Success Story:

About Kura Oncology

Kura Oncology, Inc. (NASDAQ: KURA) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on precision medicines for the treatment of cancer. Kura developed and is commercializing KOMZIFTI® (ziftomenib), the FDA-approved once-daily, oral menin inhibitor for adults with relapsed or refractory NPM1-mutated acute myeloid leukemia. The company continues to advance both menin inhibitors and farnesyl transferase inhibitors (FTIs), including darlifarnib, its next-generation FTI in development in solid tumors in combination with standard-of-care therapy. Kura has approximately 290 employees across offices in San Diego and Boston.

Meet Kura's Head of Investor Relations

Greg Mann is Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Affairs at Kura Oncology. Most of the company’s external communications strategy and execution sits with his team. He joined Kura in 2025 after senior investor relations roles at Nkarta, Gilead Sciences, Kite Pharma, and FibroGen.

Kura’s Investor Relations and Corporate Affairs team consists of three people, two of whom – Greg and an associate – work on IR day-to-day. A small team, supporting a company with an approved product on the market and a pipeline in active development.

Why Kura chose Irwin and FactSet

Greg had already been an Irwin user in a previous role before he arrived at Kura. That made the decision at Kura an easy one.

My experience with Irwin at my previous company was very positive – the platform, the quality of the data, the simplicity of the user interface, and the client support. All of those mattered. The integration with FactSet was a plus.

Replacing a platform that hadn't kept up

For much of his career, Greg inherited the same legacy IR platform each time he stepped into a new role. Each time, he ran into the same challenges.

There were a lot of gaps in the quality of the data and in updates to the platform. It was difficult to use, it felt like the technology hadn’t been updated meaningfully in 15 years.

At Kura, he had the chance to choose a new platform – and he approached it as a long-term decision rather than a short-term fix.

I wanted to bring in the platforms and technologies that could lay the foundation for the next several years – to clean house and make sure we have the tools we need.

A migration measured in days, not months

Every platform switch raises the same question: what happens to the data? Greg has been through enough of them to know how painful it can be.

I've been doing this long enough that there’s the before times and what we do today. Before, a migration was a two-month process just to get the data cleaned up and ported over. I knew from my previous experience with Irwin that it would get done quickly and get done right.

The Irwin team understood the importance of data integrity and mapping it correctly the first time. It was no obstacle to getting up and running. Once we flipped the switch, we had Irwin online within days.

How the Kura team uses Irwin and FactSet

Biotech IR runs on capital markets activity, and that activity comes with requests. When Kura is contemplating a financing or another event, the bankers and analysts behind it want to see the history.

When we’re preparing for investor meetings or working with bankers on a potential financing, we may need a report of our historical interactions with investors In Irwin, it’s a couple of keystrokes, and I can output that report. It gives me real peace of mind that I can do that at the drop of a hat.

Prioritizing conference meetings before briefing books

Conference prep gets talked about as briefing book production, but for Greg, the more consequential work happens earlier – when the preliminary schedule arrives, and someone must decide which meetings are worth taking.

Often the banks come to you with a preliminary schedule, and seeing it on paper, you have to decide which are the higher-priority meetings and which ones we shouldn't take. I can turn to Irwin for the history of our interactions, the background on the investors, their holdings, assets under management, and areas of expertise to do that prioritization work.

Honestly, that’s probably more work than pulling together the briefing books, and probably the more important work as well.

Using data as a filter, not a lead list

Kura’s targeting universe is focused, and Greg already knows much of it, so the job Irwin does for him is narrowing rather than discovery.

It's a fairly focused universe of investors we would reach out to, and I'm already familiar with many of them. I'm not going in cold looking for new leads. It's more about sorting by the activity and investment patterns of different funds over a given time window, and sorting by peer companies or companies in a similar market position to us, to identify those investors.

Unless it's a really large institution, where there could be hundreds of people inside the firm potentially looking at Kura, I usually have some familiarity with the firm and the people there. It's about using data as a filter to figure out which of those couple hundred people we should be talking to.

And underneath it all, the record itself.

Documenting the interactions and having that history in a CRM is really important.

Tracking consensus and sell-side coverage in FactSet

Now that Kura has a commercial product, the company is measured every quarter against published revenue expectations. That puts consensus squarely in the IR workflow.

I use FactSet primarily for alerts on sell-side research, using keywords and companies. I'll use it for some financial data and analysis, but after research alerts, it's for tracking analyst consensus.

Since we have a product on the market, we're evaluated on meeting revenue expectations on a quarterly basis. Many investors and folks on Wall Street look to FactSet as the source for consensus, so I need to be fluent in whatever is posted on FactSet for us.

Handing off the data entry

Kura’s team also uses Irwin Assistant to load meeting notes and interaction records, which keeps the CRM current without consuming the team’s time.

We use it pretty regularly. I wouldn't say it's like having another headcount, but being able to offload all that data entry and hand it over to the Irwin team is great. And it's fast — overnight turnaround.

Client service that sets the bar

Asked about the support, Greg pointed first to the person who supported him at his previous company.

Next-level client support in terms of product knowledge, attention to detail, following up, and answering questions. That made it easy to come back to Irwin when I joined Kura.

That experience carried over.

It’s been the same experience this time around. We get great customer support, and our account manager is always checking in and following up, trying to anticipate needs or highlight areas for me where Irwin could add value. So, the client service is really top-notch.

Greg's advice to IROs evaluating a switch

For Greg, the question isn’t only whether a platform solves today’s problems. It’s whether it will still be the right platform in the future.

What I was looking for was a platform that would grow with me. With Irwin, I know you stand behind the product, and you want to see it evolve and advance as the space does.

There's where you are today, and then there's what kind of platform you want two or three years from now. You don't want to switch every year, relearning and recreating things. That was really important to me. I felt confident that Irwin was going to invest in the technology and in the service in a way that would continue to support me long term.