Hi, everyone. Welcome to the third day of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. My name is Luka Kachukashvili. I'm an associate here in the healthcare investment banking team. It's my absolute pleasure to welcome AbCellera Biologics. Joining us is Carl Hansen, Chairman, CEO, and President. With that, handing it off to you, Carl.
Thanks very much, Luca. Thank you to JP Morgan for inviting us to participate this year. It's actually our first time at JP Morgan. I think like others here, I could express that it's terrific to be back in person meeting people and feeling the energy of the sector. Before I begin, I just wanna draw everyone's attention to our disclaimer about forward-looking statements. Please look at our filings with respect to that. With that, get into the presentation. AbCellera was founded about a decade ago in 2012 to take on a big, ambitious, and bold company-building and technology development project.
Basically, to try to assemble people first, technology, infrastructure, data science, and operations to build an antibody discovery and development engine that can make it easier, faster, more efficient, cheaper to get from a target, from an idea, right through to clinical development. We have been working on that now for 10 years. We're not finished, but we've made a huge amount of progress. Through that 10 years, I've become increasingly excited and convinced that this is the way that we can deliver huge value to the ecosystem.
Today, I'm not going to have the opportunity and the time to get into the details of the technology or, you know, various details of the business, but rather wanna take the opportunity to share with you what we think the opportunity is, what the strategy is, and how we think this effort can do a lot to move the needle for the productivity of antibody-based therapies. My hope is that after this, some of you will be as excited about our business model and our strategy as we are. What I've learned over the last two years is for that to happen, we actually have to have some common ground.
This first slide is supposed to highlight to you what is the common ground that you need to believe deeply if this is going to be a company that you're interested in and that you can really understand the business model. And those are, of course, on the slide here. The first is the hypothesis. Behind every business model sits some idea or some hypothesis, and our hypothesis is that hard work and sustained investments in technology can move the needle and make drug development more productive. We believe that very strongly. I think there's lots of good examples in the ecosystem, but ultimately, you can't prove this till you've done it. It's an article of faith, and it's something that sits below the business model.
The second one is that if you want to build a truly great company to create long-term value, the best way to do that philosophically is to start by focusing on building a company, a technology, a capability, the processes that can generate more than one drug, rather than trying to start by trying to hit the home run and get a blockbuster out there. Build a great company and good things will happen, and ultimately, you'll be able to have multiple shots on goal and get success that drives you for the long term. That's what we've been doing. I think you'll see, both that hypothesis and that philosophy woven through, the following slides. Before we begin, I just wanted to maybe set the stage and share with you how we think about drug development in a very simplistic way.
Drug development really is three things. We have one step, which is ideation. This means coming up with the target, the concept, the mechanism of action that we have conviction will allow us to treat a disease and relieve suffering and help patients somewhere else. This first part, I would say, is the thing that we do most poorly as an industry, and that most failures are ultimately because we got the science wrong, and we set off in the wrong direction. It is the domain of science, of academia, of the private sector. We're getting better and better all the time, but this is a big problem and not a problem that it's obvious a company of our size or that technology can immediately solve. This is not a place where we have developed special capabilities.
Once you have that, the second piece is to take that idea and then turn it into an actual product. The composition of matter, the data, the filings, the actual vial product that can get you to the start of clinical testing. We call that the drug creation step. The third piece is, of course, to take that drug and move it through clinical trials and see if that product actually works. If you think about it and compare drug discovery to other industries, this is a very strange ecosystem. The reason is that you typically spend, you know, a huge amount of time trying to come up with the insight. You spend anywhere from two-four years and maybe $30 million, $40 million, $50 million developing or inventing the product, creating the product.
You're going to spend 8-10 years and maybe $1 billion testing that product before it ultimately gets to the patients and you can make any revenue. That's much different than most sectors where you can have minimal viable products, and you can iterate, and you can try things and fail. In this sector, it's important that you get that product exactly right. We would argue that that drug creation step is also the place where there has been a chronic lack of attention and lack of investment. The reason for that is highlighted on this slide, and it is that if you look at the costs of development, they are huge and the timelines are huge, and you look at the success on the commercial side, and there's a big prize at the end if you happen to be successful.
Because of that, the bigger companies are really focused on development. They're great at that. It requires scale, and they're focused on the commercial side. While they do work on getting better at generating the products, they haven't taken a deliberate effort to think, "How could we do this best? Could we refresh it? Could we build something that actually works better?" On the flip side, smaller companies have neither the time nor the business case, nor the capital to actually solve that problem. As a result, it's been stranded, and no one has really been making the investments. We also had the insight that this is the place where we think technology can make the biggest difference.
Starting in 2012, when we founded the company, we recognized the world had moved a lot since the basis of therapeutic antibodies had been laid back in the 90s. The first antibodies were done with hybridoma. You know, at that time, PCR was sort of available. You couldn't really sequence genes, you couldn't synthesize genes, there was no single-cell analysis, and no one had a computer. Today or 2012 and today, we have better tools at our disposal, and we believe that that is a place where if you took a long view and really did the hard work, you could make something that works much, much better.
It's from that view of the ecosystem and that insight that we set our strategy 10 years ago, and it's a strategy that has been consistent and that we haven't changed in that time. People often think of strategy as being something that you hide, and it's tricky. This strategy is simple, and it's right out in the open. The first piece is do the hard work, take a long view, invest, and become the best in the world at going from an idea to a drug that is ready to go into patients, focused entirely on therapeutic antibodies, defined both as monoclonals and even bispecifics and other modalities.
The second part of the strategy is to use that capability to build a large and diversified portfolio of stakes in future therapies, and to do that through a variety of different models of partnership across the industry. The first part of that strategy is what I would say is the big technology project that encapsulates what we work on at AbCellera, and it represents roughly two-thirds of all of our capital allocation historically and likely going forward for the next few years. What this is about is taking best-in-class technologies, investing in infrastructure, investing in building high-performing teams and building up ex-expertise, and integrating those together to create an engine that works beautifully to go from idea to drug moving into the clinic, and that can respond to essentially any challenge that is thrown at us from our partners across the industry.
A key part of that is managing not just to have good technologies, but figuring out how do they fit well together, and how do you impedance match the various steps so that if you make an improvement on one step, you reap the reward on the other step. We have been working on that now for 10 years, and we are, you know, not yet complete, but we have taken it far enough that we believe we now have best-in-class capabilities right up to identifying clinical development candidates, and we continue to work on forward integration towards translational science, CMC, and GMP. Ultimately, the functional objective here is to be able to go from idea to clinic at twice the speed that is typical in the industry.
We are aiming to be able to do that in anywhere from two-three years, depending on the program and the target. We want to be able to unlock new opportunities to solve the unsolvable and open up new target space. We want to do that at state-of-the-art quality, so that we have the very best datasets, the very best molecules moving forward. Probably the hardest part is to invest in the data science and the integration and the facilities and capacity and teams to do that at an unprecedented scale. In the future, we would like to be able to do not 1 IND per year, not two, but dozens of INDs per year. That's an ambitious forward-looking objective. If you do that, we believe that can create huge value for the industry and for partners.
Value from this engine can be captured really in three ways. The first is in speed. If you do just a financial analysis and look at the discounted cash flows of an approved product, you'll easily convince yourself that it is worth well over $100 million in net present value for even an average product, if you can accelerate the timeline from a year. Save a year, and you've created $100 million in value. Perhaps a bigger value creator is that if you recognize that you're in a competitive industry and many people are working on the same programs, to get from start to the clinic first means that you're likely to get a larger market share, and typically, that will result in billions of dollars of extra revenue to that particular product.
A second dimension, of value creation is to find the areas of therapeutic antibody discovery that have proven to be intractable, where there's obvious, opportunity and good targets available, but where the technologies have not been up to the task of finding the right molecules. There, in areas such as GPCRs and ion channels, in certain bispecific modalities, and other classes of targets, we believe there's at least $100 billion of potential opportunity that could be unlocked. Of course, that requires a heavy lift in being able to do things that the industry has not been able to do easily or at all before.
Lastly, a big theme in our company is figuring out how to bring this to the world and level the playing field for smaller companies that don't have access to that. By doing that, expand the ecosystem and make it easier for them to move their ideas and their innovation forward. We estimate that for a small company, it would save them at least $50 million in the cost and time and effort to get to the start line, and instead allow them to develop their drugs on our engine and focus on the thing that is really valuable to that particular company.
The second part of our strategy then, having built, or being near complete in building this first generation of this antibody discovery engine, is to use that with partners to build a large and diversified portfolio of stakes in future antibody therapies. We're not dogmatic in how we do that, so there's not one deal structure. Over the years, we have done a variety of different partnerships and deals and value creation programs that fall roughly into three buckets, and they are listed here. The first is standard discovery programs. The second are co-development programs, where we have a shared ownership position in those assets. The third are pre-partnered programs, which are wholly owned assets that come out of some of the long-range R&D projects that we've been working on. I'll take a moment to go through each of these.
The first of these is what we call discovery partnerships. Basically, the way this works is that partners come to us. These can be large pharmaceutical companies that have found that there's a problem in discovery that has been difficult to overcome and they need help. It can be small companies that have the idea and the science and the people, but haven't got the capabilities to get that started. We do a diligence on the target, on the teams, we strike a deal, and then we take their information and their target in-house, we apply our capabilities, and we send back to them the candidates or the lead molecules or the final development candidates that they need to get to a value inflection for their particular business or their particular program.
We get paid for the upfront work, so the marginal cost with some profit is covered, and then the vast majority of our position is connected with downstream payments that typically are milestones, clinical milestones, and royalty positions on the ultimate sales of those products. The way to think about this deal structure is this is a deal structure where we have a high volume of deals. We've done just over 60 program starts like this that have downstream payments. The royalty positions are low to mid-single digit royalties, so think 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%. The return on investment is very high, near the infinite. The work is paid for, and we keep an upside. This is spreading wide and shallow across many programs to make a business.
In the long run, if you do any type of reasonable analysis and probabilities, we believe is going to blossom into a business that creates great cash flows at a 100% profit, but it's something that happens way out, and there's no one program within that portfolio that really moves the needle for the business. It's a diversified portfolio strategy. We have a second class of deals that we call co-development programs, and these are similar to the others. They're, again, partner-initiated. The target is picked by the partner. In this case, we have an option, but not an obligation to carry 50% of the financial cost at various stages of development. If we do that, then we maintain a 50% ownership position in those programs. These are another way to build the portfolio.
They are deeper investment and also deeper stakes. We have started this relatively recently, but there are some that are now starting to mature, and we're excited to be sharing some of that, over the coming 12 to 18 months. Lastly, we have been working on long-range technology development projects to open up areas of therapeutic discovery where we believe there's not just one target or one opportunity, but a whole family of opportunities that could really be unlocked. Two areas of big focus for us have been in T-cell engagers, where we have spoken recently, at quarterly earnings calls, describing a new CD3 panel that we believe is now the broadest and best characterized that we're aware of in the industry.
The ability to combine that with our bispecific platform to quickly generate T-cell engager molecules that we think could be developed with better or best-in-class properties such as potent killing and low cytokine release. That's an area we're excited that we're having conversations here at the conference. That's picking up speed, and we intend to push that forward, both on the business development front and in terms of demonstrating it with launching programs over the coming year.
A second area is in GPCRs and ion channels, difficult target classes, multipass transmembrane protein targets, where there is a whole range of different, targets that are well-validated, either through genetic information or through clinical data with other modalities, but for which, it has not been easy to develop small molecules and where antibodies have proven either difficult or impossible to find. Three years ago, we set up, a very substantial effort on trying to solve those problems, and through that work, have been launching, efforts on a variety of different programs. We've worked on roughly a dozen to date. That is hard work. We're trying to do, in some cases, what has never been done before.
That work, we believe, is bearing fruit, and we also expect to be able to show results from that in terms of clinical development candidates in the coming year. The last one is work that many of you are familiar with in pandemic response, where we had initiated effort to have capabilities to move quickly in response to a pandemic and find therapeutic antibodies. Of course, that was brought into the real world in March of 2020 when we launched it in response to COVID-19, not once, but twice, generating two therapeutic antibodies that received Emergency Use Authorization through a very productive partnership with Eli Lilly. Bamlanivimab, which was the fastest and first therapeutic antibody for COVID-19. Next bebtelovimab, which, until recently, was the broadest and most potent antibody that had been discovered.
Bebtelovimab has recently been knocked off by the new variants, BQ.1.1 and BQ.1. We now have a third candidate, so perhaps even a hat trick, that has been discovered that is effective against BQ.1, BQ.1.1, and XBB, although we have not tested that experimentally yet, which is in the hands of Eli Lilly and that we're hopeful can be developed provided that there's a straightforward clinical development path for that. It really comes down to a regulatory question at this point. Through that work, in partnership, we have now built a portfolio in terms of things that have been started of 84 partner-initiated discovery programs. Roughly 60 of those include significant downstreams.
Seven partner-initiated programs that are co-development, where we have a potential to have a 50% ownership stake. In combination of the TCE programs, the COVID programs, and the GPCR and ion channel programs that are being done in connection with our long-range R&D projects, there are 15 pre-partnered programs that are at various stages of pre-clinical development. To date, that work has been done with 38 partners, many of which are shown on the screen. I think what I would draw your attention to is that this really represents the upper strata across the entire sector of biotech.
You've got some very well-established companies, some of the most enabled players, the Regenerons, the Lilies, and others, right down to companies right getting out of the gate in working with venture capital groups in founding companies and helping to make it easier to move ideas forward and build an ecosystem of innovation. That has resulted so far in seven molecules in the clinic and two authorized programs. Of course, those are the COVID-19 antibodies. In terms of progress on building the company and building the engine, which has been our priority to date, as a company, after 10 years, we have raised roughly $800 million in equity financing.
We have also added to that approximately $150 million in government financing and government contracts, a large chunk of that associated with our program in building CMC and GMP capabilities that are being integrated with the front end of our platform. Through that entire process, have managed to keep a very strong ownership position from insiders and from employees, about 30%. We have built the team now to about 500 people, the bulk of which are in Vancouver, but also the sites in Sydney, Australia, that I believe I mentioned, Boston and UK, Cambridge and Montreal. To date, we have 640,000 sq ft of facilities that are either built and operational or being built, which includes the manufacturing facility.
We estimate that we have made roughly half a billion dollars in platform investments and will continue to invest in the coming years. In terms of financials, to date, we have $860 million in cash and equivalents. We have great runway. We find ourselves in a strong position given what has been a difficult market. Remarkably, after 10 years of building aggressively a capability that we believe is going to be a source of value, we have managed to build up a $450 million accumulated surplus. Averaged over the life of the company, AbCellera has thus far been profitable.
Much of that, of course, driven by the success of the COVID drugs, which, in my mind, are a small part of our operations, but really highlight the power of this business model and the ability to create value by investing in technology and working closely with partners. That brings us to capital allocation. I'd say that this is a not accurate, but a rough cut at how we think about allocating capital and resources and time across the company. This is what has been happening since inception, and it's what we expect to be happening over the coming years. Roughly a third of our work goes into executing on the partnerships and expanding the partnerships that we have ongoing. That is the work that generates the top line of the earnings calls.
It's the work that, we report in terms of programs started and programs under contract, but it is a minority of the activity at the company. It's worth highlighting that consistent with the strategy, we spend most of our time building a great company and building capabilities with the belief that that is the basis from which we create value. Then roughly two-thirds is on platform, build-out. A big emphasis there on forward integration, translational science, CMC, and GMP, and of course, on the pre-partnered programs and the technology development efforts, to unlock new target space.
In terms of, you know, our differentiation and competitive moat, this is one of those cases where we believe that what is, what is defensible is the same thing that what is difficult to do and what takes a lot of time and capital and complexity to solve is the thing that is most easily defended. We have spent 10 years working on this. We believe that we are unique in that we are taking an approach to deliberately rethink and rebuild this part of the drug development process, bringing state-of-the-art technologies, building infrastructure, building up a high-performance team, and doing it in a way that will scale off into the future.
From that perspective, I think we have, you know, a many-year head start over the field, and that we will continue to invest in that and see this through, to building something that, you know, can make a difference for our shareholders and for our partners, and ultimately for patients. The reason, of course, that we do all this and the reason that we invest and the reason that we take on these hard things is that that is what is actually required to solve the real problem that patients have and the real problem that our partners have.
One of the things that we emphasize a lot in talking with early partners is that if you work with us, we will strike a deal where our success is tied intimately to your success and where your success is tied ultimately to the success of patients or the benefit of patients. To do that means not going halfway. It means not, you know, finding a panel of antibodies, and then you're on your own. It means being able to take an idea, work closely with partners, bring all the best technologies to bear, and move that all the way to a value inflection, which in our industry is about a drug that looks good and is ready to go into patients and ultimately getting to that point of product test-testing. We have, you know, been investing for 10 years.
On the partnering side, what we're really excited about this year is really being in a position to do fewer, higher value partnership deals, particularly with companies that are not enabled in this space, and provide a fully integrated solution so that we can get them to their value inflection point, and do that in a way that is fast and high quality and capital efficient, to help them better reach their goals. We think that's even more attractive in a market like we have today. With that, I'll thank you for your time and attention, and happy to take some questions.
Yeah. Let's open up the floor for Q&A. If anyone has a question, please raise your hand and we'll run a microphone to you.
Hi, Carl. Cliff Stocks, OncoResponse. Hey, on the GPCR approach, are you utilizing your antibody technology to tackle GPCRs or using some different technologies there?
Great question. One thing I'll highlight right away is that we are laser-focused on antibody therapies. AbCellera does one thing. We build technologies to make it easier to develop antibody therapies, and then we apply that to move forward programs. All this work is on antibodies. We have a group in Sydney that has really been set up over the last 3 years to start to identify and work on the difficult technology problems that stand in the way of generating therapeutic antibodies against ion channels, against GPCRs that have drug-like properties and that have the functional modulation that you would like. People often ask me, "Hey, what is the secret sauce there?" There isn't one thing. The reason these targets have been hard is a whole gamut of different problems. They're difficult to express, they're not immunogenic.
You have to screen deeply. You have to have the functional assays, it's putting together that lattice work of technology. The only way to know if you're making progress is to start running programs through them and see where you get stuck and how you can learn. Through that effort, we've done about 12, I'd say a little bit more than half are GPCRs. Some of those problems are doable. Some of them are extremely hard. We are now of the opinion that, you know, antibody agonists that are drug-like, you know, people have shown that we think we can do it faster, we think we can do it more scalably. Antibody, sorry, I mean, antagonists. Antibody agonists, even more difficult.
GPCRs, which some people believe Sorry, ion channels, which some people believe are almost intractable targets, we're now seeing enough progress that we believe that will ultimately fall as well. We're hoping to be a big contributor to making it, you know, more commonplace to think about those classes of targets for antibodies. Long answer, sorry.
Congratulations, Carl. We're very proud of you, being a British Columbian. How do you see the future for antibody discovering since you were one of the first ones to really foray and open the space the way you have done?
Thanks, Samuel. I don't think that I would characterize us as being one of the first ones in the space. I think it's worth, you know, giving some context. You know, antibodies are a relatively new class, so 30 years ago it didn't exist. The reason it exists is that there were companies that stepped up and did some hard technology development work that made that modality a thing and made it successful. Our mental model is, you know, drugs were small molecules. We moved up the technology ceiling, and then we saw this massive explosion of innovation. Today, we have 100 antibody therapies. It's a $180 billion market, maybe it's more than that. What we're seeing now is that it's getting harder and harder.
It's getting more and more competitive, as you'd expect, 'cause we've picked off the easy things. Can you get at the more difficult targets? Can you open up the ecosystem to have more people be able to participate? You know, that's gonna put pressure on the technologies. The way that I'd frame it is the future is going to be new modalities, opening up new target classes, being able to go where we haven't gone before. The real catalyst for that is going to be investments in technology, and of course, that's what we're setting up to do. It's only gonna happen through persistent investment and then through partnership, because there's no one company that can do all of this. There's a question in the back there.
Thanks. Can you just talk about the technology itself, the differentiation and the roadmap as you see next five years? What makes you sort of unique, and competitive?
Yeah, it's a great question. I get this question a lot, but... Some people phrase it a little bit differently. They ask, "Hey, what is the secret sauce? What is it that you're doing that makes you able to succeed where others haven't, that makes you faster?" My answer is always, "It's not one thing." Right? Going from an idea to a drug is not one thing. It's 1,000 things. Every program will run into different problems. In order to succeed at that reproducibly and do it at a higher level than the industry, what you need to do is have best-in-world technologies strung together and integrated.
I could point to a series of things in our, in our process or technologies where I believe that we have either definitively best-in-world capabilities, you know, single-cell screening would be one of those, or capabilities that are knocking on the door at best-in-world. The power comes from having scale, integration and the workforce and the facilities and, you know, the ability to actually prosecute those at scale. Dealing with complexity and data science is a big part of that. It's, I think it's a thing that makes us different.
If you look at other companies, you know, the validation of the platform, the scale, the size of the organization, the investment that's been done, the technology, maybe there's companies out there that have a few of those things or one of those things. It's not about having a few of those things, it's about having all those things. That's what we're aiming to finish.
Can you maybe talk more to the roadmap of the expansion.
Yeah. Oh, the roadmap. Over the past 12- 18 months, we've roughly doubled our workforce. Maybe we've added, you know, north of 200 people. The vast majority of that has been focused on the downstream elements. A lot of focus is on forward integration, translational science, building the CMC, building the GMP, and the other area is on the data science and integration and then scaling, so infrastructure and capacity. Andrew could talk a little bit about how that plays out financially. The roadmap for the next three years is to finish that.
You know, once we're there, and we continue to get, you know, the improvements that we're having on the upstream parts of the work on, we think that the real value is on having brought it all together to start to shrink timelines and be able to do things faster and more reproducibly. It, it's really a theme of integration.
Thanks. Super impressive. I was wondering, in terms of the broadness of the scale of your partners, it's quite diverse. Do you see that eventually focusing on, you know, the top tier in scale or the mid to top tier, or does that require different capabilities in your BD team, and do you see that scaling forward or focusing on just one of that type of company for partnerships?
It's a really good question. I don't see us moving to only one of the segments, and we would roughly segment it as you've got your very enabled partners and your much less enabled partners. Actually, there's a lot of diversity in those two buckets as well. In not enabled, you've got companies just being founded by a venture capital group, it's company creation. You also have mid-cap, large-cap biopharma that just haven't made any investments in this particular modality. You know, that's an area where we think there's a tremendous opportunity, and that opportunity has gotten bigger, and I think we've become more and more competitive because we have invested in the full integration.
Our focus right now on the business development front is really about finding those great companies and opportunities and setting up deals where we're not just providing a half measure, we're walking hand in hand for the full effort to get to the point where it gets into the clinic. That's probably the big focus. On the flip side, you know, with the bigger companies, there's tremendous interest in going where people have not been able to go before. A lot of that interest is driven by things like GPCRs and ion channels. You know, at this conference, every second meeting is about, you know, T-cell engagers and CD3 and bispecifics, and I think that's a big trend that we're well positioned to participate in.
It's kind of a non-answer, you know, I don't know if Andrew wants to add anything else to that.
No, you covered.
Okay. Sorry.
Thanks a lot.
I have a question regarding your COVID program. I was wondering if there's any light you can shed on the program moving forward, given the rise of new variants, subvariants, as well as any light you can shed on the regulatory path there.
Yeah, I if you don't mind, I'll take that one, Andrew.
Yeah, go for it.
You know, we've had two antibodies that were successful in two years. Bebtelovimab a few months ago looked as though it was holding against everything, and then suddenly, in an unpredicted way, BQ.1, BQ.1.1 came out. Within a couple weeks of it being evident that that was going to be the new variant that really swept across the world, we identified a third molecule that neutralizes both of those variants and everything else. We think we've got a great molecule. That molecule is now in the hands of Eli Lilly, and it's being worked on in preclinical development.
We think that the biggest opportunity for COVID long term is going to be for pre-exposure prophylaxis, so as protection for people that cannot be protected by vaccine because they're immunocompromised and for the most vulnerable. That, you know, that is something that we also think could be done, you know, year-over-year. We imagine a scenario where you're bringing a new antibody over again and again. For the current molecule, I think whether or not it goes forward is gonna be highly dependent upon what is the clinical path.
To be really specific, if you are required to do an outcome study that's going to take thousands of patients and take a year, that's gonna be tough because it's very likely that within a year, there's gonna be a new variant, and you've run a trial, and the target has moved in the interim. What we are hopeful and what I think makes a lot of sense scientifically is that you would pursue a path called immunobridging, where you're basically showing you've got an antibody, it is potently neutralizing live virus in vitro, and you do a PK, and you do a safety study, and you put the two together, and then you can get an authorization to use that. That would be a path that you could do again and again.
It's something that has been used before during the pandemic. It would allow you to bring forward a solution that could help patients in the, in the much nearer term than if you have to do that very big study. I, I think, you know, we're hopeful that that will happen, but we really don't know. If it does, you know, we might have an opportunity to have a hat trick in COVID. I hope that happens. At this point, it's really very much in the hands of our partner, Eli Lilly, that has been fantastic, and really, really a wonderful partner.
Yeah. It's maybe last one for me. Your revenue model is pretty unique. You know, you're kind of like preclinical CRO plus optionalities. If we look at the optionalities beyond COVID, what are some of the modalities and disease in your pipeline that you're most excited about among the ones that you've done? If we take a five-year, 10-year view, I mean, are we looking at a $10 billion market here?
Apart from the partner programs, there's two buckets. There's the ones where we have options, and there's the ones that are wholly owned that have come out of the R&D work that we're doing. We have said publicly that from both of those buckets, we expect some to get to the point of clinical candidate within the next 12 months. There's still some work to do, you know, we're confident enough that that's the signal that we're giving. Within those, there's a pretty wide range of indications. As you might expect, there's oncology, you know, there's inflammation. There's autoimmune disease. If you look at the GPCRs and ion channels, you tend to get things in pain, in metabolic disorders.
It's very broad. You know, a company of our size would not be able to move on all those fronts, but that's not our strategy. Our strategy is to work on things, get them to the point where we've created value, and then find the right partner that can take them into development. To the last part of your question, you know, I don't know about $10 billion, but there are definitely multiple targets in there where it would be widely agreed that if they're successful, ultimately to be drugs, and there's a big if there's a lot of road between here and approved drug, that those are, you know, potentially first-in-class, multi-billion dollar blockbuster drugs. That's right.
All right. Thank you so much. I think we're at time, so we can call it. Please join me for a round of applause.
Great job.