Everyone, welcome to Room C and D this morning. For our next presentation, we have AbCellera Biologics and presenting is Andrew Booth, CFO. Take it away.
Thanks very much. First of all, I want to extend my thanks to Brian and Jolyon for hosting this event every year, and also real congratulations to Ian Mortimer and Sherry and the entire team at Xenon for some great results. Even more impressive, which you might not realize, is that Ian did that entire presentation without seeing the slides whatsoever, because there's no slides up here, so he's, that's pretty impressive. So first of all, the regular disclaimer: I will make some forward-looking statements, and please refer to the SEC documents for full disclosure, and we'll move right into it.
Okay, so AbCellera is a company out in Vancouver, and when you look at how you build a biotech company, actually, some have said, and Carl, by the way, Carl expresses his regrets on not being able to make it here today, so you'll have to suffer through me and these presentations. But as Carl has sometimes said, you know, if you want to create a major biotech company, it's quite easy: you just develop a blockbuster drug. Of course, that's a pretty hard thing to do, and in our way, a way to simplify it is there's only two really ways that we know about how we achieve that. The first would be that you have some unique insight into biology, and if that insight turns out to be true, then you can develop a great blockbuster drug.
The second is to, if you can rely on somebody else's insight into biology, where they have failed to find a molecule that can deliver that biological insight, then that is not a biology problem, that's a technology problem. That has failed, the capabilities that are out there have failed to find that drug, and it is by investing in those capabilities and technology that you can perhaps drug the undruggable and certainly tackle this productivity problem we have in developing drugs, which is that they cost a lot to develop, they take too much time, and they fail too often. So it has been our approach, of course, at AbCellera to do this, to try and tackle this problem, which is to develop these novel solutions to these challenging problems.
How we've gone about that is we've developed what we would call an engine, so we've invested about $500 million to date in building the best capabilities from target all the way to the clinic, laser-focused on discovering therapeutic antibodies. We have—I will go into basically all of those investments that we've made and how we are using that capability in the next few slides. So, as I mentioned, we've invested about $500 million into all of the capabilities to go from target all the way to the clinic. That is—those are investments in technology, in teams, and in infrastructure, including all the way from the CMC process development, GMP manufacturing. On this slide, you'll see on the right-hand side a facility that we're building.
It is at the moment built in Vancouver, but we now are doing the tenancy improvement, the equipment installation, qualification, in order to do our first batches in this facility in late 2025. What we have been doing over the last number of years, AbCellera, about four years ago when we went public, we were about 100 people; today we're about 600 people, we've been heavy in growth mode, building up the teams and the capabilities and investing in the technology and platform. We now have the teams in place that we need in order to execute on our vision. Next year is the last major year of capital expenditure, which is really spent filling out our lab and office space and also this CMC and GMP capability that you see in this photo.
That is when we say—and we mentioned this on our last earnings call—we are moving from being in building mode to being in using these assets, which by the end of next year will finally be complete. Now, how do we take that technology to the market? We've been building the part—the first is when you have this technology, we have been selling access to that technology, where a customer or a partner will come to us with their insight into biology, typically where they have maybe struggled and failed to find an antibody that delivers that biological insight. We have provided our capabilities, and we don't do that on a fee-for-service basis. While we do get paid upfront, we extract the majority of the economics in the form of participation in the success of that molecule.
That is through the participation in downstream milestones and also notably a royalty position. When you make that decision on where your economics, how you realize the economics out of your programs, you really want to make sure you're focusing on the quality of the programs that you do. So we have a very stringent criteria about how we select which programs we even take a look at, and that's why we're solving not for volume of programs, but for the quality of programs.
Programs where we believe in the biology, where we believe in the commercial opportunity and the unmet medical need, where we believe in the development pathway, where we believe in also the viability of making a commercial product with cost of goods, administration, delivery, and also very notably that we believe in the capability of the partner, that they really are bringing something to the table, they've got an established track record of developing a drug, and that they have the capital needed in order to take that molecule through to the clinic and ultimately to patients. We've negotiated over 200 such programs. We've started over 100 of those, 87 of which in the early days not all of them had downstream participation, but 87 of them do have downstream participation in the form of either milestones or royalties, most notably royalties.
You can see that they range across a broad therapeutic landscape from oncology, neurology, neurodegenerative disease, etc. In addition, we have done some work in animal health where, of course, the development path is much quicker, but the payout is, of course, much, much, much smaller. We've also reported on in our 10-K the progression of these as far as we know them through preclinical and then ultimately into Phase 1. The portfolio itself is still very early, very difficult for investors actually to get their head around how to exactly value this, but recognize that it is a very valuable thing in the long run.
It's still drug development, so these royalties will take a decade to really materialize, but when they come in, they're at 100% margin, and it looks kind of like Royalty Pharma's P&L, but without the giant balance sheet because we have not used cash in order to buy these royalty positions. We have used our technology and capabilities in order to buy—in order to establish them. I spoke a little bit about strategic partnerships or the fact that we're very selective about who we work with. You can see here some companies where Lilly, AbbVie, Regeneron, Novartis—so very well-enabled drug discovery companies. They typically will come to us on the very hardest problems that are out there, and that is what we generally focus on with these partners. We're really—we are really concentrated on expanding those relationships.
We have been working on a T-cell engager platform, which I'll talk about shortly, solving some of the biggest issues or some of the trickiest issues for antibody discovery and engaging and activating T-cells without initiating a cytokine expression that could lead to cytokine release syndrome. We also have a very interesting model where we went from taking partners, engaging with partners strictly in a fee-plus-royalty model to negotiating a complete co-ownership of the drug. So we have a number of drugs where we have a 50% ownership of the drug right from the get-go, and the right but not the obligation to invest in the future drug development in order to maintain that position. And we've also done some work on company creation, and most notably there's a company here at Bloom Burton that often gives us some accolades called Abdera in antibody radioisotope conjugates.
We helped as a co-founder of that company to get them up and running quickly, and with a handshake we're able to get our antibody discovery platform, use that antibody discovery platform to have them quickly develop antibodies, and they have gone with the expectation that at some time in 2024 they'll be bringing their molecules into the clinic. They've gone from company creation to going into the clinic in about three years' time, which is, you know, I think we've really tried to facilitate that speed in getting them to the clinic. So in addition to the partnership business, the co-development business, and getting this portfolio, we also have been moving into developing some of our own assets. We find ourselves in a very enviable capital position with about $1 billion in available liquidity.
That is a mixture between about $800 million in cash and equivalents, as well as over $200 million in commitments from the Government of Canada and the Government of British Columbia to continue to co-invest in both our facilities buildout and advancing a number of programs on our own steam through preclinical and IND enabling studies, as well as phase 1 to be conducted here in Canada. We have 13 molecules in the clinic with our partners, and those are molecules that will have royalty positions associated with them already. That number continues to grow. We have two programs of our own which have moved into development candidate and to development candidate and into IND enabling studies, and I'll talk a little bit about those two in a minute. On the internal pipeline, we have started a total of about 19 programs.
They're a mixture of targets working on these difficult targets or programs working on difficult targets. We generally would classify these as ion channel and GPCR targets. So, very well-known biology, coming back to the first slide, that there was no insight into biology required. Many people know about these targets but have been unable to find antibodies that deliver the therapeutic benefit of that insight into biology. So we have been turning our capabilities to such difficult targets. You would say GPCR antagonist, GPCR agonist, and ion channel have some of the most difficult discovery problems in antibody discovery, and we have reason to believe that we will be successful here. If successful, these will be first-in-class molecules against large unmet medical needs that have eluded the best of the best of antibody discovery over the past couple of decades.
In addition, we have quite an effort in the T-cell engager space, typically in engaging CD3. We have a very large and well-characterized panel of CD3 engagers that both engage, activate, and enable cell killing. We have actually shown, and there were some posters down at AACR last week, a number of posters that I recommend anyone with interest to check out that show that we can decouple cell killing of tumors from cytokine release almost entirely. This has been a real problem with the scarcity of CD3 antibodies that are out there because it is a notoriously difficult target to find antibodies against.
So we've been particularly successful there and have said that in 2024, we would anticipate doing a deal with a large pharmaceutical, a large pharma partner in a T-cell engager deal in either oncology or in autoimmunity, where T-cells have got real promise in delivering some therapeutic benefit. In addition, here you'll see one kind of lone internal development program in infectious disease. This, of course, was our work, which we started on our own steam around COVID and a couple of COVID antibodies that were eventually commercialized by Eli Lilly and delivered to over 2.5 million patients, saving tens of thousands of lives. So now getting to those internal programs that we have, we have got ABCL635 and ABCL575. So these are the first two molecules where we have advanced a candidate to advance the program to a development candidate.
We are in IND enabling studies for both of these with the intention of bringing these molecules to the clinic in 2025. We have received some funding from the Government of Canada and Government of British Columbia, as I mentioned, to take these right through the end of Phase 1, and I will go into a little bit more detail about each of these in the next slides. ABCL635, we're very excited about this molecule. It's against one of the ion channel GPCR class of targets that I mentioned previously. It is in a condition for metabolic and endocrine disease, which we would believe has a peak sales opportunity of well over $2 billion a year. It'd be a first-in-class drug for an antibody in this case, in this condition.
We're being, you know, deliberately a bit vague about exactly what the condition is, but we would expect to release that information when we're obligated to do so with running our clinical trials. And that likely is going to be at the first dose of a patient, which we would anticipate would be roughly about a year from now, so sometime in the middle of our Q2 of 2025. So this is a very exciting program to be putting forward, and we look forward to sharing the details at a later date or more details at a later date. The other program we have is called ABCL575. This is an interesting situation where a few years ago we entered into a collaboration agreement with a company called EQRx, who was interested in pursuing a fast follower model for best-in-class medicines against validated biology. That was a co-development program.
I mentioned that's one of the ways we bring these assets to the market. We co-owned this molecule with and development program with EQRx. They hit some headwinds with the markets and eventually were sold to Revolution Medicines, and this molecule then reverted to us as per the terms of that agreement. We have disclosed what the target is here as EQRx had already disclosed it in their own documents. It's against a target called OX40 Ligand. It is following a molecule developed by Sanofi, which is a molecule that they purchased from Kymab in inflammation, and specifically their lead indication is in Atopic Dermatitis. What's quite exciting is that this pathway is actually relevant for other conditions in inflammation such as Multiple Sclerosis, Ulcerative Colitis, COPD, and asthma, and has the potential to be a giant class of drugs.
We would believe there'd be several molecules that will get to the patients following this pathway. Sanofi has just released recently their phase two data showing significant dosing improvement over the standard of care today to quarterly dosing and also great clinical outcomes from their phase two data. So very exciting, a very exciting molecule. It is one where probably the right path for this molecule is to do a multi-armed, quite large phase two clinical trial. And honestly, AbCellera is probably not the right sponsor for that program. So another reason why we disclose what the target is here is that we would anticipate partnering out this molecule relatively early, sometime in phase one, and certainly for a partner to take this molecule through to a large phase two clinical trial. So just in closing here, and I'll be able to leave some time for questions afterwards.
We are continuing to invest and finalize the investments we've been making in building these best-in-world capabilities that go from target to the clinic. We are now at the point where we're moving from building that capability in order to using that capability both to the benefit of our strategic partners and for our own internal pipeline. What we expect to see over the next year or so would be the completion of that work and, like I mentioned, in 2025, running our first GMP batches through our manufacturing facility. Already in 2024, we would anticipate using some of the CMC and process development capabilities for developing our next drug candidates in our own cell line. For our first two molecules, we have needed to use a CDMO because our own capabilities were not in place.
We are also particularly encouraged by seeing a tailwind of having those capabilities here in Canada, given some geopolitical tailwinds that are making non-China-based capabilities and assets in producing biologics more and more attractive. We're hoping to also be benefiting from that for ourselves and for our partners. We continue to see a portfolio of partnered programs advance. Most recently, we signed a deal with Biogen, a one-target deal, which we're very excited about starting in this year. We would expect other partnerships to follow, including in the T-cell engager space. We have been talking about the T-cell engagers both at SITC and at AACR for the last number of years.
It is in 2024 when we anticipate to do the first of potentially many deals on that platform, licensing out the CD3 engagers with whatever work needs to be done in the tumor targeting antibody, perhaps even if we do the discovery ourselves. We also have a multi-specific platform that allows us to generate bispecifics or trispecifics if co-stimulation is desired in a partner's program. In addition, we will do everything necessary to advance ABCL635 and ABCL575 through their IND-enabling studies to be on track for IND in 2025. And we would expect another, at least one development candidate moving forward in our internal pipeline. And you would expect that to be in the ion channel and GPCR space for a first-in-class drug against one of these challenging targets. So with that, I'm happy to stop and take any questions I might have.
Thank you, Andrew. Do we have questions? Yeah.
Am I correct in my calculations that the cash reserves approximately equal the market cap of the company? Am I completely crazy to think that that's wrong?
So yeah, I think the capital story of AbCellera or the market cap story of AbCellera has been, well, character building over the last couple of years, I would say. But at the moment, we're at about $1.2 billion in market cap or somewhere between $1.2 billion and $1.3 billion. And as you mentioned, we have available liquidity of over $1 billion, which actually has been so you're correct in that observation. I'd say with the portfolio and the assets and the cash, and actually something that has been resonating with investors who would like to get some exposure into biotech, is that these assets we've built, the royalty portfolio we have, the technology we have, the intellectual property position, the teams, and even the buildings and whatnot, which we own outright, more than protect the downside of an investment into AbCellera.
And yet we have this portfolio of internal assets and a proven capability to generate first-in-class assets against some of these difficult targets, success to any one of which could be worth three times the market cap of the company today. And we have a pipeline of them that are coming out from our capabilities. So there's a lot of upside with a very limited downside given the assets and platform that's there in the company. And sometimes that resonates with investors who are looking to get that exposure to buy or more broad exposure to biotech without the binary risk associated with maybe a single asset company.
Any other question? Yeah.
This is a question around your GPCR. It's a very highly competitive marketplace. There's hundreds of drugs out there targeting everything from Type 2 diabetes to whatever, right? How are you going to differentiate your program versus what's already out there and pretty well ahead of you?
I think there are a number of small molecules against GPCR and ion channels that have, as Ian had mentioned, even in his work on epilepsy, I think what we've seen is often there can be safety profile issues related to those small molecules, which typically is a good candidate for an antibody if you can find an antibody with those same therapeutic characteristics where they could be heavily differentiated on safety. Often in many of those issues with safety, we have seen that molecules have been kind of dose limited because of limiting out the safety issues as well. So not only a much higher safety profile because there's still a lot of room to go on dosing, that we would expect to see superior efficacy as well. So I think that would be kind of a caricature of how we'd expect to differentiate on those.
Yeah. Okay.
Just on the cash burn topic, you've talked about 600 staff, so that means at least $100 million a year. You also talked about spending money on labs, office space, and GMP facilities. What's your guess as to how much cash you're going to burn between now and the end of 2025?
Yeah. Maybe I'll slightly reframe the question. So what we've mentioned in our statements is we have more than enough capital for the next three years and actually an opportunity where we won't need to raise capital again because I think that's really the heart of the question. One of the reasons we would say that is because we do generate revenues from research fees. And in addition, you look at the types of deals that are being done out there and out-licensing, not just assets, but also some of the building blocks such as the TCE platform we have. There's another number of deal comps out there where they're getting eight-figure upfronts in order for in early discovery and preclinical deals, which we would expect to be able to do as well with our T-cell engager platform.
So that actually really mitigates the cash burn that we have. In 2024, actually, our operating cash usage was well under $100 million. And our CapEx was about $70-$80 million. In 2025, sorry, that was in 2023. In 2024, we would expect our operating expenditures to be very similar to what they were in 2023. As I mentioned, we've completed building the team and have the staff on hand that we need to move forward. And it's our last year of our CapEx build. So we would expect CapEx similar to what we had last year in the tune of $70-$80 million and then in 2025 to drop off significantly after that. So I hope that answered the question. Go ahead.
Sorry. The same question indirectly is said. You've spent $500 million year to date or to date, if you wish, you're going to spend another roughly $200 million in round figures or more. So effectively, to keep the tax man at bay, I assume you're going to have tax loss carryforwards of roughly $800 million-$900 million. Is that correct?
We have actually very few carryforwards because we have had historical profitability really related to the success we had with the COVID molecules that were licensed out and sold by Eli Lilly. So actually, we have very few net operating losses. And if you look, we have more cash on our balance sheet than we have ever raised in equity. And that is from having success of charging upfronts and research fees for our existing programs and all the partners since the beginning of AbCellera. And you will notice this, actually, if you look at our cap table, there's still a very high concentrated ownership and management because there were very few equity-raising rounds in the history of the company.
In addition, over the last few years, we enjoyed a significant number of royalty payments from our work on the COVID molecule, which, among other things, in validating the technology, in validating the speed with which we could do this in arguably the most competitive drug development project ever, we were able to fill up our balance sheet and provide for ourselves this enviable cash position we see right now to continue this investment forward into the future years.