Earnings Call Transcript
OmniAb, Inc. (OABI)
Earnings Call Transcript - OABI Q3 2023
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Okay, great, we're at 8 am Pacific Time, 11 am Eastern time. So we will kick it off. Good morning everyone. I'm Matt Foehr, CEO of OmniAb, and I want to thank you all for joining our first Research and Technology Event. We are presenting today from NASDAQ's Entrepreneurial Center, in Downtown San Francisco, which is just a short drive across the Bay Bridge from our headquarters and labs over in Emeryville. It's been just over a year since OmniAb became an independent publicly traded company listed on the NASDAQ Exchange. And I want to thank the NASDAQ team here in San Francisco and back in New York, but especially the team here in San Francisco for hosting us today and furnishing this great space for our event this morning. But before I begin, I'd like to remind you that we'll be making forward-looking statements during our presentations. These forward-looking statements, of course, carry risks and uncertainties and actual results may be different from those that are projected. So I'd urge investors to please consult today's earnings release as well as our SEC filings for more information on these risks. So again, welcome. I'm going to provide some opening remarks this morning, some updates on the business and also give a bit of a roadmap to today's presentations. But before I do, I wanted to introduce you to our presenters. We've got a wider cross-section of management. I'm excited that investors and analysts get the chance to meet more of our management and leadership team here. So you'll see presentations from Todd Pettingill, who is our VP of Business Development and Strategy. Todd's been with the OmniAb business really since the beginning of forming the foundation of what has now become OmniAb. He played a critical role in all six of the acquisitions of the company and technology acquisitions that we did in less than six years to form what is now the foundation of the business of OmniAb. Bill Harriman heads our antibody discovery. Bill was a Founder of Crystal Bioscience, which was the innovator and inventor of OmniChicken. Bill's had a really illustrious career in the antibody discovery space, is also the inventor of the GEM Assay, which is a part of our technology. And Bill has the honor of doing the OmnidAb launch today, and you'll hear more about that as I run through the agenda. Bob Chen runs our Discovery Systems. Bob joined us when we acquired xCella Biosciences. Bob was the Co-Founder of xCella. He Co-Founded it along with Dr. Jennifer Cochran, who also sits on our Board of Directors. The xCella business was spun out of the Stanford School of Engineering, and Bob is an inventor of our exploration technology, which has become a key part of our business as well. And you'll also get to meet Doug Krafte. Doug is a well-known individual in the scientific circles around ion channels and transporters. He has a long history of significant scientific achievements in the ion channel and transporter space and heads our Ion Channel and Transporter Team based out in Durham. And then you'll also get to meet Kurt. Obviously, many of the investors on the line and analysts know Kurt very well. Kurt joined us not long before the split, when we became an independent publicly traded company. He has a long career in biotech and technology, the longest of which was at Amgen for many years, heading their European finance operations. So excited that you'll get a chance to meet all of these colleagues who I'm honored to work with today. Today's agenda, again, I'll provide some opening remarks. Todd is going to give an update on creating value for partners. That's something obviously very important to us. And Bill will be launching the OmnidAb technology today. We'll talk a lot about that, get into the science, get into where it fits in the industry and why it's important. Bob will highlight how we enhance discovery with OmniDeep, which is our suite of in silico tools that are woven throughout our technology stack. And Bob will provide details there and provide some case studies and other details that we think will be interesting to the investment community. And then Doug will talk about the Ion Channel opportunity, some high-value partnerships that we have there and why we see unlocking the antibody potential in ion channels as an important part of the future. And then Kurt will review our financials. Obviously, we reported our Q3 financials earlier this morning. He'll review those and also provide some other financial insights into our portfolio of partnerships in our business. But I'm going to start with our mission. We are a mission-driven organization. This is what guides us. This is what keeps us focused. Our mission is to enable the rapid development of innovative therapeutics by pushing the frontiers of drug discovery technologies. We are highly focused on this. We're highly committed to this. And I think that clarity of mission is one of the things that attracts new partners and also causes a number of our existing partners to expand their use of our platform. Our business, in many ways, is quite simple. It's a licensing business. So we license our technologies to the industry to allow them to more quickly and efficiently discover antibody-based therapeutics. Our technology offering addresses some of the most critical needs in discovery today. And we're operating one of the largest Greenfields in the pharma industry. I'll talk more about that in a couple of slides, but the antibody-related therapy elements of the industry continue to grow. We have a leading and proven technology now with a growing number of partners and a growing number of programs, and we are committed to continued innovation in what we call intelligent expansion of our technology. Because of where we sit in the industry, we have a bit of a unique position where we can have deep technical dialogues with our partners, not only understanding where they are today, but where they are headed, and that informs how we invest in and innovate around our platform. So a little bit on OmniAb today. We, as I said at the outset, we just passed the one-year mark of being an independent publicly traded company. We really do feel like all the pieces in the business are beginning to become aligned. Looking forward into 2024 and beyond, we do feel like we really have a business that is positioned to succeed. All the pieces have come into place. Our work is centered on driving the business, accelerating innovation around the platform, and consistently staying ahead of our partners' discovery needs. We are 112 employees across three primary U.S. sites. Our headquarters here in the San Francisco Bay Area, over in Emeryville. We have an ion channel and transporter team in Durham, North Carolina, as I mentioned. And then also an in silico team that's based in Tucson, Arizona. And that we've also built up our business development team more broadly, and recently established an ex-U.S. business development presence as well. We see the need for only minimal future headcount growth to support substantial growth in our portfolio and our partnerships. There's a lot of leverage in this business, a lot of efficiency that's been built in over time, and we feel like we're really well positioned to take advantage of that leverage. Despite a macro landscape in the pharma tools and technology space that has obviously been widely reported and has had a number of headwinds associated with it, our business metrics continue to demonstrate the value that our platform brings to the industry. We've had nice growth in new partners, nice growth in new programs over the last 24 months, while the industry has been facing substantial headwinds. We've also seen nice partner program advancement and we announced this morning that we now have five new clinical entrants in this calendar year 2023. Our work and technologies impact not only our partners' R&D pipelines but also on patients' lives. This is something that really motivates us. It motivates the rigor that we put into the science, how we challenge ourselves to stay ahead of partners' needs. We are quite proud of the fact of where we sit in the industry, and it's quite rewarding to see the impacts we're starting to have on patients' lives. There are over 170 active or completed clinical trials that are testing OmniAb-derived therapeutics. That's a testament not only to our partners' commitment to the antibodies discovered out of our technology but it also speaks a lot about the potential impact we can have on patients' lives. There are over 30,000 subjects either enrolled or to be enrolled in those trials. We have three approved OmniAb-derived drugs. All of those are in cancer currently, and a growing portfolio of clinical programs that I'll touch on a little bit later in this section. Our business is really designed and funded for continued innovation and intelligent technology expansion. We're obviously launching an exciting new technology today, our OmnidAb heavy-chain OmniChicken. Importantly, our innovation engine for producing new transgenic animals and new elements of our technology is becoming more efficient. We're able to do it faster and more cost-effectively. That's something that I think will feed the business well into the future. We will launch other novel technologies next year as well, and we also expect to roll out other new partner experience enhancements as we call them, by 2024 and beyond. So I'm going to step back for a moment and talk about the antibody market. This is a growing market for a variety of reasons. The antibodies are projected to have sales of $279 billion by 2025, up from $238 billion last year. In 2022, there were 51 blockbuster antibodies, which are antibodies with sales of over $1 billion. The five best-selling antibodies had approximately $75 billion of sales last year. The importance of discovery technology focused on antibodies continues to increase for a variety of reasons. There have been decades of foundational and basic biology research and scientific advancements that create what I see as a continuing need for cutting-edge antibody-related discovery technologies. A lot of foundational investment is driving the present-day and future demand, starting all the way back with Nixon's war on cancer back in the 1970s. And then a number of scientific advancements have contributed to antibodies becoming an increasingly important modality for treating disease. These advancements include hybridoma technology, cloning, the human genome project, proteomics, and a deeper understanding of immunology and molecular biology along with improved computing technology, all of which drive that demand for discovery technology. Additionally, the historical success rates for antibodies have been roughly double that for small molecules. Other factors driving interest in antibodies include the Inflation Reduction Act, which is shifting R&D spending from large pharma partners away from small molecules and toward antibodies. The data I shared in the blue of this slide is recent and was presented a couple of weeks ago by the Antibody Society, which meticulously tracks antibody success rates pursued therapeutically by commercial sponsors. This data is extremely relevant and interesting. If you look closely at how the Antibody Society tracks this data, you can see that it appears the industry is getting better at developing antibody-based therapeutics over time. Moving on to some recent metrics in the business, we've signed eight new license agreements this year. We announced new platform agreements with GigaMune and Polaris Therapeutics that were both signed in Q3 and more recently entered into a new platform license agreement with a global pharma company that was also signed recently. Our active partner count has grown to 76 as of the end of the quarter. As you can see in the bar chart, we've continued to grow the number of active partners net of attrition over several cycles in the biotech space. We also think there's strength and diversity in the types of partners that we are attracting and bringing in, which creates multiple paths to potential value creation downstream. We've also seen nice growth and advancement of active programs. We started the year with 291 active programs and ended Q3 with 314 active programs, net of attrition. You can see that growth reflected on the left side in the bar chart. On the pie chart on the right, you can see that we've had nice growth in diversity as well as graduation and advancement of programs. Several programs have moved from discovery to preclinical, five programs have moved from preclinical to Phase I clinical trials, and one program moved from Phase III to its first international filing. I want to note that our definition of preclinical is quite restrictive. We don't categorize something as preclinical unless it is in pre-IND studies and the partner is moving toward filing an IND and entering clinical trials. As you can see, there are 14 programs in that preclinical slice. We've also had growth in active clinical programs. We started off 2023 with the expectation that we expected three to five new clinical starts this year. At the end of Q3, we reached five. So we've had five new clinical programs from OmniAb-derived antibodies enter the clinic this year. Seagen had a bispecific. Immunovant entered the clinic with IMVT-1402, which is a next-generation FcRn antagonist that has already reported positive data for that program. They indicated this morning that they expect more data for that program before the end of this month. Gloria entered its first clinical trial for an anti-LAG-3, and in the third quarter, Roche entered the clinic with a bispecific antibody. Cessation Therapeutics also entered clinical trials with an antibody for an important use as an anti-fentanyl. This is crucial, given the medical tragedy and growth in medical need around preventing fentanyl overdose, and this is an important use not only in the United States but also now in other countries. I want to clarify about the Roche program that entered the clinic in Q3. It is a program that comes from a fully paid license we inherited from a company that we acquired, so there are no economics to that program. However, it validates the importance of our technology in various disease areas. We will monitor the progress of the 14 preclinical stage programs as those approach Phase I clinical trials. We've made strides in preclinical; historically, we've had a very high success rate — about 80% — of our programs advancing from preclinical to clinical. This next slide is becoming a bit busy as more of our programs enter the clinic; we are now at 31 programs that are either in clinical trials, in registration, or approved. We are considering other ways to reflect our pipeline to investors, including bulleted charts and other methods that may be more amenable to illustrating the diversity of partners, the growing diversity in therapy areas as we delve deeper into the pipeline, and importantly, the progression as well. As I wrap up my section, I'm announcing today that we are launching OmnidAb. In fact, we've already launched it, and partners are already using this newest technology in active programs. OmnidAb is the first and only transgenic chicken producing single-domain antibodies, which opens significant opportunities both medically and scientifically as well as for the business. Bill will elaborate more on that, and Todd will also share partner perspectives around OmnidAb as well. In conclusion, I want to underscore how well positioned for future growth we are. We are making a meaningful impact on human health and the industry at large. As we enter 2024, everything is aligning for our business. We are leveraging a scalable operation where technology and innovation investments are closely supported by robust discovery relationships with our partners. We put a premium on being stakeholder-focused, which is a crucial part of our foundation. I am incredibly proud of the fantastic colleagues I work alongside. Our culture is strong, and we prioritize hiring, motivating, and developing the best employees. Our commitment to our partners is unwavering; we are dedicated to understanding their needs while maintaining an intimate and collaborative scientific dialogue. And of course, we are committed to our investors as well. Superior business execution remains a top priority for us. We lead with integrity and responsibility in the communities where we operate. With that, I’ll introduce Todd, who just got back from BIO-Europe and is ready to go. So Todd, welcome.
Todd Pettingill, VP of Business Development and Strategy
Good morning, everybody. Great to be here with you. Today, I get to speak about a good topic: the value that we're creating for our partners and what's driving that. As Matt mentioned, we've had a really good run over the past several years of increasing our partner base, especially in the last 24 months, which is encouraging in light of the recent market headwinds. So what is driving that? There are several factors that stand out, but we have improved and increased platform visibility through our business development efforts and through our partners pushing antibodies into the clinic and also getting them approved. We've invested a lot into our business development and marketing presence, increasing team size and spending more time at conferences. Finally, we can be creative in how we license. We do not take a one-size-fits-all approach with our partners. We have various contract types and arrangements to find a deal that works for each partner. We now define our partner base by different areas, each with unique characteristics. First, we have discovery technology access partners. These partners have full access to the platform for both current and potential programs, and they can develop and commercialize OmniAb-derived antibodies. This is the majority of our partner base. Next, we have commercial partners, who have geographical or therapy area rights to commercial and development-stage OmniAb-derived antibodies. Finally, our academic partner licenses are designed for revenue-sharing. We provide the discovery technology platform, and in return, these academic institutions use it to conduct proprietary research and spin out assets for commercial development. So what drives partner interest in our platform? This is our platform, and we categorize it into three separate buckets: Create, Screen, and Deliver. First, we help create a large, diverse set of high-quality antibodies for our partners. We employ a wide range of transgenic and other animals that drive how we create antibodies. Next, we help our partners screen through millions of potential antibodies to find the right therapeutic. We have a high-throughput automated version and a manual version that delves deep into the repertoire. Finally, we help characterize, select and optimize the right antibody through traditional wet lab work, and we've recently incorporated in silico tools to build upon the assets we provide. Core to our platform is our transgenic chicken technologies. Our chickens consist of three different technologies: our OmniChicken, which makes fully human antibodies that are standard-sized; OmniClic, which makes human antibodies that have a fixed light chain, useful for making bispecifics; and OmnidAb, which we will present more on shortly. The chicken is important, as it is evolutionarily distinct from humans and thus more likely to identify a broad range of targets. Our rats include OmniRat, for full-length standard antibodies, and OmniFlic, a common light chain rat useful for bispecifics that allows us to achieve broader diversity. OmniTaur, our cow technology, produces antibodies that exhibit ultra-long CDRs, opening up a potential class of targets. Our exploration technology is a high-throughput B-cell screening platform that screens over 1.5 million B-cells at a time and employs integrated artificial intelligence and sequencing to maximize repertoire mining. These technologies not only attract new partners to us but also keep partners engaged as they leverage our continuous innovation to find new antibodies. This quick breakdown shows that OmniRat is currently leading in usage, but we are increasing our diversity in technology usage over time. Our antibodies are useful for anything an antibody can target, from monospecific anti-bodies to multi-specifics, including bispecifics, trispecifics, antibody-drug conjugates, and in applications like CAR-T and TCR mimetics. The potential uses for our OmniAb antibodies are vast. The last slide before Bill shares more on OmnidAb highlights the importance of versatility in how our partners utilize our technology. They can rapidly generate high-affinity human sequences from OmnidAb and potentially penetrate solid tumors or cross the blood-brain barrier. We would encourage participation in our upcoming presentations at PEGS Europe in Lisbon next week, AET Conference in San Diego in December, and a webinar series on OmnidAb in January 2024. That’s it from me. I will turn it over to Bill.
Bill Harriman, Head of Antibody Discovery
Thanks, Todd. So I want to take you a bit deeper into the technology behind OmnidAb and single-domain antibodies. First, let’s start with a conventional antibody. It’s an IgG molecule, which is the predominant antibody form in most vertebrate species. It consists of two heavy chains and two light chains held together by disulfide bridges. At the top of the molecule are two binding domains composed of a VH and a VL, while the base, in a Y shape, forms the Fc domain, crucial for serum stability and effector function. Different species, notably camelids, possess an alternate form of antibody called the heavy-chain-only antibody. This form is devoid of light chains and consists solely of a VH domain as its binding element. This unique structure allows for a stable yet smaller binding entity to exist, which has led to the creation of single-domain antibodies. These antibodies can be enmeshed with different types of molecules, including human Fc domains for enhanced stability and longer serum half-life, among others. The key advantage here is the ability to create a diverse array of multivalent molecules by stacking these single domains, leading to bispecific and multispecific constructs. The compact size facilitates the coupling of single-domain antibodies to therapeutic agents, enabling deep tissue penetration and potential efficacy in various medical applications. Deliverability options have expanded beyond standard administration, as these single-domain antibodies are stable and protease resistant, allowing for alternative delivery routes. As for imaging applications, their rapid clearance rate significantly enhances the contrast in imaging scenarios, as the bound agents combine quickly while unbound molecules are eliminated rapidly. Overall, single-domain antibodies offer a broad range of therapeutic applications and business opportunities in emerging fields. To give you an idea of how these single-domain antibodies are made, it typically starts with immunizing a llama, which produces antibodies you would like to humanize for therapeutic use. Humanizing involves replacing stability regions with human equivalents, which raises the challenge of achieving a robust and developable molecule. This is where OmnidAb shines, as it offers a pre-engineered human framework, which has stabilizing mutations integrated to bolster solubility and stability. The results we’ve seen so far validate our assertion that these antibodies will advance quicker and with exceptional robustness. On an experimental level, we have observed that these antibodies exhibit lower self-interaction scores compared to clinical failures and yield promising results highlighted in our trials. With the advantages that OmnidAb brings to the table, we believe it positions us strongly for future growth in therapeutic antibody discovery. Let me pass it over to Bob Chen, who will discuss how we're enhancing discovery with OmniDeep.
Bob Chen, Discovery Systems Lead
Hey, everyone. I'm excited to be here to discuss how we're enhancing discovery with OmniDeep, launched to showcase our suite of in silico tools for therapeutic discovery and optimization. These tools are integrated into our technology stack to create diverse repertoires, screen millions of cells, and deliver optimal antibodies. Our objective is to streamline drug discovery, making our capabilities more efficient and impactful for our partners. OmniDeep is fundamentally built upon four pillars: deep repertoires generated from our animals, thorough screening facilitated by proprietary hardware and software, deep sequencing to collect intricate data, and deep learning tools to interpret this data. I want to emphasize that the foundational inputs for OmniDeep are the vast repertoires from our animals, generated through the collaboration of rational genetic design and powerful in vivo processes. For example, immunizing various animals with different target variants yields uniquely different repertoires. This diversity allows us to create immense and varied antibody repertoires. The xPloration platform serves our AI-driven deep functional screening. Utilizing a chip with over 1.5 million features, we can efficiently conduct assays and apply various machine learning models to detect hits. We've leveraged biological intelligence with AI to accumulate data and build insightful findings through deep learning and structured-based design tools. This combined approach facilitates substantial data analysis that translates into effective drug discovery. A case study exemplifies this process. After screening over 27 million cells from three OmniFlic animals, we obtained over 3,000 positive binding events and more than 1,300 unique sequences spanning 124 lineages. This case study underscores our capability to deliver an extensive array of potential therapeutic candidates through OmniDeep's systemic strategies. We can also intelligently prioritize and select candidates from our rich pool of sequences utilizing data from high-quality input and deep learning models. OmniDeep's capabilities provide profound insights that contribute directly to our large-scale antibody discovery processes. We look forward to sharing OmniDeep as a tool for our partners to aid in both discovery workflows and optimization; offering the best of our in vivo and in silico capabilities. Thank you, and I'll now turn it over to Doug Krafte.
Doug Krafte, Ion Channel and Transporter Team Lead
Thanks, Bob. Bob and Bill have done an excellent job introducing our technological innovations. Now, let’s focus on the Ion Channel opportunities stemming from these developments. For those unfamiliar with ion channels, they are essential in managing the concentrations of charged particles in and out of cells to maintain health. Ion channels play critical roles in various bodily functions, and disturbances in their activity can lead to diseases, making them important targets for drug development. At OmniAb, we boast one of the industry's most experienced ion channel teams with extensive backgrounds in drug discovery for small molecules, now applying our expertise in the antibody space. One example of our success is the discovery of selective blockers for the Nav1.8 sodium channel, with exciting prospects for pain therapeutics resulting from these efforts. Additionally, we are developing custom technology platforms for high-throughput electrophysiology and structural biology to push our ion channel platform forward. We validate these efforts with partnerships with companies like GSK and Roche for neurological and metabolic disease programs. The opportunity in this domain is significant; both sodium and potassium channels have a rich history in drug development. However, creating viable small molecules for specific ion channels has proven challenging, which is where our antibody technologies, such as OmnidAb and OmniTaur, come in. Antibodies can offer promising solutions for targeting ion channels, and our integrated approach combining our diverse animal platforms, proprietary screening technologies, and expert personnel provides us with a robust operational framework to advance this area of drug discovery. We are also hosting a webinar at the end of this month to present some strategies regarding our work in this field. So please join us if you're interested in diving deeper into the science. Thank you, and I'll turn it over to Kurt now to finish the formal presentation.
Kurt Gustafson, CFO
Thanks, Doug. I'm going to start by discussing our third-quarter financial results and then shift to metrics for our broader portfolio. Total revenue for the third quarter was $5.5 million compared to $6.9 million in the prior year quarter. We saw an increase in license and milestone revenue due to a milestone from Seagen and the Genovac program partnered with Pfizer. However, this increase was offset by decreased service revenue from the completion of certain programs. Royalty revenue was $500,000 this quarter, comparable to the prior year period but showing an uptick relative to the beginning of the year. For operating expenses, our R&D expenses rose to $13.9 million compared to $13.2 million in the previous year due to higher personnel costs. General and Administrative costs increased to $8.5 million mainly due to headcount growth as we became a public company. The net loss for the quarter amounted to $15.7 million or $0.16 per share. Year-to-date, our license and milestone revenue significantly increased, primarily due to the recognition of a $10 million milestone from Janssen for TECVAYLI in Europe. We expect operating expenses will be consistent as previous patterns hold. Our net loss for this nine-month period was $36.6 million or $0.37 per share. I want to highlight something about our cost structure: Over half of our operating expenses are noncash items. While total operating expenses for the nine months ended September 30, amounted to $77.6 million, noncash charges like stock-based compensation, depreciation, and amortization accounted for over $33 million. After excluding these charges, our cash operating expenses are closer to $44 million. Therefore, when evaluating our metrics, understanding this distinction is vital, as net income isn’t truly reflective of our cash burn due to these noncash items. Now let’s look at our balance sheet. At the quarter's end, our cash totaled $96.6 million, down $6.5 million from $103.1 million at the end of Q2, but still above last year’s end balance. As for cash guidance, despite seeing industry headwinds affecting various elements of our business, we still expect our cash reserves to fund operations indefinitely. Regarding revenue, it has historically been uneven, largely due to milestone and license unpredictability. Royalty revenue has remained more consistent but still represents a small proportion of overall revenue. Our milestone revenue has ranged significantly over the last 11 quarters—from $1 million to $31 million per quarter, illustrating variability based on partner milestones achieved. As we evaluate future expectations, it’s essential to recognize the unusual structure of the TECVAYLI milestones. If we exclude these fluctuations and review our remaining milestone revenues, we see growth starting at $3.2 million, with an upward trajectory reaching $3.6 million in the current period. I now want to provide insights into our total active programs. Of our programs, 98% have downstream economics. Only five active programs have grandfathered or prepaid licenses, all in clinical development. In further detail, when we evaluate the remaining 294 programs, their collective milestones exceed $3 billion. Even though we don’t anticipate every single program will succeed, this represents significant opportunity. The average royalty rate for these programs stands at 3.2%. The economics for ion channel programs are even higher, with remaining milestones for those at approximately $1 billion. Due to confidentiality agreements, I can’t give specifics about royalties, but they are tiered and superior to our standard antibody platform. I hope this highlights some of the overall progress in our portfolio, and I recognize how difficult it is to model our business with early-stage programs. I appreciate your engagement today, and I’ll now move to Q&A.
Operator, Operator
At this time, we will begin the question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please raise your hand using the feature on your screen.
Joe Pantginis, Analyst
Great, guys. Can you hear me?
Kurt Gustafson, CFO
We can hear you, Joe.
Joe Pantginis, Analyst
Awesome. Great to see all of you. Todd, I hope you had a great trip. So a couple of topics I'd like to discuss. First, on the underlying business. First, Matt, you mentioned minimal headcount growth. I was curious if you could provide any color on that since you have continued to grow your technology base, so how do those two reconcile?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Yes. Yes, Joe, thanks for the question. We've come off a year of substantial headcount growth since we've been an independent publicly traded company. We've added administrative functions, built out finance and HR teams, leaned into science, added team members in our screening platform, and continued to increase our AI and ML elements in big data management, as Bob highlighted. We see more minimal future headcount growth while we expect new partnerships and new programs to grow at a higher rate than our infrastructure.
Joe Pantginis, Analyst
Great. Thanks. The second part is obviously, Kurt, you talked about headwinds in the markets and you see partner attrition, driven by failed clinical trials or strategic moves by your partners. I'm curious if any attrition came from the lack or from companies facing financing headwinds that can't commit capital to partner with you.
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Yes, I can add to that. I'll start with a comment, and then Kurt can provide any additional details. The first point I want to make is that when we examine our metrics over the past few years, everything we report takes attrition into account. Our reported figures for partners and programs are adjusted for attrition, and both have continued to grow despite the challenges faced by the pharmaceutical industry in the last 24 months. However, we have experienced some partner losses; for instance, Seeker Biologics recently announced their closure, leading to the return of some of their assets, which may offer future partnership opportunities. It's more complex with larger partners; as Kurt mentioned, there has been attrition related to a major pharma partner realigning their therapeutic focus. It's challenging to determine if these changes are mainly due to external factors or internal decisions.
Joe Pantginis, Analyst
No, absolutely fair. And then the other topic is, and I appreciate the launch of OmnidAb today. I'll keep all the pictures of people dabbing out of my notes. So can you share early information about the ease or difficulties of future manufacturing of these multifaceted structures? And will you present any experimental data from the OmnidAb program publicly? Finally, could you speak to the differentiation of OmnidAb versus traditional antibodies?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Yes. Great question, Joe. I'll let Bill comment on those. Early feedback from partners has been fantastic. Todd highlighted some of that. We have several partners with programs in progress. Bill can speak further on our disclosure plans.
Bill Harriman, Head of Antibody Discovery
Yes. We have a few presentations to discuss the qualities of antibodies from the OmnidAb technology. Next week at PEGS and in December at AET in San Diego, we will continue sharing our findings as more data comes out. We've put in significant effort to ensure that we've strained our transgenes responsibly, focusing on developability, yielding extensive and growing data.
Joe Pantginis, Analyst
Thank you, gentlemen.
Kurt Gustafson, CFO
Next question is coming from Puneet. Go ahead.
Puneet Souda, Analyst
Yeah, thanks guys. Thanks for hosting this. How do you expect the partner mix to change given the funding situation in the antibody discovery sector? Do you expect more collaboration and partnerships with larger pharma?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Yes, Puneet. Thanks for the question. In the last two quarters, we've disclosed new partnerships with global big pharma companies. This is a testament to the innovative work of our team and increased visibility of our platform. The advances are attracting these players who see the validation of our technology. We are also signing smaller partners as well, but the business development team has been actively engaged and has expanded significantly.
Puneet Souda, Analyst
Got it. I appreciate that context. As for the types of projects you're receiving now versus the last two years, are you getting more routine projects or a slew of challenging targets? Are partnering companies offloading work to you to be more capital-efficient?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Yes, Puneet, great question. It's a misconception that our technologies are suited only for difficult targets. Partners often approach us for known targets but seek new ways to approach them through our technology. We have a diverse range of targets across our growing portfolio, with innovation driving both scientific and business benefits.
Bill Harriman, Head of Antibody Discovery
Right. We engage partners with challenging targets but also with well-validated targets, guiding them in developing different modalities.
Puneet Souda, Analyst
Great, thanks for the insight. How does the growth of OmnidAb compare to OmniChicken and OmniRat? Any thoughts on market positioning?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
The visibility we have now during the OmnidAb launch exceeds previous launches. Our experiences with feedback and validation build greater anticipation for OmnidAb. We observe our technology holding great potential in patient treatment, leading us to be excited about this opportunity.
Puneet Souda, Analyst
Thank you, guys.
Kurt Gustafson, CFO
Next question is from Steve Willey. Go ahead.
Stephen Willey, Analyst
Yes. Can you guys hear me okay?
Kurt Gustafson, CFO
Yes, we can.
Stephen Willey, Analyst
Okay. Great. Thanks for doing this. Kurt and Matt, you spoke about attrition, and the delays appearing to develop in some partner programs. Where are these delays occurring, particularly in the clinical trajectory?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Yes. I’ll comment on that. As programs approach what we consider preclinical, which is a high bar in our perspective, we only categorize programs as preclinical if they’re in pre-IND studies with confirmed partner intent to file INDs. While we expected three to five new clinical starts this year, the mix of these programs turned out differently than anticipated.
Stephen Willey, Analyst
Yes, it does. Can you discuss the applications from partners showing the most interest in single-domain applications? Are there specific therapeutic areas primed for these applications?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
It’s challenging to provide specific examples due to partner confidentiality; however, we see interest in areas such as radiopharma and applications that require deep tissue penetration. We anticipate significant opportunities opening up due to OmnidAb.
Bill Harriman, Head of Antibody Discovery
Radiopharma is definitely one; single-domain antibodies are also crucial for creating novel multi-specifics — their modularity drives much interest.
Todd Pettingill, VP of Business Development and Strategy
Single-domain applications are getting a lot of conversations at conferences, with cutting-edge ideas emerging. Our ability to generate quality antibodies in a transgenic chicken provides notable advantages.
Kurt Gustafson, CFO
Lastly, we have Nishant hiding, I believe. Go ahead and unmute your line.
Nishant Gandhi, Analyst
Hello? Can you hear me? Sorry, technical issues. So regarding the success rates you showed — with your technology, do you expect this to increase? What are your thoughts?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Great question, Nishant. The data from the Antibody Society shows improved development processes for antibodies. We, so far, have seen a strong track record of advancement in our clinical programs. While we can't definitively correlate our success rates with industry data yet, we are optimistic about our trajectory.
Nishant Gandhi, Analyst
Great. What percentage of your programs have shown advancement from preclinical to clinical? Do you have any internal metrics?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
We haven't disclosed specific percentages recently, but our internal standards have shown minimal attrition in our preclinical stage programs, primarily focusing on when and not if progression occurs.
Nishant Gandhi, Analyst
Thank you, that’s informative. Lastly, you have several molecules targeting similar targets. What differentiates these various molecules?
Matthew Foehr, CEO
While some partners may pursue similar targets, individual antibody sequences will differ due to unique immunization processes, and our licensing agreements ensure specificity for each partner's project.
Bill Harriman, Head of Antibody Discovery
Our ability to produce large, unique repertoires allows each partner access to differentiated antibodies, ensuring they remain competitive in their development efforts.
Nishant Gandhi, Analyst
Thanks for the thorough explanations, everyone.
Matthew Foehr, CEO
Okay. Thank you all for joining today. We appreciate your support and engagement. We anticipate returning to the road next week for the Stifel Conference and Craig-Hallum Capital Conference. Thank you to our team and NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center for hosting us. Have a great day.