Welcome, and thank you for joining us for the Virtual Investor On Demand Top 5 for '25. My name is Janine Thomas. I am CEO of JTC IR, and today we are featuring JD Finley. He is CEO of Palisade Bio. JD will highlight his top five reasons why he believes you should pay attention to Palisade in 2025. Before I turn it over to JD, I'd like to remind you that the company will be making forward-looking statements, and I encourage everyone to view the company's website at palisadebio.com or the SEC's website for their latest filings and information. Okay, JD, over to you. Please share your Top 5 for '25.
Great. Thanks, Janine. You know, I wish we had room for more than just our top five, but I'll try and keep it focused on what I think are the top five reasons why we're so excited about what we're doing. First, let me just talk a little bit about how exciting our drug is. PALI-2108 is a PDE4 inhibitor formulated as a prodrug. This active PDE4 inhibitor was originally developed in the Merck labs in Montreal as a more potent inhibitor than those previously developed for other indications. PDE4 enzymes have been widely demonstrated to play a significant role in causing inflammation and fibrosis in ulcerative colitis and Crohn's patients.
In addition to our drug being a more potent PDE4 inhibitor to break down some of those enzymes, our prodrug formulation minimizes systemic exposure of the drug in the upper GI tract, which allows most of the drug to reach the distal ileum in the colon where the disease is focused. If you look at other oral PDE4 inhibitors that have been used in clinical studies to treat ulcerative colitis, they've achieved limited efficacy in addressing UC when compared with placebo. The problem is that patients taking these drugs experience adverse events such as nausea and vomiting, which prevented them from becoming commercially viable treatments. These adverse events were triggered by significant systemic exposure of the drug to the upper GI tract.
We believe our prodrug formulation solves this by keeping the active ingredient protected from the upper GI tract until the prodrug is dissolved in the bacteria in the colon where the active PDE4 inhibitor is then released. Second, probably the second most thing is that this is an oral treatment, which we believe is going to be a game changer for patients suffering with ulcerative colitis. You know, in the United States, there are nearly a million patients living with ulcerative colitis. Roughly 55% of these patients have moderate to severe ulcerative colitis, with approximately a fourth of those requiring surgery. Current treatment options only provide patients with less than a one in five chance of success, often coming with poor safety profiles, including many of them with black box warnings.
Over 70% of ulcerative colitis patients have an overexpression of PDE4 enzymes, which gives us great confidence that our drug will demonstrate significantly higher rates than those currently available. Because we are an oral delivery, this is a vastly preferred mechanism of delivery by both patients and clinicians. Third, we're very pleased so far with the results of our Phase I study. If you look at the preliminary data from the SAD portion of the study, which evaluated doses ranging from 15 milligrams-450 milligrams of the drug, these support our thesis that the drug was well tolerated across all levels. Importantly, there were no treatment-related dose reductions, serious adverse events, or treatment-related laboratory abnormalities observed. Treatment-emergent adverse events were mild and occurred only at the highest dose of 450 milligrams, which we believe is well beyond our therapeutic window.
Importantly, there were no EKG abnormalities or other serious safety concerns underscoring the favorable safety profile of our drug. In addition to the safety and tolerability, preliminary PK analysis from the SAD portion of the study showed that the delayed release and extended release characteristics of PALI-2108 were as anticipated. This provides sustained dose-dependent drug exposure with high local concentrations in the colon, which is a key feature of the targeted treatment of ulcerative colitis. Fourth is that if you look at the deal activity in the IBD space, this is a very, very lucrative market to be competing in. The worldwide ulcerative colitis market measured by sales is currently over $7 billion and is projected to exceed $9 billion by 2028. Deal activity in the IBD space has been very active over the last five years.
During this period, over 70 deals have been completed, and the average deal value for this period was a whopping $1.2 billion. During this time, we saw upfront payments alone on preclinical assets of over $100 million. Very excited about the opportunity for our shareholders down the road. Finally, I wanted to just talk a little bit about our second drug that we are developing, PALI-1908. It uses the same active PDE4 inhibitor as PALI-2108, but with a slightly different prodrug formulation designed to release the drug in the terminal ileum of the small intestine. This is the active area of fibrosis for many Crohn's patients.
I will point out that some of the initial PK data from our preclinical and Phase I studies of PALI-2108, our ulcerative colitis drug, suggest that we are very likely that we'll be able to use PALI-2108 to target fibro stenotic Crohn's, which would give us the added benefit of minimizing costs associated with developing a second drug for Crohn's. We'll explore this option in more detail over the coming months and hope to give everyone updates as we go along. Again, thanks for giving me the opportunity to highlight some of our exciting developments for this year. We're very excited about where we're going for the year and hope that this gives everyone here the incentive to follow us along our journey.
Thank you for sharing your top five, JD. So 2025 will be an exciting year for Palisade. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you're interested in what you heard today, I encourage you to visit the company's website at palisadebio.com for more information. On their website, you can sign up to receive their alerts and follow the company on their social channels. Choose to stay current on their latest information. If you'd like to hear more Top 5 for '25 webcasts, we encourage you to visit our website at virtualinvestorco.com. I want to thank you all for joining us and have a great rest of your day.