My name is Johan Emilsson, and I'm the CEO of Sprint Bioscience. All right, Sprint Bioscience is a company that focuses very much on doing early development. We built a company over the last 16 years, built an innovation engine focusing solely on doing innovation in the early parts of discovery into the early parts of preclinical. However, being a non-GXP company in the sense that we do not progress our programs into the regulatory space, the non-clinical talks and eventually into the clinic, rather building a broader portfolio in the early space and finding partnerships early. The purpose of doing this is that we wanted to build a company and also to build something that can be sustainably profitable over time and somewhere in a place where we can create good innovation. All right, some background. We've been around since 2009.
We IPO'd in 2014 and today listed on First North Premier. We have focused our efforts in working in immune oncology, tumor metabolism, and tumor microenvironment by utilizing a technology called fragment-based drug design, which means that we are focusing on making small molecules. How you can describe it is that many know high-throughput screening, that essentially where you have a very large library of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ready compounds, which you screen towards a target. We take a step back. Instead of utilizing a big library of, so to say, ready molecules, we utilize fragments, essentially starting points of what can be a good pharmaceutical product. We have a library of a few thousands of fragments.
That means that instead of taking several months, if not up to half a year, to go through your HTS library, we can screen our library on a specific target within weeks. We're based in Stockholm, and we're operating out of Flemingsberg, Huddinge, just next to the Karolinska site. This is essentially what we're doing. These are the core capabilities that we built over the years to make sure that you can operate a very efficient fragment-based drug design team. It essentially starts with protein science. We are finding a protein that we see is critical in the development of tumors, something that we want to inhibit. By being able to isolate that, grow it, and then purify it in big enough amounts, we're then being able to screen our fragment library towards that. We utilize structural biology.
That essentially means that we are taking our fragments in combination with the protein. We are utilizing MAX IV here in Lund to get a 3D picture of essentially how the fragment binds into the active site of the protein. We are taking that data, and then we move it to the next step, which essentially is computational chemistry, where we use different kinds of software to essentially model it, what would be the perfect molecule for this. What they do in combination with our MedChem team is that they build the blueprint. This is essentially how we see that we are going to synthesize this molecule. They go into the lab, they synthesize it, and we test it and see how it works. Getting a new crystal structure, understanding what has happened with the protein and how we can optimize this molecule.
The benefit of doing this is that we can create an iterative cycle. Having all of these functions in-house, we can also make it very efficient, minimizing the iteration steps and making speed into that, which means that we can build from the very beginning, build in the MedChem properties that you need to be able to do a small, nimble, specific, and potent small molecule. Of course, we also have the cell and in vitro capabilities to test it. All right, essentially this is how it looks. This is a rendering how it could look. Essentially what we are doing is we are just exchanging a biological molecule that has a purpose that the cell is. We work a lot with kinases, for example.
What we can then do is that we just make a plug and make sure that we just stop the active site of actually working and being able to do that in a potent and very specific manner, because that's also important, of course, that we want to be very specific on the proteins that we inhibit. For those of you who have a scientific nerve, I mean, in the sense that we can work and make extremely potent and very selective kinase inhibitor that essentially is utilizing ATP. I mean, that is being utilized in many other settings, also shows kind of the capacity we have in building very nimble and specific molecules. I mean, this is not unique for us.
I mean, fragment-based drug design has been out there, and we are now seeing that a number of molecules is also hitting the market, also proving that this is a way of working that functions and also appreciated in the industry. Historically, and I would say also currently, this is our business model. Essentially, it is that we work exclusively in the early phase, which is, I would say, a cost-efficient way. It is still decently expensive, but not as expensive as going into the clinical, focusing and making sure that we are experts in this field and we are really good at it, and also making sure that we retain the competencies to be able to be really good at this. We are finding partners before going into talks programs and essentially then handing over the clinical development to companies that know this better than us.
However, we have seen over the last couple of years that there is an opportunity for us to diversify our business model. We have been working very actively with this over the last year. We will retain and continue to work. What we have successfully done 6x before is making license agreements where essentially we will render milestones and in the end, some royalties. We also see an increasing interest also from another segment, and that is venture capital. Being a listed company, I mean, there are just a limited amount of venture capitalists interested in investing in listed companies. However, they see assets that we have that are interesting. What we are doing and what other discussions we are having is having a broad portfolio.
We can be a little bit agnostic in a way where we can see we can make the best deal for the asset at that specific point of time. We are now also looking at and having a discussion of spinning out assets and creating companies out of that. Something that's also building now and also going back to kind of the platform we built and the innovation engine is that we're now seeing we've been around for 16 years. We've had numerous discussions and built a brand in the industry over those years. Sometimes not always been a match between kind of the things we're having in our pipeline and the strategic needs of the companies we're talking to. However, they really like the science we're having and kind of the modus operandi that we built.
We are now increasingly also having more discussion about strategic collaborations, getting access to what we're doing, getting access to the people and knowledge we built over the years. We see that that's a good way for us to create some short-term to mid-term revenues as well, whilst continuously exploring the bigger deals in the license agreements. All right, going back to the pipeline or what I've talked about, we've built a fairly broad pipeline over the years. We today have five ongoing development programs internally. We struck a deal with an entity in Singapore during the summer, which took over and continued the development on our MASH and inflammation STK25 inhibitor, which essentially is an earning model where they earn in staking the program as they continue to develop the program. We share potential future revenues.
We do also retain a fairly healthy undisclosed programs, early stage things that we haven't matured enough. At the moment, we are focusing on making sure that we do the most and the best of what we were having in the portfolio at the moment. Wrapping up, I mean, we have shown over and over again that we can actually make early stage deals, and there is an interest from the industry to actually make these kinds of deals. We have a diversified portfolio. Someone told me once that, and I think I might have mentioned it during the last Bioscience talk event, that in this business, you need a little bit of luck. You need to make sure that things are aligning. The thing is that luck is not created out of thin air. Luck is a consequence of effort.
We believe then by having a broader portfolio, the potential for us to get lucky and have is in this setting bigger. We have a good, strong pipeline. We have a platform and a number of programs that are maturing. We see more and more things happening around our assets in the scientific community. We have some existing, and we definitely see some new potential partnerships. With that, I'll leave you with a picture of one of our chemistry labs. Thank you.
You have obviously explored areas beyond oncology, like you mentioned MASH there. How do you keep the strategic focus whilst pursuing different options?
I mean, for us, what's critical when you look into the organization and how we operate is that we built, essentially, if you look on the slide where I had all the capabilities, if you go all the way up to cell biology, that's essentially TA agnostic. It could be any therapeutic area, essentially. We needed to define an area where we want to be really good at. Then you need to focus from a biology perspective on a certain area. We see that oncology continues to be the biggest market potential. Yeah, that's why we focus on it. Of course, there are serendipities in all science, and something else might come out. Who knows?
You're not going to say no. This business model, what sort of reactions have you gotten to this type of business model?
I mean, we're trying to lower the threshold of getting, so we built a really good brand over the years. I've been amazed over just the two years I've been with the company, how well recognized we are and how everyone has been looking into what we're doing, how complementary they are at their work. It might be that the strategic fit has not been there. For us, it's just lowering the thresholds to being able to collaborate with people. That seems to be appreciated.
Thank you so much, Johan.
Thank you.