Tazeen Ahmad
BofA Securities, Research Division

Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the Bank of America Healthcare Conference. I'm Tazeen Ahmad, one of the senior biotech analysts here at the bank. It is my pleasure to have our next presenting company Bicara Therapeutics. Up here on stage with me is Ryan Cohlhepp from Bicara. Ryan, good morning. Thank you for making the trip over from Boston.

Ryan Cohlhepp
President, COO & Director

Thank you. Thank you for having us, and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you here today.

Tazeen Ahmad
BofA Securities, Research Division

So maybe for those who aren't as familiar with the Bicara story, can you just give us a quick overview of the company and your lead program, and then we can go into some questions from there.

Ryan Cohlhepp
President, COO & Director

Yes, absolutely. So Bicara Therapeutics, so we're a company focused on large molecules, so bifunctional antibodies focused in solid tumor oncology. Our lead program is ficerafusp alfa, which is an EGFR TGF-beta and we -- the company was founded in 2020. We're based in Boston, Massachusetts. And today, we're a development phase company and have about 100 employees. We've grown fairly rapidly over the last 2 to 3 years following going public in 2024. Our lead program, again, as I mentioned, our focus is on bifunctionals, where what we're looking to do is use tumor targeting to get things like TGF-beta to the tumor. Early on, when the asset was being developed, one of our views was that TGF-beta had a lot of promise, but we had seen very limited activity, particularly in the oncology setting with TGF-beta.