Welcome to Circio. My name is Erik Digman Wiklund. I am the CEO, and today we are hosting a webcast to provide an update on both corporate and R&D progress. I have with me CFO Lubor Gaal and lots of participants, so glad to see everyone here. We received several questions beforehand. We will cover them at the end in the Q&A, and it will also be possible to submit questions directly in the meeting if you use the Q&A tab. With that, we dive into the presentation. Important forward-looking statement. Please take notice.
To begin with, I would like to give you an update on the market situation for circular RNA and how that's progressed. circular RNA is a very novel therapeutic format. It really only emerged in the biotech and pharma space in therapeutic development in 2021. This is a young field, less than four years old.
No one yet has entered the clinic with a circular RNA project, but we see several companies have raised substantial funds. A couple of the big pharmas have made moves, like Merck and Pfizer have entered into the space, and we know the rest are sitting on the side and following the field. There was one interesting update early this year. Vertex, a gene editing CRISPR company, made a deal with Orna Therapeutics, which by many is considered the pioneer in synthetic circular RNA.
This deal had a substantial upfront, $65 million, and Vertex is acquiring a license to utilize Orna's oRNA, their proprietary circular RNA format packaged in LNPs, for genetic blood diseases, delivering Vertex's gene editing toolbox. A highly relevant deal for the field, and I think it's an important validator for circular RNA in general. I'd like to also highlight another important transaction that happened.
Novartis, late last year, acquired a company called Kate Therapeutics. Kate Therapeutics is developing a suite of AAV gene therapy vectors, which are targeted against muscular dystrophies, the lead one being the same as Circio's lead program. We are deploying our circular RNA technology in AAV gene therapies as a first step for a proof of concept of the technology, and we are specifically also active in these diseases. I think both of these deals sort of highlight the potential of what we're doing and are relevant in their own right to Circio and illustrating the potential of what we're doing.
We have had a broad program to build our visibility in both the scientific and industry media and journals and conferences. This is important because we are a small company in the Nordics.
We're developing a completely novel technology for circular RNA that really no one else is doing yet. Getting the message out, showing what we're doing is very important. This can be highlighted scientifically by an oral presentation we had at ESGCT. This is the flagship gene therapy event in Europe, which was in October last year. Two of our eminent scientists also published a wide-ranging review in Nature Reviews earlier this year. I highly recommend this article for anyone interested in the therapeutic potential of circular RNA.
It gives a very thorough review of the space, including both the synthetic circular RNA approach and the vector approach, which Circio is deploying. In addition, we've been covered in industry media, been on podcasts, so we're getting the word out there. This means people are aware of the company, they're aware of our technology, and start following what we do.
Moving on to a technology update. We late last year announced that we had established a novel circVec Generation 3.0, which further extends the potential and power of our expression system. On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see the evolution from our circVec 1.1, which is the first-generation circVec construct that we brought out. This is important to remember, this was already outperforming mRNA-based expression. That first one was already better in terms of durability than what you could achieve with mRNA expression.
We systematically have improved various aspects of both the RNA and DNA side of our technology, and we've now arrived at our 3.0 cassette, which, with the incremental advantages, now actually improves 27x in vitro, this is, over our 1.1. This means our technology is more potent. That's, of course, very important. It also is important for IP reasons.
We now have various design features that we can patent. Some already are patented. Some we are drafting patents for in order to broadly protect the technology. Maybe even more important, you kind of need to figure out all of these steps along the way in order to get to something that is equivalent to what we can achieve. The know-how here is critical. This is not going to be trivial for anyone else to replicate and achieve the same type of expression that we are.
We are confident we have something powerful and we have something that is well protected. What we have showed to date is the circVec 3.0 and what we call plasmid DNA. Now, plasmid DNA, as you could say, is a technical workhorse.
It's what you use in the lab to explore, test, validate, but it's not really suitable as a therapeutic format. It is the easiest and quickest technology available for lab work. That is what we showed you in December. What we have done since then is start to move our circVec 3.0 into other DNA and viral vector formats that can actually be used as a therapeutic in the future. This is an important step into making our findings therapeutically relevant. We have now successfully established both circular and linear synthetic DNA formats expressing our circVec 3.0 design.
These are created, validated in vitro, and they are currently in in vivo testing. We have also built AAVs based on the circVec 3.0. Now, AAV is a bit fiddlier to work with in vitro, so here we are moving straight to in vivo experiments.
That is why this is ongoing and not as a check mark yet, but the constructs are generated, and we currently have mice running around in their cages, which are being treated with these vectors. Important message, the 3.0 design has now been transferred successfully into these vector types, and this is important validation. Each of these also requires their own steps of optimization to make them work in each relevant setting. When it comes to these DNA formats, they need to be delivered. They cannot just be injected into a patient, then it would be broken down.
You need delivery chemistry to make them survive and enable them to get to the right cell that you are targeting. Here we have established several collaborations.
Those of you who follow the company will know, whereby we test different delivery technologies to get our circVec DNAs into specific organs of interest. One of these collaboration partners is a company called Certest. This is an LNP company. Remember what I said before with the Orna deal, for example, that is LNP-delivered circular RNA. Here we are going with LNP-delivered DNA that then is expressing the circular RNA in the target cell. We have tested multiple tissues with this LNP delivery, and we are particularly encouraged by this data here from spleen.
If you look on the left-hand side, we are delivering a vector expressing a luciferase, a protein that lights up in the mouse, from mRNA. On the right-hand side, we are making the exact same protein just using circular mRNA. This is with the circVec construct.
Now, very interestingly, with mRNA, we get a lot of expression in the liver early on, and then it disappears. You can see the durability is short. We only get expression in the liver. However, with circVec, we see early on no expression in the liver, and we do not want that expression in the liver because that is not the organ we are targeting. However, over time, from week three onwards, it starts building up in spleen. You can see very specifically and increasingly we are getting signal in spleen, much, much longer than what you achieve with the mRNA.
This now creates a novel opportunity for us where we can actually get our CircVec DNAs into the spleen. Spleen is where immune cells are, so an obvious potential application here could be in vivo cell therapy as a future application.
We are very excited about these data, and we are currently exploring them further to more fully understand what cell types we are reaching and what therapeutic programs would make sense to start based on this delivery possibility. You can do some cool analysis, and here is a 3D bioimaging that we have done on these mice to pinpoint exactly where the expression is, and the color shows you where we are getting signal from circVec. You can see we are getting strong signal, and it is very clean. It is only in the spleen, nowhere else.
This is exactly what we are after: potent, specific delivery with as little expression anywhere else as possible. That was DNA delivery. I also mentioned the AAV. We think AAV is probably the shortest path to enter the clinic and to achieve a business development collaboration because this is a more established technology.
Currently, basically all approved gene therapies, more or less, are based on the AAV vector with just one or two exceptions. Classic AAV will transfer a gene into a patient that has a genetic defect, and that gene will be expressed via linear mRNA and make the missing protein. Now, we are simply exchanging the standard mRNA expression system with circVec, and then circVec will make a circular mRNA expressing the protein. Everything else is equal. It is exactly the same AAV on the outside. The difference is whether it will make the protein from circular or linear mRNA.
What we are aiming to achieve here, and the feedback we are getting from the market, is if we can demonstrate something from between 3x-5x enhanced protein expression versus classic mRNA AAV, this would be very interesting to companies and scientists that are working in the AAV field.
AAV biology is complicated. You can't just copy-paste what we've done in plasmid DNA and expect that immediately it will work. This takes some time to fiddle around with. It also takes time to generate different AAV designs. So far, we have successfully, with our circVec 2.0—remember, we're now at 3.0—made AAVs that are roughly doubling the protein expression in vitro. We know it's possible. We know it's feasible to make AAVs that make more or more potent than a protein expression. We have tested several AAVs in vivo, and we showed you early data from this experiment back in December.
We're now up to week 15 with these mice, and we're starting to see a trend where circVec is beating the mRNA vectors. After 60 days, the lines start separating when you average out all the mice.
After 90 and 106 days, which are the two latest measurements, we roughly have 50% higher expression. It is feasible, validated that it works. I think we still need to increase this advantage before this becomes really clinically relevant and interesting to partners. Obviously, we are very excited now to test our new circVec 3.0s, whether they may boost that expression level up so we get a bigger advantage. I would also like to point out here that AAV biology is complicated. It is complex, and it is not fully understood exactly how AAVs, what their life cycle is like.
It also means that there is more experimental variability, and that is why I show you here four animals in each group. On the left side is the circVec. On the right side is mRNA equivalent.
The aggregate here is an advantage to circVec, but there is relatively large variability between the animals. This is just a fact of matter when you're working with these types of biological systems. It takes some time to iterate, optimize, extend, do bigger experiments in order to fully capture the advantages. Right now, we're testing multiple AAVs in parallel. This is just what it's like. This is what biology is. We're systematically working to robustly generate data packages that we then can convince others are meaningfully better than mRNA vectors.
Early promising looks good. Very excited to test our new vectors. That brings me to the next slide, which shows you our ongoing program. Based on the data and the new vectors, we have a very rich in vivo program ongoing.
The first line on top here is the spleen data that I showed you. We tested with Certest LNPs, IV delivery, very encouraging signals in spleen. We now have terminated these mice, and we're doing post-mortem tissue analysis to understand more fully precise expression, what cell types are expressed, etc. We then have two ongoing in vivo experiments, one with the non-viral DNA vectors. These are ongoing, and we expect first interim readouts during April. Shortly after that, we've initiated an AAV experiment with multiple different AAV designs, including both 2.1 and 3.0 versions, IV delivery.
Certain designs are specific to muscle or heart, which are tissues of particular interest for us in addition to the spleen. This also will generate the first interim data during April. Now, the AAV experiment, as you saw before, needs to run maybe 60 days before you start seeing the difference.
Here we have to track and see how it goes. We're also starting two experiments now in April where we're following up on the Certest data. We're going to test Certest expression with other vectors and the 3.0 design and validate these results with the spleen delivery. We're also preparing to run experiments now soon where we're going to express other proteins that may be more therapeutically relevant than the luciferase, which we're using for imaging purposes. These are our own in-house experiments that are ongoing. I think in particular, the AAV experiment is of interest when it comes to business development.
Here we know exactly what companies and what level of interest there is. As soon as we have data that is sufficiently robust, we will follow up with potential partners.
We are also very actively now collaborating with and searching for delivery companies that can enable us to access interesting tissues. Now, this is for our DNA vectors. We have the Certest and 4basebio collaborations, which have been publicly announced. In addition to that, we actually have four other undisclosed collaborations with partners that have various types of delivery tech that we are testing. One of these is already ongoing, and the three on the bottom here are starting in the near future and will also generate data during Q2.
Now, these are then experiments run by the partner where they're also investing resources and funds into running in vivo testing with our circVec construct. We are very happy to see companies wanting to work with circVec.
This also gives us multiple shots on goal where we can understand what the delivery format is the best option for getting circVec DNA vectors to the right cells and tissues and then highlight to us what the best therapeutic opportunity may be. I think particularly the two last ones here are of high interest, both scientifically, if these work. That would be extremely interesting data in itself. These collaborations are with companies that are potential collaboration partners also going forward for them to deliver their own drugs using circVec. These could lead to deeper and larger deals in the future if successful. The third one here is actually a novel technology to get to the spleen.
We're digging further into that spleen opportunity, found another chemistry, and we're going to compare that to LNP with Certest and see what works best, and maybe they can even be combined. That's another track we're now actively pursuing to see what circVec can achieve in the field of cell therapy. This is a short summary of our priorities. Hopefully, it was clear from my presentation. We are validating 3.0. We need to get the 3.0 into multiple vector formats and confirm that they are effective. The gene therapy applications are therapeutically important.
We want to enhance on current gold standard vectors and short-term watch out for our development in AAVs, in particular at least circVec 3.0 AAVs. As these data mature, we're actively searching more partners, specifically on the AAV side.
I think we're very happy with the collaboration setup we now have on the drug delivery on circVec DNA. These will let readout and then choose which collaborations we prioritize for continued development beyond the ongoing experimental work. With that, I hand over to my colleague Lubor, who will summarize the financials from 2024 and also our financial prospects going forward.
Thanks, Erik, very much. I really appreciate the large attendance of our shareholders to the meeting, and I'm really looking forward to giving a presentation on the financial strengths and the results. In 2024, we substantially strengthened our financial position. We raised NOK 30 million in equity financing in 2024, as you can see, about NOK 20 million or close to NOK 20 million from the rights issue in July and more than NOK 10 million from the warrants exercise in December. At that time, the interest in our shares was that high that we were always to put a private placement on top of the warrants exercise period.
With that, we were able to attract a lot of equity financing. Next step. In 2024, we were able to arrange a financing commitment with Atlas that guaranteed financing until June 2025.
This was possible because we did a tight cost control. There were, of course, certain conditions attached to this financing commit from Atlas, and we reduced non-R&D expenses by more than 40%. I will go more into our cost control in the next few slides. A very important event also was the loan waiver by Business Finland of about NOK 70 million. This was a very important achievement by the finance team because the repayments were due in 2024. Looking at our current burn rate, very small burn rate, that would have represented a significant portion of our payment burn rate.
This has been a very important achievement for the future of the company. Also, of course, very important, we reduced our bond exposure to Atlas from a high level of NOK 45 million down to NOK 15.5 million. Next slide.
Here are the financial results from 2024 versus 2023. As you can see clearly, we have been able to reduce our operating expenses extensively. This has, of course, come also in the transition from basically putting on hold the Oncos clinical development and becoming a preclinical company that reduced our R&D expenses by 75%. We also, of course, reduced the payroll expenses. We had to right-size the company for the new strategy, and a lot of employees, unfortunately, had to leave the company. The payroll cost actually reduction would have been even higher percentage-wise.
In 2023, the entire management team, as well as the finance team in Norway, agreed to a voluntary pay cut. If you were to compare our 2024 payroll versus 2022, it would be even higher reductions. We also reduced the operating expenses. We really cut down on everything that was not essential.
We even terminated our office lease. We reduced travel. We reduced the legal fees. We really tried to minimize our expenses outside of R&D to an absolute minimum. That brought us to operating expenses of NOK -43 million for the year versus NOK 100 million and NOK 101 million next year. Here highlighted is the waiver of the Oncos loan, which I mentioned in the previous slide. This, as I said, was a very important financial event for the company, and that really secured or lowered the burn rate going forward. This is an important achievement, of course, for the future as well.
The net cash at the end of the period was NOK 18 million based on the fundraising that we did during the year. Next slide. What does the company look like right now? As I said before, the organization really was right-sized for the purpose.
Clearly, it's a lean and efficient team. I really want to give kudos to the entire team at Circio. People are very flexible and taking on additional tasks. Clearly, ideally, of course, we would have more FTEs to take care of certain activities and responsibilities, especially as a public company. We are really trying to create a minimum burn rate, and people are very flexible and taking on additional tasks. This is only due because we have a highly dedicated team. As we said, mostly the R&D team is focused, of course, on generating a data package for transaction.
As Erik just mentioned in the previous section, we have a lot of things going on.
These are very important events, and we're looking forward to these results in the near future so that we can, of course, leverage them and generate value for our shareholders by attracting new investments or partnerships. On the cost base, as I said before, we have cut very, very low to a cash burn rate of NOK 4 million a month. That was also a requirement for the financing commitment for Atlas. More cost cutting is unlikely unless it really basically has to be a reduction in FTEs.
We are very, very careful how we spend our money and how we invest money so that we really can maximize our current resources in R&D and to generate the results we need for the next steps. Next slide. We are continuously exploring, of course, multiple financing options.
We understand the situation very thoroughly, and we are looking for potential investors. We are continuously exploring all options and talking to many interested parties. We also, of course, talked to Atlas and have been able, and Atlas has agreed to extend the financing commitment beyond June 2025. This gives us a security and really gives us a runway that we can now use in order to explore these financing options I just mentioned above. We are also exploring all kinds of transactions.
We also have several assets in our drawers, some of which we cannot actively pursue right now because we do not have the funding for that. We have explored with other interested parties whether they could take it forward. We are continuously being very creative about maximizing the value of all assets that we have available to us.
This is only because our technology, as Erik said, is very versatile and can be taken in different directions. We are focusing, as he said, on AAV and gene therapy, but there are other applications possible. We are, of course, pursuing all options in order to attract investments into Circio. On business development, as Erik was saying before, we are now very well known. We have done a very good job in industry publication and journals too, and people are really well known about our CircVec technology.
We are actively going to business conferences and partnering events to talk to pharmaceutical companies as well as gene therapy companies about the application of our technology. We are in dialogue with many companies about potential collaborations. Which brings me up to the near-term milestones. As you can see here, laid out in quite detail are the upcoming data.
This is basically a different display of what Erik just presented to you earlier. Very important here, of course, are the near-term data here, which we and some of this which we'll be presenting at ASGCT 2025 in mid-May. This is the premier event in our field. It's attended by thousands of scientists and many companies, of course, and will strengthen and deepen our relationship with interested parties at this conference. In the more longer future, we see some value inflection points.
This, of course, depends on the near-term data that was shown in the first half of 2025. If this data looks very good, then, of course, that will be putting fuel in our engine to talk to interested parties about a potential transaction. I want to be also clear that this will start discussions, so don't expect everything to happen in one day.
These collaborations are complex discussions, and of course, complex discussions require time to resolve. It really gives us a near-term opportunities to have these meaningful discussions with pharma companies. In the future, of course, the more data, the more possibilities we have to do transactions. Of course, as Erik's saying, we are working on many different fronts using different delivery formats, which enable us, of course, to have multiple discussions with different parties. Next slide.
I think this was the final slide, and thank you, Lubor. I can also add that we intend, as Lubor said, to present an update from our In Vivo program at ASGCT 2025. Shortly thereafter, we will host a deeper scientific webcast for our investors. This will then probably be during the last two weeks of May after data has been presented at ASGCT. Stay tuned for a presentation then of the outcome or interim data from this broad In Vivo program that we've just described.
With that, we can move to Q&A. We received several questions by email beforehand, and we can start by addressing one specifically on delivery. I think several people have found it complicated to navigate all the different vectors and delivery types we talk about.
When we speak about vectors, a vector is something we utilize to get circVec delivered to the correct cell or tissue in a patient to be able to make it therapeutic. You can do that either with viruses or you can do it with DNA. The advantage of using a virus is that this is a very effective tool at transporting genetic material. This is what viruses evolved to do. You use a virus, you really fast and easily get your DNA to where it wants to go. The problem with viruses is that it elicits an immune response. You gain immunity to the virus, and then you can't re-dose.
Using viral such as AAV vectors is effective, but you can only dose one time. As it wears off, you can't go back and give the patient the therapeutic again.
DNA holds the promise of repeat dosable gene therapy for the future. Using synthetic DNA, you avoid this problem of immunity to the virus. That is a big advantage. It is also going to be much cheaper to manufacture. The problem with the DNA is that it has to be delivered somehow. It has to be packaged into a technology that gets the DNA where you want it to go. If you just inject the DNA, it is going to be degraded. It is not going to go anywhere. That is why we have these delivery collaborations. One track is improving AAVs.
Here, we do not rely on partnerships, really. We can just take AAV viruses, these are well-known, make them with circVec, push them forward, and then manufacturing and development is all known. That is why we say this is probably the shortest path to get into the clinic and get the deal.
Longer term, we're really excited about this prospect of DNA-based repeat dosable gene therapy, and that's where we're investing resources into it. There we need collaboration partners with delivery technology, such as Certest, 4basebio are examples. We're using LNP. LNP is the way the COVID vaccines are delivered, for example. The advantage is that it's well understood. They work. You can actually use them in patients. They are approved, commercially available. However, AAVs are really inefficient in reality.
Most of the DNA or RNA you deliver gets degraded. Maybe 99% of everything you give actually is lost on the way, and only 1% makes it into the cell. Everyone is searching for next-gen LNPs or next-gen other chemistries that are better than LNP for the future.
These other four we described in terms of drug delivery collaborations are companies with either variants on or variations on LNPs or completely other chemistries that we can use. These we are now testing, and we will look at what is best, what is best for a specific purpose, and then pursue these going forward. Hopefully that explained this delivery and vector question in a bit more detail. Following that, we can cover a question we received on competition and how we are comparing to the other circular RNA companies.
Now, the other circular RNA companies, more or less all of them, are making synthetic circular RNA and then package them in LNPs. This is good for vaccines and sort of shorter-term durability therapeutics. It is fundamentally different to what we are doing. Remember, we are making vectors, DNA or virus that express the circular RNA. We do not directly compete.
Orna is not a direct competitor of Circio. We are simply using the power of circular RNA for different purposes. When you're looking at competitors for Circio, you need to look at the specific disease or vector type. For example, in terms of an AAV for muscle disease, a competitor would be other AAV companies targeting that same disease area, and we will have to be better than those. My point is that we shouldn't get too hung up on circular RNA companies as competitors, but rather look at the specific context. Having said that, success in the circular RNA field in general is great validation for us as well.
Showing that circular RNA works and is better than mRNA in any setting is going to be super helpful for everyone active in the space.
Following on, we can have maybe for Lubor here, business development, twofold question, Lubor. Can you talk a bit more about the Certest and 4basebio collaborations specifically, how these have evolved and whether the data is good? Secondly, if we are on track to achieve a business development deal this year.
Thanks, Erik. Yes, the relationships are going very well. We have found some very interesting results, as Erik has presented in his presentation today. Some of the results from the Certest collaboration we have presented to you today, this was about the spleen delivery, so these were quite exciting results. As Erik was saying, we are in the process of confirming and extending those results. 4basebio is ongoing, and we will present results as soon as possible, but these are going well, this relationship.
These are only two of the, I think, four or five relations that we have ongoing, two of which we are about to sign and start. We have got a lot of interest, actually, from drug delivery companies that Erik called the vector companies.
I just came back from a partnering meeting last week where we have received interest again from other parties who want to work with us because other companies realize the novelty of our format and the properties that this can really bring. These are people, of course, who are very close to our biology and understand the benefit that our approach brings over other approaches. This is very encouraging. To some degree, we know we have to be careful who we are partnering with and select with.
This is actually a very active field. We hope, of course, we can announce some of them fairly soon about these potential collaborations. We are in that way always doing partnering deals.
Of course, we need more data from these parties, sometimes from these collaborations in order to go forward and sign with larger companies deals later this year. I want to mention or highlight, as Erik was saying, that some of these companies that we're doing this as a test phase to test our technology, and should the results meet the expectations, then this, of course, leads to a much different relationship and future transactional potential collaboration going forward.
Thanks, Lubor. We can follow up with a question on IOVaxis as well as TG progress. There is interest in that. We did not really talk about that in the presentation. TG, this is our cancer vaccine legacy program. This is currently in two active clinical trials. These are cancer vaccines targeting KRAS mutations. Our cancer vaccines is a bit of a complicated field at the moment. There have been several negative data readouts. That has made it difficult to finance and fundraise for this particular modality. We are starting to see good data emerge, and there are results coming out later this year.
Maybe we can change the dynamic in the field. Fortunately, we have been able to set up our TG program largely with external partners. The funding is mainly from outside parties and then supported by Circio.
Progress on the trials has recruitment has been a little bit slower than expected, but for the trial in Oslo and multiple myeloma, I think we're getting close to the end of recruitment. There is a plan to submit data to EHA, a conference later this year. There should be an update at that point from the Oslo study. We have a much larger study, which is in the US, where this TG cancer vaccine is being tested in a triple combination in collaboration with Georgetown University, Janssen, or J&J, as well as BMS.
They were testing TG on one triple combo in pancreatic and lung cancers. I think this study is currently in a safety review of the safety cohort. Once that's cleared, it will proceed. We are a bit at arm's length in these two trials.
We have less control and less frequent updates. I expect in the second half of the year, there should be initial interim results coming from the Georgetown study. These are non-core to the company. I think we view it a bit opportunistically. If the data is good, it may enable us to continue the program or raise funding for that specifically. With that, maybe Lubor, you can provide an update on our discussions with IOVaxis, the potential partner in China.
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we continue to stay in discussion or communication with John Wang, the CEO at IOVaxis. He has repeatedly expressed interest in the asset at the Greater China region. We have clearly communicated that this is tied to the fulfillment of certain criteria, which we had negotiated with him in the past and which we have announced to you previously. He is in the process of, our understanding, is he in the process of raising additional funding, financing to take this program forward and to make the necessary payment to make this license effective.
We are waiting for him to complete his process, and then we could maybe have some good news about them exercising the option to take the development forward in China.
Dialogue remains open, but it's depending on their fundraising, the short answer. We've received several questions related to the Atlas financing facility, both in how it operates and how long it lasts and the amount of outstanding bonds currently. Lubor, please, maybe you can summarize for the listeners.
Yeah, thanks very much. It is fully understandable that that is not very clear. It is a bit more difficult to understand. In a nutshell, as you know, we entered into this agreement in March of 2023. This was a three-year agreement, so it would terminate in March of 2026. This sets the framework, the legal framework for the duration of this facility. As you said, as you all know, this facility has the opportunity of drawing up to NOK 300 million. We also said that we will never do that. We will only draw the facility as needed. It is in our control how much we take from this facility.
Last year, we negotiated an addition, an amendment, you can say, to this agreement, which was the financing commitment from Atlas until June 2025.
The advantage of that amendment was that we had a commitment from Atlas that they will fund us through June 2025. This was very important for us in 2024. As we just announced today, we also have the agreement, Atlas has agreed to extend that commitment beyond June 2025. This is an amendment to the original agreement. It is within the investment agreement by Atlas and can be seen as an addition to what we negotiated originally. If there are any other questions, if this one is not clear, happy to answer questions later on. Please submit them.
We can also add that we've substantially reduced the bond exposure. A year ago, there was more than NOK 45 million in outstanding bonds. This has been reduced down to NOK 12 million. The exposure is much lower, which is very good. Of course, we're working systematically to reduce that to zero. We did draw another tranche of NOK 4 million from Atlas, as announced 10 days ago. That will increase the amount of outstanding bonds from NOK 12 million to NOK 16 million for full clarity. With that, I think we've dealt with the majority of the questions we have received.
If you have additional requests, please do not hesitate to send us an email, and we're happy to answer in writing or have a phone call if you prefer. Thank you all for listening in.
We look forward to updating you in the second half of May when we're going to have a very substantial program having read out and a big update from the ongoing in vivo, internal, and external program. Thank you and goodbye.
Thank you, everybody. Thanks for dialing in.