Zymeworks Inc. (ZYME)
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Sep 18, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT - Market closed
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Morgan Stanley 24th Annual Global Healthcare Conference

Sep 14, 2026

Summary

FDA approval of zanidatamab in HER2-positive gastric cancer establishes a new standard of care and drives significant royalty and milestone potential. The pipeline is advancing with multiple phase III readouts and innovative trispecific and ADC programs, while disciplined capital allocation and strategic partnerships, including the Theravance acquisition, support long-term growth.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Hello, everyone. My name is Frank Tang, and I'm with the investment banking division at Morgan Stanley. Thank you all for joining us for the fireside chat with Zymeworks. I'm joined here today by the Chairman and CEO, Ken Galbraith. Ken, welcome back. A lot has evolved since last year since we were here. It'd be great if you could provide an update on where Zymeworks stands today, and give us an overview of your broad model across licensed royalty assets, Zani, the wholly-owned TCEs, your ADC platform, and now the Theravance acquisition.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

No, it's a great thing, and again, great to be back here again.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Absolutely

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

This year with you. Back to school, back to work.

Seems like it's a long week already, but.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Absolutely

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Really happy to be here and have a chance to update you on Zymeworks. For 2026, we've had an amazing year already as a company, and it's not finished yet. O bviously with the recent FDA approval of zanidatamab in first-line GA patients and HER2 overexpressing GA patients.

We've made this amazing journey from discovering this molecule inside our company 11 years ago with a great protein engineer who came up with this idea of creating this bispecific antibody that would really create a brand new class of agent to be able to use in the HER2 class.

Over this past 11 years, we've traveled that journey of trying to move that into clinical studies and move that closer to commercialization, in this case, with our partners, Jazz and BeiGene, in different territories.

We've found ourselves in this position of getting an FDA approval at the end of the day in the place where every biotech wants to be. We've changed the standard of care after 12 years of an amazing molecule, Herceptin.

Be able to make an advancement for patients. Whenever you're in a situation where you can move the median OS six months or more for a patient population overall, in this case it was seven months.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

You just realize the fundamental change you're going to make in people's lives in a large group of patients on a global basis. It's the reason that we do this in this business. Having that really just recharged us to think again about how do we build a company with that behind us. In front of us, how do we do that again? How do we do that maybe in different ways when we think about success?

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

What else comes with that is obviously there's a tremendous financial return that comes to the company from being the innovator and developer of that agent.

When we start to look at the royalties and milestones that will come to us in a product that Jazz has guided recently to be a $3 billion-$5 billion peak sales opportunity. We have some responsibility for those financial returns for our shareholders to make sure that we take care of them, protect them, grow them, use them wisely, and that's the next step for us. Certainly amazed at the journey that zanidatamab has taken Zymeworks on.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

To get here. Beyond that, we have another phase III trial readout coming from zanidatamab in metastatic breast cancer setting in a post- HER2 patient population, which is going to be fully recruited by the mid- next year, and then read out by late 2027, early 2028. We have another chance to be back in front of FDA with something that might make a meaningful change in that breast cancer setting with zanidatamab. That's not that far away. In addition to this, our next product that we've worked on with J&J , pasritamig, which is the incredibly innovative KLK2/CD3 T-cell engager, will have its first phase III readout next year. It's something that J&J has guided to the potential of $1 billion-$5 billion in peak sales. Very excited about it. I ncreasing their clinical development investment of that agent, and that reads out next year.

I think for us, we clearly see where we've come from. It's amazing to be in this place, a biotech company, and certainly solidifies our financial future. W e have some additional phase III readouts coming very quickly for us next year. At the same time, we've moved our wholly owned R&D portfolio forward this year in four or five different themes between oncology, hem-onc, and also autoimmune and inflammatory.

Have an opportunity over the next 6-12 months to showcase some additional clinical data and pre-clinical data around that diverse part of the portfolio. It's still wholly owned.

We did set goals earlier this year to figure out how we would integrate partnerships, collaborations, maybe the use of spinoff vehicles to bring other capital in that so that we can move forward this very broad and diverse portfolio. That's been really exciting this year. At the same time, we made our first acquisition.

Which we talked about as a strategy. We haven't closed our acquisition of Theravance yet, but really hopefully showed what our acquisition strategy is about in trying to find interesting companies who have multi-components that we can attribute value to, whether it's a royalty stream or a profit share like they have in YUPELRI, which is on the market, on R&D assets or portfolio that we can evaluate to decide if we want to move forward or license.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Some tax attributes and other things. Hopefully, we illustrated the way we think about the acquisition strategy, helping the overall growth of our company moving forward. Did all of that within the capital discipline that we have inside the company, and at the same time continued to buy back our own shares, which was one of our goals we set out back in the summer of 2024.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Was to try and buy back a significant part of the company before everyone else caught up on the value, the underlying value of the assets that we think we have in front of us.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Since the summer of 2024, including this year, we've repurchased 10.5 million common shares. That's about 14% of our outstanding stock. It's allocated about $215 million to that allocation. We certainly think that just provides liquidity for current shareholders who want to exit. M ore importantly, it will provide an additional advantage to total share return as we continue to grow the company. We've been able to continue to do that this year. I think every aspect of what we set out to do in January, we've been able to execute so far. 2026, not finished. I think we have a number of things we'd like to get done before the end of the year that hopefully people will see as another illustration of how we run this company in the future.

Nothing can be as great as getting an FDA approval on something that really changes the standard of care for a big group of patients after an 11-year journey from lab to hospitals where docs can treat patients with something they didn't have available to them before. It's why we do this. It just encourages us to do it again.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Maybe we do it in different ways, but we're really, really excited and energized by that.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Great. You have so many different major pillars for the story, and thank you for giving us that overview. I'd like to maybe first start by going a little bit deeper into Zani. Last year, we were focused on the timing of GEA data. Now that you've secured approval in first-line HER2 positive, could you walk us through what that approval means, how that launch is going with your partners, and kind of maybe a little bit into the milestones and the financial side of those partnerships?

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Yeah, absolutely. I think when I took this job almost five years ago to become the Chair and CEO of Zymeworks, we had zanidatamab, which was just getting ready to go into the phase III trials, and I think there was this tremendous feeling that zanidatamab did not have a place. It could not be a meaningful medicine. At that time, we started to see the launch of T-DXd, which seemed like it was going to dominate the market segment in every indication available. We just felt that Zani could be a meaningful medicine in a way that others couldn't be. The differentiation of being really the only bispecific antibody being developed in this space just made us think about where it could be positioned to do well.

We certainly focused on gastric cancers, both GEA and BTC, which was the subject of our first approvals, to look for a situation where we could be the first-line therapy, we could be standard of care. I t was an important step for us to really execute clinical studies in those segments, as opposed to maybe moving to try to compete with T-DXd in metastatic breast cancer or try to be one of the others that would be behind what was going to eventually be the first-line therapy in T-DXd. I think after five years of clinical studies, we certainly see now where we could be the standard of care in those indications.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

That provides us a leverage point to then look at other indications which we can add on to that in the HER2 space.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Obviously, it gives us a base of revenues for our partners to start with. It gives us a base royalty and milestones that we can then utilize in the rest of the business. T hat was a very important thing for us to do. I think these are indications that I think if you look at our partners, Jazz and BeiGene, they're ideally suited to execute on. I think if you look at Jazz's strategy of wanting to be more of a rare disease company and whether that's rare CNS or rare oncology, it's an excellent fit with their capabilities and what their strategy is.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

If you look at the benefit of what we saw in our GA studies of looking at the combination of Zani and chemo and a PD-1, I think BeiGene was very well-positioned to bring Tevimbra to that combination, and that provides them an opportunity for another indication to build Tevimbra sales, and also to sell Zani in their markets in Asia-Pacific and Asia-Pacific sell both.

I think our commercial partner is doing a great job of getting the product approved and positioning it commercially to make it as broadly available as they can. This is a U.S. approval. We have obviously got filings and future filings to go around the world, but I think they are perfectly suited for maximizing or optimizing the brand. Beyond GEA, I think Jazz has already laid out the next clinical studies they hope to do beyond the metastatic breast cancer phase III that is reading out next year. They have outlined a registration study in metastatic colorectal cancer and non-small cell lung cancer in the HER2 overexpressing market, an early gastric cancer indication because there is an early gastric cancer patient setting as well, as well as some additional early breast cancer indications of interest.

I think they have laid out a pretty aggressive and broad clinical development investment behind zanidatamab that is going to be necessary to build that to that $3 billion-$5 billion in peak sales eventually.

I think we are well-positioned for launch. I think they have done a great job.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Of understanding what will be necessary. They've been in the marketplace for a while with the biliary tract indication, which has allowed them to do things like get a J-code and get on formularies in 90% of the centers where you then want to prescribe Zani for GEA. They've done really well in preparing for the rapid adoption of zanidatamab in this new indication approved by FDA. We're just wait to see the results of that in the next couple of quarters. W e're really expecting this to It is the standard of care. It's a new standard of care. It's a huge improvement over what was available for patients, and things like that usually see some rapid adoption curve.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. It's good to see the rapid expansion beyond GEA. I guess you mentioned metastatic breast cancer as well as colorectal. Any other specific tumors that you're excited about that it might be expanding into?

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Yeah, I think if you look at We also have had a pan-tumor study underway for some time, which could get us a tumor-agnostic label indication in the U.S. similar to what T-DXd did. I think that has had a positive effect on T-DXd usage in the U.S. T hat study has been underway for some timeframe. T hat would be interesting to take a look at. I think if you look at the phase I data set that we had a number of years ago, you could see that Zani could be meaningful and useful in a whole range of patient settings similar to where you've seen trastuzumab usage, but even broader than that, and overlaid where you might see T-DXd usage as well.

I think there are a number of other tumor types where I think Zani could be beneficial of most of those in a first-line setting, most of those looking as an interesting combination agent with other classes of molecules and whether that's chemotherapy or checkpoint inhibition. I think its combinability is one of its strongest features, and its tolerability is so good.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

You seem to be able to combine it very well with different classes of molecules, and I think that was very important in trastuzumab becoming the top-selling agent in the HER2 space.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

You certainly have some elements of that, and we have at least a randomized study with an FDA approval that shows that in that first GA indication, Zani provides more activity than trastuzumab.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Being different combinations. E xcited to explore the full range of indications that we can. Try to reach every patient we can.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Everywhere in the world, where Zani can provide the standard of care improvement that we've been able to show so far in GEA.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

It's a great foundation. Moving on a little bit to talk about T cell engagers, including your next- generation T cell engager approach, including your DLL3 program, and ZW209 heading into IND. How would you characterize your T cell engager effort today? What does it stand, and how do you expect ZW209 to differentiate from other DLL3-targeted therapies?

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Yeah. Obviously, we've been following the development of bispecific T cell engagers for some time. I think I've been working in that field for 20 years now. Certainly, they're becoming more meaningful, but not yet enough approved. I think we felt a couple of years ago that there was an element that might be missing to try and improve upon activity and tolerability for a bispecific T cell engager. W e started this idea that because we can engineer multi-specific antibodies, we could look at a tri-specific capability, and if you had an extra arm and a bispecific that you could add, what would you add for functionality? What would you add for durability?

We came up with this concept of which ZW209 is the first agent, which is due to go in the clinic this year, of trying to incorporate a CD28 costimulatory factor in with a T cell engager and really provide some more durability activity to CD3, but not as an independent signal, but as a conditional signal. C onditionally activated CD28. What we found, at least in preclinically, is that we were able to generate something completely different than looking at a standard bispecific T cell engager. DLL3 is the first one we selected. We just thought that was really interesting. We certainly have validation with tarlatamab being available in the marketplace now on its own or with PD-1, and the thought is that maybe we could provide something extra than tarlatamab for that specific indication in small cell lung cancers.

That's the first place we started.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Okay.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

That is not the only place we think this could be potentially applied. We have a host of other solid tumor targets in hem-onc, and also in autoimmune inflam, which are, again, around this trispecific understanding, that maybe a trispecific, though more complex.

Can provide more functionality to a bispecific antibody. I think it is what a number of companies have been trying to do. Proper protein engineering is really the key to solving that.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We think we have come along with something that is really interesting, and if ZW209 can show that in concept in clinic that we are correct, then we can replicate that many more times against different targets and different tumor types. We are just looking forward to putting ZW209 into the clinic and seeing where that part of our R&D strategy can go to.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Got it. Any key milestones to be aware of in the next 12-18 months?

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Yeah. A lot of them. We are pretty active at a whole range of things within the company. I think for us, you will see for ZW209, you will see that go to the clinic, but we will start to give some visibility to what is behind that in our trispecific TCE portfolio.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Got it.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

I think we have said before we need to integrate some partnerships and collaborations and funding sources into our R&D portfolio because it is wholly owned now.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

It is really diverse and broad. Our R&D group in Vancouver is very productive, which is great.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

They're providing too many opportunities for us to try to pursue on our own capital. I think trying to find a way to integrate partnerships and collaborations from others into that portfolio, finding opportunities where we can maybe think about spinning off something to a dedicated entity, which we can work then with outside investors on while maintaining an equity stake and a royalty stake, that's something we're pursuing as well. As we talk publicly, we're thinking about that as an outcome for our pan-RAS inhibitor payload ADCs, which we disclosed earlier this year at AACR, and that seems like that might be a good structure for us to move a part of our portfolio forward.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Faster and broader than if we relied just on our own capital.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We can maintain a very significant equity stake and royalty interest in that development. We're excited about executing on a number of those things to see how they move forward. We look forward to being able to announce some of those completed transactions that we had talked about earlier this year.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Thanks for mentioning ADCs. I think it's a good shift. You've now demonstrated very strong data from ZW191 in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. What do you think is the takeaway from that data set? What do you want investors to take away from it? How do you expect it to differentiate in the competitive folate receptor alpha landscape?

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Yeah. We set out in 2022 to develop our own portfolio of topo payload ADCs in therapeutic areas where we thought there was some improvement needed.

We focused, as we have talked about before, on gynecological tumors, on thoracic, especially lung, and also in GI. We developed our own proprietary payload, we came up with our own strategy, and we developed ZW191 in folate receptor alpha. We developed ZW251 in GPC3 ADC, targeted ADC, and ZW220, which is our NaPi targeted ADC, and all those in our portfolio. I think when you look at that portfolio, we got some initial clinical data already from ZW191.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

ZW251 is in phase I right now, so we will see some data on that.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

At the appropriate time. I think we are really excited about the concept of how we design those topo ADC payloads with the idea that the antibody is extremely important.

There's some really unique attributes of every antibody that we have attached to those ADCs. Focusing on tolerability, this idea that being able to dose at a much higher level than you might have seen with topo ADCs before was going to benefit patients by having more drug exposure, and maybe being more tolerable, having more prolonged drug exposure.

I think if you look at ZW191, we were able to dose that DAR8 version at a much higher level than you might have seen before.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

ZW251, which is our GPC3, which is in phase I for HCC patients at the DAR4.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We are dose escalating at a level that has almost never been seen before in topo-based ADCs. We will see if that high- dose strategy, though it is tolerable, drives enough activity for us to think about that justifies the thesis we had about that being important for things like antigen sink, but also prolonged exposure at higher levels. Really excited about that, and we are almost just getting started in the clinic to understand what those agents can do.

We also realized in 2024 that topo payloads were becoming more common, getting a little bit more crowded. We need to go to the next generation as well. We were trying to find the next generation payload that would be something we would want to buy into beyond the topo payloads.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We decided that was target small molecules.

A different approach than maybe looking at toxins delivered by ADCs, and that is where we stumbled upon the idea of delivering pan-RAS inhibitors.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

In an antibody-directed way. For the last two years, we've worked on that. First disclosure in April this year at AACR with, again, a portfolio of three opportunities that cover all the RAS-mutated cancers that you would be interested in covering. That's the really interesting next generation. I know it seems funny to.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Go to the next generation when we haven't really.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Got clinical proof of concept of the first generation.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Yeah.

That's how quickly you need to move these days to the next thing.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

I think we're trying to continue to be innovative while still supporting what was innovative for us a while ago. I think both of those two ADC portfolios, though different, hopefully illustrate the types of skills we have at being a great antibody company, good protein engineers, but also our medicinal chemistry and bioconjugate skills showing as well.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

You already hit on the three ADC programs I was thinking of, including the pan-RAS. Any other assets in the pipeline that investors should be paying attention to? Any updates you would like to highlight for us?

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

It is a very diverse R&D strategy, but it is a very productive group, and a really cost-effective group when you look at what we are able to accomplish. We have our two separate ADC strategies that we are pursuing with both our topo payload and the RAS inhibitor payload strategy.

There are other technological developments behind that I will not talk about, and dual payload, et cetera.

If you go to the other side of the house, which is our multispecific antibody programs, we talked about the trispecific TCE programs.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Which is really interesting for us, as ZW209 is the first of possibly many behind that. If you go beyond that, we are also looking at our dual engineered checkpoint inhibitors, and obviously we have one that is targeted to go in the clinic next year, ZW1528, which is a bispecific against IL-4 receptor and IL-33.

Having just come from Barcelona recently, looking at the AstraZeneca data around their IL-33 antibody in phase III results is pretty amazing.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

The idea combining Dupixent, what is really Dupixent, an IL-4 receptor alpha target.

An IL-33 target in the same bispecific molecule could be really interesting for the future of COPD.

That is the next piece of what we are doing. We have other dual- engineered cytokines below that for different specific indications as well. That is another area of research that we are very interested in. Beyond that, we like this idea of trispecifics, but they do not necessarily have to be T-cell engagers.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We like this idea of trying to combine three arms of antibody or more and trying to understand what functionality can be built in. I know checkpoint inhibition has gone now to dual checkpoint inhibition. Think about things like PD-1 VEGF, and we look at that and we go, "That is a great innovation." What we start to think about is if you had a third arm to add to PD-1 VEGF, what would it be? What could you add to add functionality to something as interesting as that? You will start to see from us a little bit more some preclinical presentations around how we think about trispecifics and beyond. When I say beyond, we have things like a pentaspecific antibody, which is really interesting, hard to think about. It is not just adding complexity, you are adding functionality

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Hopefully driving more activity or improving tolerability or other factors. I think we have the engineering skills to make complex biologics which can drive more activity.

That is what we are really exploring. It is four or five different diverse research themes inside the company.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Very productive, so no shortage of opportunities. We think about integrating partnerships and collaborations in our wholly owned R&D portfolio, we're not in any danger of running out of novel unencumbered opportunities in the future for the company.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great overview on the pipeline. I think on that same topic, I'd like to move a little bit into corporate and strategy.

With a strong balance sheet today, $300+ million, 2022 , and you have an active buyback, how do you think about the future of the collaboration strategy, acquisition strategy, capital return, and how should investors think about financial runway with you guys under this new model?

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Yeah. We've been talking to investors about this for probably a year now about how we think this strategy can help us build into something in the future that's very valuable, although it might be a little bit different than a traditional biotech strategy.

We definitely made a decision back in 2022 that the best thing for zanidatamab was to partner that with someone who could then fund development, fund commercialization. We would simply take a good share of the success from that. We wouldn't forward integrate to be a commercial organization. That's just what we decided to do.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

I think when you look at the peak sales potential of Zani and how to optimize that globally, that was the right decision.

It definitely left us with this thought back in 2022, that in a number of years, we might be faced with, say, the problem of having a pretty substantial, durable, long-term cash flow stream from royalties and milestones from zanidatamab success.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We would start to look like a royalty company or a royalty portfolio. I think we've seen this in biotech before, and I think it scares some biotechs, and you think, "Well, I should just monetize that, make it cash, and go back to doing what I'm doing as an R&D biotech company." We looked at that and we said, "Look, these cash flow streams that come from commercial assets are very valuable and getting much more valuable in our marketplace when you look at the amount of capital that's now chasing to have exposure to biotech through royalties and underlying products as opposed to equity.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Our thought was, if these are so valuable, why are we not keeping those for our shareholders? If we are going to keep these for our shareholders, it is going to be a long-term basis, so we might as well actively manage those royalty streams and not simply just collect cash when it comes in.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

When you look at where zanidatamab can go over its lifetime, if pasritamig is successful in phase III next year and J&J can take that to market, that will add another royalty stream for us on top of that. The Theravance acquisition is a way for us to manage that, so we are adding a profit share from the sale of YUPELRI.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Which has, again, long-term, durable, predictable cash flows. We are actually trying to manage that in an active way.

I know it makes it seem like we look like a royalty company, but there is tremendous value in those cash flows that are all generated from, at least the first two, from our own R&D innovation. YUPELRI from someone else's. We just happened to acquire it and bring it inside Zymeworks. Those are very valuable cash flow streams. We would love the value of all of that as it appreciates in the future.

From development stage to commercial for Zani and pasritamig to have that flow to our own shareholders.

Which means we have to be comfortable having the skill sets to actively manage that, making shareholders know where value will come from.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

From holding onto those, why we are holding onto those, rather than seeing those as a source of financing, because we do not. We have shown structure this year, how we have used those to maybe access capital. To help that strategy. We did earlier this year, completed financing with Royalty Pharma, where we borrowed against our future Zani cash flows to bring in $250 million in capital earlier this year.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We allocated half of that to buying back our shares because we felt that was a good transaction, and the other half went in to fund our share of the acquisition of Theravance.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We've used some debt structure to move capital around and be thoughtful capital allocators, reduce share counts, and add another royalty stream.

To that part of the house. That's great, but we're still an R&D company at heart. We're still creating innovative molecules, which we can use in different ways. We can partner them to create our own royalties. A lso the types of acquisitions we look at, like a Theravance or these multi-component, we can access maybe some of these acquisitions that a traditional financial player can't. Because we have an R&D organization, we can develop assets. We have an operational infrastructure to manage drug development. I can apply that to someone else's assets that weren't invented inside the company. I think trying to get the best out of both worlds, these royalty assets are tremendously valuable.

I want to hold onto them. R&D innovation can create something really valuable, like a Zani, anytime.

Need to manage the amount of investment you have there and the capital intensity and risk of that.

We can do that if we're financially disciplined and thoughtful about capital allocation. I n the same ticker symbol, we can get the best out of royalty exposure and the best out of R&D innovation in the same ticker symbol. We don't have to choose one or the other.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We don't have to split them as we've seen in our sector done before. I think the combination of those two things running synergistically with the same management team, the same capital structure, is really, really interesting when you look at the financial model and look at the future risk-adjusted cash flows that are generated and the total shareholder return that comes out of running a business like that and reducing share count at the same time. That's where you can accomplish outsized returns in our sector.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

I know it's not traditional biotech and it's not traditional royalty financing. It's somewhere a composite of both of those together. I know that's differentiated, but.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

We can create differentiated products. We can also create a differentiated strategy as a company and maybe create some differentiated returns and differentiated risk profile against those returns. That's the whole thing that we're trying to accomplish. We've shown some of that execution this year. We've got more things to do before the end of the year to show that. I think over time, we'll show the execution against that strategy. We haven't gotten credit for a lot of it yet, but eventually, we're hoping that that will catch up with us as we continue to execute and outperform against the strategy.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Absolutely. It's a unique place to be and a unique positioning in a competitive but very interesting and profitable sector, or a portion of the biotech sector. Moving on a little bit to talking about the sector, there's been a lot of talk about Chinese biotechs again this past year, I would say even more than when we spoke last year. How will Zymeworks react to this heightened competition, and how does it factor into your strategy?

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

That's interesting. N ext year will be my 40th year in biotech. One of the first things I did in my first biotech company, which happened to be in Vancouver, Canada, is went to China in 1988 and struck the first collaboration between a North American biotech and a Chinese research group. Maybe 25 or 30 years ahead of my time because it didn't work out that well for cultural reasons. W e could certainly see the power then, obviously, of what China might bring to global drug development.

I think from our standpoint at Zymeworks, we've tried to take advantage of that every step of the way. We use preclinical contractors in China because they're high quality, but sometimes they can move faster or be less expensive. We use manufacturing capabilities in China, which are as good as anywhere in the world in terms for quality and delivery. We've partnered with BeiGene, as it was known almost 10 years ago.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Because we could see to develop zanidatamab, especially in gastric indications, we were going to have to have access to clinical trial studies in China.

Not just in China, but as a part of a global study.

It was probably easier to do that with a partner than not. I think without that BeiGene relationship that we struck 10 years ago, Zani would not be approved where it is today. I think we've tried to take advantage of everything that's available in China. We can certainly do more. There's certainly a tremendous amount of licenses there with royalties that I think people like Royalty Pharma and others are trying to figure out how to access. There's definitely more collaborative activity there. There's definitely product acquisition we could take advantage of.

We've done very well with collaborating with the qualities that China brings to global drug development, and we'll do that. Think broader, you can start to see that already operating in places like Korea, Singapore, India. I think China's not the only place on Asia-Pacific where I think you can take advantage of the capabilities they bring to a global drug development strategy. It's just China was at the front of the curve.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

I think from our standpoint, we'd like to do more in Asia-Pacific and have that help our global programs. I think if you structure it in the right way, it's going to be fantastic for us and the rest of the sector.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Great. Well, that's all the questions I had. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today, and thank you, Ken, and I look forward to our next conversation.

Ken Galbraith
Chairman and CEO, Zymeworks

Yeah. Appreciate your time. Thanks for coming.

Frank Tang
Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking Group, Morgan Stanley

Thank you, everyone.