Denali Therapeutics Inc. (DNLI) Morgan Stanley 23rd Annual Global Healthcare Transcript

Sean Laaman
Head of Healthcare Research & Equity Analyst

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare Conference. I’m Sean Laaman, Head of U.S. mid-cap biotech equity research at the firm. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you do have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

For this session, we have the pleasure to host from Denali Therapeutics, the CEO, Ryan Watts. Welcome, Ryan, and maybe we kick off by giving us a few minutes on what Denali does.

Ryan Watts
Co-Founder, President, CEO & Director

Great to be here. Great to be back at Morgan Stanley. I think this is probably year #8 for us, maybe 9. And it’s such an exciting time for Denali and an exciting time in the biotech sector. Roughly 10 years ago, we set out to invent a platform to cross the blood-brain barrier to get large molecules in the brain such as enzymes and antibodies and oligonucleotides. And it was at a time where most companies were exiting neurodegeneration and neuro more broadly.

And so for the first 5 years, we just buried our heads and invented this platform. The subsequent 5 years, we proved that it works in a disease known as Hunter syndrome, which we’ll discuss in some detail and have now gone much more broadly. Our vision for the next 5 years is catalyzing those initial discoveries and the proof of concept with a large number of blood-brain barrier enabled therapeutics. And I think along those lines, when you show something works in