Zymeworks Inc. (ZYME)
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2026 Bloom Burton & Co. Healthcare Investor Conference

Apr 21, 2026

Kenneth Galbraith
Chair and CEO, Zymeworks

Great. Well, I'm really pleased to be able to have a chance to come back to Bloom Burton after a couple of years and give you an update on Zymeworks. What a time in our sector to be able to do that. Amazing what's finally happening in our sector right now, where at least we're getting credit for some of the innovation that's been going on in the past few years. XBI was yesterday, 138. Haven't seen that for five years. It's pretty amazing. As you'll hear Eric talk at lunch, you'll hear about the most activity in the M&A sector, in our sector for some time period, if ever. Looking forward to Eric talk about that. Also for myself, as of yesterday, first time I can come and present at an investor conference where our stock is above where it was five years ago.

I know there's lots of people who probably have that same situation in our sector. I chose to talk this morning to make sure that's still the case, but I think it still is. Great time in our sector to celebrate innovation that's been going on in the past years, but also celebrate the fact that we're finally getting credit for some of the innovation we're bringing to patients. Certainly, Zymeworks has been a beneficiary of that trend the last period of time. I want to explain to you a little bit about the innovations we've been working on, where those are going and helping patients, and what we're going to do next from here to further our position that we've built over the past number of years.

Legal disclaimer, please refer to our SEC filings, because I will try to make forward-looking statements today if I can. A little snapshot of numbers for you all here. Again, we've been at this for some time period, pretty actively over the past 10 years, making molecules for ourselves as opposed to being a computational platform making molecules for others. We'll talk a little bit about zanidatamab and some of the things that have been coming out of that work the past number of years. We've got a whole host of other platforms within the company that we still use for our own benefit and also available for partners. We have our first approved drug, which is great and provides us with a different strategy we can utilize in the biotech company just because we now have a source of revenue.

We don't have our own commercial force, but the revenue that comes from sales of these partners is durable, long-term, and very substantial. Lets us think about being a self-funded entity from the proceeds from our first product getting commercialized to fund the rest of the company. Doesn't make investment bankers happy in terms of trying to look for equity issuances, but certainly gives us the ability of a very stable cash flow to build a biotech underneath that and continue to invest based on that cash flow, and that's really where we are today, and I'll try to explain that to you a little bit more.

We also, because we now have this stream of revenues coming at us in the future in the form of royalties and partners, don't want to sell that, want to hold onto it's very valuable and growing, but we can access that for sources of financing that aren't available if you don't have that. We recently did a financing with Royalty Pharma to borrow against the future cash flows to today and invest that back again in the things that we like to do, R&D, acquisitions, and returning capital back to shareholders to pay them along the way as we build this company for the future.

Beyond that, we're well-funded. The $271 million does not include the $250 million in royalty proceeds. We're well-funded to where we don't really think about a cash runway anymore. We just think it'd be able to sustain ourselves in the future if we manage our business properly. That's a nice position to be in. We're certainly appreciative of the work that took to get there. Still have a number of strategic partnerships in different parts of our business, but we're very active right now in trying to build more partnerships and collaborations into our business, and hopefully this year we'll show some of the results of that activity this year. In addition, I think we've talked a little bit about trying to be a royalty-oriented, profitable biotech company, but don't want to forget that we are at the heart, and always will be, an innovative R&D vehicle.

This past weekend at AACR, we had seven great presentations, there's still some going on today, of all the work that we're doing around mostly, in this case, our ADC platform, including our brand-new pan-RAS inhibitor payload-driven ADCs, which is really an exciting next step or next generation for us beyond thinking about topo payload ADCs, and I'll talk a little bit about that. You can certainly go to our website and look at our posters from AACR if you're interested in that. What are we trying to do? At least for ourselves, we're trying to refine the way we think about biotech inside Zymeworks.

It's not something that we're thinking about for the industry as a whole, but for us, we kind of crossed a threshold last year where we could see with our first approved agent, it's going to drive a substantial amount of royalty funding to us in a very durable and growing way for a long time period, at least out to 2039, if not further. It gives us the ability of thinking then about not worrying about capital. We don't have a capital problem, we have a capital allocation problem. What do I do with that? How do I use that capital to enhance shareholder value over time, given the fact I have that, and given I've got that without the need to have a commercial sales force of my own?

I don't have to worry about products feeding my own commercial sales force. Right now, I don't have one. Could do that in the future. Right now, I'm able to generate all of these royalties revenue without having to forward integrate to be a commercial company. We thought a lot last year about how we're going to do this in a way that builds shareholder value and doesn't simply hope that we can replicate an amazing innovation that was made with zanidatamab 10 years ago inside Zymeworks. We have a number of different strategies that we have that will make us a more valuable company in the future without having to replicate that amazing innovation that happened with zanidatamab.

I'll try to explain a little bit about that, but what we're hoping to do is simply try and be a positive revenue company and a growing revenue over a long- term, turn that into a profitability venture, which still allows us to invest in R&D, but allows us to use the excess cash to make acquisitions, which we've never really done, and also to return capital to shareholders along the way, which I think is an important element of biotech. For us, the biotech model's changed last year. Still has innovative R&D at the heart, but it's quite a different model that we came up with beyond the threshold, and allows us to do some things that are novel, which I'll talk about from a business perspective.

We still have a very full pipeline of both ADCs and multi-specific antibodies within this pipeline. Beyond zanidatamab, every one of these is unpartnered, so it's unencumbered. A lot of optionality, flexibility of how we integrate partnerships into this to share risk and costs with partners, but still keep unencumbered R&D assets inside the company because of the nature of the upside that potentially can be attainable with those. We've recently added to our ADC platforms, moved beyond looking at topo payload ADCs to now looking at the idea of trying to deliver pan-RAS inhibitors in an ADC construct and understand what that might give you beyond what we're seeing out of some of the excellent data from RevMed and others this weekend at AACR, which is phenomenal advancements in pancreatic cancer and others. There may be an ADC construct that might be interesting to even go beyond that.

We're working on this for some time period. Really interesting now to start to push this forward now that we've really seemed to have cracked the undruggable. What allows us to think about this different business model is simply zanidatamab or Ziihera, as the trademark is, and just looking at the sales potential from this asset. Back in 2022, we thought this could be a billion-dollar compound. Really exciting. Every biotech's gold. Let's create something that's so innovative, differentiated, provides value to patients. It could be a billion-dollar seller, which is great. It's obviously above consensus beyond that now, just because of the clinical data generated, the potential applicability beyond that, and we don't think that's the end of it. We clearly think that zanidatamab could be even potentially beyond that from peak sales. It's very differentiated. There aren't a host of HER2 bispecific antibodies on the marketplace or in development right now. Zani's the only one.

We unusually find ourselves in a situation where we're kind of alone with an innovation we make, which we think then provides sustainable, durable cash flows in the future. We need to make sure that we take advantage of that from a business perspective. We think zanidatamab's going to be a multi-billion-dollar seller. Our share of that is pretty substantial. We can see, as I said, a positive cash flow going forward for a long timeframe in this company without having to invent something new and without having to partner it. That's already been done. We can build upon that base in the future, is how we hope to do it. We hope to do it by being a little bit differentiated.

Yes, we will fund R&D. We'll do it in a managed way within the context of what we can afford inside the company. We're going to allow ourselves to do two things. One is we're going to allow ourselves to hold onto our royalties for the long- term, let them grow, and take advantage of that value flowing to our shareholders. It's very easy to monetize royalties in the current marketplace, very quickly. It doesn't mean by doing that you're not giving up value to someone else. We'd like to retain that value to ourselves. We will look like a royalty company somewhat because we'll be holding these royalty instruments and letting them grow for the value of the benefit of our own shareholders. If we're going to do that, we'll actively manage that. We'll try to add to that as we move along.

We can add to that by internal R&D that then gets partnered, which drives additional royalty and milestone streams, or I can see myself going and buying something which also will be a royalty on a commercial product that I can add to what I have now. We allow ourselves to be a bit of a royalty aggregator or acquirer, a little bit different than some of the monetization players or financial players, but we allow ourselves to do that. In addition, very productive internal R&D organization, as you can see from the pipeline we had. Never really bought a product in Zymeworks. Everything we developed, we've invented ourselves. We're going to give ourselves the flexibility that that doesn't always have to be the case.

If we find an interesting R&D asset that we just didn't have a chance to invent, but think we could develop it and add value to it, we'll allow ourselves to acquire that. Something we've never done before. We have a full pipeline. Doesn't mean we shouldn't think about optionality of other great inventions that happened outside that we can bring inside and make valuable. Those are the things that we're changing going forward based on last year, based on our own circumstances. I think we do have a proven execution track record so far. Ziihera was invented inside Zymeworks. We developed it right into phase III trials, partnered it with Jazz and BeOne, or who used to be known as BeiGene, in a structure that gave us a really considerable share of the stream of royalties and milestones in the future.

We think we've showed the R&D capabilities, the partnering capabilities, the financial piece of making sure we keep a good share of that for ourselves. We want to try to replicate what we did with Ziihera going forward. If we ever see the opportunity to take something to BLA ourselves and market ourselves, we can always do that, and have got a good source of cash flow to do that. But it might be in our model, we never actually have to do that and can still be a very profitable, successful biotech company, and that's okay. Beyond Ziihera, we do have a number of technology platform partnerships that we did more than 10 years ago inside the company. It was a way for us to learn about our own platforms before we applied it to making things like zanidatamab.

This was very valuable for us at the time. Also, what happens is we took a financial interest in obviously some of the products being developed with our platforms, and one of them has popped out to be pretty interesting. Pasritamig, which is a KLK2 T-cell engager for prostate cancer being developed by Johnson & Johnson, looks really interesting. Early clinical data last year has now moved into phase III studies. Looks like it could be the cornerstone of J&J's future prostate cancer franchise. Really interesting. Sorry, they've guided that to be $1 billion-$5 billion in peak sales, and we have a nice milestone and royalty interest in that product. Could be others in this platform, but that's pretty interesting, and if you add that to zanidatamab, it also just accentuates the reason we're taking on the strategy we have right now.

Obviously operating from a very strong financial position, strong cash position that's going to get stronger. If we manage our business right, then our cash runway becomes irrelevant, and we can invest as we want in R&D, acquisitions, returning capital to shareholders in the right mix. We need to make sure we do that properly. 2026, a lot of great things coming up for us beyond 2025, which is a phenomenal year for Zymeworks. These catalysts exist across the portfolio that we have right now. Obviously, zanidatamab is in front of FDA right now for a review for a label expansion into HER2-positive gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma. That's obviously something we'll look forward to this year. We have a number of global filings around Ziihera for the same indication, which will be exciting.

We're looking for progress in zanidatamab to maybe even position it for a potentially higher peak sales consensus than you've ever seen today. Hopefully, we can work on that this year. We've got a very significant breast cancer study ongoing right now, which should read out in late 2027, which could also be helpful to that peak sales consensus number as well. Beyond that, we'd like to see J&J make more progress with pasritamig, which they seem to be. They seem to be starting additional phase III studies moving along, and the first of those will start to read out in the years ahead, which is exciting. In our own pipeline, I have some really interesting data being presented today at AACR in San Diego on our ADC ZW191, which is targeted in ovarian cancer tumors.

That'll be an interesting data update today at AACR in an oral presentation. Beyond that, we have a whole host of other scientific presentations planned for either clinical data releases or preclinical publications as we did also at AACR this weekend. Looking for a really rich catalyst event driven for 2026 for us, at the same time, as people starting to understand the financial dynamics going on inside the company, around where we're getting to and why we decided to change the strategy somewhat last year. For AACR, as I mentioned, we will have our ZW191 data presented this afternoon. There'll be a press release out with that data.

Beyond that, we've been spending time at the conference this year talking about our new pan-RAS inhibitor platforms or ADCs. I think we've been looking for where ADCs go next beyond the innovations and using camptothecin analogs as payloads, which has been phenomenal in multiple tumor types. Trying to find where to go beyond that, we looked at different toxins, we looked at bispecifics, we looked at protein degraders, looked at all sorts of other payloads we could deliver. We finally decided that maybe trying to apply the same logic to thinking about how chemo agents might be more effective in ADC construct than as naked chemo agents could be the same thing with small molecule inhibitors. We picked pan-RAS because there's obviously a great benchmark there right now to look at. We could do others, and that'll be interesting. Beyond that, we do still think about this idea of dual payloads being interesting.

If you could deliver a payload effectively with an ADC, can you deliver two payloads? Maybe the combination of a targeted small molecule inhibitor with a toxin like a TOPO could be pretty interesting. We're presenting some of our early data around pan-RAS. Again, the data from Revolution Medicines is amazing. It's just going to change the nature of pancreatic cancers and others for patients, which is phenomenal. Also, we want to try to think about where do we go next? Those are all monotherapy studies. Thinking about combination therapies and oncology is always a great idea. Trying to find better tolerability to drive activity is always a necessity to then start thinking about combinations. We think an ADC construct could deliver same or better activity, but with better tolerability that allows it to be used in combination with other agents. That's what we're trying to pursue with using ADCs as a construct to try to do that.

Really exciting. Obviously early. We have a lot to prove. There's obviously a big benchmark there right now, which is changing patients' lives, which is great. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to shoot to go beyond that with something that's pretty innovative. That's what we're trying to do. Please pay attention to some of those presentations going on. Shows you that at the heart, we're still an innovative R&D company despite having revenues and a royalty strategy on top of that. That's it. Hopefully that was a good start for you. Didn't go over time. Give you a chance to get settled, calm down after all the rah rah of the start of Bloom Burton, which is always something which is great, ringing the bell.

Really excited about this time in biotech right now. I think we've gone through a number of years. We didn't get credit for the innovation. Innovation didn't stop. Patient needs didn't stop. Everyone in this room was trying to play a part in the ecosystem to address those things. It's just nice now from investors and acquirers to start getting credit for some of the innovation we worked on for the past number of years. I hope that cycle continues going forward. At Zymeworks, we're just positioning ourselves for where we go next in terms of success.

We've already had the great ability to invent something, have it be meaningful to patients to get it to approval, and it's going to be financially successful for the company. Need to know what we do next to try to continue to be a long-term player in this ecosystem that we love in Canada. That's the focus of what we've been working on last year, and we'll continue to report out those results to you this year. Thank you for your time and attention.

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