We're going to get started with the first presentation of the morning. Okay. Okay. So our first presenter I am very excited to present is Andrew Booth, the Chief Financial Officer of AbCellera Biologics. Andrew, take it away.
Do you put them on the screens? There we go. Perfect. Is this the—excellent. Okay. Real pleasure to be here today. Actually, I want to thank, first of all, Brian and Jolyon, and the whole Bloom Burton team for having this conference every year. It feels like being a Canadian biotech company, being able to present to a Canadian investor conference, it feels like family in here. I probably know half of the people in the room, so it's always a pleasure. Thanks, as always, for your support. A regular disclaimer here: I'll be making certain forward-looking statements. Please refer to all of our SEC filings. I'll start with a little bit of history with AbCellera. We're a company out in Vancouver. For those of you who've been following the story, you may remember we went public on the Nasdaq in 2020.
We went public at a CAD 20 share price, and our first trade, I think, was about CAD 70. We closed the day at, and basically, since that first trade, it's been a pretty character-building journey since then over the last good number of years. We ended the first day in the high CAD 50s, and then we're trading now somewhere about CAD 2.50. I have been to many of these investor conferences, including Bloomberg, over the years. Many of the very thoughtful investors that we encounter, they often ask, "Hey, in this volatile time, and certainly a time where the share price and all biotech, we don't feel particularly special." I think all biotech have really faced challenges in the public markets. We are actually some of the fortunate ones, and I'll come and talk about that in a minute.
Many of the thoughtful investors just ask, "Hey, how's the team being held together? How's the team doing?" We now are a team of several hundred people growing our capabilities and really focused still on discovery and now into development. When you ask how the team is doing, we are incredibly fortunate that we have a strong and visionary and charismatic leader like Carl Hansen, who is the founding CEO. Originally, the company came out of Carl's lab, as many of you know. Carl recently did a talk at—he was invited down to UATX, University of Austin, Texas, and gave a talk about an hour long to a series of undergraduates. I highly recommend that you go and listen to that talk. He's an excellent speaker and a real visionary.
I think when you listen to that talk, you'll really understand the vision of what the company is trying to do, what our employees get exposed to all the time through Carl's words. I'll try and just briefly summarize. He takes about an hour. I'll try and take five minutes or less. Again, Carl Hansen, UATX talk to listen to it. Really, he talks about four things. One is that we are at this watershed moment in biotech, that drug development is possibly one of the hardest things out there to do. The only thing harder is to try and build a company that sustainably develops drugs. There's a reason why we do it because of the incredible impact it can have on human life.
For the first point, that we're at this watershed moment, some of you may know that actually Carl and I met each other doing our undergraduate work in engineering physics at UBC many, many years ago. Carl draws this parallel to a historical moment in time with physics and the Solvay Conference in the 1920s. Everyone's probably seen this picture. It's sometimes published as the most intelligent picture ever taken. I think it's about 30 people. Over half of them have got the Nobel Prize. There's Einstein and Schrödinger and Marie Curie and Max Planck and everyone who are the names, the who's who that you hear about in physics.
Carl goes on to say, "Hey, if you were to take a Solvay Conference picture today or in biotech, it would be taken around today." All of those pioneers who understood the fundamentals of physics back in the 1920s that laid the groundwork for what afterwards was an explosion in productivity in the world of atoms and subsequently in microprocessors and the world of bits, all of the progress that we have been experiencing, that is what is happening today in biotech. Watson and Crick, of course, with the double helix. Watson is still around. Till and McCulloch. Till is still around in Toronto. Of course, Kary Mullis with PCR, the cloning IVF, the sequencing of the genome. All of these things have happened in our lifetimes.
That picture with Yamanaka for stem cell factors, Jamie Thomson, Jennifer Doudna, that picture for a Solvay Conference for biotech could be taken today. It is a sign of the incredible progress that we're going to be making over the coming decade. The big question is there's probably 10 seats missing that are still figuring out who those people are going to be that are going to contribute to this in the future. Carl goes on to talk about drug development, where we are really struggling in productivity. People would say it costs too much, it takes too much time, it fails too often. This is the challenge that we have in trying to develop a drug.
First of all, you're required to get this insight into biology and then go through the herculean task to deliver a molecule that actually or develop a molecule that delivers on that insight, manufacture it. Unlike in engineering, there's no such thing as minimum viable product. You have to bring this right to a product because it's going to go into humans. You have to have it ready for safety, efficacy. There is this Herculean task of clinical trials, which is not for the faint of heart. Only one in maybe 20 of these attempts even succeeds. The only thing harder than developing that drug is developing a company that develops drugs.
If you consider that, let's say, escape velocity of a sustainable biotech or pharma company comes when you've got a series of drugs and maybe a market cap over CAD 20 billion, there are only 35 companies that have done it. 29 of them are like 100 years old, or the majority of them are 100 years old. There are only six that have been made in the last 40 years. You have Regeneron, you have Vertex, you have Gilead, then it came Alnylam, and then you would say that BioNTech and argenx have done it, let's say, in the last 20 years. This is very rarefied air, maybe the most difficult thing that's possible to undertake.
Because drug development is inherently, you develop a drug and you do not have either the capabilities, maybe even the ambition, but certainly not the capital to go and do anything other than to sell that drug to a larger pharma who have already invested in the late-stage clinical trials, perhaps the commercial force is very difficult to try and go that full distance. The regular mode of investing and selling and company creation and exits are to bring those companies and those drugs to as much clinical validation as you can in order to sell them off. Very few companies that try even have the ambition to try and do what argenx has done, do what Alnylam has done, or Gilead, or Vertex in the last 40 years, Regeneron. That is something that we definitely aspire to do.
Especially speaking in front of a Canadian audience, there are very few Canadian companies who have tried. As many of you are aware, we're the only company or the only country, I think, in the G7, G10 maybe, that doesn't have a major pharmaceutical company. It is something that we're definitely aspiring to do. The data will tell us if we get there because we're going to take it one step at a time. Lastly, what Carl says in his talk is that we do this because these are actually miracles of modern science, that Keytruda can cure cancer, that even a drug like Dupixent can take what is a debilitating disease and make it tolerable or treatable. Somebody once said at a conference that while we're here, we're ambitious people, we're trying to do 100 things.
If you're sick, you're trying to do one thing. That really gets us motivated, I think, and keeps the company very healthy and focused. With that, I invite you to watch that talk. It's an excellent talk. Carl is really an inspirational leader. That gets us to where we are with AbCellera. Hopefully many of you are familiar with the story. We're out in Vancouver. We're about 600 people right now. We have been laser-focused on therapeutic antibody development. We have been investing in tools, technologies, teams, and infrastructure to go from target all the way to the clinic for antibody therapeutics. We started the company by providing this capability for our partners.
We would get paid for doing the work that we did, and we would also collect and participate in the success of the molecules that we discovered typically through downstream milestones and royalties, a very typical biotech model. We have done that at some scale, having done over 100 programs for our partners. The investments have been in the technology, the team, the infrastructure, the platform in order to do this scalably and repeatedly. We have done this with a good number of partners. Many of those names that you'll recognize have provided great validation for the platform and also capital for us to continue to invest. We have taken many, many molecules through early stage, through discovery, and handed them back to our partners.
A number of those, say 16, have made it to phase I clinical trials, most notably in those were the two molecules that we developed for Eli Lilly that were Eli Lilly's COVID molecules, antibodies, and that went on to treat over 2.5 million patients and, to by our estimation, saved hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of lives. The rest of the portfolio is still very early, so either in preclinical work, only a dozen or so molecules that are in phase I, and they continue to progress. We do have good disclosures on these molecules and this portfolio in our 10-K that I would point you to to find more details. Over the years, actually, we started by providing the capabilities in order to do the discovery. We would take increasingly larger positions in the molecule, so typically in the form of a royalty.
We then modified that to a co-ownership position where we'd own the drug 50/50. We have evolved that since in order to wholly own the molecules. The focus of the company right now is really in advancing that wholly owned pipeline. We have also made significant investments in the Vancouver area. If you go to Vancouver, hopefully you'll notice those investments. We have a beautiful lab office building where we have everybody in a single building. We also have a group down in Australia. Actually, Carl at the moment is down in Australia at an antibody development conference with the team down in Australia. We have also built a GMP manufacturing facility where we received some funds from the Canadian government in order to do that. That facility is nearly complete.
We will be doing our first runs, engineering runs at the end of this year, and our first runs that will be clinical batches in 2026. I would say that that project miraculously over four or five years is on time and only slightly above budget, which for a large project like that is saying quite something. The feedback that I get as well from investors is that it is great that we have the validation. They love it that we have turned our attention to developing our own pipeline because that is how you really develop value in biotech and in pharma. They also love our liquidity position.
We've been fortunate in the time when we went public and as well the economics we had on the COVID molecules to fill up our balance sheet, to have the wherewithal to take on this incredible task of developing drugs and moving them forward to the clinic. We've also negotiated with the government of Canada and the province of British Columbia some certain co-funding for us to advance a portfolio of assets through phase I and do the discovery, the development, the GMP manufacturing, and also the phase I clinical trials here in Canada. We have about CAD 650 million of cash on our balance sheet and close to CAD 200 million in the committed capital from these government funding sources in order to keep prosecuting these drugs. What we hear from investors is they love the cash position, and they know we're going to turn that cash into drugs.
The feedback I get is, "I sure hope you pick good targets and good things to work on." We have been holding our cards pretty close to our chest with regards to that over a good number of years. I am happy to say that in this quarter, we will bring our first two molecules to the clinic. When we select these targets, because target selection is so important, we actually have developed internally, I would say, quite a good framework for this. We have to love the science. It might sound obvious when you spell it out, but keeping yourself honest to all of these criteria is actually quite important. We have to love the science. The target biology we believe is very well validated, and we have an angle on why our capabilities can crack the scientific problem.
We have to like the commercial opportunity, a big market, ideally, or a market that is certainly worth the effort. We have to have an angle on the differentiation. Finally, there has to be a very clear clinical development plan. Normally that means for not very much money, we get some dispositive clinical data, typically in our phase I trial, that really tells us if we have something that is going to be a drug. It is difficult to get back to the fact that developing drugs is an extremely difficult task. It is difficult to get a perfect score in all four of these dimensions all in one. When you do, you know you have a really good winner. It's not always the case. There's usually one of these is kind of the weak element of any one of the drugs that we bring forward.
We are trying to be quite transparent and open about that. I think we can afford to do that because we are advancing an entire portfolio. If you have only one drug, you have to love it in all its entirety. If you have a portfolio, I think you can be a little bit more sober about what the opportunities are in front of you. We have, first of all, ABCL635. We have disclosed these first two molecules, ABCL635 and ABCL575, are going to reach the clinic in phase II or at least have a CTA applied. We are on track for that. Dosing would start in the third quarter. We believe that both of them are molecules that will find the first clinical results in the first half of 2026, fairly straightforward phase I trial.
For ABCL635, I would say we are going to the target is undisclosed, but I am happy to announce that on Thursday during our earnings call, we're going to finally disclose this target and we can start talking about it. We expect the patent to publish sometime next week, which is why if you were paying attention, you'd be able to figure it out on your own. Instead, we're going to disclose it at our earnings call on Thursday. It's a first-in-class antibody against a difficult target. We would say that's an ion channel and GPCR target. It's in the area of metabolic and endocrine. Just to be clear, not weight loss, just because everyone is developing things in weight loss. It is not in weight loss. We believe the total addressable market is north of CAD 2 billion.
This would have the opportunity to have a, let's say, blockbuster status. The development path, we're very excited about this one. The development path, we believe we'll have some great data that will give us a strong indication of not only its safety, but its efficacy in the phase I trial. Stay tuned on this one. In just a few days, we'll be revealing more information. The other one is ABCL575. It's an antibody against OX40 ligand. It's a molecule that we originally developed in partnership with EQRx, where their business model was a fast-follower model. They are, of course, following Sanofi's molecule amlitelimab, which is scheduled for a phase III readout focused on atopic dermatitis, but also is implicated in all sorts of other I&I conditions. They have a number of other phase II trials that are reading out in the coming quarters.
We will be bringing this in and hoping to have an opportunity to differentiate based on half-life. This one is where the opportunity for differentiation is probably the weakest of those four metrics that I mentioned before. Amlitelimab is going to be the leader here with this molecule from Sanofi. It is a molecule they purchased off of Kymab. We do believe because atopic dermatitis is such a gigantic market, there is going to be opportunity for this molecule, for subsequent molecules, and followers that could even themselves be blockbusters. Please stay tuned on this one. Probably most notably for this drug, we will be giving a quite comprehensive preclinical data package at the upcoming Society for Investigational Dermatology that is happening later in May.
With that, we have the beginnings of what I hope over the years as we come back here year in, year again at Bloom Burton will be the developing pipeline. We target to be bringing a couple of molecules into the clinic every year. That will start with disclosure of what our development candidates are and confirmation we've entered IND-enabling studies. We have a portfolio of some 20 programs internally that we have started. It's from that pool that we'll be selecting the most promising candidates under those metrics that I mentioned earlier to be bringing forward into preclinical studies and ultimately into phase I clinical trials starting here in Canada by filing the CTA. Just what we can expect for 2025, I realize I've flown through this presentation, but there's quite a crowd here, so we'll take some questions afterwards.
You can expect that we'll start these phase I trials for 635 and 575. You can expect our GMP facility to be complete. You can expect the disclosure of a couple of more molecules to IND-enabling studies. Our expectation would be that those molecules will be against this difficult target space, more typical of where our investment thesis has been in technology to find these first-in-class molecules against the ion channel and GPCR, particularly in the ion channel space. If successful, I would expect the R&D team to be quite enthusiastic of finding some of the first functional antibodies against ion channels. With luck, because it's still drug development, anything can happen. If successful, I think we'd have quite robust scientific disclosure about that because that'd be quite a feat of the engineering and biology and protein engineering that the team has done.
I think in the next 18 to 24 months, you can expect our phase I readouts. You can expect the next molecules to be entering into the clinic. With that, I'm happy to leave 10 minutes for questions.
Okay. Do we have any questions from the audience? We have about 10 minutes. People are rather shy this morning, I suppose. Maybe I'll just kick off with an easy one, but, well, what I hope is easy. So there's a lot of discovery programs you have in your pipeline. Do you have any thoughts about timelines for those, or is this kind of something you're keeping close to the chest?
As I mentioned, the internal pipeline, we have some 20 programs that we've started. We'd expect to be bringing, on average, or our goal is to bring on average two of those to the clinic every year. That means that we'll bring two to the IND to development candidate and IND-enabling studies at about that same pace. It's quite expensive to do the IND-enabling studies, invest in the manufacturing. We're optimistic that the next molecules will be manufactured in our own facility. I think the next one or two might still be manufactured at a CDMO in Asia, but the subsequent ones would be manufactured at our facility in Vancouver at the pace of about two a year.
Has your transition to doing your own programs had a negative impact on your collaborations and your partnerships? With your new facility, will you be producing on a contract basis for any of those programs as a field of the greenhouse molecules?
That's a great question. I would say that over the last four years or so, I think in 2021, we made a conscious decision to be focusing on strategic partnerships. That's typically with big pharma, the Lilly's, the AbbVies, the Regenerons. We're doing fewer of those, but our own internal efforts have not, I don't believe, have dampened those relationships at all. Quite the opposite. In some case, we've made an investment over the last number of years, and I didn't speak about it today, but in the T cell engagers. A couple of years ago, we turned our attention to developing and characterizing a portfolio of ways to engage T cells, largely through anti-CD3 antibodies. I think everybody agrees that for fighting cancer, it seems like T cells, radioisotopes, antibody drug conjugates are kind of the modalities of choice.
In T cells, what seems to be missing is a comprehensive portfolio for managing and activating T cells and also presenting them to tumor cells. We did a lot of that work on our own, including looking for more and more validation by pairing up with a tumor-targeting antibody and getting preclinical or animal data. Recently, that data and those efforts on our own caught the attention of AbbVie. We signed a deal with AbbVie that we announced just in this year for us to advance more in the T cell space on a couple of programs with them. Similarly, some of our programs, like the OX40 ligand, as an example, this is a program which likely is better under the stewardship of a company with a franchise in I&I to do the phase II, and certainly the phase III.
It's a molecule where many companies, big pharma companies, are looking at us. They're happy we're doing the phase I. We actually have a low cost of capital position to do the phase I here in Canada, thanks to the government contributions we have. With that clinical data, we'd be able to partner that. Many of those partners, the best place to look is places where we have those established relationships in order to—there's already a respect of the science and the rigor and the clinical development and the executive relationship to actually do that transaction. I'd say those things are all synergistic in the way we run the business, not competing. I think that we would see that also—I would be surprised if you didn't hear that same response from our partners, particularly in the difficult target space.
That's typically what our big partners come to us for. They come to us when they're stuck. Lilly, Regeneron, extremely expert, extremely qualified and smart people and experts in antibody discovery. They come to us when they get stuck on very difficult problems. If we have molecules against some of those indications, we cannot advance all of them ourselves. We would be happy to partner them with them. Because of our existing relationships, we can have earlier conversations with them. Absolutely, I would imagine that in the event of any such partnership, we would be happy to manufacture that molecule, and the partner would be happy for us to manufacture that molecule at our facility.
I'd say that certainly for those that we might out-license, but even more so for those strategic partners who've asked us to do the discovery, they're happy for us also to do the manufacturing. I'd say it is the plan that we will do the manufacturing, but only for antibodies where we have done the discovery, not on kind of a strict CDMO basis.
Got one more question at the background.
Joshi Ramanjulu, Apogee Pharma, two questions. What is the key differentiating aspect for your OX40 ligand project? I didn't catch it.
Yeah, I would say that, you're from Apogee, so you must know this molecule quite well, or the target. I'd say the key, as I mentioned, differentiation, because there are several molecules, including from Apogee and also from amlitelimab, obviously. The key opportunity for differentiation is going to be in half-life and so in dosing, so less frequent dosing. We would believe that as a monoclonal antibody treatment, so not in combination, that we may have a best-in-class molecule most different with the opportunity for differentiation in the half-life that we have. As I mentioned, we're revealing that preclinical data at the Society Investigational Dermatology later this month that will put a lot of the data around exactly what does that mean. There's still a question as to whether that's going to be important. Amlitelimab may, in fact, get quarterly dosing.
Once you have quarterly dosing, does it even matter if you're on semi-annual dosing or maybe annual dosing? We won't know that until we see the data. The data we would get from our phase I would be on safety, but also the PK data and give us a better indication if there is any angle on the dosing differentiation.
Second question, what are your thoughts on not going after the OX40 receptor rather than ligand?
Sorry?
What are your thoughts on going after the receptor?
Oh, the ligand instead of OX40. I think Rocatinlimab by Amgen is after OX40. Honestly, again, Carl has given a great talk about this. Our view on the biology is that if you block either of them, it should give the same or similar result. Rocatinlimab is also a depleting antibody, so it had other impacts because it's a depleting antibody. However, the science would suggest that if you block either, you should have the same result. We're going to see it in the data if actually that hypothesis holds true.
I think that's why one of the most important things that can happen for our own 575 program are the confirmations of that biology from the readouts of what Sanofi is going to be getting and what the competitive readouts are going to be, which is a different story than the first-in-class molecules, which we expect to be the caricature of the ones that come behind the OX40 ligand molecule.
Thank you all for joining this talk. Unfortunately, we're at the end of the time. If you have any questions, please find Andrew outside. Thank you, and please give me a round of applause.
Thank you.