80% of proteins that cannot be addressed by existing small molecule therapies, commonly referred to as "undruggable" targets. We are using our PROTAC platform to build an extensive pipeline of protein degradation product candidates to target diseases in oncology, neuroscience, and other therapeutic areas. We have designed and optimized our proprietary platform for the discovery of PROTAC therapeutics to address diseases caused by abnormal proteins or aberrant protein expression. We engineer our PROTAC targeted protein degraders to tag a target protein for degradation through the ubiquitin proteasome system, one of the cell's natural protein disposal systems, and then to iteratively degrade additional target protein molecules. Our experienced scientific team has developed our PROTAC platform, including a proprietary synthetic PROTAC matrix, to rapidly identify and optimize efficient protein degraders with tunable properties relating to potency, selectivity and method of delivery. We have combined the potential of our PROTAC technology with our specialized knowledge to obtain encouraging preclinical results, successfully degrading more than 95% of all proteins that we have targeted. We have developed PROTAC targeted protein degraders that are capable of being delivered through multiple routes of administration, including oral delivery, as well as PROTAC targeted protein degraders that are able to penetrate the blood brain barrier. Our two lead product candidates are ARV-110 and ARV-471. We are developing ARV-110, a PROTAC protein degrader targeting the androgen receptor protein, or AR, for the treatment of men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, or mCRPC. We initiated a Phase 1 clinical trial of ARV-110 in March 2019. This Phase 1 trial is designed to assess the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of ARV-110 and also includes measures of anti-tumor activity as secondary endpoints, including reduction in prostate specific antigen, or PSA, a well-recognized biomarker of prostate cancer progression. We received fast track designation for ARV-110 for mCRPC in May 2019. We are also developing ARV-471, a PROTAC protein degrader targeting the estrogen receptor protein, or ER, for the treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic ER positive / HER2 negative breast cancer. We initiated a Phase 1 clinical trial of ARV-471 in August 2019. This Phase 1 trial is designed to assess the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of ARV-471 and also includes measures of anti-tumor activity as secondary endpoints. In our preclinical studies, these lead product candidates have demonstrated potent and selective protein degradation. We believe favorable clinical trial results in these initial oncology programs would provide validation of our platform as a new therapeutic modality for the potential treatment of diseases caused by dysregulated intracellular proteins regardless of therapeutic area.
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