Welcome to the 41st J.P. Morgan Annual Healthcare Conference. This is the APAC LatAm track for the January event, this Wednesday. My name is Daisuke Yoshizumi, Global Healthcare Investment Banking team. I'm glad to introduce Chris Cargill, the President and CEO of the Sosei Group. Chris.
Excellent. Thank you very much, Daisuke. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for those that have attended and show of strength, I appreciate it. It's very nice to be back in San Francisco. My name is Chris Cargill. As Daisuke said, I'm the CEO of Sosei Group in Japan. Here in the room today, I am joined by our Chief Financial Officer, Hironobu Nomura, over here on my right, and also Matt Barnes, who's the head of our U.K. R&D operations. I'll begin with a short overview of our history to orient people who aren't familiar with our business. Following that, I plan to talk to you about 4 key areas of focus for us over the next three-five years as we aim to build a disruptive commercial stage biotech business.
We'll be happy to take any questions from the audience at the end, we don't have any formal Q&A time allotted. We start from pretty humble beginnings. Our history and corporate setup as a company is quite unique. We were founded in 1990 by Japanese businessman, Shinichi Tamura. The company funded itself through the 1990s via a series of Series A and Series B financing with the aim to become a conduit for tech transferring innovations that were coming out of the U.S. West Coast at that time.
In 2005, we IPO'd on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and used the increased capital base to support investments and acquisitions outside of Japan, namely two major transactions of Cambridge, U.K.-based biotechs, Arakis for GBP 100 million in 2005, and also Heptares Therapeutics for $180 million in 2015. The acquired technologies and capabilities underpin the company that we have today. We have over 40 pipeline programs and growing at various stages of discovery and early clinical development. This is what we look like today. We're now one of Japan's most innovative science-led biotechnology businesses.
We have an extensive and highly productive structure-based drug design platform, largely focused on G protein-coupled receptors, and we take programs through discovery all the way to translational medicine and early clinical development at our research center in Cambridge, U.K. We have a late-stage clinical development team in Japan, and currently, our market cap is approximately $1.4 billion. We've got over $500 million of cash available on balance sheet to fund our growth going forward. We've got 200 employees worldwide. We've got over 20 blue-chip global biotech and pharma partners. We've received $950 million in milestone and royalty revenue to date, and we've generated 25 preclinical candidate stage programs over the last 10 years. We're very well set up for the future.
The next slide, the way I like to describe our business and our pipeline, we have the diversification of a big pharma pipeline, but the catalyst-rich upside of a biotech. Here you can see we've got various programs at various stages of discovery and development. We have early multi-target discovery collaborations with Genentech, Takeda, Lilly, and AbbVie. We have a number of preclinical and Phase I programs, both with partners, but also we have an emerging in-house pipeline. You can see them with the ticks and the oranges down the bottom there, and I'll talk about those later. You know, most interestingly for us, and what has really sort of driven investor interest in our company over the past few months, has been the Phase II start on the GLP-1 agonist, which is with Pfizer, and the muscarinic M4 agonist, which is with Neurocrine.
Our business model is differentiated, and it delivers through all stages of the cycle. Some of the milestones we had last year, which was a pretty rough year for the sector in general, we announced a new collaboration with Cancer Research UK for a cancer immunotherapy, and I'll talk about that later. We had a new multi-target collaboration with AbbVie for neurology diseases.
Our muscarinic M4 agonist started Phase II, as I just mentioned. We had a new multi-target collaboration with Lilly for diabetes and metabolic diseases, and the GLP-1 agonist that I also mentioned started the Phase II towards the end of last year. What that did for us as a company, it drove some pretty strong relative share price performance against both the index that we're compared to in Japan, the Mothers, but also the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index.
For biotech, we are cash flow generative, as you can see in the bottom right-hand corner there. For the last 3 to four years, we've been building up that cash base to help us grow in the future. We've got a clear strategy to drive our business forward, and that really involves the 4 sort of pillars or legs that I'll talk to you about today. It's really about extending and enhancing our advantage that we have with our drug discovery platform capability. 2, it's about striking new partnerships but also progressing the existing partnerships that drive major milestones and cash flow into our business. 3, we're transforming the way that we do R&D. 4, we plan to activate a Japan commercial business. Why GPCRs and why do we focus on this area?
Well, GPCRs have been active in a wide range of diseases for a long period of time. There have been a number of companies that have been targeting GPCRs for the last 30, 40 years. There's about 400 GPCR targets that are known to be active in disease. To date, 34% of FDA approvals are in this target class, there is a wealth of targets that are yet to be drugged, and this is really where we're focusing. You've seen over the last sort of two years there's been, they call it, the second golden age of GPCR targeted discovery. New companies have been founded, existing companies have been acquired.
I think the key point for us that differentiates is we've got a 15, 20-year head start in this space, and we think it's going to be very productive for us going forward. Just touching on our platform. First leg of the strategy, as I said, involves extending and enhancing the platform advantage that we have. The Heptares StaR technology underpins this structure-based drug design platform. We use it as a powerful tool for GPCR drug discovery, and we continually strengthen our world-leading platform by adding complementary technologies, as you can see here on this slide.
Firstly, Sosei Heptares has been an early adopter of cryo-electron microscopy. Richard Henderson, co-founder of the Heptares technology and a member of our scientific advisory board, who won the Nobel Prize in this space in 2017. To date, 45...
Over 45 structures and 15 unique GPCRs have been determined by cryo-EM at Sosei Heptares in both agonist and antagonist conformations. Secondly is the development of our protein binder toolkit. Protein binders like this offer clear benefits in structure determination for GPCRs and other non-GPCR membrane protein target classes. The third technology that we're adding to our platform is DEL screening or DNA encoded library screening. DEL screening offers an alternative strategy for hit identification in early drug discovery, and involves chemical libraries of 15 billion to over a trillion compounds accessed through partners to allow unprecedented levels of chemical diversity. Lastly, we've been assembling a bespoke chemogenomic GPCR library screening over the last few years, which we can use with wild type or non-StaR proteins as well.
Our world-leading and highly productive platform has, as I mentioned earlier, generated more than 25 preclinical candidate molecules for our in-house and collaborative projects, and is ultimately attracting several large pharma companies to work with us on a multi-target discovery collaboration basis. The next leg of our strategy involves the major milestone in cash flow generating partnerships that I mentioned earlier, ensuring that we execute new ones going forward and that we progress the existing partnerships that we have. I just want to touch on two of the programs that have recently driven significant investor interest. The first is a Phase II partnered clinical program, which was part of our novel muscarinic receptor agonist collaboration with Neurocrine Biosciences for schizophrenia and neuropsychiatric disorders.
We recently announced late last year that Neurocrine had initiated a placebo-controlled Phase II study to investigate this five-six-eight molecule, which is a selective muscarinic M4 agonist as a potential new treatment for schizophrenia. This clinical development milestone triggered a $30 million payment to Sosei Heptares from Neurocrine late last year, and that was exactly a year after we signed the transaction with them in November 2021, where we received $100 million up front, and potentially $2.6 billion in development and commercial milestones going forward. Five-six-eight represents the most advanced candidate under this multi-program collaboration. Also of note is the intention to initiate phase I studies on both the dual M1/M4 agonist and M1 selective agonist, hopefully this year in 2023.
We are working extremely closely and effectively with our partner Neurocrine Biosciences on this collaboration. The second one I wanted to touch on is a Phase II clinical program discovered by Pfizer using our technology. It relates to a GLP-1 agonist, which is the first clinical candidate from our multi-target discovery collaboration with Pfizer to advance into Phase II trials. The 532 molecule is a once daily next-generation oral small molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist in development for Type 2 diabetes and obesity. Pfizer sees this molecule as a potential best-in-class small molecule against an already well-validated target in GLP-1, and this has huge potential in indications such as Type 2 diabetes and obesity. It's a $25 billion GLP-1 market today, and it's slated to grow at 30% every year, reaching approximately $90 billion by 2030.
Of this market, the orals are predicted to capture 30% by 2032 due to strong patient preference, with 60% of patients preferring orals over injectables. The safety and tolerability profile was found to be consistent with GLP-1 class and mechanism of action, with adverse events generally mild. We think this program, assuming Pfizer decides to move it forward, is very well-positioned to compete in the class on efficacy, tolerability, and simplicity of administration versus other therapies. The third leg of our strategy involves transforming our R&D business and the operations and how we run it, and this is largely completed already. However, it's worth touching on. What we've been doing with our R&D operations in the United Kingdom is really thinking about how we optimize them to enhance productivity, value, and success going forward.
There's four areas that we're really focused on. Target biology, to really entrench target biology, to understand disease processes in everything that we do, to define robust and testable hypotheses. We have merged our preclinical and early clinical teams to create a translational medicine team that is lean, fit for purpose, and operating via best practice.
We have moved to a full program-centric model, and what I mean by this is the programs are first and foremost in the way that we operate, and the functions around the organization exist to support what we do on a program basis. We have a VC-like, or venture capital-like, quick win, fast fail model. We try and shift as much critical information to as early possible stage so that we can make decisions. If we need to kill programs early, we can while they are cheaper.
The faster attrition enables us to drive better reinvestment decisions in the pipeline so that we can move alternative programs forward that have a better chance for commercial success. What we're really doing is we're complementing our drug discovery platform and our technology, our world-leading science, by deploying operational best practice to increase efficiency, probability of success on our programs, and ultimately return on investment. With this program-centric approach, we're advancing the next wave of in-house programs, with 3 likely to move into the clinic this year. The first of these is our EP4 antagonist for immunosuppression in solid tumors. This is in collaboration with CRUK, but importantly, we own the intellectual property around the programs. Here we're targeting a once-daily oral small molecule for the treatment of PGE2-high cancers in combination with checkpoint inhibitors.
The second program that we're focused on is a GPR52 agonist program, which is a novel GPCR target, and it presents opportunities to address both the positive symptoms and the negative symptoms and cognitive impairment in schizophrenia and psychosis, where we are also targeting a once-daily small molecule. Oral small molecule, I should say. Third is our EP4 agonist, where we are developing an oral GI-restricted molecule with minimal systemic exposure for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, with good potency and selectivity. Through combined anti-inflammatory and barrier-protecting effects, EP4 agonists are expected to bring benefits in IBD and promote mucosal healing. We're very excited about these three programs. They offer opportunities across key therapeutic areas of focus for us.
They represent a mix of novel and validated drug targets, which allows us to mitigate some of the risk, but also provide a great opportunity for our translational medicine team to demonstrate the best practice approach that we strive for. Perhaps the newest leg, which we haven't talked about, is the huge opportunity that we see to create a disruptive pharma business in Japan. The reason why we like Japan, despite being a Japanese company and, having our origins in Japan and our listing in Japan is, we like the market, we like the opportunity. A couple of things that we wanna sort of touch on here just to remind everyone. You know, ex-China, Japan is the second-largest pharma market.
It has a very large aging population, universal healthcare system, a stable pro-innovation market, what we see as relatively weak incumbents, sort of our size and scale, and we think that that all adds up to be an attractive market for disruptive companies like ours. What we're looking to do over the course of the next three to five years is focus on underserved specialty therapeutic areas, build out a lean, rational development and commercial model, and use Japan as a linchpin market before potentially expanding into Asia-Pacific. Just to recap, our plan for Japan really is around targeting product opportunities in selected therapeutic areas, and we're having lots of meetings out here this week on that topic, looking for products that are approved and perhaps post proof of concept or Phase III programs as well.
We're going to build this pipeline not only through in-licensing, but over the longer-term organic development of the programs that we discover. We're going to build a scalable model in Japan that relies a lot on virtual R&D and partners, not sort of , adding hundreds and hundreds of people to a commercial infrastructure, but building a strategy that can be a go-to-market strategy for assets that is appropriate for an organization of our size. We've got a team over there, an expert clinical development team already, but we're going to build out regulatory affairs, and we're gonna build out commercial as well, so that we can do this more and more over time. We've got plenty of capital available to do this strategy. We've got JPY 500 million of cash on our balance sheet at the moment.
Hopefully, over the next few years, you will see Sosei begin to transform in Japan as well, so that we can hopefully make a difference for patients living with unmet medical need. To sum up the key initiatives, over the next three to five years, where we're aimed at increasing our corporate value. Well, one of the core productions that we're looking to do is potentially up list from the junior exchange that we're listed on, which is called the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers and we're looking to go up to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime. What that will do for us as a company is hopefully balance our register composition a little bit more in favor of institutional investment in Japan as opposed to where it is today, with 70% sort of retail-level ownership.
We're hopeful that we will be able to achieve this, and that's something we're working on in the first half of this year. As I mentioned earlier, we're becoming very program-centric and efficient with regard to how we do translational medicine and R&D in the United Kingdom. We are looking to execute new partnerships, but progress existing partnerships, and we expect these to generate major milestone income events for us over the coming years. As I mentioned just before, we're looking to build a Japan commercial pharma unit, one that's right-sized for our organization so that we can make a difference for patients in Japan. If I think about our 2030 vision, it can be summed up in 5 bullet points. Novel medicines on the market globally through our collaborations with major partners.
A commercial business in Japan based on a combination of in-licensed products and, in time, our own products. A broad, deep, and sustainable pipeline with significant potential in the future. Rapidly growing sales, cash flow, and profits. A leading biotech in Japan driving innovative medicines to patients. That concludes my presentation today. Thank you very much.