Newron Pharmaceutical Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2025 Results and 2026 Outlook Conference Call. I am Mathilde, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Stefan Weber, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mathilde, and good afternoon, everybody in Europe. Good evening, everybody in Asia, and good morning and early 6:30, have a good starting to the day from Dana Point, California. As usual in the past years, we are spread over the world. The only person right now in our Milan offices is the CFO as he should be. He's sitting on the money that we need to spend in the upcoming period. Our Chief Medical Officer, Ravi Anand, is right now preparing for the SIRS, Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference that starts tomorrow. And I am attending the conference of ROTH Capital at Dana Point. So welcome to this call.

I hope you have had a chance to download the slide deck that we are going to guide you through, and I will start with Slide #4. So if we look back at the last 15 months and the period that we are reporting about, and I will then do the outlook for '26 and hand over to Ravi for the new science and R&D progress and then to Roberto for the financials and the AGM EGM that is upcoming. If we look back, this has really been a period that couldn't have been much better. We practically hit all the quick points. We made all the milestones. But what I want to tell you already now is that for the upcoming 12 to 15 months, we might see even better outcome. So be prepared for that. If we look back, and that is all about evenamide and schizophrenia for the moment. We have to start with the deal that we signed in December 2024, the validating deal with EA Pharma from the Eisai Group.

We did that deal with one of the top 10 Japanese pharma groups with a CNX experienced company, and there were some reasons. We wanted to validate our unique mechanism, the only drug that modulates glutamate in schizophrenia. We wanted to validate being the first add-on therapy in schizophrenia. We wanted to validate our claim that this is the drug that is the only one that qualifies to work in the vast majority of schizophrenia patients who are poor responders or treatment resistant to the current medication. We wanted to get an indication of the intrinsic value of that compound, which by analysts was after that deal was signed, estimated to be more than EUR 1.5 billion. And finally, we wanted to get the cash to perform our Phase III study because at that time, the markets were very challenging on equity. We got all that and since we signed the deal, and that is the starting point of the 2025 success story, we collected EUR 48 million, which was exactly the money we needed to advance our evenamide into the decisive pivotal study program called ENIGMA-TRS.

And as you know, that is split in 2 studies. One is ENIGMA-TRS 1, that is a 600 patients, 1-year double-blind placebo-controlled study, which was finally enrolling first patients in August after we had gotten the approval for the overall program in May. This study is right now actively enrolling on all target continents, and Ravi will give you more update on the status. Importantly, in December then, we could start ENIGMA-TRS 2, the second pivotal study. So 2 shots at target even if 1 sufficiently positive study should do to get this drug approved. We started ENIGMA-TRS 2 in the U.S. study centers with UCLA and since then have added Johns Hopkins and the other studies centers are ready to initiate, and we have submitted the documentation in all the other countries in which we want to enroll patients. So this study is up and rolling now. And again, Robbie will give you an update.

And then importantly, just by the beginning of this year, 2026, we could inform markets that also our partner, Eisai Group has initiated their Phase III program. So right now, I can say this is the most advanced clinical program in schizophrenia. We are right now running 3 pivotal studies in total with more than 1,300 patients in the world. And as you will hear later on, we expect results from the 12 weeks readout within this very year.

Now we did have absolutely thrilling. I'm moving to Slide 5. We did have absolutely thrilling 1-year results from a study in treatment-resistant schizophrenia when evenamide was added to best-selling antipsychotics. And we did have the first highly statistically significant efficacy results from Phase III study called 8A, but there was plenty of questions given the new mechanism and the new positioning. So it was very important that all the clinical results of the past have by now been peer reviewed and published in the papers. We have presented them at numerous conferences. All the space is now being educated about the benefits of this drug in those patients in which today's medications just don't do good. But it was very important last year in August that Pittsburgh University came up with a piece of research, which could explain for the first time why in the pivotal -- why in the Phase II and Phase III studies, we saw that ever increasing efficacy, doubling, tripling responder rates by 1 year, 50% patients no longer qualify as treatment resistant and for the first time ever, treatment-resistant patients being reported to be in remission for 6 months. We didn't know why and how our drug would do that.

And I think Pittsburgh has provided substantial explanation how this drug does so by qualifying schizophrenia as a disease that is substantially caused a hippocampus, a section of the brain where today's drugs simply don't hit, and that is why they do not improve negative symptoms, neuro cognition and why they only have limited benefits in symptoms. So that work of Pittsburgh now peer-reviewed and substantial support for the positioning of our compound and the explanation of the benefits we have shown. Again, starting this year, early 2026, we got another validation that is on a new composition of matter patent on crystalline forms of evenamide, which has the potential to extend our exclusivity to 2044. That would be 17 years post the expected approval of our compound, which we expect by end of '27. This patent has been submitted a year before, but ahead of time, the European Patent Office declared their decision to grant this patent in Europe in early January. The same patent is right now in the process of being reviewed, and we expect it to be approved also in all the other key territories, importantly, including the United States, where, again, this would give us exclusivity until 2044 and thus 17 years post the expected approval of this drug.

On the corporate ends, moving to Slide 6. All the excitement about our results and the initiation of the U.S. study triggered 3 U.S. analysts to start covering Newron and the fourth one joined from Europe. So we got plenty of new coverage. We saw doubling or tripling liquidity in the stock. We are right now trading between 0.7% and 1% of the stock every day, which is clearly showing us that we get better coverage around the world and more people looking at our stock. This is a process that must be continued and even further improved.

Very importantly, we also resolved 2 key issues on funding. Number one is that with existing shareholders and new shareholders from Europe and Asia, we signed a funding agreement in February this year, which will give us access to up to EUR 38 million, of which EUR 15 million are already in the bank, EUR 11 million will come before this year is over with no milestones attached and then the EUR 12 million remaining will come conditional to positive results of our pivotal studies by end of the year. That money being in the bank, we now have the funds to complete our ENIGMA-TRS 1 and 2 studies to the 12-point readout. So we will have all the money to report on the primary endpoint after 12 weeks and the secondary endpoint, and we will be able to advance our drug into NDA submission, and we will have a number of months of reserves beyond that point in time.

And the second component of improving our financial situation was that we reached agreement with the European Investment Bank that all future payments under our loan agreement would be delayed at least by 2 years and a quarter to not before June 2028. So we are now in a very good financial situation. We have 3 pivotal studies rolling, and we have all the cash required to get to read out.

On the corporate end again, our Board of Directors is already 1 year that Chris Martin has become our new Chairman. And I have to say that it is a marvelous cooperation between management and Chris, very much appreciated. He succeeded Ulrich Kostlin who was our Chairman for the 12 years before. In order to now complete the new setup of our Board of Directors and have completely independent directors on the Board, both Patrick Langlois after 18 years of service on the Board and Luca Benatti, after 12 years of service on the Board. Luca was the last founder of the company, have declared they will not stand for reelection in this year's shareholders' meeting. And I think we can say that we have found 2 outstanding new candidates for the Board, George Garibaldi, who is a highly respected industry [indiscernible] with years of experience and Paolo Zocchi, senior ex-partner in the top 4 audit company who are proposed for election by our shareholders as independent nonexecutive directors in the upcoming shareholders' meeting.

So what should we expect for this year, 2026 and early 2027? And I'm moving to Slide #7. I think it is worth to start from the end. If you look at where we want to be in the end and you remind yourself what are our peers. And the peers, the latest companies with one product nature in schizophrenia were Karuna and Intra-Cellular. And Karuna was acquired once they had submitted the NDA for their 1 product company -- for their 1 product to the FDA. They were acquired for $14 billion by Bristol-Myers and Intra-Cellular were acquired after they had launched their own compound in the United States, commercialized it for a few years up to $680 million sales with a market cap of $9 billion. They were then acquired by J&J for $15 billion. We are now the most advanced follow-up to those companies. So what are we missing? Well, to be fair, we are missing positive results from our Phase III program, and we will be getting to those results in the next 12 months. Then what they had, what we do not have, they were listed on NASDAQ. And that is something we cannot ignore because as we have lately seen again, about 2/3 of the global biotech money is traded in the United States.

So clearly, if you want to have full access to capital markets and you want to get a fair price, you should also have your shares listed on that largest stock exchange. So what we need to do is we need to work the path towards the results of our pivotal program. We need to prepare our NDA dossier. The initiation of the work must start way ahead of the results. Then something which is important that evenamide does not only work in schizophrenia, but like all the other compounds like Intra-Cellular's drug that has gone big in bipolar. This drug will also work in additional indications, and I'm also thinking of the elderly patients with dementia and psychotic episodes. This should be a perfect drug for those patients. And that is where additional indications should be pursued and Newron should start working on those.

Clearly, on the corporate side, we should strengthen our institutional shareholder base, and we are working with a number of supporting agencies to do that. And now this all takes us to the shareholders' meeting of April 2023 of this year because there is things that we can do on our own with the means we have and the tools we have and there's steps where we need the support by our shareholders, and we need to get the tools from our shareholders. And you have probably seen the agenda of the shareholders' meeting. There's the usual household stuff like approval of financials, then there's the important elections of the Board. And then you will see that we have also put on the agenda of the shareholders' meeting a capital increase authorization for 15% of the capital.

I do believe this is a moderate request, and it's clearly a compromise between aggressive strategy and the wish of some shareholders not to see any dilution. Clearly, the intention is that those shares would be used to advance evenamide in indications beyond schizophrenia and to support us towards submitting the NDA dossier and getting our drug approved. Clearly, also those shares might be used for a listing of our shares on a U.S. stock exchange like NASDAQ. And these are all procedures that need months and months of preparations. So what we are asking our shareholders for right now is not to approve a capital increase that will be put in place tomorrow, but what we ask them for is to give us the tools and the instruments that we need to start preparations and execute transactions at the right time, which also clearly means at the right share price to the right parties. So if the question is, is an IPO and uplisting of Newron stock to NASDAQ an option today, the answer is probably not because we are missing key ingredients, including share price results and other components. What we ask our shareholders for is support, providing us the tools and allowing us to initiate the process.

So your question might well be, so is it worth? What is the opportunity, and that takes us to Slide #9. What we have to offer today is truly the opportunity to transform schizophrenia treatment with evenamide. This is the first compound that offers glutamate modulation in schizophrenia, and we start understanding how much more important it is to go beyond the dopaminergic pathway drugs that have dominated schizophrenia in the last 70 years. This is a huge market opportunity. We talk about 1% of the global population, but the vast majority of patients is not well treated by today's medication. The vast majority of patients is poorly responding or treatment resistant. So what it needs is a completely new mechanism of action, that is what we offer. And what we need is the first ever add-on treatment to be approved in schizophrenia. What we need is the option for doctors not to change the current medication, but to add a drug with no additional side effects of relevance, but with additional incremental benefit. No risk of relapses, reduced risk of hospitalization, suicidality. That is the promise of such a new mechanistic drug, an add-on to the current medications. As evenamide is the first and so far only drug that qualifies as an add-on to any antipsychotic of relevance, including importantly, including clozapine, and Roberto will talk to that.

What we offer is highly exciting 1-year Phase II results of evenamide as an add-on to antipsychotics as well as highly statistically significant first Phase III results in a 4-week study in poorly responding patients. What we have seen is excellent tolerability, the most prevalent side effect being nasal pharyngitis in the Phase III study. I have already spoken about the potential of evenamide beyond schizophrenia that must clearly be evaluated. And we have also covered the topic of the strong IP protection. Right now, we have a Composition of Matter in the U.S. of 2035 and Process Patents to 2042 -- this new Composition of Matter 2044, that would be 17 years of a truly innovative treatment in schizophrenia, protection and market exclusivity post approval.

That all said, it's my pleasure to hand over to Ravi on Slide 10 for the update on science and clinical.

Thank you, Stefan, and good morning and good afternoon to everybody else. So I think I'm going to start with Slide 10, and I think this is a schematic presentation of how we currently view schizophrenia. And this has been brought out by the University of Pittsburgh and some of the universities.

Contrary to common belief, the schizophrenia symptomatology does not begin in the basal ganglia, but in the hippocampus. The hippocampus controls the rate of abnormal firing from the dopamine receptors in the basal ganglia. When it's not working, there is hyperfiring from the dopamine receptors, and that leads to some of the symptoms of schizophrenia. What has also become very clear is that the hippocampal nuclei control negative symptoms, control cognition. So you need to have a drug working there. All current antipsychotics work at the level of the basal ganglia where you have the dopaminergic receptors. And therefore, they will never be able to reach the hippocampal nuclei, and that is one of the reasons why we don't see any benefits in negative symptoms or cognition with currently available drugs. Evenamide at the level of hippocampus, it has no activity at the basal ganglia at all. And the data that I'll show you will convince you based upon the work done by Pittsburgh University that it works on all these facets.

I'm moving now to the next slide, Slide #11. So this is the experiment done. I'm very briefly describing this experiment. You should really take the effort to read the paper, which is fully published and it's on the Newron website. In this experiment, what was done by Pittsburgh University Research is they take rats, they give them a DNA alkylating agent called MAM. MAM changes the brain structure, changes the cytoarchitecture. The progeny, which are born basically show many of the symptoms and signs of patients with schizophrenia. So it's a neurodevelopmental hypothesis model of schizophrenia. You see hyperactive firing from the hippocampal pyramidal neurons, and that is reduced in this -- that this model creates and then basically get reduced by evenamide. What we see is the ventral pigmental area, dopamine neuron population activity is hyper and again, that is normalized by evenamide. Some of the most important findings are that the effects of evenamide outlast its presence in the brain and there's no way to explain it because the drug has a very short half-life, and this is way beyond that. This suggests that we are having the induction of long-term plasticity, which would be a very welcome thing for patients with schizophrenia.

And then as I said before, you will see data which suggests that basically evenamide improves cognition and improves negative symptoms in these animal models and likely, we'll be able to do that in patients. If I move to Slide 12. This is a wonderful experiment, a little difficult to understand, so you need to just concentrate on it. If you look at the first bucket, that's looking at the effects of neurons. We're looking at the active dopamine neurons per track and how they're firing. If you look at the first 2 bars, there's no difference because it's only normal animals, so there's no effect of evenamide.

The next 2 bars, you see the black bar, which is high up. That's because that's showing you increased abnormal firing in the MAM-treated animals. But the same MAM-treated animals, when they get evenamide, you can see there's a significant reduction. This is within 1 hour and the drug half-life is about 25 minutes. If you look at the second hour, there's no drug remaining. The drug has no active metabolite. There's no sequestration. But you see that the activity is actually increasing. The difference between the black bar and the blue bar is increasing. So even when the drug is not there, it's producing a benefit.

And if you look at the third hour where there's no chance even of getting the drug around, the effect of evenamide is going on increasing. It's reducing further and further the abnormal dopaminergic file. Nobody is able to explain this. We can't really fully explain this, except that this is a very welcome finding because what it suggests is that patients will continue to benefit from this drug for long periods of time.

Moving on to Slide 13. Now negative symptoms are present in all patients with schizophrenia. Even when patients improve from positive symptoms, negative symptoms don't improve. And one of the main reasons why patient functioning does not improve is because of the presence of negative symptoms. Now in this model what you're seeing out here, we have a rat in the middle. The rat has a choice to go to a toy chamber where there's a toy or to a social chamber where there's a real rat. Rats are very inquisitive animals. They love to interact with each other. So therefore, what will happen?

Next slide, if you see now what is in the next slide is happening is, we are looking at the MAM-treated animals. There, there is no difference between the toy chamber rat, the time spent sniffing or the real one. But if you look at the second -- the third and fourth bar, you can see the MAM-treated animals are not able to distinguish between the toy, whereas the evenamide-treated animals recognize, which is a real rat and they're spending a significantly more time on that. And this is not because there's any effect on locomotion, which is shown by the other graphs, but because the animal now which is socialized. Any socialization is a prominent feature in patients with schizophrenia. And this suggests that this drug will improve social interaction.

If I now move to the next slide. This is now looking at novel object recognition. This is a test of cognition. We take the rat, we give it an object. It familiarize it cells by sniffing. We then take it away, 1 hour later, we introduced the old object and the new object. The rat which is inquisitive, will memorize that, oh, this is the old object. I'm not interested. I want to go to the new object. Does this really happen? In the non-treated animals who have lost a lot of the neural architecture, there is no difference between the vehicle and the evenamide-treated animals -- in the evenamide treated because there's no deficit. But if you look at the non-treated animals, cognitively, these animals are impaired. The amount of time they spent on the wrong model, which is the Toy, the old object has gone down.

Evenamide is able to protect against that, and there's a significant improvement. So you're seeing an improvement in negative symptoms, you're seeing an improvement in cognition. We've already seen an improvement in firing rates. All this leads us to the clinical data, which is shown in the next slide. And then basically, I will walk you through that. So what have we seen until now? This is Slide 18. Evenamide has shown efficacy in virtually every study performed, whether it be a 4-week study, in early patients, a 4-week study in patients who are inadequate responders and a 1-year study in patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia. In all these studies, it was given as an add-on treatment. The benefits of our ranging, they are seen on positive symptoms, they are seen on negative symptoms. The drug is very well tolerated. The attrition rate is less than 5%. The most common adverse event is nasopharyngitis, which means missing and the same incidence as placebo. What we've seen in the first Phase III study that we did in patients with inadequate response more or less confirm the results that we saw in the open-label study in treatment-resistant schizophrenia. It's one of the very few first times that I've ever seen that I -- all efficacy endpoints came out significant in the Phase III study, which is the 8A study, and this is published also.

All the endpoints reach statistical significance. And basically, what we are seeing is the side effect profile is so benign that you cannot tell the difference. Now we are basically looking at this, these results and the animal results because we are doing a 1-year study, where you expect to see efficacy continuing to improve over 1 year. Just to remind everybody, in schizophrenia, we generally have improvements in 3 weeks, 4 weeks, but rarely after that. That's why the FDA advises the sponsors nowadays to limit the study to 4 weeks because after that, there's no real improvement.

I move on to Slide 19 to show you the study 8A, which I talked about, the potentially pivotal study, which has now been published everywhere. It's a 4-week study done in 11 countries, 291 patients were patients who are on second-generation antipsychotic, received either 30-milligram bid of evenamide or placebo. All second-generation antipsychotics were allowed in this study, and the patients had to be psychotic.

The design is shown on the next slide. What we did in this study is at the very beginning of the study, we took blood samples to make sure that patients were really poor responders and noncompliant patients. We had the blood samples analyzed to make sure the concentration of the antipsychotic was at the right level to be able to ensure that they were getting a therapeutic dose. 30% of the patients had no measurable plasma levels, which tells us that they were noncompliant rather than inadequate responders. This study took us much longer to do because of this of the difficulty of finding patients who are compliant with medication. Ultimately, we got 291 patients. And as you can see, the study went up to 4 weeks, which was the endpoint of the study. The drugs that were allowed in the study, the second-generation antipsychotics are listed at the bottom, and they constitute about 90% of all second-generation antipsychotics in the market.

Slide 21 shows you the side effect profile of the drug. If you just look at the bottom part of the table where you see preferred term, the most common adverse event is nasopharyngitis. The incidence is almost the same as placebo. Again, then headache, which seems to be more -- almost the same as in placebo. What is more important is what you do not see [indiscernible]. You do not see any extrapyramidal symptoms. You don't see tremor, you don't see rigidity, you don't see akathisia. You don't see weight gain, you don't see diabetes. You don't see sexual dysfunction, no abnormal changes in the ECG or in the liver function test or kidney function test. No blood pressure changes at all. No severe sedation, no severe excitation. So it's a remarkably silent drug, which is ideal as an add-on treatment.

If we now go to the next slide, Slide 22. This gives you the primary results for the study. In line with the expectations from FDA and from ICH requirements that the primary measure should be the PANSS total score. So we designated the PANSS as the primary estimate for the study. The analysis are done in the ITT population. And as you can see from the fourth row, the null hypothesis, meaning there's no difference between drug and placebo is rejected with a p-value of 0.006. And the core secondary measure, which is the CGI of severity, meaning clinical global impression of severity is also significantly reduced with a p-value of 0.037. But that's not all. If you look at the next slide, this is showing you now the slope of the curve over a 4-week period of time. Obviously, this is not long enough. But you can imagine that if this study were to go on longer, the placebo group will keep on flattening, the drug group keeps on improving. And based upon this, we have designed the next studies.

This is the next slide is showing you the simulation in which we are imagining what would happen at week 12 and what would happen at week 26 and 24. What you can see is based upon the data from the previous studies, it seems like at week 12, we would have about a 10 to 14 point difference -- a 12- to 14-point difference from baseline, that is likely to be highly significant. Similarly, if you go to 26 weeks, we expect that basically we'll have a difference between 14 and 19 points compared to baseline, and that's likely to be highly significant.

Now I'm showing you some very interesting data. These have been published again. We looked at what happens to other antipsychotics when evenamide is added. Firstly, to our surprise, the clozapine patients, clozapine is the most effective antipsychotic. And even those patients when they get evenamide improved by about another 3 points compared to clozapine alone. But more surprising than that is olanzapine. Olanzapine is probably one of the most effective antipsychotic, has never come out second to any antipsychotic in the trial. And those patients, when they receive evenamide, they improve by about 5 points more than they get olanzapine alone. And this difference is statistically significant.

Overall, it looks like whenever you get patients receiving evenamide on top of a second-generation antipsychotic, they improve. And this leads us to believe that this could be a drug which could help all patients who are not doing well on their current medication. But what are the other results like in this study? So you can look at this, Slide 26, where basically we're showing you the PANSS responder analysis, clinically significant. In other words, 20% improvement, which is considered clinically significant in treatment-resistant patients with poor responders. You can see the effect is increasing over time and at day 29, which is significant. This rate, if it continues, you can imagine at week 12, we will have a very large difference between patients who are responders on current treatment as well as those who are current treatment and evenamide. But it's not only on the PANSS, we now look at the CGI of change. This is an analysis, which looks into account -- takes into account only those patients who show much improvement, not minimal improvement, only much improvement. And once again, by day 29, you can see almost a doubling of the number of patients who are responders on evenamide. Again, a very nice outcome. And if we continue this projection forward to week 12 and 26, we will have a very significant outcome.

Now I'm now going to just very briefly mention the pivotal ENIGMA trials which are currently ongoing. And I'm now on Slide 29. This is the TRS 1, the treatment of schizophrenia 1 study. This is a 52-week study. The first study ever done in treatment-resistant patients, which is placebo-controlled and 52 weeks. All patients have to be on treatment -- have to be diagnosed as treatment resistant. They are -- we confirm this by taking blood samples at the beginning, 3 times in 42 days to make sure that they are really taking their medication and even then they are not responding. Then the data are going to an independent eligibility committee, which really decides that these patients are actually treatment resistant. Then only the patients get randomized to 15 or 30 milligram of evenamide or placebo add-on. And the study is very tightly monitored, and we will look at the primary results at 12 weeks and the next results at 26 weeks and the last results at 52 weeks. And these results are the basis for which we will get the registration.

The 12-week endpoint is really necessary for showing the drug in an antipsychotic and will be the basis with which we file for regulatory approval, the first regulatory approval, both in CHMP in Europe as well as in the U.S.

The second TRS study is a shorter study. It's a 12-week study that is currently ongoing also, but that study has only got 400 patients into the 600 patients. And that study has just started. It's got approval in virtually all of the countries that we wanted to. And then basically, we expect that this study will also complete fairly quickly. We expect the TRS-1 study to complete enrollment by the end of August, which will provide us results by the end of the year and lead to hopefully to an NDA filing around the first to second quarter of next year. The TRS study will come in close behind that, so we will be able to include the results in that package.

With that, I turn it over -- we have done a lot of congresses this year, sorry. And you can see that on the Slide 32, we have a listing of all the congresses that we are presenting at. It's been a very busy season for us. Everybody is recognizing the value of evenamide and making up to a new mechanism of action. And all this paper, we have published a lot of papers, which you can also get from there.

With that, I turn it over to Roberto. And thank you for your attention.

Thank you, Ravi, and good morning and good afternoon to everybody else. So I'm on Slide 34. As you know, Newron is listed at SIX since December 2006. And since June 2019, we are also traded at Dusseldorf Stock Exchange, et cetera. By the end of the year 2025, we had 20 million -- around 20 million shares outstanding. Currently, they are EUR 20.8 million because of the capital increase Stefan was mentioning to you before.

And always at the end of December 2025, we have outstanding call option and derivative or warrants, if you prefer, of up to 1.6 million, of which 50% more or less were related to call options and the remaining 50% were the warrants that we granted to EIB. Let me welcome 3 new U.S. banks among our analysts, and I'm talking about Wainwright, ROTH Capital and Lucid, and they are on top of the already existing ones, so Baader, RX Securities, ValueLab, Edison and Octavian.

I'm now moving to Slide 35. Let's just talk about a few numbers. License income decreased. But of course, in 2024, we booked the downpayment of the Eisai deal. So no surprise here. And the value you can see are mainly related to the Myung In deal down payment and certain milestones that we got from the TRS 1 study progression. The other income, even if it's not a big amount, I want to talk about those because I'm referring the R&D tax credit benefit that we were able to book after 4 years of no additional benefit. And I'm talking about a couple of million, so EUR 1.9 million. What I want to tell you on top of this R&D tax credit is that accumulated, so since 2025, we got EUR 25 million of benefit. And so far, we have used EUR 22 million.

The financial results net decreased by about EUR 3 million. And the main reason is a technicality and IFRS technicality because according to IFRS, we are supposed to evaluate the warrant fair value and this value because of the increase in the share into increased by EUR 2.5 million. Please note that there is no cash impact related to this effect.

On the very last, I want to talk about the income taxes. Last year, for the very first time, we paid income taxes, while this year, the amount you see are only the withholding tax paid on the milestone and now payment received from the deals I was mentioning to you before. In Slide 36, so I'm showing you the balance sheet on the left and the cash flow on the right. So let me start from the balance sheet. What you see in the current asset in 2024 that is EUR 51 million is mainly the receivable related to the 8A Pharma deal that became cash. And this is why you see the increase in cash in 2025. While in the liabilities, the EIB loan last year was booked mainly in the noncurrent liabilities. And this year, you see everything in the current liabilities. But as Stefan was mentioning to you before, 1 week ago, we obtained from EIB the chance to delay the debt till end of -- sorry, till June 2028.

On the right, you can see mainly the bar on the working capital and the green -- it's green because it's generating cash and it's exactly the effect that I was mentioning to you before. So the cash in -- the cash we received in January and of the revenue that we booked in December 2024, partially compensated by decrease in brand and other payables.

If we move to the last slide. So on April 23, 2026, at 10 a.m. CET, we will have our general meeting. In the agenda, in the ordinary part of the agenda, the first point, as usual, is the approval of the financial statement. The second point is the approval of the new member of the Board of Directors. Stefan has already thanked both Patrick and Luca for being with us for so many years. And let me reiterate this concept because we really well appreciate their work and then I'm also willing to introduce to you, George Garibaldi and Paolo Zocchi as new nonexecutive directors.

On the extraordinary part, we will amend -- slightly amend, let me say, the bylaw in a few articles, and this is due because after 20 years and COVID, a few laws have changed and so we are willing to align the text of our bylaw to the new and amended shareholder laws. The second and the third point are a capital increase. On the second point, we are asking shareholders to grant 5% for option plans of capital increase. And in the third point of the agenda, we are asking for 15% of capital increase also potentially for an uplisting at NASDAQ and the point 4 is strictly related to point 4, 3 because the creation of ADR serves for the NASDAQ listing. Everything has been already uploaded or will be uploaded in our website. So if you want to look for additional information, please do not hesitate to visit the website. And with that, I think I'm done.

So I guess it is time for the Q&A session. I hand over to Mathilde from Chorus Call to introduce us to the questions by the parties who have registered for such.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Ram Selvaraju from H.C. Wainwright.

Congratulations again on a landmark year in 2025. You really are to be congratulated on how many fronts Newron advanced on. Firstly, I wanted to ask about your feelings regarding additional indications for evenamide beyond schizophrenia. In particular, we have seen evidence that other antipsychotic drugs, while perfectly serviceable in schizophrenia, actually turn out to be even better in other indications that are ancillary to schizophrenia that may constitute even larger markets. So I was wondering if you could perhaps comment on this. If there are other indications in which you believe evenamide is particularly well suited to have a therapeutic effect, what might these be, whether that would be bipolar disorder, patients with mixed depression and schizophrenia symptoms or others?

Thanks, Raju. You basically took my hands away from me. I would expect this drug to be highly effective in patients with bipolar disorder. Secondly, I think I would definitely like to go for treatment-resistant depression with psychotic features. And lastly, patients who have behavioral symptoms of dementia but cannot take second-generation antipsychotics. There, I think this drug, because it doesn't affect any neurotransmitter system will be very well tolerated and not have the increase in mortality that we see with all the other drugs.

That's very helpful. And I think we're all familiar with the intracellular therapies example that demonstrated just how large a market opportunity there could be for an antipsychotic with applicability beyond schizophrenia. Secondly, I wanted to ask about the information you presented regarding the ability of evenamide to augment the efficacy profiles of multiple second-generation antipsychotics. And if you could perhaps drill down on that a little bit further for us and give us a sense of whether there is a particular subclass of those second-generation antipsychotics that you consider evenamide to be particularly well suited to be combined with? And if so, what might be the kind of your top 1 or 2 choices? Obviously, you furnished a lot of information, in particular on clozapine, but I was wondering if you had additional granularity to provide.

Sure. I think clozapine because it's the most obvious candidate because when you talk about treating schizophrenia and clozapine, all the drugs, even though it's not used that much. Second, I think what has really been surprising for me and not just in 1 study, but in almost 2 to 3 studies has been the effect in combining it with olanzapine. And as you know, olanzapine and clozapine share certain features. So then the question comes up, really, is it basically because of the fact that both of these drugs are affecting D2 and D1. And -- but then what we see also is that is also affecting risperidone. It's also improving patients with aripiprazole. So I think this improvement facet is probably unrelated to the neurochemistry. It's a generalized effect on brain where it is acting in a way it's more like an antidepressant and produces some degree of configuration change in the brain receptors, which makes them amenable to treatment with the other drugs. I think we are monitoring this very carefully now in the Phase III study, and we're trying to collect plasma levels to exclude pharmacokinetic interaction as a reason for this.

With respect to the effect you showed of evenamide kind of having a long-term persistent impact even when the drug is no longer necessarily biologically circulating in the system. I was wondering if you could comment on, first of all, the long-term strategic plans at Newron to potentially explore the possibility of developing a long-acting injectable of evenamide. And if that is the case, how this information indicating long-term persistent effect of evenamide might dovetail with those efforts?

No, absolutely. I think as you probably know, some of the companies in Europe, which have been led the charge to develop formulation changes, especially in France and for TEVA, for instance, we are going to be in early discussion with them soon. I think to me, it's really a mystery almost that a drug which has only got a half-life of 25 minutes is affecting changes beyond 3 hours. But also in patients, we have a short half-life of 2.5 hours, but the effect seems to persist for more than 12 to 14 hours. So I think a long term, a depot formulation would have to be a very different type, but it would be a fantastic thing because a drug which is very well tolerated, doesn't produce EPS, doesn't produce sexual dysfunction could be ideal for giving long term, not only to the confirmed schizophrenia patients, but to those patients who are early on in their career, like the first episode patients or the at-risk patient population, that would be the way to go for those new formulations. And we would definitely explore that once we are done with the NDA.

And I think it's well documented that the long-acting injectable segment of the schizophrenia market is by far the fastest growing and at this point, probably the most lucrative. One last question from me. When do you expect U.S. office action on the COM patent that was already granted in Europe that would extend protection to 2044?

Stefan?

Yes. Ram, thank you for joining. Thanks for the questions. So we are right now in discussions with one of the leading U.S. IP consulting firms, and we are in discussion with the leading expert on crystalline form and solid formulations in the United States. We are discussing the strategy. As you know, there is 2 ways of getting a fast-track treatment of the Composition of Matter application in the United States. We are right now evaluating both. And I guess we will take a decision within the next few months. Depending on that decision, we might well see this patent being treated and decided upon before this year is over. And that means we might get that same patent application approved in the United States as per our expectation in this year still, which would be remarkable.

The next question comes from the line of Joris Zimmermann from Octavian.

Joris Zimmermann from Octavian here. Two from my side. The first one on your cash reach guidance throughout 2027. You mentioned that this includes EUR 50 million already received from the new financing plus another EUR 10 million that you expect later in the year. Question is on the remaining, I think, EUR 12 million from that new financing that is not reflected in this guidance. So that would provide you a further extension of the cash reach. And also in terms of the amended European Investment Bank repayment schedule, I would assume that this is already included in the guidance.

Okay. So let me start from EIB. Yes, EIB is absolutely included in the guidance, of course. As per the additional EUR 12 million, I am a very cautious CFO. So given that we are talking about something that is related to the data, I have kept this upside from these projections. So if data will be positive, most likely, we will see an additional injection of EUR 12 million. And this will, of course, increase the availability of cash in Newron most likely till the end of 2027. So this will give Newron additional, let's say, 6 to 9 months of time to strike the most appealing deal because of the positive data, yes.

One more question on the potential new indications and also a bit on the funding in that regard. You outlined the potential indications where you expect most benefit of evenamide. So in terms of your plans, how would that likely impact funding in the near to midterm? Is that already something in the plans? Or is that still to be decided upon?

I think it largely is still to be decided upon, but some initial activities are already included in the plans.

We now have a question from the line of Arron Aatkar from Edison Group.

Just two for me here. First of all, I just wanted to confirm that the ENIGMA-TRS 2 top line readout will also be in Q4 '26. I think I've seen some approaches where it's specified and others where it's not mentioned. And for this as well, would this come simultaneously with ENIGMA-TRS 1 if so, or will they be separate announcements?

Okay. Let me answer this. I think ENIGMA-TRS 1 is very, very, very, likely to be within this year. ENIGMA-TRS 2 is a borderline case, whether it's towards December or early January, things of this time. But both of them would be available to be included in the filing for regulatory approval. The announcements would definitely be separate.

Okay. Perfect. And my second question, I think you kind of covered it, but I was just looking at the licensing income of EUR 8.6 million. It sounds like that includes upfront payment from Myung In Pharma and also some milestone payments from both partners. Just wanted to clarify if you could provide like a breakdown on how much of the licensing income was upfront versus milestone payments from the 2 partners.

Yes. So the EUR 8.6 million are more or less 50-50, let's say, 30% related to Myung In and the remaining part related to additional milestone coming from EA Pharma. Sorry, I cannot be much more precise because I cannot disclose the final figures. But these are more or less the percentages.

Okay. That's very helpful. My other questions have sort of been covered off already. So no more from me. I just wanted to say congratulations again on the recent progress. Look forward to following the story.

The next question comes from the line of Joseph Hedden from Rx Securities.

Just wondered if you could say a little more on recruitment into the ENIGMA studies. Any information on how many patients today or progress in terms of are you on track with where you expect to be?

Yes. That's always a challenge. As you know, the regulatory process has become very prolonged nowadays especially the one in Europe, which takes forever and then the contracting progress though. So at present moment, I would say that 75% of the sites that we wanted to have initiated have already initiated. And we are basically just about coming up to where we should be. We have over 300 -- approximately 300 patients who have been enrolled in the program in the TRS 1. The TRS 2, as I said, has just got approval. So it's a little bit behind. But I think keeping the progress of TRS 1 in mind, I think we're very, very confident that we should be able to complete the enrollment on time for TRS 1 and then subsequently, the effort for TRS 2. The TRS 2 is a shorter study. It's only a 12-week study, and it's a smaller number of patients, only 400 patients compared to the 600 plus for TRS 1. So we should be okay with the enrollment time lines.

Okay. And then on the BD side, just wondering what you think the likelihood of any other regional deals ex U.S. for the ENIGMA results later this year, what's the likelihood do you think?

Thank you, Joseph, for the question. This will clearly depend if any interested parties will be willing to pay fairly and dearly for the new patent life that we have just added. And we understand that some parties might want to see the patent being granted first. But at the same time, clearly, with the European patent office decision to grant our patent, our expectations have increased. And as we have no cash urgency or lack at this point in time, we would be confident to go full steam ahead towards the results from both pivotal studies and then decide on how to deal with all those territories at the maximum value for our shareholders.

So that's the good news after getting all the funding done. We do not depend on income from licensing. But if there are fair offers, we will absolutely consider them. And yes, there could be other deals, but conditional to fair value, including the new patent life.

[Operator Instructions] Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Stefan Weber for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Mathilde. Thank you all for joining this call. I hope we have been able to explain to you why we believe this was an extraordinary 15 months in the past. But let me be clear, you please should stay tuned for the next 15 months because this could be much more exciting even than what we have seen in the last 15 months. This is really the opportunity to turn this company into a completely different size of company with a drug that might be approved and with a drug that we might decide ourselves to commercialize to get to the peak value for our shareholders and to secure the sustainable future of this company. So please stay tuned. We are happy to keep you updated. Looking forward to the next opportunity. Have a great day. Goodbye.

Thank you.

Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.