A story who are new to it. Talk through more in depth for those who aren't. I'm Brad Sitko, Chief Investment Officer. Joining the room with Tom Burns, our CFO, and Juliane Snowden, Head of IR. Happy to answer any questions you may have afterwards.
All right. We'll be making some forward-looking statements. I encourage everyone to look at our public filings for anything related to disclosures. XOMA Royalty, what do we do fundamentally? We're a biotech royalty aggregator, which means we buy at-risk future entitlements of milestones and royalties based out of partnerships that happen between biotech companies. With building that large-scale royalty and milestone portfolio, we create a diversified set of exposure to biotech without having the underlying risk of biotech. The idea is to create a large aggregated portfolio that tends to be uncorrelated to the underlying asset class assets within it. How do we do that? We do intensive scientific diligence similar to what you'd see at any type of fund or investment vehicle. We use structuring as part of that to create a perpetual stream of cash flows based on these underlying royalties.
The XOMA Royalty business, at its most simple point, is something that's incredibly scalable. We have a cost infrastructure that runs around $20 million a year, a lean team as a 13-person public company. Plus, it's very scalable in terms of we don't do any ongoing R&D or development or commercialization ourselves. We're the passive recipients of the royalties and milestones that are generated by our partners who are developing or commercializing the drugs. Why is that important? Why is this milestone piece important? Since we've pivoted to this business model in 2017 as a royalty aggregator, we've received more than $120 million of milestones from those partnerships to date, essentially funding the majority of the operations of the company through to this point.
We have our commercial royalty portfolio on the right side, so six commercial royalties anchored by Roche's VABYSMO, Day One's OJEMDA, Zevra's MIPLYFFA that are generating the bulk of the growth for the company and royalty receipts. We have 11 programs in the portfolio that are in phase III or registration to date. Think of creating downstream value as time goes on and the partners develop those programs. Supported behind that is an even deeper portfolio of phase II and earlier, all the way through preclinical of over 100 assets. To date, we have over 130 assets within the portfolio. We're going to continue to do new business development and acquire new royalties and create non-dilutive capital solutions for companies. The business model at its essence is quite simple.
What we think about is the compounding effect for our investors, which is you disaggregate the risk inherent in clinical development and commercialization of biotech. You receive these passive royalty interests and milestones. You pair that with a low-cost and stable infrastructure so that any of the excess receipts beyond that $20 million that we talked about earlier for our general cost structure drop straight to the bottom line. You are thinking about a very leverageable and scalable business model. As a management team composed of former investors ourselves, we're incredibly focused on the dilution and value our equity on a per-share basis. We can talk more about that later. Where is the company now? We're actually at that inflection point where for the foreseeable future, we'll have the royalty receipts alone exceed the costs of that underlying infrastructure and start to generate that inflection point.
It's been a long time coming as this model has developed year over year. Programs have gotten advanced. To give an example, at the time I joined the company back in 2023, we had one approved product. Now we're talking at six. We had a handful in phase III. Now we're talking 11. We have built and scaled the portfolio and are starting to see the story played out as we envisioned. One of our acquisitions and key drivers of growth has been the OJEMDA royalty launched by Day One Pharmaceuticals in pediatric low-grade glioma and brain cancer. That was acquired as part of our model in talking about finding things where others aren't looking. This was acquired while the program was in phase II out of a reverse merger through Sunesis and Viracta.
That's one that will drive a lot of the returns for the portfolio going forward. To give you an example of the type of structuring and how we think to get inside of our heads, how to think about how we structure these types of assets. Before the program had even generated any of the royalties, we had received over $22 million in milestones and other payments from that transaction before royalties were created. Our idea is, since we're deploying capital off of our balance sheet, we continue to structure deals in a way where we try to pull risk off the table and be able to recycle that capital into new royalty acquisitions. Similar type of concept in a transaction that we did back in 2023 was for $5 million upfront.
We acquired a mid-single-digit royalty on what is now Zevra's MIPLYFFA, which was then known as arimoclomol, which at the time we acquired it had a CRL, did the diligence to figure out that the underlying data was quite promising, all the activities were being taken care of, and the upside of a transaction like this could generate in the neighborhood of hundreds of millions of dollars of royalties if we were successful, all for a $5 million upfront. That concept of being able to think about the relative potential return relative to the capital outlay is important in our DNA. It's how we think about things. Like what is the upside if we're right? What is the downside if we're wrong? In this case, the downside was $5 million upfront for making that type of a calculated bet.
That product has been one of the most successful rare disease launches in recent history in an indication called Niemann-Pick Type C, where there's incredible unmet need and had until the time of this approval been no approved products in the space in the U.S . Why we're different? Royalties as an asset class and royalty monetization is becoming more ubiquitous these days. We know names like Royalty Pharma, Healthcare Royalty, DRI, and a host of others. Where XOMA chooses to play is in a place where others don't. We're willing to embrace through our large portfolio so that we could diversify away the risk, buying these same assets that others would look at at a stage that's earlier in their clinical development where we can absorb the binary risk. Most importantly, because of our public company structure, can be patient with time.
Many of the folks that you'd see on the right side would be in a fund structure that would be limited by life cycle or time, say a typical 10-year fund. We can be incredibly patient. In fact, by doing so, for an example, at the end of last year, we acquired a portfolio of 60 preclinical royalties from Twist Bioscience, where we can hold those royalties and then be patient as those programs, knock wood, hopefully continue to develop and progress. By playing in a swim lane where others do not, we've set up a competitive moat. We become an alternative for many companies in this market, especially as we're looking at where the market sits today. We're a viable alternative compared to equity because it saves the share dilution and focuses any dilution to economic dilution specifically related to a partnership that they have.
Why is this important? We think the royalty model in its scalability and inherent value is really important. One of the things as a public vehicle that many of the royalty companies do not get appreciated for is they have the DCF value of the portfolio alone. You can run analyst consensus against the products in the portfolio and kind of get a sense as to what a real value is on an intrinsic value basis. With the XOMA model, we believe it is different, which is you want the DCF value of the public or the approved assets in the portfolio. You get the upside potential of the positive events that can happen in the phase III portfolio that have nearer-term visibility. You support that, as we talked about earlier, with over 100 assets that are earlier that can be surprising.
The one thing we all know about biotech is as much as we study biotech, there's a lot we don't know about biotech. What will be right? What will be wrong? What's in favor this year? What's in favor next year? The pendulum is always swinging. The belief that we have is by in this model, you're creating additional pipeline value, which for the public markets creates multiple expansion. The time is now. 15 years ago when I started getting involved in the royalty space, royalty monetization was a less known vehicle. It was a kind of a financing of last resort or less priority. It was a bit more esoteric. In markets like these, especially, it highlights the needs for creativity for non-dilutive capital.
If you think in management teams are appreciating one that compared to equity where equity issuance is down, it creates a potential alternative to the dilution. Compared to debt, it does not have the typical covenants and overhang that you would have with debt. Partnering volume is not as robust as it has been in recent times, aside from coming out of China. M&A volume is down. This is a viable financing alternative for companies compared to where they would otherwise have been available in the capital markets for the last couple of years. There are opportunities abound. Because of the breadth of what we do, we can access deals that were done from anywhere from preclinical to phase III. If you average around 500 transactions a year, licensing deals in the space, our addressable market is really significant.
The hardest part, quite frankly, is being prudent and disciplined about where we're deploying capital and finding opportunities that we believe have the right type of risk-reward profile to generate the types of returns we're looking for. For those less knowledgeable about the royalty monetization space, royalties are generally created on the bottom half of the slide between a license agreement between, say, a biotech company and a larger partner, like a pharma partner. In exchange for licensing the IP and know-how to those programs, royalties and milestones come in. As we know with biotech, typically what happens is the partner receives their upfront. They put that capital into their next program that they're working on.
Those future milestones and royalties are so far out in the future and at risk compared to other capital that they have near and available to them that they can't do anything with them. We are creating an alternative where we can buy those future at-risk developments, commercialization, regulatory milestones, and royalties for capital and pull that risk forward today into capital that the program can use and deploy into other parts of their specific portfolio. What do we look for? We look for assets that we believe are going to have long, durable cash flow with long IP lives.
We want to find things that are differentiated in their relative markets, address a high unmet need or gap in the market, and are differentiated, ideally where there's a developer or marketer of differentiation, so someone who can take the program forward and make a meaningful contribution to the market. Our key focus is mid and early-stage assets, though we can certainly expand on both sides of that portfolio. For thinking about how to value XOMA ultimately, both here in our slides and on our website, we provide some of our key assets, the different partners that they're in, what is consensus, and what we can disclose about the royalty rates to help folks build the bridge and understand the value relative to our current market cap.
In this, I think you'll see that over time, if you look back, this has developed quite significantly in terms of programs that have advanced. We've acquired new programs, and we're continuing to build a portfolio. For instance, when we joined back in 2023, myself and our CEO, Owen Hughes, the portfolio was about 70 assets. We're sitting at over 130 today. We believe there's a lot of value in that number, in those numbers. I think key programs to point the group to are understanding in the phase III pipeline with readouts this year, seralutinib from Gossamer and Chiesi related to pulmonary arterial hypertension, of which the market is currently seeing the resurgence with the launch of WINREVAIR sotatercept from Merck.
Also, coming from the legacy XOMA portfolio is Rezolute RZ358, which was generated from XOMA technology and has a significant milestone package and royalties in the rate of high single digits escalating to mid-teens. Both of those programs will have data cards. At the same point, other programs are initiating their phase IIIs this year, such as with Takeda and mezagitamab initiating their phase III ITP trial and highlighting that in their R&D day in December as anywhere from a $1 billion-$3 billion peak potential product. How we think, to get a window into how we think about it, our structuring is very important. Within doing these royalty acquisitions, we focus on our upfront payment.
We look to the nearer term and closer in milestone payments that come from turning over clinical development cards, so typically like a phase II milestone, a phase III milestone, a regulatory milestone, so that within the right risk-reward profile, we can get payments back early on after a royalty acquisition and then the royalty stream. How we think about our portfolio overall is delivering to investors a risk-mitigated broad portfolio where we think that there's a right risk-reward profile relative to what we're paying for these in the initial acquisition. And then we want diversity, both by indication, modality, stage, mechanism, et cetera. The way we think about it as a management team, we're incredibly equity protective.
Back in December of 2023, as our own balance sheet was starting to get thin, we partnered with Blue Owl Capital to take out a loan specifically against our VABYSMO royalty stream and VABYSMO royalty stream alone, where instead of issuing equity and putting more shares out into the market, we pulled forward $130 million at close with the ability to take down an additional $10 million to preserve the equity we have in the company and not issue new shares, and then be able to provide, have a full balance sheet to be able to provide capital to others through new royalty acquisitions. At the same point, as a management team, our philosophy is that you need to reward investors. Oftentimes, failures in the biotech model is that the company has a win, but the investors don't see any of that.
There are multiple inefficient ways to return capital to shareholders, like through special dividends. Our view is we announced, near simultaneous with that Blue Owl transaction, a share repurchase program that we can use for up to $50 million over the course of the three years from the time it was put in place. Because if you think back to what I was talking about with the business model slide, where you're growing the royalty receipts and milestone receipts, and you're ultimately being able to shrink the capital base, you're creating more leverage return for the equity investor. We talked about the OJEMDA deal.
We talked about the MIPLYFFA deal here today, speaking as Daré Biosciences, where we created a capital solution where we funded the company $22 million upfront at the time when the market cap was about $30 million to buy one, a commercial royalty of a program launched with Organon, two phase III programs, including Sildenafil Cream, which is being launched by Daré later this year through a 503B compounding program for female sexual arousal disorder. I talked about earlier this idea of the Twist transaction. In part of our view of building a large diversified portfolio, we acquired for $15 million the half of the milestone and royalty economics for Twist Biosciences, who was at that point over a $2 billion company, to help them meet some near-term capital needs as they thought about restructuring parts of their business.
For us, to build the scale and breadth of the portfolio that we have for our investors for years to come. To give another sense of a type of transaction, last fall, in order to get the seralutinib royalty, we acquired a private company, Pulmokine, as a way to access that royalty. We view that there's multiple situations in this market where there's a disconnect between the intrinsic value of the future royalty that someone is holding, and especially in the public markets, the value that is being ascribed or the market cap of the company. M&A can be used as a tool to acquire some of this value.
Also consistent with our theme of finding areas of high unmet need, we were part of a syndicate of a transaction where we put in $5 million to acquire part of a royalty stream and future economics related to Castle Creek's program called D-Fi for epidermolysis bullosa, a high unmet need collagen binding disorder where patients have essentially skin that will not stay connected and think of chronic wounds with up to 70% of their bodies. Huge unmet need. These are the types of situations that we look at. What to look for and what to follow is the continued ramp of VABYSMO as one of the drivers. OJEMDA, still very early in its launch, has had some success from Day One. MIPLYFFA is very early in its launch. Also, XACIATO.
We also have phase III data announcements coming later this year out of partners with Rezolute and Gossamer that we expect towards the second half of this year. The ongoing phase III starts with Rezolute, Takeda, and Daré with the Sildenafil Cream, and then continued business development. The idea is this portfolio is going to create significant amounts of news flow. With that, I'm happy to pause and if we have any questions that haven't been covered.
Yes? Can you talk a little bit about what you're using for thresholds or IRRs?
Yeah, what we disclose publicly is we think about venture-like returns. Part of the challenge with many of the royalty buyers is they end up taking what can be equity-like returns or equity-like risk for debt-like returns, and where it can be part of a competitive process.
Our view is if we're taking on the binary risk, we want the reward. So we want essentially equity-like risk for venture-like returns is the way we think about it.
Awesome. Very much appreciate your time.
Happy to answer any questions afterwards.