Insmed Incorporated

I do think M&A is coming.

Insmed, you may have talked about it yesterday.

Another great quarter out of them.

That stock is finally getting off the mat.

There are a lot of things to be disappointed about on the biotech side.

Insmed has not traded well now in quite some time.

I have to bring it up because we were very bullish on the way up.

It's given the entire move back.

So lot, lots to study in immunology.

Yaron, are you surprised that, uh, Argenx is like flat even to one year ago, even after the market and this setback? Like, I was just, honestly, as you were talking, I was just looking at the chart of this versus Alnylam and Insmed to, you know, people were putting these in the same bucket.

Alnylam, Insmed both down a lot.

Um, Argenx is still kinda hanging in there.

What do you think?

Good point.

So there's the, so there was the puts and takes, right? Insmed was supposed to get acquired, they didn't, and then the question is the launch crushing numbers or not? Alnylam is not crushing numbers.

Of course, BridgeBio is doing very well.

And our, our working hypothesis is that those liabilities relate to the covalent irreversible binding rather than to the target itself.

AstraZeneca out-licensed its second generation DPP1 inhibitor to Insmed, and it was really only after Insmed's positive Phase 2 data that the field started paying attention again to DPP1.

At which point the question became whether or not there are limitations that a next generation drug could further improve upon.

Our approach uses a completely novel chemotype with a non-covalent reversible binding mechanism, which we believe opens the possibility of a better therapeutic window with it, the opportunity to push for greater efficacy.

And in an increasingly competitive therapeutic class, what is it that in practical development terms, you know, you've got with MLD 151 that you think is going to make a difference?

Um, it really has to mean something you can demonstrate, uh, and demonstrate early.

Since the Insmed Phase 2 data were published, there have been many attempts at follow-on compounds, including a number of very structurally similar drugs out of China with the same chemotype.

And after a thorough landscape analysis, we haven't yet seen anything that we would put in the same bucket as MLD 151 in terms of chemical novelty, and with it, a potentially improved pharmacological and therapeutic profile.

And obviously since, you know, these funds don't tend to hold a lot of dry powder available, you know, they're typically close to being fully invested, you know, the, the, the theory was that these investors essentially had to sell down their positions in a lot of other biotechs, a lot of them, you know, quite broadly owned, and that that was really what pushed down biotech, uh, in the third quarter, in particular in September.

So they were basically having to sell off in some of the bigger names like Argenx or Insmed or some of these other ones.

And so, you know, these pretty liquid names had pretty poor performance.

Which are not the same names you just brought up with respect to the clinical failures, right?