Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for the Life Sciences Investor Forum. Our next presentation of the day is from InMed Pharmaceuticals. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides, and you can view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking "Book Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Eric A. Adams. He's the Chief Executive Officer and President of InMed Pharmaceuticals, which trades on NASDAQ under the symbol INM. Welcome back, Eric.
Great to be here. Thank you very much for the invite to participate, and I appreciate everyone taking time to listen to the presentation today. What I'd like to do is just basically introduce you to the company and its drug development programs. Starting off, of course, with the forward-looking statement. As a publicly listed company, it's important for the listeners to understand that we will be using forward-looking statements in this presentation. We are a pharmaceutical drug development company that is looking at a proprietary pipeline of small molecule drug candidates that target the endocannabinoid system, which are the CB1 and CB2 receptors. It's a really interesting approach to treating disease. These receptors are found throughout the body and are responsible for a number of different effects in the body and something that can be targeted to seek specific pharmaceutical or medical outcomes.
We have three candidates right now in our pipeline: one for Alzheimer's, one for ocular disease, in particular dry age-related macular degeneration, and in dermatology, we completed a phase two study in a very severe skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa, and I'll touch base briefly on that program. The company itself is segmented into two groups. InMed Pharmaceuticals is the bread and butter of the company. This is our drug development activities, where we have quite a bit of know-how in discovery, development, and manufacturing of compounds targeting the pharmaceutical market. We also have a commercial entity in the United States called BayMedica. I'll talk briefly about that. It's a way that we've leveraged our manufacturing know-how to manufacture rare, non-intoxicating cannabinoids for the health and wellness market. I'll just give you a brief update on what we're doing there.
I really want to start out by focusing on what the company is all about, which is the drug development programs. As I mentioned, we have three drug candidates. You can see here that INM-901 and INM-089 are still in the preclinical phase and advancing towards phase one clinical trials. I'll go into more detail of both of those. As well, I mentioned that INM-755 was tested in epidermolysis bullosa patients, and we're currently seeking partnerships for that. We do have the ability to screen other analog compounds in our pipeline, and we're seeking new applications for these types of molecules. I won't go into too much detail about Alzheimer's disease.
I think at this point, we've all been touched in one way or another by Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia, but it's currently understood that a buildup of amyloid beta plaques and tau protein tangles can cause a lot of the damage that leads to the progression of disease. It remains a very high unmet medical need, and while some products have been approved in this space, they haven't been able to reverse the disease. In some instances, they've been able to slow it down. I think there's still a really high need for new medications and new approaches in this field. For this purpose, we are developing INM-901, which is a preferential signaling agonist for the CB1 and CB2 pathways. It has other mechanisms of action as well in the PPAR signaling pathway.
What we've been able to do is compile quite a bit of early in vitro data that looks pretty exciting, and we've combined that now with a very extensive long-term study in vivo in the mouse model to really elicit what these effects are and understand better what role this drug might play in the armamentarium of treatments for this disease. I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about this animal study because it is a very good, very large, very long-term study, and we were able to glean a lot of information from this study. We used a well-characterized and validated model called the 5X FAD or 5X FAD mouse model, and this is an amyloidosis model where there's a buildup of amyloid beta in the brains of these animals that leads to Alzheimer's-like symptoms.
We had a very large study that included five treatment arms. Three of them were placebo and two of them were active drug treatments, and these animals were dosed for a very long period of seven months. We had done an earlier trial with a shorter duration of treatment, and we were very encouraged by that, so we decided to invest in this longer term to really understand what the effects of the drug actually are. Once these animals reached the age of nine months, we tested them to see how do normal mice behave in a series of behavioral tests and how do the diseased animals behave. If you have animals with disease who are treated with our compounds, how do they behave?
The goal here is to have the diseased animals that receive treatment behave more like a normal mouse than like a diseased mouse, and indeed, that's what we saw across a whole host of different tests. I won't go into too much detail about these, but these are a number of MESs and acoustic tests to really take a look at the behavioral aspects of the mice. Across the board, we saw, in many cases, statistically significant improvement in the diseased mice who were treated versus just the diseased mice who were untreated. We're very excited about that data, and we've shared that at a recent Congress for Alzheimer's disease. The mice were then sacrificed.
We took brain tissue and blood tissue and performed a large number of downstream analyses just to take a look at various markers for the disease to better understand what the potential effects of INM-901 was in this study. What I want to do is summarize for you some of the key findings that we have both from the in vitro and the in vivo studies. In a brain, you have these buildups of amyloid beta, which are depicted here by these large look like tumbleweeds. What we wanted to do is better understand what effects we were having with INM-901 that led to this improvement in their disease state and their ability to act more like normal mice. We classify this as four different effects that we're seeing. In the lower right-hand corner, the amyloid beta load was reduced.
We do see a reduction in amyloid beta itself, but we think this is probably the least interesting thing that we observed. I'm not going to talk a lot about that. There are other drugs that are approved to do this specifically, but we don't think that is where this drug had its best effect. What we did see as well is a reduction in neuroinflammation. Dementias, including Alzheimer's disease, are neuroinflammatory diseases, and this inflammation can cause all kinds of problems. We were able to measure a number of different biological markers of inflammation to detect that indeed the inflammatory aspect of this disease was directly addressed. We also looked at the neuroprotection. In the presence of the disease as well as in the presence of normal mice who received our compound, the neurons themselves were protected from aging and dying.
We think that's going to be a very important aspect to this drug treatment and something that we're seeking to better understand and explain. Also, really interesting is that we saw this neurogenesis and neuritogenesis. Now, what happens as neurons mature is they start to form branches, and these branches start to elongate, and that's really where the neurons start to talk to each other. In the disease state, dementia or others, Alzheimer's disease, what you see is, number one, and it's probably more an aging effect, is that these neurons, they are farther and farther apart. In some aspect, they're shrinking, but they're also, the communication between them is clogged up with the amyloid beta, tau proteins, or a number of different things.
What we saw in the treated animals with INM-901 is that, number one, we start to see more branching of the neuron, but we also see the elongation. They start to grow and become closer in proximity to each other, which we think could be playing an important role in the outcomes that we measured. On the left-hand side, the effects that we saw were a decrease in cytotoxicity, a decrease in neuroinflammation, an increase in neuroprotection, an increase in neurite outgrowth, an increase in neuronal function, and from a behavioral standpoint, an increase in their locomotion, their memory, and their cognition. In those aspects, they started to behave more like normal mice than diseased mice. We're very excited about the breadth of data that we have here.
It certainly opens the door for a lot of questions that we need to answer and look at more closely, which we're in the process of doing. Overall, this is something that we think is pointing towards a new potential treatment paradigm for people with Alzheimer's disease and with possibly other dementias. The profile of the compound, it's a small molecule that can cross the blood-brain barrier. It's difficult to emphasize this enough. This is a very important factor, of course, when the disease resides in the brain. In general, in the pharma industry, it's difficult to find compounds that safely cross into the blood-brain barrier, and that's what we saw in these early studies.
Keeping in mind that there are products approved for amyloid beta reduction that can cross into the brain, but they actually cause inflammation and bleeding, which we did not witness in any of the test subjects. It could be formulated orally, so it could be taken as an oral compound. As we said, it has multiple mechanisms of action, which we're looking to further elucidate in more studies. This is a summary of the data to date: positive trends in cognitive functions, anxiety-related behavior, and sensory responsiveness, the strong neuroinflammatory modulation. You can see in terms of the biomarkers, we tested a wide range of inflammatory biomarkers and had a positive effect in reducing these in these studies.
As I mentioned, we do reduce amyloid beta in the brain, which may be an interesting and even an important component, but that's not the most important thing that we think is going on here. Overall, the MRA data that we extracted from this study supports these improvements that we saw in cognition, memory, and neurogenesis. We're very excited about this program. We think there's a lot of potential here, and we look forward to the further development over the coming couple of years. The next steps are that we're continuing to look at additional measurements from the trial that was conducted. We're going to evaluate stress responses and cellular growth and survival. We have several ongoing manufacturing activities, which are important as a drug makes its way through the preclinical testing.
You need to also invest quite a bit in manufacturing of the compound and making sure that the manufacturing aspect is not a rate-limiting step as you advance the drug towards human trials. We are going to do some further receptor interaction mechanism of action studies, and we are planning to conduct a pre-IND meeting next year with the FDA to make sure that we are on the path and answering all the questions and collecting all the data that's going to be needed to move into human trials. This is also something that I think could be an interesting partnering opportunity, so we continue to explore those avenues. I'm going to shift gears now and talk about our next program, which is targeting the disease called dry age-related macular degeneration. This is an ocular disease.
Again, it's one of these diseases that are very common in the elderly, affecting almost 200 million people worldwide. Many people have heard of wet AMD, which is a different disease state, but dry AMD actually accounts for over 90% of all cases of this disease. There have been a couple of products launched in this area. They haven't seen a wide adoption. We think there's still a very high unmet medical need in this disease state. I won't go into too much detail. This is a disease of the back of the eye, the retina, and you can see what a normal retina looks like in terms of the different components: the retina itself, the photoreceptor cells, the retinal pigment epithelium, and the choroid layer.
What happens in the disease is that the retinal pigment epithelial cells and the photoreceptor cells are damaged, leading to this gap in your vision. The damage affects your ability to see in certain areas. That's really what we're looking to do. What we've been able to show with our product candidate, which is INM-089, is that this is able to improve the thickness of the layer of the eye where the photoreceptors are located. That's a strong indication in these early studies that you're improving vision. Much like in the brain with 901, 089 also has a very high neuroprotective effect, and it can protect the retinal ganglion cells, these nerve cells at the back of the eye that are responsible for vision. In the normal circumstances as well as in disease circumstances, we can provide neuroprotection to these specific cells.
Similar to the 901 program, we have ongoing CMC or manufacturing activities for both the active pharmaceutical ingredient, the drug itself, as well as how it's going to be delivered. It will be delivered as an injection into the eye, which is a very standard treatment in this disease. We are continuing to look at mechanism of action studies. We are well set for a pre-IND meeting next year. As with the 901 program, we think that this could be an interesting partnering opportunity for other companies to get involved. I'll touch briefly on our program called 755, which was a CBN cream that seems to have some very strong anti-itch effects. We looked at the patient population called epidermolysis bullosa, and this is a very devastating genetic skin condition where the layers of the skin lack integrity and are very easily damaged or torn or open wounds.
We looked at this disease for a number of reasons. We think that what we show in our preclinical studies was that CBN has the ability to be anti-inflammatory, to address itch, to address pain, to aid in wound healing. There's also an underlying reason that CBN itself can up and down-regulate different keratins in the skin, and these keratins, or the lack thereof, are what causes the most common form of epidermolysis bullosa. We wanted to look specifically at these patients. Now, when we went to a phase two study, the patients that were actually enrolled were all ED patients who had moderate to severe itch. We weren't able to really look at these other components of the disease, but we got very good and very encouraging data in non-wound itch. Itch is a very difficult condition for this patient population.
You can imagine if your skin tears easily or if it wounds easily, if you get an itch, you can't really do anything about it because you would be ripping your skin off if you tried to address that, if you tried to itch that. It is very interesting and a very important component of the disease. We had very good data that showed that INM-755 provided meaningful anti-itch activity beyond what just the control cream would do. We had a very good, very thick, very moisturizing cream that this product is based on. It by itself was bound to have some effect in addressing itch, but when you add the drug to that cream, it had a much higher effect.
This is probably poised well to go into phase three trials as an anti-itch drug addressing chronic itch, not just the bug bite that you get, but people who suffer from chronic itch every day and at a meaningful level. From a resource standpoint, it's not something that we as a company can take into phase three because that's a very big expenditure. We reallocated our resources towards the earlier stage programs that we think have a lot of promise, and we are seeking partnerships for this to advance it into phase three studies as a drug for chronic moderate to severe itch. I'll touch briefly on BayMedica and the commercial business here. Leveraging our know-how in manufacturing of these classic compounds, we have branched out to make rare, non-intoxicating cannabinoids for the health and wellness industry. Currently, we have four non-intoxicating cannabinoids that are targeting this market.
It's a good business. It's probably right around $5 million per year, and it's a profitable business, which is not common in this space. We've continued to drive the actual number of kilograms that we're selling, but because of downward pricing pressure, we haven't really seen that translate into higher revenues, but we continue to be profitable. With our manufacturing know-how and coming up with new ways to manufacture these compounds at a lower cost, we've been able to stay ahead of the curve and continue to achieve the same sales level, even with the number of kilograms increasing significantly over the last 18 months. It's a good business located in the U.S. and South San Francisco. We have a good staff there and a very professional sales and marketing organization down there to work on these products and help grow this business.
Just from a quick corporate overview standpoint, on the left-hand side of the line, you can see the InMed team. All of us have extensive experience in drug development and commercialization, all the way from drug discovery all the way through to marketing, sales and marketing. It's a small team, but very good at what we do and very experienced in this industry. On the right-hand side, we have a couple of individuals heading up the BayMedica business, commercial business, and both of them have quite a track record, not only in pharmaceutical but also in general sales and marketing to the OTC industry. We'll be reporting an update on our financial snapshot in the next couple of days as we prepare our 10-K. Based on the information from our last 10-Q plus other public information, our estimated cash balance at the end of June was $9.2 million.
You can see here the shares that are issued outstanding include a private placement that we conducted. You won't see that on the float. That's not shares that we've released into the market yet, but that's the total shares that are available to be released. Just to be clear on that, you can see we've had a wide range of a high and low over the last year and a market cap, including all these shares that, as I mentioned, have not yet been released. It's equivalent to about a $10 million market cap. A lot of know-how, a lot of opportunity, and a relatively low market cap, which seems to be not unusual these days. The key value drivers going into next year, we want to advance INM-901 and Alzheimer's disease towards an IND filing.
We may not accomplish that by the end of next year, but there's a lot of activities that go into that, including meeting with the FDA, getting the CMC, the manufacturing, pulled together, and finalizing some of the GLP studies that are required prior to entering human clinical trials. INM-089 in dry age-related macular degeneration is in a similar position and will be advancing that compound. We have a very deep library of other proprietary drug candidates that we'll be screening to see if there's any hits, meaningful hits in other diseases. We have to keep our eyes open for strategic initiatives and other partnership opportunities that are going to help build shareholder value. Thank you very much for your time. Inquiries can be sent to Colin Clancy, who's our Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications.
I'll leave that there and try and take a couple of questions here. We have a question. Will you need to raise capital in the next 12 months for current initiatives? We are currently, for a company of our size, we're well cashed up. We have a cash runway into the fourth quarter of calendar 2026. As a small company, we're always looking to raise money, and of course, the primary focus is raising non-dilutive funds, which is our preference. We don't have to raise money, but we certainly will be keeping our eyes open to opportunities to do so. Another question here. What are the key value drivers that we're focused on for shareholder value creation? I just went through some of those. I think we need to continue to develop our drug pipeline, in particular, 901 in Alzheimer's and 089 in macular degeneration.
We need to get those to a point, some inflection points, be it a partnering inflection point or moving into human clinical trials. Let's see here. A lot of questions about the key milestones. In terms of regulatory submissions for the two, we will be conducting pre-IND meetings. Pre-IND meetings are designed to enable the company to talk with the FDA and make sure that everyone's on the same page in terms of what data is going to be required to move into human clinical trials. It's a really important milestone. We conducted one earlier with the glaucoma program that we had.
We think we know a lot of the answers to the questions for the 089 program in dry AMD, but nevertheless, we want to take that opportunity to engage with the FDA and make sure we have a very clear understanding as to what the expectations are as we understand it and make sure there's a unified understanding between the company and the regulatory agency. All right. That appears to be it from a question standpoint. We're running out of time here, but I want to thank everyone very much for listening in today. We think we have a very exciting platform here. We have a couple of really great candidates, and we're very excited about the early data, in particular in Alzheimer's and dry age-related macular degeneration. We'll be updating investors as we go, as we make more and important progress with these programs. Thank you very much.