Good afternoon, everyone. We heard Åsa Fexby earlier, and I would like to bring you back to the cancer ward. How many people here know somebody who had cancer? Nearly everybody. Nearly 4 million people in Europe alone are diagnosed with cancer every year. More people are diagnosed with cancer because we live longer, because of the HPV virus, and because of earlier detection. What is less known is that more than one-third of these patients will experience something called oral mucositis. These are very painful wounds in your mouth and your throat that makes life hell. It makes it very difficult to eat. We speak to people that tell us that drinking water is like eating glass, and just having your tongue hit your teeth gives you excruciating pain.
You can get this condition from chemotherapy alone or, in the case of head and neck cancer, nearly all of them will get it because of the radiation that is administered to the head and neck region. There are large risks of treatment interruptions. It has a large impact to your quality of life. These patients incur more weight loss, risks of opioid dependence, and because of unplanned hospitalizations and tube feeding, also extra healthcare costs. There are research reports available that outline the challenges that these patients face. We also did our own study together with UCLA in California, end of last year, where we did a patient engagement study. Today's standard of care includes lidocaine. It includes various kinds of mouthwashes, various opioids, photobiomodulation light therapy, ice cubes, regular painkillers, and surprisingly, none of it works sufficiently for a lot of these patients.
In our study, 74% of the patients that received any available pain medications reported a pain of 7 or higher on a 10-point scale. This is a best-in-class hospital. Our proposed solution to this is a pill, a dissolving lozenge. We call it BupiZenge, and it is formulated using the well-known API bupivacaine. Bupivacaine has been used for decades in other formulations, like after surgery or in epidural at childbirth, but now reformulated in a pill that you leave in your oral cavity, and that will bind bupivacaine locally with lesser systemic risks and effects. Bupivacaine's efficacy is well-known, and we can offer pain relief of three hours or more, which then has the potential of giving patients significant pain relief during the weeks they are going through their chemotherapy and their radiation.
Make it a little bit easier to get away with your daily activities, make it a little bit easier to sleep, make it a little bit easier to eat and to drink, and to maintain as much weight as possible to be able to get through your cancer treatment and to recover as fast as you possibly can. We have come far in our development and are currently in our phase III study execution. We have hospitals in Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Germany now open for recruitment. We submitted our Clinical Trial Application in December, received our European regulatory approval in May, and recruited our first patient now in July, which is very exciting for us. Thank you. We have six hospitals open at the moment. We will have one more hospital opening in Germany in the coming week or so and another hospital in Denmark also in September.
By the end of September, we should have eight hospitals close to home actively recruiting. Our focus now is obviously to finalize our phase III trial as soon as absolutely possible and to deliver our clinical study report early next year, which then becomes the foundation for submitting our marketing application, prioritized on Europe to start with. To then launch with partners. Speaking of commercial strategy, we have made a conscious choice to not build our own sales and distribution capabilities, but to partner. It doesn't make sense for us to build our own organization, raising hundreds of millions of SEK to build our own organization for a single product that needs to go into the same oncologists that's already receiving probably too many pharma reps.
Our product will sit neatly in someone else's portfolio and distribution. In Europe, we have already signed a partnership with Molteni, who's present here today, actually, with their CEO and their head of commercials. They are a pain and addiction specialist with distribution in more than 40 countries. They have supported our technology program, and we are working jointly on the marketing application, and they are currently working to establish volume manufacturing in Milan. We move forward commercially with confidence, partly because we are relying on bupivacaine that's well-known and well-characterized, partly because of our phase II results that have been very good, a 50% improvement of pain in the oral cavity, and partly because we see the demand.
We've received lots of inbound interest of pharma companies in other parts of the world that could do local registration based on our European data and our European dossier. They have asked us for support with local IP filings, and just recently, we followed through on our commitment to do so, now having filed additional patent applications in 17 jurisdictions around the world. We are in active conversations with several pharmas, and we hope to come back soon with news on where we will go after Europe. There's a long-term potential in oral pain relief beyond oral mucositis and cancer care. That's our lead indication and what we will seek approval for first. That involves a number of chronic conditions and also pre- and post-procedure needs for pain relief.
We have filed additional patents to secure some of that future potential that's there, and our partner in Impala Nordic has also written a nice analyst report that explains some of what those other potential uses could be for our product beyond cancer care. If you're interested, I'd encourage you to take a look at that. With that said, we have not made any commitments on additional clinical programs, so no additional OpEx or cost attached to that, but it's a potential that we would look to develop together with future partners. On the topic of financing, just today, we will be releasing the final results of a share issue that we've been working on over the past several weeks.
We are thrilled to see the support of our current shareholders with Linc, who is also in the room, as well as the guarantee support that was offered by the Life Science Invest Fund with Jan Poulsen, John Haurum, as well as Erik Selin. We saw the subscription on Friday with preliminary results at 92%, which we are very proud of. The goal of this was to build a stronger balance sheet that will look better in our partner discussions, as well as to secure some additional runway beyond the readout of the phase III results and to add some funds for the preparation of our marketing application.
On a bit of a personal note, we have been in a windy road of a turnaround effort, and we have come to a place where we have been able to attract a stellar team that has been able to take the company through the milestones and get us through and beyond the first patient in our phase III program. We are incredibly proud of that. We have also attracted strong and reliable partners that have been able to work with us and get to where we are today. So I would like to say thank you to Molteni and also to Linc, and to our other partners that are not in the room today. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Stian. Do you have any questions from the room? Do not forget that you can also use the QR code and just send in a question if you do not want to use the microphones. I will ask you a question I actually asked you when we did our last interview.
The tricky one?
Not the tricky one. We scuffed all the tricky ones. Stian did an interview that you can see on the BioStock website, actually. It was about the partnership discussions and what you can tell us about the status and if you could give us some hint to what geographical area maybe is the closest to a deal.
Okay. There's been several interested parties in different parts of the world. Many have wanted to see that we were able to get the Clinical Trial Application approval, of course. Some have wanted to see that we pass through and get our first patient recruited and the structure of the study set up. What's closer in time, I guess, is the countries that can rely on the European data, and I'd say Asia-Pacific is probably what is closest at hand.
Let's say the partnering doesn't pan out, or Heaven forbid, you get an offer that you deem inadequate, would you be willing to launch yourself then?
I think the short answer is no.
Right.
I think we would pursue with our partner strategy because we are a single drug company, and the costs of establishing your own sales and distribution would be very high for a single product.
Simply not worth it in that sense. Now we get on to slightly trickier territory, I guess then. We've talked a lot about China and working with China, and you've had some issues getting payment from, I can never pronounce this, but Sichuan Yangtian Bio-Pharmaceutical. Can you comment on that and what is your experience of working with China?
How much time do we have?
You have two minutes and 47 seconds.
All right. I'd start with the positives, and that is we found a company that really believe in the product and see the potential and wanted to support the journey, and they injected capital that helped us progress. The Chinese investor was one of the key parts for us to actually get through to first patient, where we are now. We are very appreciative of that. However, the process to get there was challenging at times. It was very difficult to see clearly where they were in their local regulatory process. It was very difficult.
Because you did not have insight into that side of the work. Okay. Yep.
Yes. There are capital controls and numerous regulatory processes in China that needs to be worked through in order to release funds. Having a financial plan for a pharmaceutical company in development and nearing patients or with patients, having that kind of risk in your financial plan is an eerie feeling.
Yeah.
In hindsight, maybe we should have planned with more buffers and/or diversified where we would get our funds from. But in the end, we set up now the share issue and we have seen great support in that, which is also very nice to see.
All in all, it turned out okay. There are some things you would have maybe done differently then.
We have been running a very tight ship, and that has also been conscious. When investment proceeds are delayed, at some point, that creates an issue just from a pure cash flow point of view. We have solved that in order to protect the values in the product and the project.
Natasha, this bupivacaine is already well known, right?
Yes.
Where is your competitive protection? Is it in your IP, or is it the delivery concept itself?
I guess it's kind of both. We have patents on the formulation, and we have quite a bit of internal knowhow on how to be able to build a stable product leveraging bupivacaine.
Thank you so much, Stian.
Thank you.