Ashwin Subramanian, and I'm with the healthcare investment banking team at Jefferies. Welcome to the Global Healthcare Conference here, and it's my great pleasure to introduce Matt Foehr from OmniAb. Thank you.
Ashwin, thanks. And thank you to Jefferies for having OmniAb here. I'm joined today here in New York. It's a great time to be back in New York to be talking to investors about OmniAb. I'm joined by our CFO, Kurt Gustafson , and one of the members of our board of directors, our board chair, John Higgins. As I said, it's always great to be back in New York and good to be talking with investors about OmniAb. In this presentation, I will make forward-looking statements. Our industry faces risks, our business faces risk, and I encourage investors to review a full discussion of risks that face our industry and business in our filings on file with the SEC.
So just an overview of our business at OmniAb. We are, in a simple sense, a licensing model. We license innovative technologies to the pharmaceutical industry to allow them to more quickly and efficiently discover cutting-edge medicines. And we do that by licensing a novel technology offering that addresses the most critical challenges that face discovery of antibody-based medicines. We're working in one of the largest greenfields that exists in the pharma industry, a large total addressable market for antibody discovery, and one that is continuing to grow, and that growth has been accelerating in recent years for reasons that I'll review.
We have a leading and proven technology that's highly leverageable, highly scalable, and we have and continue to expand our number of partners and number of programs that are leveraging our technology. We also have an innovation engine within OmniAb. We continue to innovate around our platform and expand our technology offerings, leveraging the relationships that we have with our growing roster of partners. And as you'll see, as I go through this, we're well-positioned and poised for growth as a company, and poised to meet what is a growing industry need. Our mission at OmniAb is to enable the rapid development of innovative therapeutics by pushing the frontiers of drug discovery technologies.
We've got a rich history of innovations, of scientific firsts in the discovery tools and technology space, and that's something that attracts partners to us, to leverage our tech. I mentioned the greenfield of antibody discovery, and that's an area that's growing. There's a growing need for antibody discovery tools, and it's driven by a multitude of factors. Really starting about a decade ago with the realization that antibody-based modalities have higher clinical success rates. The industry success rate for developing antibody-based medicines is higher, roughly double that of small molecule medicines, and that had led, and it continues to lead to a shift in the pharmaceutical industry towards leveraging antibody-based modalities as a way to address key unmet medical needs.
In addition to that, some other factors, mainly the Inflation Reduction Act, which provisions drug price negotiations between Medicare and drug makers, also tilted a balance more towards large molecules and antibody-based medicines, specifically. On the right hand of this slide, you see a deeper dive into the phase I approval rates. As I mentioned, it's roughly. The approval rates for antibodies are roughly double that of small molecules. And for antibodies, they appear to even be getting better.
Some data from the Antibody Society that was released fairly recently shows that the success rates for antibody-based medicines appear to be getting even better over time, as the industry understands biology better, understands its targets better, and leverages our technology more to find better medicines to address medical needs. This slide provides an overview of our technology offering. Again, we're a licensing business. We license our technology to the industry, and you can basically separate our technology into three major elements: the creation of novel antibody repertoires, leveraging transgenic animals. These are highly engineered animals with fully human immune systems in them. You see on the left-hand side, the lower left of this slide.
We have the industry's only four species transgenic animal platform with rats, mice, chickens, and cow-based technologies. We also have bispecific technologies that are designed specifically to allow partners to quickly and efficiently discover bispecific antibodies. And more recently, we've launched novel scaffolds as well, and I'll talk more about our latest technology launch, OmnidAb, a little later in the presentation. But we also continue to innovate around novel scaffolds. In the center are our screening technologies. We also have novel screening technologies that allow us to screen millions and millions of cells for partners to find, very quickly and efficiently, their winning antibodies.
As understanding of biology increases, understanding of targets and target engagement increases, that increases the pressure on screening technologies, and we have two novel innovative screening technologies that we leverage for our partners to allow them to very quickly and efficiently screen for winning antibodies. And then the last is the delivery of I'll say, the winning sequence. We can further characterize, select, and optimize the right antibodies for our partners as well. This is a licensing and partnering model. We continue to grow our number of active partners, net of attrition. We ended Q1 with 80 active partners who are leveraging OmniAb technologies.
We added three new agreements in the first quarter, and we've seen nearly a doubling of active partners since 2018, net of attrition. Importantly, I'll also point to, you know, the period of 2021 through 2023, where we've really started to see an acceleration of growth, really at a period of time, especially as you look at 2021 and 2022, where biotech funding was widely reported to be some of the lowest in history, but yet we were growing our number of active partners and number of active programs very quickly and efficiently. Says a lot about the quality of our technology, and why partners will come to it to very quickly discover the antibodies for their programs.
You see here a selection of our OmniAb partners, well over 75, as I just said, 80 partners have access to OmniAb technologies, and you can see a who's who of folks in the large molecule space, also ones with very large R&D budgets who continue to invest aggressively in novel discovery programs. Beyond this, obviously, we're also proud of partnerships with startup companies, some of whom have been quite successful in expanding their pipelines and novel biology and raising money around programs that were discovered out of OmniAb technologies. This slide provides a summary of active programs. Currently, there are 327 programs that are progressing through various stages of development that leverage our technologies.
These are ones where partners have taken a license with us, and are and have discovered a novel antibody and then take it through discovery and ultimately development. We continue to see nice growth in and nice progression, matriculation, if you will, of programs from discovery through preclinical, through the various stages of of clinical development. And importantly, I'll point your attention to the preclinical slice there, the orange slice. We have a very high definition of what we consider to be preclinical. These are essentially pre-IND programs, ones in which the partner has confirmed they are planning on entering human trials and are doing the final talks or other in vivo screening to allow that.
So you can get a sense of the growth of the pipeline itself, but the potential growth in clinical programs. This next slide is a bit of an eye chart. Now it's becoming more and more of an eye chart as more and more partners enter clinical trials, but this provides a summary of the programs that are either approved under regulatory review or are in the clinic that have leveraged our technology. We've produced over 30 clinical programs or over 30 active clinical or approved programs, and this continues to grow. We've also provided the outlook that we expect four to six new programs to enter the clinic this year, and we're well on track for that and excited to see the progress of our partners.
So again, this shows our our technology offering, and in the next couple of slides, I'm gonna dig a little bit deeper into various elements of this, specifically highlighting either new technologies or other ways we've been leveraging our technology stack for our partners. Again, at the foundation of our technology is here, this left-hand side, the creation of novel antibody repertoires, leveraging engineered animals with fully human immune systems that allow partners to very quickly and efficiently discover fully human antibodies. The screening, again, our screening technologies allow efficient screening and then ultimately delivery. Woven throughout this, as you see on the bottom of this technology slide, is what we call OmniDeep. And OmniDeep is a suite of in silico tools that are woven throughout our platform.
We obviously have been for many years leveraging AI and machine learning. When you're in a business such as ours, that is generating millions and millions and millions of antibody sequences that are fully human, you have an interesting vantage point and ability to leverage AI and machine learning in a variety of ways to facilitate novel discovery. So, at the core, as I said, of our technology, are our transgenic animals. And engineered into these genetic animals is a concept that we call biological intelligence. So engineered, we believe, engineered animals that are creating fully human sequences are also generating antibodies that inherently are naturally optimized, given that they are produced in a living system. Our animals, specifically, are engineered, but they are not clones.
Just like all of us, we'll produce a different immune response to an insult, whether that is an infectious disease or any other outside force, something that's creating inflammation, also a cancer, for instance, each of us would produce a different and unique antibody response. You can leverage that power, those millions and millions of antibodies, to then ultimately discover the best one for a desired application. And this biological intelligence is often one of the core pieces that attracts our partners. As I said, we have the only multi-species platform that exists with transgenic mice, rats, chickens, and cow-based technology, each of which provide a unique advantage for certain applications in drug discovery.
Specifically, in relation to the chicken platforms, and I'm going to talk more about one of our most recently launched technologies in a moment, but chickens specifically are one of our fastest-growing platforms, largely because of the what we consider the power of evolution. Chickens are evolutionarily very distant from all of us and other mammals. And because of that evolutionary distance, that can be leveraged in discovery to elicit robust immune responses. Beyond that, we've engineered our chickens to have fully human immune systems so that the sequences that they produce are fully human antibodies.
Because of this evolutionary distance, again, you can get a robust response to things like rare cancer targets or other key targets, either in the CNS or other areas, and that's what has attracted a lot of our most prolific and most efficient partnerships. Earlier, or late last year, we launched a new technology that we call OmniDab. This is a chicken that produces single-domain antibodies, which are a novel class of antibodies that are naturally found in camelids. And these are being increasingly exploited and used in a clinical setting, largely because they have a number of structural features to them that can be leveraged in a number of high-value areas.
So we're seeing more and more partners approaching us from the moment we launched OmniDab at a scientific conference last November. We've had partners leveraging the technology, and that interest continues to grow. I'll get a little more sciencey here for a moment and talk about what is a single-domain antibody. But essentially, it's a compact format of an antibody that because of its size, its small molecular weight and size, can be leveraged in a number of areas that are of growing interest to the industry, especially in CNS and other high-value diseases. Single-domain antibodies or heavy-chain-only antibodies open up opportunities for alternate routes of administration, meaning they can be administered in an injectable, in inhalable, and even in oral format.
They can increase penetration and have fast and tunable clearance. This can drive blood-brain barrier transmission, tissue penetration, as well as tumor penetration, and they can also be leveraged in imaging, diagnostics, and theranostics, which are new areas for us, and areas for which we are seeing significant interest from new and existing partners. They also have broad therapeutic applications. As I referenced, CNS diseases and neurodegenerative diseases are an area of significant interest for single-domain antibodies, as well as infectious diseases, autoimmune, and a variety of cancers. I'll next just touch on our screening platforms in a little more depth. As I mentioned, we have two novel screening platforms. These are powerful platforms that allow partners to very quickly and efficiently screen millions of B cells.
B cells are the ones that will contain the antibody sequences. These technologies are called xPloration and GEM, and they are able to bypass significant bottlenecks that have existed in the industry. In addition to our novel transgenic animals that generate novel antibodies, we also pride ourselves on generating novel workflows as well that can create more efficient discovery paths for our partners. Specifically in our screening platforms, we have AI-driven multiparameter screening capabilities that allow us to screen tens of millions of cells in hours instead of weeks. This is really important to our partners as they look to expand their discovery pipelines and enter into new areas.
And our technologies in the screening realm also enable screening against very difficult targets, GPCRs and ion channels and surface antigens, which have traditionally been ones that are seen as high-value targets for the industry, but have been difficult to leverage or difficult to pursue in the past, and this technology obviously can be leveraged for those as well. I mentioned our OmniDeep suite of technologies. Again, this is a suite of in silico tools that are woven throughout our technology stack, from the creation of novel antibody repertoires with our transgenic animals, to the screening using our novel B-cell screening technologies, and ultimately to the delivery of the winning sequences.
So we have been leaning into this area for many years, about five to six years ago entered into a partnership with Landing AI to leverage AI first in our screening area, but have developed novel tools in the in silico space, leveraging both AI and machine learning throughout our technology stack. This is something our partners have known about us for many years, given the nature of our business, but it's something that is continuing to expand within our internal innovation and R&D engine. And I'm gonna finish the presentation here just with a few minutes on our business model overall.
As I mentioned at the outset, this is a licensing model, so partners come to us to license our novel technologies, to enable them to more quickly and efficiently discover fully human antibodies. From a financial perspective, what it's all about, obviously, are these licensed partnerships. This is a mixture of ways in which we create value for our stakeholders through the upfront and access fees, through potential collaboration and service revenue, where we may do work for our partners, through milestones, milestone payments as partners progress through development, whether that be through later stages of discovery or entering clinical trials at phase 1, phase 2, phase 3, for instance, or whether that's regulatory milestones in terms of new approvals or filings, et cetera, and then ultimately, royalties on commercial sales.
That's obviously a key part of our business. It's built around those financial royalties, and as you can imagine now, with 327 programs, as you model out the business, there's a lot of power, financial power in this royalty model. What we've done here on this slide is just provide investors with a little more detail of illustrative antibody deal structures. As I mentioned, we have 80 partners spread throughout the industry. That continues to grow. No two license agreements are exactly alike, but you get a sense of the profile here and the mix of the financial elements of our license relationships, from the collaboration and access fees here in the...
represented by the blue bar to clinical and regulatory milestones and ultimately to royalties here in the purple. And you can kinda get a sense from this slide, just the interplay between upfront fees, and milestones, and royalties, which range from the low single digits here on the left to the mid-single digits on the right. And this, again, is a royalty that partners would pay to us on a quarterly basis as they report sales on a program that leverages our technology. Importantly, just a last comment, as, and this is especially important as it relates to royalties related to our platform.
As you would expect, we have a deep and broad intellectual property portfolio associated with our technologies, over 300 patents issued worldwide on our technologies. But importantly, the license agreements that I just mentioned, the royalties for those license agreements, and the duration of the royalty and the royalty itself is actually linked to the patents that the partners file on the antibody that is discovered out of our technology. So what that does is it creates a diverse intellectual property pool upon which our future royalties are based. And it also creates a long and extending tail for duration of royalties downstream.
Currently, now out to 2043, and importantly, you can see here on the right, the increase in patent filings by our partners. So these are patents that are filed by partners for which the primary invention is an OmniAb-derived antibody, and you can get a sense there of the growth in that as partners have had more and more success leveraging our technologies, and are obviously planning to pursue those globally as they file patent applications that are related to an antibody that came out of our technology. And as I wrap up here, I just wanna spend a moment on key areas of focus. We believe we are very well-positioned for future growth.
We have a highly leverageable business model, one that leverages technology and our internal innovation engine, and where our investments in technology and innovation are also informed by the deep discovery relationships that we have with our growing roster of partner. We'll continue to focus on growing our partnered pipeline and development and expansion and advancement of that pipeline. We continue to innovate around our platform and launch new technologies, work on workflow versatility initiatives, and we will continue to expand the reach of our platforms. We have an exciting set of innovations ongoing at OmniAb around new technologies, and we expect to launch a number of new technologies in the coming years, and at the core continues to be a focus on our stakeholders.
We obviously focus on our team and our partners first and foremost in terms of keeping them moving forward, of course, investors and the communities in which we work as well. So, with that, I think we're out of time, but I welcome any questions or at all.
Okay. Thank you.