Dimerix CEO speaks with Proactive at the ASX SMIDcaps Conference

With me now live from the ASX Small Mid Caps conference is Dimeric CEO, Dr. Nina Webster.

Dimerics is the clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing new therapies for kidney diseases with significant unmet medical need.

Nina, nice to meet you.

Pleasure to be here.

Now the company is developing DMX 200 for a rare kidney disease.

Can you tell us more about the science and the global market opportunity?

Absolutely. So, FSGS is a disease called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, and it's a type of rare kidney disease for which there's very limited treatment options around the world. FSGS literally means some sections of the kidney are scarred. And what happens over time is more and more sections become scarred until there's not enough left to filter blood and you end up in kidney failure. Sadly, this is a disease that impacts children down to two years old as well as adults. So it's not an old person's disease at all. And from diagnosis to kidney failure is often less than five years, hence a very compelling need for these treatment options. Now, what DMX 200 does is it works on the inflammatory post process. What we're aiming to do is drive down inflammation, prevent scarring and fibrosis and therefore preserve the kidney cells. It's a, a disease that at the moment impacts about 220,000 patients globally, uh, hence that rare disease category, but is growing in incidence as kidney diseases are becoming more and more diagnosed.

Now, your action three phase three trial has completed recruitment and passed a blinded interim futility assessment. What does that tell us about DX 200's chances of success and when should investors expect the final readout?

Yeah, so we're in the fully recruited trial, um noting that we actually recruited across 21 countries around the world. So it really has been a global clinical study. Um throughout that process, we ran an interim analysis in 2024, looking at the primary end point and it showed at that point in time that the drug was doing better than placebo and was on the trajectory to hit our final end point, hence reducing that risk. More recently, in uh March of this year or April of this year, we ran a statistical power review on the full uh cohort of patients now we're fully recruited to show that we are 90% powered for that clinical endpoint. What does that mean? What it means is that if we see the treatment effect that we expect to see and we're on trajectory for in 2024, we've got a 90 greater than 90% probability that we'll get our statistical difference or P value. And that again reduces risk for the clinical trial.

You've now signed five commercial partners across the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. How does the partnership model work and what does it mean for the company's risk profile?

Absolutely. So we've signed with five different companies, and these deals are valued up to $1.9 billion in upfront and milestone payments with royalties on top of that as well. So that is really a very, very compelling opportunity. What this means is a couple of different things. One is we've already received over $80 million in upfront fees. So we're sharing the risk with our partners and taking the risk away from the investors. The second component is that this is not just about a financial opportunity. It's exponentially grown our expertise because we can tap into our partners skills and capabilities in each of these territories, uh where they have the key competencies and expertise to take us through to that next level. So a very exciting opportunity given they've done a very thorough due diligence process on the asset as well and still signed on the bottom line. I should also note that there is opportunity for other territories for licensing, so potential for further income as well.

You've also added DMX 652 for acute kidney injury as a second pipeline asset. What's the investment case for the company as both programs progress?

So DX 652 we acquired this year and so that means that we own that, all the patents are coming into our name and we will move forward with that asset for an indication called acute kidney injury. So what this means for us is we really are managing to leverage our core expertise that we've built up over time with our DMX 200 program, leverage the expertise, the expert communications around the world that we've got, 21 countries where we know experts to help leverage that to develop 652 in acute kidney injury. That is a huge opportunity because acute injury, when patients go in for cardiac surgery, one in four can get a kidney injury as a result of on pump surgery. And that goes up to almost one in two for high risk patients. So this is a huge opportunity for which there is nothing approved anywhere in the world at the moment.

Nina, thank you for your time.

Appreciate it. Thank you.