Cantargia, we are a publicly listed company, founded and based here in Lund. We are a global leader in interleukin-1 receptor accessory protein targeting through antibodies, and we have taken two antibodies into the clinic. Now, nadunolimab is our lead candidate. It's pivotal ready, and we have pivotal stage ready, and we have received a fast-track designation from the FDA, to take it forward into patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, or PDAC. Our second antibody CAN10 is in late stage of phase I, and it's been acquired earlier in the year by Otsuka Pharmaceutical in a very nice deal that provided some financial flexibility for us. It has a total value of over $613 million and a nice upfront of $33 million, which enables us to invest into the next generation of antibodies, targeting IL1RAP.
Not only the financial flexibility from the Otsuka transaction was important, it was also the validation of the target, the technology that we have developed, and the company's ability to conclude a deal. We have a pipeline of very, a lot of interesting ideas and projects. In the interest of time, I will only focus on the nadunolimab in PDAC during this presentation. Here's a lot of other interesting projects that we're working on. Nadunolimab is a monoclonal antibody. It's got a dual mechanism of action. The first of them is that it's blocking IL1 signaling through a mechanism that you see on the left side. It is known that interleukin-1 signaling promotes tumor growth.
What nadunolimab does is that it binds to a co-receptor called IL1RAP, as I mentioned earlier in the presentation, and thereby this signaling cannot take place. As you see in the middle of the slide, there is no intracellular signaling, and therefore IL1 is sort of out of the game. It is also ADCC enhanced, which means that when it is hooked up to the receptor, it actually activates natural killer cells that can target, in this case, the tumor cell in blue there, and attack it and hopefully kill it. We have tested nadunolimab in over 300 cancer patients, with very exciting results and an acceptable and very good safety profile. Our focus now is to bring it forward in PDAC, where we have the most exciting results. PDAC is a devastating and deadly cancer disease.
It's usually diagnosed late when it's progressed to a metastatic stage where basically there are few treatments available. The treatments that are available today are basically chemotherapy and different combinations. The ones that are listed here in the middle, and the median survival is between nine and 12 months from the start of treatment or from diagnosed. What we know is that our target IL1RAP plays a role and is a marker for poor prognosis. The higher levels of our target in the tumors or in the cancer biopsies from these patients, the worse prognosis. We have shown this and others have shown this by looking into databases, and you see them all here on the screen.
It's the cancer genome atlas, to the left. It's the Pan-Cancer Proteome tumor database in the middle, and it's a protein-based collaboration that we have with the Herlev University over in Herlev Hospital in Copenhagen, where we looked at biopsies from cancer patients who have undergone treatment with the standard of care, cell therapy or chemotherapy. What you see on all of them is that the orange bar indicates a lower chance of survival, and the lower bar indicates a high level of our target in the samples here. High IL1RAP is connected to poor survival in PDAC. We, in a phase I/II study called CAN04, there was one arm where first line metastatic PDAC patients received nadunolimab in combination with standard of care, gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel.
73 patients, we saw very good and, and durable responses, as you can see on the, on the right hand side in the, in the waterfall chart, and it correlated to an, a very exciting and, and positive overall survival of 13.2 months in median for these, this group. It was a single arm study. We can't really compare to, to anything in that study, but we know from historical controls that the expected overall survival is between eight and nine months for this, patient population. What our scientists did was that they were able to, to obtain and analyze, 49 samples, biopsies from this, from this study and, analyze it with the IHC method to detect the level of our protein in, in those, tumor biopsies. What they saw was that the, the 49 samples, were separated into two distinct groups.
29 of them had high level of the, the protein and, 20 had a lower level. That, that's one finding. The other finding was when we correlated that to survival, we have more impressive results. Remember what I said a couple of slides back, that high levels of IL1RAP is a prognosis or a marker for poor prognosis. We saw the opposite when they were treated with nadunolimab. The patients with high levels at start of treatment lived longer. It's a statistically significant difference. We had 14.2 months survival in the group that received our antibody in combination with chemotherapy versus 10.6 for those with a low level. 35% of the patients in the high group lived even two years after starting of treatment.
We strongly believe that we would be remiss, and it would be a shame for cancer patients and actually our shareholders if we do not make all attempts possible to bring this product forward to cancer patients. We intend to do that in a pivotal study where we select the patients that we believe and we have documented have the greatest chance of getting benefit of the treatment. We need an assay for that, and we have spent two years roughly developing that assay so that we can run it in a study where we test and select the patients that have this high level of IL1RAP. We also have discussed that with the FDA, as I mentioned in my earlier slides, and we obtained the fast-track designation for that approach earlier in the summer.
We have a clear plan, and it's a pivotal study. Obviously it requires a significant investment. We follow a two-track scenario, where we explore all the options of doing that ourselves. It will of course require a significant investment whilst at the same time we have discussions with partners on potential collaborations to bring this forward in a similar way as we used when we worked on the CAN10 program during last year and this year, and it ended up with a successful transaction with Otsuka. To conclude, we have an opportunity to become first in class and therefore also best in class in a new treatment for patients with PDAC.
We have a clear biomarker strategy that we believe reduces the risk, increases the probability of success, and we got through the Otsuka transaction and external validation that what we're doing really makes sense and provided a flexibility for us financially to reinvest into the next generation of IL1RAP antibodies. With that, I think my time is out on the prompt over there.
It is.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much. We've got a couple of questions for you here.
Yep.
The first one is actually what you see as Cantargia's greatest differentiation. Is it, for example, the target biology, clinical data, partnering approach, great CFO? I don't know.
All of the above.
I thought you might say that.
Yeah, it's difficult to pinpoint one of them, but I would say we have a strong team. We have definitely the best knowledge about the target in the world, and we've proven that by taking two assets into the clinic. We are not alone in this field, but we are the only ones who have basically taken two assets into the clinic.
You mentioned the team that you've recently brought on board a new CMO. Can you tell us a little bit about him and what he will add?
Yeah, Wolfram Dempke. He is a, yeah, it's difficult for me to tell exactly how he is, but he has a very strong long record of developing cancer treatments and bringing them to the market. He also treats patients still as, so he's a physician, doctor, oncologist. He meets and treats patients with PDAC and lung cancer at his clinic.
As a final question, which might be a bit difficult to answer at this stage, but do you know about other types of cancers? Would your candidate possibly work with?
We have very exciting data in non-small cell lung cancer, in a subset, more clear subset, maybe than PDAC, but it's a small group of patients and to explore that, we need to verify that in a study.
Thank you so much for that.
Thank you.