Item 1A. Risk Factors.
RISK FACTORS
Investing in our common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the risks described below, as well as the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including our audited consolidated financial statements and the related notes and the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.” The occurrence of any of the events or developments described below could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition, prospects and stock price.
Risk Factor Summary
The following summarizes the most material risks that make an investment in our securities risky or speculative. If any of the following risks occur or persist, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially and adversely affected and the price of our common stock could significantly decline. This summary should be read in conjunction with the section titled “Risk Factors.”
We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company with a limited operating history and no products approved for commercial sale. We have incurred significant losses since our inception, and we anticipate that we will continue to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future, which, together with our limited operating history, makes it difficult to assess our future viability.
We will require substantial additional financing to achieve our goals, and a failure to obtain the necessary capital when needed on acceptable terms, or at all, could force us to delay, limit, reduce or terminate our product development programs, commercialization efforts or other operations.
Our operating results may fluctuate significantly.
Our business is dependent on the successful development, regulatory approval and commercialization of our product candidates and future product candidates.
We may encounter substantial delays in our clinical trials or may not be able to conduct or complete our clinical trials on the timelines we expect, if at all. Our clinical development activities could be delayed as we may find it difficult to enroll patients in our clinical trials and we have minimal or no control over investigator-initiated clinical trials.
Research and development of biopharmaceutical products is inherently risky. We cannot give any assurance that any of our product candidates will receive regulatory approval, which is necessary before they can be commercialized.
Our product candidates or any future product candidates may be associated with undesirable side effects or adverse events that could delay or prevent their regulatory approval, limit the commercial profile of an approved label or result in significant negative consequences following marketing approval, if any.
The regulatory approval process is lengthy, expensive and uncertain, and we may be unable to obtain regulatory approval for our product candidates under applicable regulatory requirements. The denial or delay of any such approval would delay commercialization of our product candidates and adversely impact our ability to generate revenue, our business and our results of operations.
Interim and preliminary data from our clinical trials may change.
The FDA and other regulatory authorities may not accept data from clinical trials conducted outside of the United States.
We may not be able to obtain or maintain orphan drug designations for any of our product candidates, and we may be unable to maintain the benefits associated with orphan drug designation, including the potential for market exclusivity.
There is no guarantee that Fast Track designation for bomedemstat or other expedited development and review programs will result in a faster regulatory approval.
The inability of our contract manufacturers to meet the current Good Manufacturing Process.
We may develop certain of our current and future product candidates in combination with other therapies, and safety or supply issues with combination-use products may delay or prevent development and approval of our product candidates.
Our business has been and could continue to be adversely affected by the evolving and ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic or other pandemics in regions where we or third parties on which we rely have significant manufacturing facilities, concentrations of clinical trial sites or other business operations. The COVID-19 pandemic or another pandemic
could adversely affect our operations, as well as the business or operations of our manufacturers or other third parties with whom we conduct business.
Our business could be adversely affected by wars and related sanctions, supply chain interruptions or cost increases, including for example, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
We compete with both approved therapeutic products and therapeutic candidates being developed by our competitors, most of which have significantly greater resources than we do.
We may experience difficulties in managing growth and attract and retain senior management and key scientific personnel.
We depend on information technology systems, and any failure of these systems, including as a result of a cyberattack, could harm our business.
Our business involves the use of hazardous materials and we and our third-party manufacturers and suppliers must comply with environmental laws and regulations.
We rely on third parties to conduct and support our preclinical studies and clinical trials, and to manufacture our product candidate, and such third parties may not properly and successfully carry out their contractual duties or meet expected deadlines.
If we are unable to obtain, maintain and enforce intellectual property protection directed to our current and any future technologies that we develop, others may be able to make, use or sell drugs or combination therapies substantially the same as ours, which could adversely affect our ability to compete in the market.
If product liability lawsuits are brought against us, we may incur substantial liabilities and may be required to limit commercialization of any approved products.
Third parties may claim that our product candidates infringe their intellectual property rights, and we may also be subject to other intellectual property related claims by our employees, contractors, competitors or other third parties.
Risks related to our licensing and co-licensing arrangements with third-parties and our ability to procure such arrangements.
Our ability to comply with laws and regulations related to healthcare, tax, export and import controls, sanctions, embargoes, anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, environment, data protection, privacy and security, and changes thereof.
Provisions in our charter documents and under Delaware law could discourage a takeover that stockholders may consider favorable and may lead to entrenchment of management.
We incur significant costs as a public company and our “emerging growth company” and “smaller reporting company” status may render shares of our common stock less attractive to investors.
Failure to implement and maintain proper and effective internal control over financial reporting could impair our ability to produce accurate and timely financial statements.
Risks Related to Our Limited Operating History, Financial Condition and Capital Requirements
We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company with a limited operating history and no products approved for commercial sale.
We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, and we have only a limited operating history upon which you can evaluate our business and prospects. Bomedemstat, our most advanced product candidate, is in Phase 2 clinical development, while our other product candidates are in the preclinical stage. We have no products approved for commercial sale and have not generated any revenue from product sales. In addition, we have not yet demonstrated an ability to successfully overcome many of the risks and uncertainties frequently encountered by companies in new and rapidly evolving fields, particularly in the pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, including an ability to obtain regulatory approval of a product candidate, manufacture any product candidate at commercial scale, or arrange for a third party to do so on our behalf, or conduct sales and marketing activities
necessary for successful product commercialization. You should evaluate our business in light of the substantial degree of risk for biopharmaceutical product development generally, and for clinical-stage biopharmaceutical companies in particular.
We have incurred significant losses since our inception, and we anticipate that we will continue to incur significant losses for the foreseeable future.
We have had significant operating losses since our inception. Our net losses for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020 were $42.3 million and $17.8 million, respectively. As of December 31, 2021, we had an accumulated deficit of $112.7 million. Our prior losses, combined with expected future losses, have had and will continue to have an adverse effect on our stockholders’ equity and working capital. We do not expect to realize revenue from sales of products or royalties from licensed products in the foreseeable future, if at all, and unless and until a product candidate is clinically tested, approved for commercialization, and successfully marketed. Bomedemstat and our other product candidates will require substantial additional development time and resources before we will be able to apply for or receive regulatory approvals and begin generating revenue from product sales. We expect to continue to incur losses for the foreseeable future, and we anticipate these losses will increase as we continue to develop bomedemstat, our other product candidates and any future product candidates, conduct clinical trials and pursue research and development activities, and as we incur costs as a public company. Even if , we may never generate revenues that are significant or large enough to and subsequently sustain .
We will require substantial additional financing to achieve our goals, and a failure to obtain the necessary capital when needed on acceptable terms, or at all, could force us to delay, limit, reduce or terminate our product development programs, commercialization efforts or other operations.
We expect to incur substantial expenses as we advance bomedemstat and our other product candidates through clinical development, seek regulatory approval, prepare for and, if approved, proceed to commercialization, and continue our research and development efforts. These expenditures will include costs associated with conducting preclinical studies and clinical trials, obtaining regulatory approvals and manufacturing and supply, as well as marketing and selling any products approved for sale. In addition, other unanticipated costs may arise. Because the outcome of any preclinical study or clinical trial is highly uncertain, we cannot reasonably estimate the actual amounts necessary to successfully complete the development and commercialization of bomedemstat, our other product candidates or any future product candidates.
As of December 31, 2021, we had capital resources consisting of cash, cash equivalents and short-term marketable securities of $217.4 million. However, our operating plans and other demands on our capital resources may change as a result of many factors currently unknown to us, and we may need to seek additional funds sooner than planned.
Our future capital requirements depend on many factors, including:
the scope, progress, results and costs of researching and developing bomedemstat, our other product candidates or any other future product candidates, and conducting preclinical studies and clinical trials, including our ongoing Phase 2 clinical trials, and any delays related to the COVID-19 or other pandemic;
the timing of, and the costs involved in, obtaining regulatory approvals for bomedemstat, our other product candidates or any other future product candidates;
the number and characteristics of any additional product candidates we develop or acquire;
the cost of manufacturing bomedemstat, our other product candidates and any future product candidates, including supply for clinical development as well as potential commercial use;
the cost of building a sales force in anticipation of product commercialization;
the cost of commercialization activities, including marketing, sales and distribution costs;
our ability to establish new, strategic collaborations, licensing or other arrangements and the financial terms of any such agreements, including the timing and amount of any future milestone, royalty or other payments due under any such agreement;
any product liability or other lawsuits related to our products or product candidates;
the expenses needed to attract, hire and retain skilled personnel;
the costs associated with being a public company;
the costs involved in preparing, filing, prosecuting, maintaining, defending and enforcing our intellectual property portfolio;
the timing, receipt and amount of sales of any future approved products, if any; and
the impact of the COVID-19 or another pandemic, which may exacerbate the magnitude of the factors discussed above.
Until and unless we can generate substantial revenues, we expect to finance our cash needs with existing cash on hand, including proceeds from our initial public offering, and through a combination of equity offerings and debt financings, and potentially through license and development agreements or strategic partnerships or collaborations with third parties. Such financing may result in dilution to stockholders or granting of rights superior to those of existing stockholders, imposition of burdensome debt covenants and repayment obligations, or other restrictions that may affect our business, and, in the event of insolvency, debt holders would be repaid
before holders of our equity securities received any distribution of our corporate assets. If we raise additional funds through licensing, we may have to relinquish valuable rights to our product candidates, or grant licenses on terms that are not favorable to us.
In addition, we may seek additional capital due to favorable market conditions or strategic considerations even if we believe we have sufficient funds for our current or future operating plans. Attempting to secure additional financing may divert our management from our day-to-day activities, which may adversely affect our ability to develop our product candidates. In addition, we cannot guarantee that future financing will be available in sufficient amounts or on terms acceptable to us, if at all.
If adequate funds are not available to us on a timely basis, we may be required to delay, limit, reduce or terminate preclinical studies, clinical trials or other research and development activities or eliminate one or more of our development programs altogether; or delay, limit, reduce or terminate our efforts to establish manufacturing and sales and marketing capabilities or other activities that may be necessary to commercialize bomedemstat, our other product candidates or any other future product candidates, or reduce our flexibility in developing or maintaining our sales and marketing strategy.
Our operating results may fluctuate significantly, which makes our future operating results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations.
Our quarterly and annual operating results may fluctuate significantly, which makes it difficult for us to predict our future operating results. These fluctuations may occur due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control and may be difficult to predict, including:
the timing and cost of, and level of investment in, research, development and commercialization activities, which may change from time to time;
the timing and success or failure of preclinical studies and clinical trials for our product candidates or competing product candidates, or any other change in the competitive landscape of our industry, including consolidation among our competitors or partners;
the timing of receipt of approvals from regulatory authorities in the United States and internationally;
the timing and status of enrollment for our clinical trials;
the cost of manufacturing, as well as building out inventory in advance of any commercial launch, and the terms of any agreements we enter into with third-party suppliers;
timing and amount of any milestone, royalty or other payments due under any future collaboration or license agreement;
coverage and reimbursement policies with respect to bomedemstat, our other product candidates and any future product candidates, if approved, and potential future drugs that compete with our products;
expenditures that we may incur to acquire, develop or commercialize additional products and technologies;
the level of demand for our products, if approved, which may vary significantly over time; and
future accounting pronouncements or changes in our accounting policies.
The cumulative effects of these factors could result in large fluctuations and unpredictability in our quarterly and annual operating results. As a result, comparing our operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful. Investors should not rely on our past results as an indication of our future performance.
Risks Related to Our Business
Our business is dependent on the successful development, regulatory approval and commercialization of our current and future product candidates.
We have no products approved for sale, and our current clinical-stage product candidate, bomedemstat, is in the early stages of clinical development. The success of our business, including our ability to finance our company and generate revenue in the future, will primarily depend on the successful development, regulatory approval, and commercialization of our product candidates and, in particular, the advancement of bomedemstat. In the future, we may also become dependent on other product candidates that we may develop or acquire. However, given our stage of development, it may be many years, if we succeed at all, before we have demonstrated the safety and efficacy of a product candidate sufficient to warrant approval for commercialization. We cannot be certain that our product candidates will receive regulatory approval or, even if we receive regulatory approval, that such product candidates will be successfully commercialized.
Lysine-Specific Demethylase-1, or LSD1, inhibition is a novel therapeutic approach, which exposes us to certain risks. For example, we may discover unforeseen safety events or that our product candidates do not possess certain properties required for therapeutic effectiveness, or that even if found to be effective in one type of disease, a product candidate, or the therapeutic approach, is not effective in other diseases. In addition, given the novel nature of this therapeutic approach, designing preclinical studies and clinical trials to demonstrate the effect of the product candidates is complex and exposes us to risks.
The clinical and commercial success of our current product candidates and any future product candidates that we may develop or acquire will depend on several factors, including those discussed in this “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. These factors, many of which are beyond our control, could cause us to experience significant delays or an inability to obtain regulatory approvals or commercialize our current or future product candidates. Even if regulatory approvals are obtained, we may never be able to successfully commercialize any products. Accordingly, we cannot provide assurances that we will be able to generate sufficient revenue through the sale of products to continue our business or achieve profitability.
We may find it difficult to enroll patients in our clinical trials. If we encounter difficulties enrolling patients in our clinical trials, our clinical development activities could be delayed or otherwise adversely affected.
The timely completion of clinical trials in accordance with their protocols depends, among other things, on our ability to enroll a sufficient number of patients who remain in the clinical study until its conclusion. We may experience difficulties in patient enrollment in our clinical trials for a variety of reasons. The enrollment of patients depends on many factors, including:
the patient eligibility criteria defined in the protocol;
the size and nature of the patient population required for analysis of the clinical trial’s primary endpoints;
the proximity of patients to clinical trial sites;
the design of the clinical trial;
the risk that enrolled patients will not complete a clinical trial;
clinicians’ and patients’ perceptions as to the safety of the product candidate;
clinicians’ and patients’ perceptions as to the potential advantages of the product candidate being studied in relation to other available therapies, including any new therapies that may be approved for the indications we are investigating, as well as any drugs under development; and
our ability to obtain and maintain patient consent.
We will be required to identify and enroll a sufficient number of patients for each of our clinical trials. Potential patients for any planned clinical trials may not be adequately diagnosed or identified with the diseases which we are targeting or may not meet the entry criteria for such trials. We also may encounter difficulties in identifying and enrolling patients with a stage of disease appropriate for our planned clinical trials and monitoring such patients adequately during and after treatment. We may not be able to initiate or continue clinical trials if we are unable to locate a sufficient number of eligible patients to participate in the clinical trials required by the FDA or a comparable foreign regulatory authority. In addition, the process of finding and diagnosing patients may prove costly.
In addition, our clinical trials may compete with other clinical trials for product candidates that are in the same therapeutic areas as our product candidates, and this competition will reduce the number and types of patients available to us, because some patients who might have opted to enroll in our trials may instead opt to enroll in a trial being conducted by one of our competitors. Since the number of qualified clinical investigators is limited, we may conduct some of our clinical trials at the same clinical trial sites that some of our competitors use, which will reduce the number of patients who are available for our clinical trials in such clinical trial site.
Furthermore, certain conditions for which we plan to evaluate our current product candidates are rare diseases with limited patient pools from which to recruit for clinical trials. For example, our lead product candidate, bomedemstat, is currently being evaluated in clinical trials in patients with myelofibrosis, or MF, essential thrombocythemia, or ET, and polycythemia vera, or PV. The timing of our clinical trials depends, in part, on the speed at which we can recruit patients to participate in our trials, as well as completion of required procedures and assessments and follow-up periods.
The eligibility criteria of our clinical trials, once established, will further limit the pool of available trial participants. If patients are unwilling to participate in our clinical trials for any reason, including the existence of other approved therapies or concurrent clinical trials for similar patient populations, or we otherwise have difficulty enrolling a sufficient number of patients, the timeline for recruiting patients, conducting studies and obtaining regulatory approval of our product candidates may be delayed. Our inability to enroll a sufficient number of patients for any of our future clinical trials would result in significant delays or may require us to abandon one or more clinical trials altogether. In addition, we expect to rely on clinical research organizations, or CROs, and clinical trial sites to ensure proper and timely conduct of our future clinical trials and, while we intend to enter into agreements governing their services, we will have limited influence over their actual performance.
We may encounter substantial delays in our clinical trials or may not be able to conduct or complete our clinical trials on the timelines we expect, if at all.
Clinical trials are expensive and can take many years to complete, and their outcome is inherently uncertain. We cannot guarantee that any clinical trials will be conducted as planned or completed on schedule, if at all. We cannot be sure that submission of an investigational new drug application, or IND, or a clinical trial application, or CTA, will result in the FDA or other regulatory authority, as applicable, allowing clinical trials to begin in a timely manner, if at all. Moreover, even if these trials begin, issues may
arise that could suspend or terminate such clinical trials. A failure of one or more clinical trials can occur at any stage of testing, and our future clinical trials may not be successful. Clinical trials can be delayed or terminated for a variety of reasons, including delays or failures related to:
enrollment of an adequate number of suitable patients to participate in a trial;
the COVID-19 or another pandemic, which may result in clinical site closures, delays to patient enrollment, patients discontinuing their treatment or follow-up visits or changes to trial protocols;
inability to generate sufficient preclinical, toxicology or other in vivo or in vitro data to support the initiation or continuation of clinical trials;
the FDA or comparable foreign regulatory authorities disagreeing as to the design or implementation of our clinical trials;
delays in obtaining regulatory authorization to commence a trial;
reaching agreement on acceptable terms with prospective CROs, and clinical trial sites, the terms of which can be subject to extensive negotiation and may vary significantly among different CROs and trial sites;
identifying, recruiting and training suitable clinical investigators;
obtaining institutional review board, or IRB, approval at each trial site;
imposition of a temporary or permanent clinical hold by regulatory agencies for a number of reasons, including after review of an IND or amendment, or equivalent foreign application or amendment;
new safety findings that present unreasonable risk to clinical trial participants;
changes to clinical trial protocols;
a negative finding from an inspection of our clinical trial operations or study sites;
having subjects complete a trial or return for post-treatment follow-up;
clinical sites deviating from trial protocol or dropping out of a trial;
addressing subject safety concerns that arise during the course of a trial;
adding a sufficient number of clinical trial sites; or
obtaining sufficient product supply of product candidates for use in preclinical studies or clinical trials from third-party suppliers.
In addition, we may experience numerous other adverse or unforeseen events during, or as a result of, preclinical studies and clinical trials which could delay or prevent our ability to receive marketing approval or commercialize our product candidates, including:
we may receive feedback from regulatory authorities that requires us to modify the design of our clinical trials or require that we submit additional data or information before allowing a clinical trial to be initiated;
clinical studies of our product candidates may produce negative or inconclusive results, and we may decide, or regulators may require us, to conduct additional clinical trials or abandon drug development programs;
our third-party contractors may fail to comply with regulatory requirements, fail to maintain adequate quality controls or be unable to provide us with sufficient product supply to conduct and complete preclinical studies or clinical trials of our product candidates in a timely manner, or at all;
we or our investigators might have to suspend or terminate clinical trials of our product candidates for various reasons, including non-compliance with regulatory requirements, a finding that our product candidates have undesirable side effects or other unexpected characteristics or a finding that the participants are being exposed to unacceptable health risks;
the cost of clinical trials of our product candidates may be greater than we anticipate;
the quality of our product candidates or other materials necessary to conduct preclinical studies or clinical trials of our product candidates may be insufficient or inadequate; and
regulators may revise the requirements for approving our product candidates or such requirements may not be as we anticipate.
If we are required to conduct additional clinical trials or other testing of our product candidates beyond those that we currently contemplate, if we are unable to successfully complete clinical trials or other testing of our product candidates, if the results of these trials or tests are not positive or are only moderately positive or if there are safety concerns, we may:
incur unplanned costs;
be delayed in obtaining marketing approval for our product candidates or not obtain marketing approval at all;
obtain marketing approval in some countries and not in others;
obtain marketing approval for indications or patient populations that are not as broad as intended or desired;
obtain marketing approval with labeling that includes significant use or distribution restrictions or safety warnings, including boxed warnings;
be subject to additional post-marketing testing requirements; or
have the product removed from the market after obtaining marketing approval.
We could also encounter delays if a clinical trial is suspended or terminated by us, by the IRBs of the institutions in which such trials are being conducted, by the Safety Advisory Board, or SAB, for such trial or by the FDA or other regulatory authorities. Such authorities may suspend or terminate a clinical trial due to a number of factors, including failure to conduct the clinical trial in accordance with regulatory requirements or our clinical protocols, inspection of the clinical trial operations or trial site by the FDA or other regulatory authorities resulting in the imposition of a clinical hold, unforeseen safety issues or adverse side effects, failure to demonstrate a benefit from using a drug, changes in governmental regulations or administrative actions or lack of adequate funding to continue the clinical trial.
Further, conducting clinical trials in foreign countries, as we currently do for certain of our product candidates, presents additional risks that may delay completion of our clinical trials. These risks include the failure of enrolled patients in foreign countries to adhere to clinical protocol as a result of differences in healthcare services or cultural customs and managing additional administrative burdens associated with foreign regulatory schemes, as well as political and economic risks.
Principal investigators for our clinical trials may serve as scientific advisors or consultants to us from time to time and may receive cash or equity compensation in connection with such services. If these relationships and any related compensation result in perceived or actual conflicts of interest, or a regulatory authority concludes that the financial relationship may have affected the interpretation of the trial, the integrity of the data generated at the applicable clinical trial site may be questioned and the utility of the clinical trial itself may be jeopardized, which could result in the delay or rejection of the marketing application we submit. Any such delay or rejection could prevent or delay us from commercializing our current or future product candidates.
If we experience delays in the completion, or termination, of any preclinical study or clinical trial of our product candidates, the commercial prospects of our product candidates may be harmed, and our ability to generate revenues from any of these product candidates will be delayed or not realized at all. In addition, any delays in completing our clinical trials may increase our costs, slow down our product candidate development and approval process and jeopardize our ability to commence product sales and generate revenues. Any of these occurrences may materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. In addition, many of the factors that cause, or lead to, a delay in the commencement or completion of clinical trials may also ultimately lead to the denial of regulatory approval of our product candidates. If one or more of our product candidates proves to be ineffective, , or commercially unviable, our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects may be materially and affected.
Some of our product candidates are being or may in the future be studied in investigator-initiated clinical trials, which means we will have minimal or no control over the conduct of such trials.
We may supply bomedemstat to support basic and clinical research including investigator-initiated clinical trials in the future. Investigator-initiated clinical trials pose similar risks as those set forth elsewhere in this “Risk Factor” section relating to our internal clinical trials; however, because we would not be the sponsors of these trials, we would not control the protocols, administration or conduct of these trials, including follow-up with patients and ongoing collection of data after treatment. As a result, we would be subject to risks associated with the way investigator-initiated trials are conducted. In particular, we may be named in lawsuits that would lead to increased costs associated with legal defense. Additional risks include difficulties or delays in communicating with investigators or administrators, procedural delays and other timing issues and difficulties or differences in interpreting data. Third-party investigators may design clinical trials with clinical endpoints that are more difficult to achieve, or in other ways that increase the risk of negative clinical trial results compared to clinical trials that we may design on our own. Negative results in investigator-initiated clinical trials could have a material effect on our efforts to obtain regulatory approval for our product candidates and the public perception of our product candidates. As a result, our of control over the conduct and timing of and communications with the FDA and other regulatory authorities regarding investigator-sponsored trials may us to additional risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside our control, and the occurrence of which could affect the commercial prospects for our product candidates.
Research and development of biopharmaceutical products is inherently risky. We cannot give any assurance that any of our product candidates will receive regulatory approval, which is necessary before they can be commercialized.
Our future success is dependent on our ability to successfully develop, obtain regulatory approval for and then successfully commercialize bomedemstat and any other product candidates we may develop in the future, and we may fail to do so for many reasons, including the following:
our product candidates may not successfully complete preclinical studies or clinical trials;
a product candidate may, on further study, be shown to have harmful side effects or other characteristics that indicate it does not meet applicable regulatory criteria;
the market for a product candidate may change so that the continued development of that product candidate is no longer reasonable or commercially attractive;
a product candidate may not be capable of being produced in commercial quantities at an acceptable cost, or at all;
if a product candidate obtains regulatory approval, we may be unable to establish sales and marketing capabilities, or successfully market such approved product candidate; and
a product candidate may not be accepted as safe and effective by patients, the medical community or third-party payors.
If any of these events occur, we may be forced to abandon our development efforts for a product candidate or candidates, which would have a material adverse effect on our business and could potentially cause us to cease operations. Failure of a product candidate may occur at any stage of preclinical or clinical development, and we may never succeed in developing marketable products or generating product revenue.
We may not be successful in our efforts to further develop our current and future product candidates. We are not permitted to market or promote any of our product candidates before we receive regulatory approval from the FDA or comparable foreign regulatory authorities, and we may never receive such regulatory approval for any of our product candidates. Each of our product candidates will require significant additional clinical development, management of preclinical, clinical, and manufacturing activities, regulatory approval, adequate manufacturing supply, a commercial organization and significant marketing efforts before we generate any revenue from product sales, if at all. Any clinical studies that we may conduct may not demonstrate the efficacy and safety necessary to obtain regulatory approval to market our product candidates. If the results of our ongoing or future clinical studies are inconclusive with respect to the efficacy of our product candidates, if we do not meet the clinical endpoints with statistical significance or if there are safety concerns or adverse events associated with our product candidates, we may be prevented or delayed in obtaining marketing approval for our product candidates.
If any of our product candidates successfully completes clinical trials, we plan to seek regulatory approval to market our product candidates in the United States, the European Union, or the EU, and in additional foreign countries where we believe there is a viable commercial opportunity. We have never commenced, compiled, or submitted an application seeking regulatory approval to market any product candidate. We may never receive regulatory approval to market any product candidates even if such product candidates successfully complete clinical trials, which would adversely affect our viability. To obtain regulatory approval in countries outside the United States, we must comply with numerous and varying regulatory requirements of such other countries regarding safety, efficacy, chemistry, manufacturing and controls, clinical trials, commercial sales, pricing, and distribution of our product candidates. We may also rely on collaborators or partners to conduct the required activities to support an application for regulatory approval and to seek approval for one or more of our product candidates. We cannot be sure that any such collaborators or partners will conduct these activities successfully or do so within the timeframe we desire. Even if we or any future or partners are in obtaining approval in one jurisdiction, we cannot ensure that we will obtain approval in any other jurisdictions. If we are to obtain approval for our product candidates in multiple jurisdictions, our revenue and results of operations could be affected.
Even if we receive regulatory approval to market any of our product candidates, we cannot assure you that any such product candidate will be successfully commercialized, widely accepted in the marketplace or more effective than other commercially available alternatives. Any approval we may obtain could be for indications or patient populations that are not as broad as intended or desired or may require labeling that includes significant use or distribution restrictions or safety warnings. We may also be required to perform additional or unanticipated clinical trials to obtain approval or be subject to additional post-marketing testing requirements to maintain approval. In addition, regulatory authorities may withdraw their approval of a product or impose restrictions on its distribution, such as in the form of a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS. The failure to obtain timely regulatory approval of product candidates, any product marketing limitations or a product withdrawal would negatively impact our business, results of operations and financial condition.
The regulatory approval process is lengthy, expensive, and uncertain, and we may be unable to obtain regulatory approval for our product candidates under applicable regulatory requirements. The denial or delay of any such approval would delay commercialization of our product candidates and adversely impact our ability to generate revenue, our business, and our results of operations.
Our business is dependent upon our ability to obtain regulatory approval for our product candidates. The development, research, testing, manufacturing, labeling, approval, selling, import, export, marketing, promotion, and distribution of drug products are subject to extensive and evolving regulation by federal, state, and local governmental authorities in the United States, principally the FDA, and by foreign regulatory authorities, which regulations differ from country to country. Neither we nor any future collaborator is permitted to market any of our product candidates in the United States until we receive regulatory approval of an NDA from the FDA.
Obtaining regulatory approval of an NDA can be a lengthy, expensive, and uncertain process. Prior to obtaining approval to commercialize a product candidate in the United States or abroad, we or our collaborators must demonstrate with substantial evidence from well-controlled clinical trials, and to the satisfaction of the FDA or other foreign regulatory authorities, that such product candidates are safe and effective for their intended uses. The number of nonclinical studies and clinical trials that will be required for regulatory approval varies depending on the product candidate, the disease or condition that the product candidate is designed to address, and the regulations applicable to any particular product candidate.
Results from preclinical studies and clinical trials can be interpreted in different ways. Even if we believe the nonclinical or clinical data for our product candidates are promising, such data may not be sufficient to support approval by the FDA and other regulatory authorities or to support approval by the FDA or other regulatory authorities for as broad an indication as we request. Administering product candidates to humans may produce undesirable side effects, which could interrupt, delay or halt clinical trials and result in the FDA or other regulatory authorities denying approval of a product candidate for any or all indications. The FDA may also require us to conduct additional studies or trials for our product candidates either prior to or post-approval, such as additional clinical pharmacology studies or safety or efficacy studies or trials, or it may object to elements of our clinical development program such as the primary endpoints or the number of subjects in our clinical trials.
The FDA or any foreign regulatory bodies can delay, limit, or deny approval of our product candidates or require us to conduct additional nonclinical or clinical testing or abandon a program for many reasons, including:
the FDA or the applicable foreign regulatory authority’s disagreement with the design or implementation of our clinical trials;
negative or ambiguous results from our clinical trials or results that may not meet the level of statistical significance required by the FDA or comparable foreign regulatory authorities for approval;
serious and unexpected drug-related side effects experienced by participants in our clinical trials or by individuals using drugs or combination therapies similar to our product candidates;
our inability to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the FDA or the applicable foreign regulatory authority that our product candidates are safe and effective for the proposed indication;
the FDA’s or the applicable foreign regulatory authority’s disagreement with the interpretation of data from nonclinical studies or clinical trials;
our inability to demonstrate the clinical and other benefits of our product candidates outweigh any safety or other perceived risks;
the FDA’s or the applicable foreign regulatory authority’s requirement for additional nonclinical studies or clinical trials;
the FDA’s or the applicable foreign regulatory authority’s disagreement regarding the formulation, labeling and/or the specifications of our product candidates;
the FDA’s or the applicable foreign regulatory authority’s failure to approve the manufacturing processes or facilities of third-party manufacturers with which we contract;
the potential for approval policies or regulations of the FDA or the applicable foreign regulatory authorities to significantly change in a manner rendering our clinical data insufficient for approval; or
the FDA or the applicable foreign regulatory authority’s disagreement with the sufficiency of the clinical, non-clinical and/or quality data in the NDA or comparable marketing authorization application.
While we have held preliminary discussions with the FDA about key trial design parameters for a registrational Phase 3 program of bomedemstat for the treatment of ET and MF, we have not yet held an End-of-Phase 2 meeting with the FDA to discuss the registration pathway for bomedemstat, and our current clinical development plans for bomedemstat in ET, MF and PV, may change as a result of future interactions with the FDA or EMA. If the FDA or other regulatory agencies disagrees with our clinical development plans for bomedemstat, including the design or implementation of our clinical trials or study endpoints, the FDA or such other agency may require that we modify our intended trial design or endpoints, or conduct additional clinical trials to support our regulatory submissions. For example, the FDA may require that we conduct more than one pivotal trial in order to gain approval in ET or MF.
Of the large number of drugs in development, only a small percentage successfully complete the FDA or other regulatory approval processes and are commercialized. The lengthy development and approval process as well as the unpredictability of future clinical trial results may result in our failing to obtain regulatory approval to market our product candidates, which would significantly harm our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
Even if we eventually complete clinical testing and receive approval of an NDA or foreign marketing application for our product candidates, the FDA or the applicable foreign regulatory authority may grant approval contingent on the performance of costly additional clinical trials, including Phase 4 clinical trials, and/or in the case of the FDA, the implementation of a REMS which may be required to ensure safe use of the drug after approval. The FDA or the applicable foreign regulatory authority also may approve a product candidate for a more limited indication or a narrower patient population than we originally requested, and the FDA or applicable foreign regulatory authority may not approve the labeling that we believe is necessary or desirable for the successful commercialization of a product candidate. Any delay in obtaining, or inability to obtain, applicable regulatory approval, or the failure to receive marketing authorization with a label that allows us to market the product candidate as we desire, would delay, prevent or otherwise limit commercialization of that product candidate and would materially adversely impact our business and prospects.
Interim, top-line and preliminary data from our clinical trials that we announce or publish from time to time may change as more patient data become available and are subject to audit and verification procedures that could result in material changes in the final data.
From time to time, we may publicly disclose unaudited interim, top-line or preliminary data from our clinical trials, which is based on a preliminary analysis of then-available data, and the results and related findings and conclusions are subject to change following a more comprehensive review of the data related to the particular study or trial. We also make assumptions, estimations, calculations, and conclusions as part of our analyses of data, and we may not have received or had the opportunity to fully and carefully evaluate all data. As a result, the unaudited interim, top-line or preliminary results that we report may differ from future results of the same studies, or different conclusions or considerations may qualify such results once additional data have been received and fully evaluated. Interim, top-line and preliminary data also remain subject to audit and verification procedures that may result in the final data being materially different from the preliminary data we previously published. Such preliminary data should be viewed with caution until the final data are available. Unaudited, interim, top-line or preliminary data from clinical trials that we may complete are subject to the risk that one or more of the clinical outcomes may materially change as patient enrollment continues and more patient data become available. Adverse differences between unaudited interim, top-line or preliminary data and final data could significantly our business prospects.
Further, others, including regulatory agencies, may not accept or agree with our assumptions, estimates, calculations, conclusions or analyses or may interpret or weigh the importance of data differently, which could impact the value of the particular study, the approvability or commercialization of the particular product candidate and our company in general. In addition, the information we choose to publicly disclose regarding a particular study or clinical trial is based on what is typically extensive information, and you or others may not agree with what we determine is the material or otherwise appropriate information to include in our disclosure, and any information we determine not to disclose may ultimately be deemed significant with respect to future decisions, conclusions, views, activities or otherwise regarding a particular product candidate or our business. If the unaudited interim, top-line or preliminary data that we report differ from actual results, or if others, including regulatory authorities, disagree with the conclusions reached, our ability to obtain approval for, and commercialize, our product candidates may be harmed, which could harm our business, operating results, prospects, or financial condition.
Our product candidates or any future product candidates may be associated with undesirable side effects or adverse events that could delay or prevent their regulatory approval, limit the commercial profile of an approved label, or result in significant negative consequences following marketing approval, if any.
As with most pharmaceutical products, use of our product candidates could be associated with side effects or adverse events which can vary in severity from minor reactions to death and in frequency from infrequent to prevalent. Undesirable side effects or unacceptable toxicities caused by our product candidates could cause us or regulatory authorities to interrupt, delay or halt clinical trials and could result in a more restrictive label or the delay or denial of regulatory approval by the FDA or a comparable foreign regulatory authority. Results of our clinical trials could reveal a high and unacceptable severity and prevalence of these or other side effects. Furthermore, certain of our product candidates, such as bomedemstat, may be co-administered with third-party approved or experimental therapies. These combinations may have additional side effects. The uncertainty resulting from the use of our product candidates in combination with other therapies may make it to accurately predict side effects in future clinical trials.
To date, only one of our product candidates, bomedemstat, has been tested in humans. While it has been shown to be generally well tolerated in our Phase 2 clinical trials for bomedemstat for ET and MF through November 1 and October 31, 2021, respectively, 335 adverse events, or AEs, were reported in 33 patients (89%) in our ET trial, including eight serious adverse events, or SAEs, two of which were deemed related to bomedemstat by the study investigator, and 1,443 AEs were reported in 85 patients (94%) in our MF trial, of which 82 were SAEs. Fourteen SAEs in our MF trial, one Grade 4 (thrombocytopenia), nine Grade 3 and four Grade 2, all occurring once with the exception of nausea reported by two patients, were deemed by investigators as possibly, probably or definitely related to bomedemstat: abdominal discomfort, splenomegaly, rectal haemorrhage, cardiac failure, headache, vertigo, gastrointestinal haemorrhage, anaemia, nausea (n=2), abdominal wall haematoma, pyoderma gangrenosum, sepsis and thrombocytopenia. While there have been no dose-limiting toxicities or deaths attributed to bomedemstat in the MF and ET trials, if unacceptable side effects arise in the course of further development of bomedemstat or in the development of any of our other product candidates, we, the FDA or the IRBs at the institutions in which the clinical trials are being conducted could or our clinical trials or the FDA or a comparable foreign regulatory authority could order us to clinical trials or approval of our product candidates for any or all targeted indications. Dose-limiting toxicities would be toxicities related to bomedemstat that would limit the dose or the duration of treatment in the intended patient population. Treatment-related side effects could also affect patient recruitment or the ability of enrolled patients to complete any of our clinical trials or result in potential product liability . In addition, these side effects may not be appropriately recognized or managed by the treating medical staff. We expect to have to train medical personnel using our product candidates to understand the side effect profiles for our clinical trials and upon any commercialization of any of our product candidates. training in recognizing or managing the potential side effects of our product candidates could result in patient or death. Any of these occurrences may our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects significantly.
In addition, even if we successfully advance our product candidates or any future product candidates into and through clinical trials, such trials will likely only include a limited number of patients and limited duration of exposure to our product candidates. As a result,
we cannot be assured that adverse effects of our product candidates will not be uncovered when a significantly larger number of patients are exposed to the product candidate. Further, any clinical trials may not be sufficient to determine the effect and safety consequences of using our product candidates over a multi-year period.
If any of our product candidates receives marketing approval and we or others later identify undesirable side effects caused by such products, a number of potentially significant negative consequences could result, including:
regulatory authorities may suspend, limit or withdraw approvals of such product, or seek an injunction against its manufacture or distribution;
we may be required to conduct additional clinical trials or post-approval studies;
we may be required to recall a product or change the way such product is administered to patients;
additional restrictions may be imposed on the marketing of the particular product or the manufacturing processes for the product or any component thereof;
regulatory authorities may require the addition of labeling statements, such as a “ black box ” warning or a contraindication or issue safety alerts, Dear Healthcare Provider letters, press releases or other communications containing warnings or other safety information about the product;
we may be required to implement a REMS or create a Medication Guide outlining the risks of such side effects for distribution to patients, a communication plan for healthcare providers and/or other elements to assure safe use;
we could be sued and held liable for harm caused to patients;
we may be subject to fines, injunctions or the imposition of criminal penalties;
the product may become less competitive; and
our reputation may suffer.
Any of the foregoing events could prevent us from achieving or maintaining market acceptance of the particular product candidate, if approved, and result in the loss of significant revenues to us, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. In addition, if one or more of our product candidates prove to be unsafe, our entire pipeline could be affected, which would have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
We may develop certain of our current and future product candidates in combination with other therapies, and safety or supply issues with combination-use products may delay or prevent development and approval of our product candidates.
We currently plan to evaluate bomedemstat in combination with ruxolitinib for MF in a two-arm Phase 2 clinical trial, and if successful, we may pursue a registrational program for this combination. In addition, we may develop other product candidates in the future in combination with one or more cancer therapies, both approved and unapproved. Even if any product candidate we develop were to receive marketing approval or be commercialized for use in combination with other existing therapies, we would continue to be subject to the risks that the FDA or similar regulatory authorities outside of the United States could revoke approval of the therapy used in combination with our product candidate or that safety, efficacy, manufacturing or supply issues could arise with these existing therapies.
Combination therapies are commonly used for the treatment of cancer, and we would be subject to similar risks if we develop any of our product candidates for use in combination with other drugs or for indications other than cancer. Similarly, if the therapies we use in combination with our product candidates are replaced as the standard of care for the indications we choose for any of our product candidates, the FDA or similar regulatory authorities outside of the United States may require us to conduct additional clinical trials. The occurrence of any of these risks could result in our own products, if approved, being removed from the market or being less successful commercially.
We may also evaluate our product candidates in combination with one or more cancer therapies that have not yet been approved for marketing by the FDA or a similar regulatory authority outside of the United States. We may be unable to effectively identify and collaborate with third parties for the evaluation of our product candidates in combination with their therapies. We will not be able to market and sell any product candidate we develop in combination with any such unapproved cancer therapies that do not ultimately obtain marketing approval. The regulations prohibiting the promotion of products for unapproved uses are complex and subject to substantial interpretation by the FDA and other government agencies. In addition, there are additional risks similar to the ones described for our product candidates currently in development that result from the fact that such cancer therapies are unapproved, such as the potential for serious adverse effects, delay in their clinical trials and lack of FDA approval.
If the FDA or a similar regulatory authority outside of the United States does not approve these other drugs or revokes approval of, or if safety, efficacy, manufacturing, or supply issues arise with, the drugs we choose to evaluate in combination with any product candidate we develop, we may be unable to obtain approval of or market such product candidate.
We may not be able to obtain or maintain orphan drug designations for any of our product candidates, and we may be unable to maintain the benefits associated with orphan drug designation, including the potential for market exclusivity.
We have received orphan drug designation for bomedemstat in the United States and European Union for the treatment of ET and MF. In the United States, under the Orphan Drug Act, the FDA may designate a drug product as an orphan drug if it is intended to treat a rare disease or condition, defined as a patient population of fewer than 200,000 in the United States, or a patient population greater than 200,000 in the United States where there is no reasonable expectation that the cost of developing the drug will be recovered from sales in the United States. Orphan drug designation must be requested before submitting an NDA.
In the United States, orphan drug designation entitles a party to financial incentives such as opportunities for grant funding towards clinical trial costs, tax advantages and application fee waivers. After the FDA grants orphan drug designation, the generic identity of the drug and its potential orphan use are disclosed publicly by the FDA.
In addition, if a product receives the first FDA approval for the indication for which it has orphan designation, the product is entitled to orphan drug exclusivity, which means the FDA may not approve any other application to market the same drug for the same indication for a period of seven years, except in limited circumstances, such as a showing of clinical superiority over the product with orphan exclusivity or where the manufacturer is unable to assure sufficient product quantity for the orphan patient population. Exclusive marketing rights in the United States may also be unavailable if we seek approval for an indication broader than the orphan designated indication and may be lost if the FDA later determines that the request for designation was materially defective.
In the European Union, Regulation (EC) No. 141/2000, as implemented by Regulation (EC) No. 847/2000, provides that a medicinal product can be designated as an orphan medicinal product if its sponsor can establish that (1) the product is intended for the diagnosis, prevention or treatment of a life-threatening or chronically debilitating condition; (2) either (a) such condition affects no more than five in ten thousand persons in the European Union, or EU, when the application is made, or (b) the product, without the benefits derived from orphan status, would not generate sufficient return in the EU to justify the necessary investment; and (3) there exists no satisfactory method of diagnosis, prevention or treatment of the condition in question that has been authorized in the EU or, if such method exists, the product will be of significant benefit to those affected by that condition.
In the EU, orphan drug designation entitles an applicant to incentives such as fee reductions or fee waivers, protocol assistance, and access to the centralized marketing authorization procedure. Upon grant of a marketing authorization, orphan medicinal products are entitled to a ten-year period of market exclusivity for the approved therapeutic indication, which means that the European Medicines Agency, or the EMA, cannot accept another marketing authorization application, grant a marketing authorization, or accept an application to extend a marketing authorization for a similar product for the same indication for a period of ten years. The period of market exclusivity is extended by two years for orphan medicinal products that have also complied with an agreed Pediatric Investigation Plan, or PIP. No extension to any supplementary protection certificate can be granted on the basis of pediatric studies for orphan indications. Orphan medicinal product designation does not convey any advantage in, or shorten the duration of, the regulatory review and approval process.
Even if we obtain orphan drug designation for a product, such exclusivity may not effectively protect the product from competition because different drugs can be approved for the same condition. Even after an orphan drug is approved, regulatory authorities can subsequently approve the same drug for the same condition if such regulatory authority concludes that the later drug is clinically superior because it is shown to be safer, more effective or makes a major contribution to patient care. Orphan drug exclusivity may also be lost if regulatory authorities later determines that the initial request for designation was materially defective, or if the sponsor seeks approval for an indication broader than the designated indication. In addition, orphan drug exclusivity does not prevent regulatory authorities from approving competing drugs for the same or similar indication containing a different active ingredient. In addition, if a subsequent drug is approved for marketing for the same or a similar indication as any of our product candidates that receive marketing approval, we may face increased competition and lose market share regardless of orphan drug . Orphan designation neither shortens the development time or regulatory review time of a drug nor gives the drug any in the regulatory review or approval process.
There is no guarantee that Fast Track designation for bomedemstat for the treatment of ET and MF or other expedited development and review programs will result in a faster regulatory review or regulatory approval or that we will qualify for other expedited development and review programs, such as Breakthrough Therapy designation, Accelerated Approval and Priority Review, which could substantially delay the potential approval of bomedemstat and our other product candidates.
If a product is intended for the treatment of a serious or life-threatening condition and preclinical or clinical data demonstrate the potential to address an unmet medical need for this condition, the product sponsor may apply for Fast Track designation. The FDA has broad discretion whether or not to grant this designation, so even if we believe a particular product candidate is eligible for this designation, we cannot assure you that the FDA would decide to grant it. We have received Fast Track designation for bomedemstat for the treatment of ET and MF, and we may receive Fast Track designation for other product candidates in the future; however, we may not experience a faster development process, review or approval compared to conventional FDA approval timelines, and the FDA
may still decline to approve bomedemstat or our other designated product candidates. The FDA may rescind the Fast Track designation if it believes that the designation is no longer supported by data from our clinical development program or for any other reason.
We may also seek Breakthrough Therapy designation for any product candidate that we develop. A Breakthrough Therapy is defined as a drug that is intended, alone or in combination with one or more other drugs, to treat a serious or life-threatening disease or condition, and preliminary clinical evidence indicates that the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement over currently approved therapies on one or more clinically significant endpoints, such as substantial treatment effects observed early in clinical development. Like Fast Track designation, Breakthrough Therapy designation is within the discretion of the FDA. Accordingly, even if we believe a product candidate, we develop meets the criteria for designation as a Breakthrough Therapy, the FDA may disagree and instead determine not to make such designation. In any event, the receipt of Breakthrough Therapy designation for a product candidate may not result in a faster development process, review or approval compared to drugs considered for approval under conventional FDA procedures and does not ultimate approval by the FDA. In addition, even if a product candidate we develop qualifies as a Therapy, the FDA may later decide that the drug no longer meets the conditions for qualification and rescind the designation.
Drugs designated as Fast Track products or Breakthrough Therapies by the FDA are also eligible for accelerated approval if the product has an effect on a surrogate endpoint that is reasonably likely to predict clinical benefit, or on a clinical endpoint that can be measured earlier than irreversible morbidity or mortality, that is reasonably likely to predict an effect on irreversible morbidity or mortality or other clinical benefit, taking into account the severity, rarity, or prevalence of the condition and the availability or lack of alternative treatments. As a condition of accelerated approval, the FDA will generally require the sponsor to perform adequate and well-controlled post-marketing clinical studies to verify and describe the anticipated effect on irreversible morbidity or mortality or other clinical benefit. If we seek accelerated approval of bomedemstat for the treatment of MF and/or ET, we expect to be required to conduct one or more confirmatory trials post-approval, if obtained. In addition, the FDA requires pre-approval of promotional materials for accelerated approval products, once approved. We cannot guarantee that the FDA will agree that bomedemstat or any other product candidate has met the criteria to receive accelerated approval, which would require us to conduct additional clinical testing prior to seeking FDA approval. Even if any of our product candidates received approval through this pathway, the product may required post-approval confirmatory clinical trials, and we may be required to remove the product from the market or amend the product label in a way that impacts its marketing.
Once an NDA is submitted to the FDA, the application may be eligible for Priority Review if the product candidate treats a serious condition and, if approved, would provide a significant improvement in safety or effectiveness. Products with Fast Track or Breakthrough Therapy designation are generally eligible to be considered for Priority Review. If an NDA receives Priority Review, the FDA will aim to take action on the application within six months of the filing date, compared to ten months under standard review. We cannot guarantee that any NDA we submit will qualify for Priority Review, including our planned NDA for bomedemstat, which could significantly impact our timeline and plans for commercialization, if approved.
In addition, bomedemstat has received PRIority MEdicines, or PRIME, designation by the EMA for the treatment of MF. PRIME is a scheme provided by the EMA to enhance support for the development of medicines that target an unmet medical need. To qualify for PRIME, product candidates require early clinical evidence that the therapy has the potential to offer a therapeutic advantage over existing treatments or benefits patients without treatment options. Among the benefits of PRIME are the appointment of a rapporteur to provide continuous support and help build knowledge ahead of a marketing authorization application, early dialogue and scientific advice at key development milestones, and the potential to qualify products for accelerated review earlier in the application process.
PRIME eligibility does not change the standards for product approval, and there is no assurance that any such designation or eligibility will result in expedited review or approval or that the approved indication will not be narrower than the indication covered by the PRIME eligibility. Additionally, access to PRIME can be revoked if the criteria for eligibility cease to be met as clinical data emerges.
We have conducted and may continue to conduct future clinical trials outside of the United States. The FDA and other regulatory authorities may not accept data from such trials, in which case our development plans will be delayed, which could materially harm our business.
In addition to the United States, we have enrolled patients in Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, and the United Kingdom in our Phase 2 clinical trial of bomedemstat for MF and in Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, the United Kingdom and New Zealand in our Phase 2 clinical trial of bomedemstat for ET. We may conduct additional future clinical trials outside the United States.
Although the FDA may accept data from clinical trials conducted outside the United States and not pursuant to an IND, acceptance of this data is subject to certain conditions imposed by the FDA. For example, the FDA requires the clinical trial to have been conducted in accordance with Good Clinical Practice, or GCP, and the FDA must be able to validate the data from the clinical trial through an onsite inspection if it deems such inspection necessary. In addition, when clinical trials are conducted only at sites outside of the United States and not pursuant to an IND, there is an additional potential risk that the FDA could determine that the study design or
protocols for such non-U.S. clinical trials were inadequate, which would likely require us to conduct additional clinical trials in order to pursue later-stage clinical development or seek FDA approval. If the FDA does not accept data from our clinical trials of bomedemstat and any future product candidates conducted outside the United States, it would likely result in the need for additional clinical trials, which would be costly and time consuming and delay or permanently halt our development of bomedemstat and any future product candidates.
Conducting clinical trials outside the United States also exposes us to additional risks, including risks associated with additional foreign regulatory requirements, foreign exchange fluctuations, patient monitoring and compliance, compliance with foreign manufacturing, customs, shipment and storage requirements, cultural differences in medical practice and clinical research, and diminished protection of intellectual property in some countries.
We must manufacture multiple batches of bomedemstat using a commercial current Good Manufacturing Process, or cGMP, in order to complete pivotal clinical trials, to obtain regulatory approval for commercial sale, and to have bomedemstat available for commercial launch.
To date, we have utilized contract manufacturers to manufacture bomedemstat for our preclinical and clinical studies and plan to continue to do so in the future. We may, however, add new contract manufacturers to our existing manufacturers. In addition, we are contemplating several changes to the manufacturing process to enable a scalable, cost-effective, and commercially viable cGMP manufacturing process. If any batches of bulk bomedemstat, or encapsulated finished drug product, fail to meet specifications, or fail to have been manufactured in accordance with cGMP, we may be delayed in supplying bomedemstat for our planned pivotal clinical trials. In addition, we will require multiple successful cGMP batches of bomedemstat to obtain regulatory approval for commercial sale. Any delay or technical hurdle in our validation work may impact the availability of such product and may result in additional expense. A number of factors could impact the risk of delay or failure in these manufacturing efforts, including:
insufficient supply of raw materials for cGMP manufacturing of bomedemstat;
higher than expected cost of manufacturing;
failure to validate changes in the commercial cGMP processes in a timely manner, or at all;
changes that we make to optimize our manufacturing, testing, or formulating of cGMP materials could negatively impact the cost, safety, tolerability, and efficacy of bomedemstat;
inability to supply clinical trial needs would delay our planned pivotal clinical trials; and
inability to satisfy the commercial demand for bomedemstat, if approved for sale.
Our business has been and could continue to be adversely affected by the evolving and ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic in regions where we or third parties on which we rely have significant manufacturing facilities, concentrations of clinical trial sites or other business operations. The COVID-19 pandemic could adversely affect our operations, as well as the business or operations of our manufacturers or other third parties with whom we conduct business.
Our business has been and could continue to be adversely affected by the effects of the recent and evolving COVID-19 pandemic, which was declared by the World Health Organization as a global pandemic. As COVID-19 remains a significant worldwide problem, we may experience ongoing disruptions that could severely impact our business and clinical trials. These disruptions in our operations and the global economy could negatively impact our business, operating results, and financial condition.
Our clinical trials have been, and may in the future be, affected by the COVID-19 pandemic or another pandemic. For example, as a result of the COVID- 19 pandemic and policy responses to it, in the months between March and May 2020 we observed a decrease in patient screening and patient enrollment in certain of our ongoing clinical trials. Further, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who have serious chronic medical conditions are at higher risk of getting very sick from COVID-19. As a result, potential patients in our ongoing clinical trials of bomedemstat or any other clinical trial may choose to not enroll, not participate in follow-up clinical visits, or drop out of the trial as a precaution against contracting COVID-19. Further, some patients may not be able or willing to comply with clinical trial protocols if quarantines impede patient movement or interrupts healthcare services.
We are unable to predict with confidence the duration of such patient enrollment delays and difficulties. If patient enrollment is delayed for an extended period of time, our Phase 2 clinical trials of bomedemstat or any of our other clinical trials could be delayed or otherwise adversely affected. Similarly, our ability to recruit and retain principal investigators and site staff who, as healthcare providers, may have heightened exposure to COVID-19 or other infectious diseases, may be adversely impacted.
Ongoing or planned clinical trials may also be impacted by interruptions or delays in the operations of the FDA and comparable foreign regulatory authorities. For example, we have made certain adjustments to the operation of our trials in an effort to ensure the monitoring and safety of patients and minimize risks to trial integrity during the pandemic in accordance with the guidance issued by the FDA and may need to make further adjustments in the future. Many of these adjustments are new and untested, may not be
effective, may affect the integrity of data collected, and may have unforeseen effects on the progress and completion of our clinical trials and the findings from such clinical trials.
In addition, we may encounter a shortage in supplies of, or in delays in shipping, our study drug, or other components of the clinical trial vital for successful conduct of the trial. Further, the successful conduct of our Phase 2 clinical trials of bomedemstat and our other clinical trials depend on retrieving laboratory, imaging, and other data from patients. Any failure by the vendors with which we work to send us such data could impair the progress of such clinical trials. These events could delay our clinical trials, increase the cost of completing our clinical trials and negatively impact the integrity, reliability, or robustness of the data from our clinical trials.
Further, quarantines, shelter-in-place and similar government orders, or the perception that such orders, shutdowns, or other restrictions on the conduct of business operations could occur, related to COVID-19 or other infectious diseases could impact personnel at our study sites or third-party manufacturing facilities upon which we rely, or the availability or cost of materials, which could disrupt the supply chain for our drug and combination therapy candidates. To the extent our suppliers and service providers are unable to comply with their obligations under our agreements with them or they are otherwise unable to deliver or are delayed in delivering goods and services to us due to the COVID-19 pandemic or such other infectious diseases, our ability to continue meeting clinical supply demand for our drug and combination therapy candidates or otherwise advancing development of our product candidates may become impaired.
COVID-19 and actions taken to reduce its spread continue to rapidly evolve. The extent to which COVID-19 may impede our clinical development programs, reduce the productivity of our employees, disrupt our supply chains, delay our clinical trials, reduce our access to capital or limit our business development activities, will depend on future developments, which are highly uncertain and cannot be predicted with confidence. In addition, to the extent the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic adversely affects our business and results of operations, it may also have the effect of heightening many of the other risks and uncertainties described in this “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Our business could be adversely affected by wars and related sanctions, supply chain interruptions or cost increases, including for example, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
Geopolitical uncertainties, including wars and related sanctions, could cause the supply chain interruptions of our clinical trials, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, clinical sites or vendors with which we do business. We currently contract with third parties outside of the United States for clinical developments and manufacturing, which we continue to use such third-party vendors. Any disruption in development and production of our vendors outside the Unites States could cause inability to produce adequate quantities to meet our needs, and impairs our ability to operate our day-to-day business and continue our development of our product candidates. Furthermore, we are exposed to the possibility of product supply chain disruptions and increased costs in the event of changes in the policies, political unrest and unstable economic conditions of the United States or other foreign governments. In addition, manufacturing interruptions or failure to comply with regulatory requirements by any of these vendors could significantly our clinical development of product candidates and reduce third-parties’ or clinical researchers’ interest and support. While we do not presently rely to our knowledge on any suppliers in Ukraine or Russia and do not have any current or planned clinical trial sites in Ukraine or Russia, it is possible that ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and related sanctions, supply and increases in cost will have an effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
We compete with both approved therapeutic products and therapeutic candidates being developed by our competitors, most of which have significantly greater resources than we do.
The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries in particular are characterized by rapidly advancing technologies, intense competition and a strong emphasis on developing proprietary therapeutics. We compete with a variety of multinational biopharmaceutical companies and specialized biotechnology companies, as well as technology being developed at universities and other research institutions. Our competitors have developed, are developing or will likely develop product candidates and processes competitive with our product candidates. Competitive therapeutic treatments include those that have already been approved and accepted by the medical community and any new treatments currently under development that may enter the market. We believe that a significant number of product candidates are currently under development, and may become commercially available in the future, for the treatment of diseases and other conditions for which we may try to develop product candidates. Our competitors may obtain regulatory approval of their products more rapidly than us or may obtain patent protection or other intellectual property rights that limit our ability to develop or commercialize our product candidates. We believe that while our scientific and technical know-how give us a competitive advantage in this space, competition from many sources remains.
Our commercial opportunity and success will be reduced or eliminated if competing products that are safer, more effective, or less expensive than the therapeutics we develop. Our competitors may develop drugs that are more effective, more convenient, more widely used, less costly or have a better safety profile than our products in development and these competitors may also be more successful than us in manufacturing and marketing their products.
If any of our product candidates are approved, they will compete with a range of therapeutic treatments that are either in development or currently marketed. For bomedemstat, other companies are conducting research and development of potential therapies for ET, MF and acute myeloid leukemia.
For the treatment of MF, Incyte markets ruxolitinib in the United States, and Novartis markets the drug in the rest of the world. Bristol-Myers Squibb markets the JAK inhibitor fedratinib in the United States. The FDA has granted accelerated approval for pacritinib from CTI BioPharma in the United States. A number of companies are developing other product candidates for myeloproliferative neoplasms some with unique mechanisms of action. Among these companies are AbbVie, Acceleron, Fibrogen, Geron, Kartos, Protagonist, MorphoSys, Roche, 4SC, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Epizyme, GlaxoSmithKline, Incyte, Merck, Oryzon, Salarius, Spectrum, Taiho, Takeda, Vivid and Sierra Oncology.
Furthermore, we also face competition more broadly across the market for cost-effective and reimbursable cancer treatments. The most common methods of treating patients with cancer are surgery, radiation, and drug therapy, including chemotherapy, hormone therapy and targeted drug therapy or a combination of such methods. There are a variety of available drug therapies marketed for cancer. In many cases, these drugs are administered in combination to enhance efficacy. Some of these drugs are branded and subject to patent protection, and others are available on a generic basis. Insurers and other third-party payors may also encourage the use of generic products or specific branded products. We expect that if our product candidates are approved, they will be priced at a significant premium over competitive generic, including branded generic, products. As a result, obtaining market acceptance of, and gaining significant share of the market for, any of our product candidates that we successfully introduce to the market will pose challenges. In addition, many companies are developing new therapeutics, and we cannot predict what the standard of care will be as our product candidates progress through clinical development.
Many of our competitors have significantly greater financial, technical, manufacturing, marketing, sales and supply resources or experience than we do. If we successfully obtain approval for any product candidate, we will face competition based on many different factors, including the safety and effectiveness of our products, the ease with which our products can be administered and the extent to which patients accept relatively new routes of administration, the timing and scope of regulatory approvals for these products, the availability and cost of manufacturing, marketing and sales capabilities, price, coverage, reimbursement and patent position. Competing products could present superior treatment alternatives, including by being more effective, safer, less expensive or marketed and sold more effectively than any products we may develop. Competing products may make any products we develop obsolete or noncompetitive before we recover the expense of developing and commercializing our product candidates. Such competitors could also recruit our employees, which could negatively impact our level of expertise and our ability to execute our business plan.
We expect to expand our development and regulatory capabilities and potentially implement sales, marketing and distribution capabilities, and as a result, we will need to increase the size of our organization, and we may experience difficulties in managing growth.
As of December 31, 2021, we had twenty-seven employees. We will need to continue to expand our managerial, operational, finance and other resources in order to manage our operations and clinical trials, continue our development activities, submit for regulatory approval and, if approved, commercialize our lead product candidate or any future product candidates. Our management and personnel, systems, and facilities currently in place may not be adequate to support this future growth. Our need to effectively execute our growth strategy requires that we:
manage our preclinical studies and clinical trials effectively;
identify, recruit, retain, incentivize and integrate additional employees, including potentially sales and marketing personnel;
manage our internal development and operational efforts effectively while carrying out any contractual obligations we may have to third parties; and
continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls, reporting systems and procedures.
There is no assurance that any of these increases in scale, expansion of personnel, capabilities, IT capacities, or controls and process enhancements will be successfully implemented, or that we will have adequate space in our facilities to accommodate such required expansion.
If we fail to attract and retain senior management and key scientific personnel, our business may be materially and adversely affected.
Our success depends in part on our continued ability to attract, retain and motivate highly qualified management, clinical and scientific personnel. We are highly dependent upon our senior management, particularly our Chief Executive Officer, as well as our senior scientists and other members of our senior management team. The loss of services of any of these individuals could delay or prevent the successful development of any products, initiation or completion of our planned clinical trials or the commercialization of our lead product candidate or any other product candidates.
Competition for qualified personnel in the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical fields is intense due to the limited number of individuals who possess the skills and experience required by our industry. We will need to hire additional personnel as we expand our clinical development and if we initiate commercial activities. We may not be able to attract and retain quality personnel on acceptable terms, or at all. In addition, to the extent we hire personnel from competitors, we may be subject to allegations that they have been improperly solicited or that they have divulged proprietary or other confidential information, or that their former employers own their research output.
We currently have no sales function. If we are unable to establish sales capabilities on our own or through third parties, we may not be able to market and sell any products effectively, if approved, or generate product revenue.
We currently do not have a marketing or sales function. In order to commercialize any product, if approved, in the United States and foreign jurisdictions, we must build our marketing, sales, distribution, managerial and other non-technical capabilities or make arrangements with third parties to perform these services, and we may not be successful in doing so. In advance of any of our product candidates receiving regulatory approval, we expect to establish a sales function with technical expertise and supporting distribution capabilities to commercialize each such product candidate, which will be expensive and time consuming. We have no prior experience in the marketing, sale and distribution of pharmaceutical products, and there are significant risks involved in building and managing a sales function, including our ability to hire, retain, and incentivize qualified individuals, generate sufficient sales leads, provide adequate training to sales and marketing personnel, and effectively manage a geographically dispersed sales and marketing team. Any failure or delay in the development of our internal sales, marketing and distribution capabilities would adversely impact the commercialization of these products. We may choose to collaborate with third parties that have direct sales forces and established distribution systems, either to augment our own sales and distribution systems or in lieu of our own sales and distribution systems. If we are to enter into such arrangements on acceptable terms or at all, we may not be to commercialize our product candidates. If we are not in commercializing products, either on our own or through arrangements with one or more third parties, we may not be to generate any future product revenue and we would incur significant additional .
We depend on our information technology systems, and any failure of these systems could harm our business. Security breaches, loss of data or financial assets, and other disruptions could compromise sensitive information related to our business or prevent us from accessing critical information and expose us to liability, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.
We are dependent on information technology systems, including software, hardware, infrastructure and cloud products and services (collectively, “IT Systems”). We operate certain IT Systems but also rely on third party providers to host, manage, and/or protect IT Systems that are critical to our internal and external operations. In addition, in the ordinary course of our business, we and various third parties collect, store and transmit large amounts of confidential information, including intellectual property, proprietary business information and personal information. It is critical that we do so in a secure manner to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of such confidential information, including both our own and that of third parties. We apply physical, technical and organizational security measures to our IT Systems and data, but there can be no guarantee that such measures are or will be effective, including where we have outsourced those activities and security measures. As a result, our IT Systems and those of our current and any future collaborators, contractors and consultants and other third parties with whom we interact, are vulnerable to compromise, loss, damage and from natural , terrorism, war, and telecommunication and electrical , as well as from cyber-attacks involving computer viruses, malware (such as ransomware) and other intrusions involving perpetrators inside our organization, or persons who have or are to access to our or third-party IT Systems.
Like most companies, we experience cyberattacks from time to time, and our industry is a target for events of this nature. The risk of cyberattacks and events that cause operational disruption or data compromise, is expected to accelerate as the number, intensity and sophistication of attacks continues to escalate. The COVID-19 pandemic and the pervasive use of mobile devices that access confidential information have also increased cybersecurity and related operational risks. In addition, threat actors are increasingly using tools and techniques designed to circumvent security controls, evade detection and remove forensic evidence, which means we, or our critical third parties, may be unable to timely or effectively detect, identify, contain or recover from, future cyberattacks.
The cost to mitigate network security problems, bugs, viruses, worms, malicious software programs and security vulnerabilities and/or to remediate and recover from a cyberattack could be significant, and could result in unexpected interruptions, delays, cessation of service, and other harm to our reputation, business and competitive position. If such an event were to occur and cause interruptions in our operations, it could result in a material disruption of our product development programs. For example, the loss of clinical trial data could result in delays in our regulatory approval efforts and significantly increase our costs to recover or reproduce the data. Moreover, if cyberattack affects our or critical third parties’ IT Systems or results in the release of confidential business or personal information, our reputation could be materially . In addition, such a may require public disclosures and notifications to governmental agencies, the media or individuals pursuant to various privacy and security laws, and us to a risk of , including financial assets or , regulatory and potential , , and other liability, any
or all of which could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. Our insurance policies may or may not provide coverage of such losses or liability, and even if coverage applies, it may not fully reimburse us for all incurred losses and liability.
Our employees and independent contractors, including principal investigators, consultants, collaborators, service providers and other vendors may engage in misconduct or other improper activities, including non-compliance with regulatory standards and requirements, which could have an adverse effect on our results of operations.
We are exposed to the risk that our employees and independent contractors, including principal investigators, consultants, collaborators, service providers and other vendors may engage in misconduct or other illegal activity. Misconduct by these parties could include intentional, reckless and/or negligent conduct or other unauthorized activities that violate: the laws and regulations of the FDA and other similar regulatory bodies, including those laws that require the reporting of true, complete and accurate information to such regulatory bodies; manufacturing standards; U.S. federal and state healthcare fraud and abuse, data privacy laws and other similar non-U.S. laws; or laws that require the true, complete and accurate reporting of financial information or data. Activities subject to these laws also involve the improper use or of information obtained in the course of clinical trials, the creation of data in our preclinical studies or clinical trials, or of product, which could result in regulatory sanctions and cause to our reputation. It is not always possible to identify and by employees and other third-parties, and the precautions we take to detect and prevent this activity may not be in controlling unknown or unmanaged risks or or in protecting us from governmental or other actions or lawsuits stemming from a to be in compliance with such laws or regulations. In addition, we are subject to the risk that a person or government could such or other , even if none occurred. If any such actions are instituted us, and we are not in ourselves or asserting our rights, those actions could have a significant impact on our business and financial results, including, without , the imposition of significant civil, and administrative , , monetary , , possible exclusion from participation in Medicare, Medicaid and other U.S. federal healthcare programs or healthcare programs in other jurisdictions, oversight and reporting obligations to of non-compliance, individual , other sanctions, contractual , reputational , profits and future earnings and of our operations, any of which could affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
Our business involves the use of hazardous materials and we and our third-party manufacturers and suppliers must comply with environmental laws and regulations, which can be expensive and restrict how we do business.
Our research and development activities and our third-party manufacturers’ and suppliers’ activities involve the controlled storage, use and disposal of hazardous materials owned by us, including the components of our product candidates and other hazardous compounds. We and any third-party manufacturers and suppliers we engage are subject to numerous federal, state, and local environmental, health and safety laws, regulations and permitting requirements, including those governing laboratory procedures; the generation, handling, use, storage, treatment, and disposal of hazardous and regulated materials and wastes; the emission and discharge of hazardous materials into the ground, air and water; and employee health and safety. Our operations involve the use of hazardous and flammable materials, including chemicals and biological and radioactive materials. Our operations also produce hazardous waste. In some cases, these hazardous materials and various wastes resulting from their use are stored at our and our manufacturers’ facilities pending their use and disposal. We generally contract with third parties for the disposal of these materials and wastes. We cannot eliminate the risk of contamination, which could cause an interruption of our research and development efforts, commercialization efforts and business operations, environmental resulting in clean-up and liabilities under applicable laws and regulations governing the use, storage, handling and disposal of these materials and specified waste products.
Although we believe that the safety procedures utilized by our third-party manufacturers for handling and disposing of these materials generally comply with the standards prescribed by these laws and regulations, we cannot guarantee that this is the case or eliminate the risk of accidental contamination or injury from these materials. Under certain environmental laws, we could be held responsible for costs relating to any contamination at our current or past facilities and at third-party facilities. In such an event, we may be held liable for any resulting damages and such liability could exceed our resources and state or federal or other applicable authorities may curtail our use of certain materials and/or interrupt our business operations. Furthermore, environmental laws and regulations are complex, change frequently and have tended to become more stringent. We cannot predict the impact of such changes and cannot be certain of our future compliance.
Compliance with applicable environmental laws and regulations may be expensive, and current or future environmental laws and regulations may impair our research, product development and manufacturing efforts. In addition, we cannot entirely eliminate the risk of accidental injury or contamination from these materials or wastes. Although we maintain workers’ compensation insurance to cover us for costs and expenses we may incur due to injuries to our employees resulting from the use of hazardous materials, this insurance may not provide adequate coverage against potential liabilities. We do not carry specific biological or hazardous waste insurance coverage, and our property, casualty, and general liability insurance policies specifically exclude coverage for damages and fines arising from biological or hazardous waste exposure or contamination. Accordingly, in the event of contamination or injury, we could be held liable for damages or be with in an amount exceeding our resources, and our clinical trials or regulatory
approvals could be suspended, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
We, or the third parties upon whom we depend, may be adversely affected by earthquakes or other natural disasters and our business continuity and disaster recovery plans may not adequately protect us from a serious disaster.
Our corporate headquarters is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, which in the past has experienced both severe earthquakes and wildfires. We do not carry earthquake insurance. Earthquakes, wildfires or other natural disasters could severely disrupt our operations, and have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition and prospects.
If a natural disaster, power outage or other event occurred that prevented us from using all or a significant portion of our headquarters or other facilities, that damaged critical infrastructure, such as our enterprise financial systems or manufacturing resource planning and enterprise quality systems, or that otherwise disrupted operations, it may be difficult or, in certain cases, impossible, for us to continue our business for a substantial period of time. The disaster recovery and business continuity plans we have in place currently are limited and are unlikely to prove adequate in the event of a serious disaster or similar event. We may incur substantial expenses as a result of the limited nature of our disaster recovery and business continuity plans, which, particularly when taken together with our lack of earthquake insurance, could have a material effect on our business.
Furthermore, the third parties on which we depend, including suppliers, contract manufacturers and CROs are similarly vulnerable to natural disasters or other sudden, unforeseen and severe adverse events. If such an event were to affect our supply chain, manufacturing arrangements or interfere with a preclinical study or clinical trial, it could have a material adverse effect on our business.
If product liability lawsuits are brought against us, we may incur substantial liabilities and may be required to limit commercialization of any approved products.
We face an inherent risk of product liability as a result of the clinical testing of product candidates and will face an even greater risk if we commercialize any products. For example, we may be sued if any product candidate we develop causes or is perceived to cause injury or is found to be otherwise unsuitable during clinical testing, manufacturing, marketing or sale. Any such product liability claims may include allegations of defects in manufacturing, defects in design, a failure to warn of dangers inherent in the product, negligence, strict liability or a breach of warranties. Claims could also be asserted under state consumer protection acts. If we cannot successfully ourselves product liability , we may incur substantial liabilities or be required to limit commercialization of any approved products. Even defense would require significant financial and management resources. Regardless of the merits or eventual outcome, liability may result in:
decreased demand for any approved product;
injury to our reputation;
withdrawal of clinical trial participants;
initiation of investigations by regulators;
costs to defend the related litigation;
a diversion of management’s time and our resources;
substantial monetary awards to trial participants or patients;
product recalls, withdrawals or labeling, marketing or promotional restrictions;
loss of revenue;
exhaustion of any available insurance and our capital resources;
the inability to commercialize any product candidate; and
a decline in our share price.
Our inability to obtain sufficient product liability insurance at an acceptable cost to protect against potential product liability claims could prevent or inhibit the commercialization of products we develop, alone or with collaboration partners.
Insurance coverage is increasingly expensive. We may not be able to maintain insurance at a reasonable cost or in an amount adequate to satisfy any liability that may arise, if at all. Our insurance policy contains various exclusions, and we may be subject to a product liability claim for which we have no coverage. We may have to pay any amounts awarded by a court or negotiated in a settlement that exceed our coverage limitations or that are not covered by our insurance, and we may not have, or be able to obtain, sufficient capital to pay such amounts. Even if our agreements with any future collaborator entitle us to indemnification against losses, such indemnification may not be available or adequate should any claim arise.
Risks Related to Reliance on Third Parties
We currently rely, and plan to rely on in the future, third parties to conduct and support our preclinical studies and clinical trials. If these third parties do not properly and successfully carry out their contractual duties or meet expected deadlines, we may not be able to obtain regulatory approval of or commercialize our product candidates.
We have utilized and plan to continue to utilize and depend upon independent investigators and collaborators, such as medical institutions, CROs, CMOs and strategic partners to conduct and support our preclinical studies and clinical trials under agreements with us. We are continuing to build our internal chemistry, manufacturing and controls, biology and preclinical development capabilities to supplement activities conducted by third parties on our behalf. As part of this personnel build out, we may incur additional costs or experience delays in engaging directly with other third-party CROs and CMOs.
We expect to have to negotiate budgets and contracts with CROs, trial sites and CMOs and we may not be able to do so on favorable terms, which may result in delays to our development timelines and increased costs. We will rely heavily on these third parties over the course of our preclinical studies and clinical trials, and we control only certain aspects of their activities. As a result, we will have less direct control over the conduct, timing and completion of these preclinical studies and clinical trials and the management of data developed through preclinical studies and clinical trials than would be the case if we were relying entirely upon our own staff. Nevertheless, we are responsible for ensuring that each of our studies is conducted in accordance with applicable protocol, legal and regulatory requirements and scientific standards, and our reliance on third parties does not relieve us of our regulatory responsibilities. We and these third parties are required to comply with Good Clinical Practice, or GCP, requirements, which are regulations and guidelines enforced by the FDA and comparable foreign regulatory authorities for product candidates in clinical development. Regulatory authorities enforce these GCP requirements through periodic inspections of trial sponsors, principal investigators and trial sites. If we or any of these third parties fail to comply with applicable GCP regulations, the clinical data generated in our clinical trials may be deemed and the FDA or comparable foreign regulatory authorities may require us to perform additional clinical trials before approving our marketing applications. We cannot you that, upon inspection, such regulatory authorities will determine that any of our clinical trials comply with the GCP regulations. In addition, our clinical trials must be conducted with pharmaceutical product produced under cGMP regulations and will require a large number of test patients. Our or any by these third parties to comply with these regulations or to recruit a sufficient number of patients may require us to repeat clinical trials, which would the regulatory approval process. Moreover, our business may be if any of these third parties federal or state and or laws and regulations or healthcare privacy and security laws.
Any third parties conducting our clinical trials will not be our employees and, except for remedies available to us under our agreements with such third parties, we cannot control whether or not they devote sufficient time and resources to our product candidates. These third parties may also have relationships with other commercial entities, including our competitors, for whom they may also be conducting clinical trials or other product development activities, which could affect their performance on our behalf. If these third parties do not successfully carry out their contractual duties or obligations or meet expected deadlines, if they need to be replaced or if the quality or accuracy of the clinical data they obtain is compromised due to the failure to adhere to our clinical protocols or regulatory requirements or for other reasons, our clinical trials may be extended, delayed or terminated and we may not be able to complete development of, obtain regulatory approval of or successfully commercialize our product candidates. As a result, our financial results and the commercial prospects for our product candidates would be adversely affected, our costs could increase and our ability to generate revenue could be .
Switching or adding third parties to conduct our preclinical studies and clinical trials involves substantial cost and requires extensive management time and focus. In addition, there is a natural transition period when a new third party commences work. As a result, delays occur, which can materially impact our ability to meet our desired clinical development timelines.
We currently rely and expect to rely in the future on third parties to manufacture our product candidates, and we may rely on third parties to produce and process our products, if approved. Our business could be adversely affected if we are unable to use third-party manufacturing suites or if the third-party manufacturers fail to provide us with sufficient quantities of our product candidates or fail to do so at acceptable quality levels or prices.
We do not currently own any facility that may be used as our clinical-scale manufacturing and processing facility and must currently rely on outside vendors to manufacture our product candidates. We have not yet caused our product candidates to be manufactured on a commercial scale and may not be able to do so for any of our product candidates. We will need to negotiate and maintain contractual arrangements with these outside vendors for the supply of our product candidates and we may not be able to do so on favorable terms.
The facilities used by our contract manufacturers to manufacture our product candidates must be approved by the FDA or other comparable foreign regulatory authorities following inspections that will be conducted after we submit an application to the FDA or other comparable foreign regulatory authorities. We may not control the manufacturing process of, and may be completely dependent on, our contract manufacturing partners for compliance with cGMP requirements and any other regulatory requirements of the FDA or other regulatory authorities for the manufacture of our product candidates. Beyond periodic audits, we have no control over the ability of our contract manufacturers to maintain adequate quality control, quality assurance and qualified personnel. If the FDA or a comparable foreign regulatory authority does not approve these facilities for the manufacture of our product candidates or if it
withdraws any approval in the future, we may need to find alternative manufacturing facilities, which would require the incurrence of significant additional costs and materially adversely affect our ability to develop, obtain regulatory approval for or market our product candidates, if approved. Similarly, if any third-party manufacturers on which we will rely fail to manufacture quantities of our product candidates at quality levels necessary to meet regulatory requirements and at a scale sufficient to meet anticipated demand at a cost that allows us to achieve profitability, our business, financial condition and prospects could be materially and adversely affected.
Our anticipated reliance on a limited number of third-party manufacturers exposes us to a number of risks, including the following:
we may be unable to identify manufacturers on acceptable terms or at all because the number of potential manufacturers is limited, and the FDA must inspect any manufacturers for cGMP compliance as part of our marketing application;
a new manufacturer would have to be educated in, or develop substantially equivalent processes for, the production of our product candidates;
our third-party manufacturers might be unable to timely manufacture our product candidates or produce the quantity and quality required to meet our clinical and commercial needs, if any;
contract manufacturers may not be able to execute our manufacturing procedures and other logistical support requirements appropriately;
our future contract manufacturers may not perform as agreed, may not devote sufficient resources to our product candidates or may not remain in the contract manufacturing business for the time required to supply our clinical trials or to successfully produce, store and distribute our products, if any;
manufacturers are subject to ongoing periodic unannounced inspection by the FDA and corresponding state agencies to ensure strict compliance with cGMP and other government regulations and corresponding foreign standards and we have no control over third-party manufacturers’ compliance with these regulations and standards;
we may not own, or may have to share, the intellectual property rights to any improvements made by our third-party manufacturers in the manufacturing process for our product candidates;
our third-party manufacturers could breach or terminate their agreements with us;
raw materials and components used in the manufacturing process, particularly those for which we have no other source or supplier, may not be available or may not be suitable or acceptable for use due to material or component defects;
our contract manufacturers and critical reagent suppliers may be subject to inclement weather, natural or man-made disasters, cyberattacks or economic distress; and
our contract manufacturers may have unacceptable or inconsistent product quality success rates and yields, and we have no direct control over our contract manufacturers ’ ability to maintain adequate quality control, quality assurance and qualified personnel.
Our business could be materially adversely affected by business disruptions to our third-party providers that could materially adversely affect our potential future revenue and financial condition and increase our costs and expenses. Each of these risks could delay or prevent the completion of our clinical trials or the approval of any of our product candidates by the FDA, result in higher costs or adversely impact commercialization of our product candidates. In addition, we will rely on third parties to perform certain specification tests on our product candidates prior to delivery to patients. If these tests are not appropriately done and test data are not reliable, patients could be put at risk of serious harm and the FDA could place significant restrictions on our company until deficiencies are remedied.
Risks Related to Intellectual Property
Our current and any future product candidates could be alleged to infringe patent rights and other intellectual property rights of third parties, which may require costly litigation and, if we are not successful, could cause us to pay substantial damages and/or limit our ability to commercialize our drugs and combination therapy candidates.
Our commercial success depends on our ability to develop, manufacture and market our current and any future product candidates that may be approved for sale, and to use our technology without infringing the patents and other intellectual property rights of third parties. If any third-party patents, or other intellectual property rights are found to cover our product candidates or their compositions, methods of use or manufacturing, we may be required to pay damages, which could be substantial, and we would not be free to manufacture or market our product candidates or to do so without obtaining a license, which may not be available on commercially reasonable terms, or at all.
Regardless of the merits or any third-party claims, intellectual property disputes can be costly to defend, time-consuming and may cause our business, operating results and financial condition to suffer.
We operate in an industry with extensive intellectual property litigation. As the pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and biotechnology industries expand and more patents are issued, the risk increases that there may be patents issued to third parties that relate to our products and technology of which we are not aware or that we may need to challenge to continue our operations as currently contemplated.
From time to time, we may be subject to legal proceedings and claims with respect to intellectual property with respect to our product candidates and technologies we use in our business. We may face allegations that we have infringed the trademarks, copyrights, patents and other intellectual property rights of third parties, including patents held by our competitors or by non-practicing entities. We may be forced to defend ourselves by challenging the scope, enforceability and validity of third-party proprietary rights, or to establish our proprietary rights. Interference or derivation proceedings provoked by third parties or brought by us or declared by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, may be necessary to determine the priority of inventions with respect to our patents or patent applications. Regardless of whether claims that we are infringing patents or other intellectual property rights have merit, the can be time consuming, management attention and financial resources and are to evaluate and . Results of any such are to predict and may require us to developing, manufacturing, or commercializing the product candidate, stop treating certain conditions, obtain licenses or modify our drugs or combination therapies and features while we develop non- substitutes, or may result in significant settlement costs. For example, can involve substantial for , and if the court finds that the was willful, we could be ordered to pay treble and the patent owner’s attorneys’ fees. We may also be prohibited from selling or licensing our product candidates unless the third party licenses rights to us, which it is not required to do at a commercially reasonable price or at all. If a license is available from a third party, we may have to pay substantial royalties or upfront fees or grant cross-licenses to intellectual property rights for our product candidates.
Although we have reviewed certain third-party patent filings that we believe may be relevant to certain of our product candidates, we have not conducted a freedom-to-operate search or analysis for all of our product candidates. As such, we may not be aware of patents or pending or future patent applications that, if issued, would block us from commercializing our product candidates. Thus, we cannot guarantee that our product candidates, or our commercialization thereof, do not and will not infringe any third party’s intellectual property.
In addition, patent applications in the United States and many international jurisdictions are typically not published until 18 months after the filing of certain priority documents (or, in some cases, are not published until they issue as patents), and publications in the scientific literature often lag behind actual discoveries. Claims in patent applications can also be revised before issuance. Therefore, we cannot be certain that others have not filed patent applications or made public disclosures relating to our technology or our contemplated technology. A third party may have filed, and may in the future file, patent applications covering our product candidates or technology similar to ours. Any such patent application may have priority over our patent applications or patents, which could further require us to obtain rights to issued patents covering such technologies. For patent applications filed before March 16, 2013, if another party has filed a U.S. patent application on inventions similar to ours, we may have to participate in a priority contest (such as an interference proceeding) declared by the USPTO to determine priority of invention in the United States.
The costs of priority contests, patent litigation and other proceedings could be substantial, and it is possible that such efforts would be unsuccessful if it is determined that the other party had independently arrived at the same or similar invention prior to our own invention, resulting in a loss of our U.S. patent position with respect to such invention.
The coverage of patents is subject to interpretation by the courts, and the interpretation is not always uniform. If we were sued for patent infringement, we would need to demonstrate that our product candidates either do not infringe the patent claims of the relevant patent or that the patent claims are invalid or unenforceable, and we may not be successful in doing so. Proving invalidity or unenforceability is difficult. For example, in the United States, proving invalidity requires a showing of clear and convincing evidence to overcome the presumption of validity that applies to all issued patents. Even if we believe third-party intellectual property claims are without merit, there is no assurance that a court would find in our favor on questions of , validity, or enforceability.
Some of our competitors may be able to sustain the costs of complex patent litigation more effectively than we can. Even if resolved in our favor, litigation or other legal proceedings relating to intellectual property claims may cause us to incur significant expenses and could distract our technical and management personnel from their normal responsibilities. In addition, there could be public announcements of the results of hearings, motions or other interim proceedings or developments, and if securities analysts or investors perceive these results to be negative, it could have a material adverse effect on the price of our common stock. Any uncertainties resulting from the initiation and continuation of any litigation could have a material adverse effect on our ability to raise the funds necessary to continue our operations.
There can be no assurance with respect to the outcome of any future litigation brought by or against us, and the outcome of any such litigation could have a material adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition. Litigation is inherently unpredictable, and outcomes are uncertain. Further, as the costs and outcome of these types of claims and proceedings can vary significantly, it is difficult to estimate potential losses that may occur. Such claims and proceedings could substantially increase our operating losses and reduce the resources available for development activities or any future sales, marketing or distribution activities. We may not have sufficient financial or other resources to conduct such litigation or proceedings adequately. Accordingly, we are at this time to estimate the effects of these potential future lawsuits on our financial condition, operations or cash flows.
We may be subject to claims by employees, consultants, contractors or third parties claiming ownership of what we regard as our own intellectual property, or we may need to bring such claims ourselves.
While it is our policy to require our employees, consultants and contractors who may be involved in the conception or development of intellectual property to execute agreements assigning such intellectual property to us, we may be unsuccessful in executing such an agreement with each party who, in fact, conceives or develops intellectual property that we regard as our own, which may result in claims by or against us related to the ownership of such intellectual property. In addition, such agreements may not be self-executing such that the intellectual property subject to such agreements may not be assigned to us without additional assignments being executed, and we may fail to obtain such assignments. Such agreements may also be breached. Accordingly, we may be forced to bring claims against third parties or defend claims that they may bring against us to determine the ownership of what we regard as our intellectual property. If we in or any such , in addition to paying monetary , we may intellectual property. Even if we are in or such , could result in substantial costs and be a to our senior management and scientific personnel, which would have a material effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
We may be subject to claims that former employees, collaborators, or other third parties have an interest in our patents or other intellectual property as an inventor or co-inventor. The failure to name the proper inventors on a patent application can result in the patents issuing thereon being unenforceable. Inventorship disputes may arise from conflicting views regarding the contributions of different individuals named as inventors, the effects of foreign laws where foreign nationals are involved in the development of the subject matter of the patent, conflicting obligations of third parties involved in developing our product candidates or as a result of questions regarding co-ownership of potential joint inventions. For example, inventorship disputes may arise from conflicting obligations of consultants or others who are involved in developing our product candidates. Alternatively, or additionally, we may enter into agreements to clarify the scope of our rights in such intellectual property. may be necessary to these and other inventorship. If we in any such , in addition to paying monetary , we may intellectual property rights, such as ownership of, or rights to use, intellectual property. Such an outcome could have a material effect on our business. Even if we are in such , could result in substantial costs and be a to management and other employees.
We may in the future rely on support from third-party consultants or collaborators or on funds from third parties, such as the U.S. government, such that we may not be the sole and exclusive owners of the patents we in-licensed. If other third parties have ownership rights or other rights to our patents, including in-licensed patents, they may be able to license such patents to our competitors, and our competitors could market competing products. This could have a material adverse effect on our competitive position, business, financial conditions, results of operations and prospects.
We may be subject to claims that we have wrongfully hired an employee from a competitor or that we or our employees have wrongfully used or disclosed alleged confidential information or trade secrets of their former employers.
As is common in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, in addition to our employees, we engage the services of consultants to assist us in the development of our product candidates. Many of our employees and consultants were previously employed at or may have previously provided or may be currently providing consulting services to, universities or other pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies including our competitors or potential competitors. These employees and consultants may have executed proprietary rights, non-disclosure and non-competition agreements, or similar agreements, in connection with such other current or previous employment or consulting services. Although we try to ensure that our employees and consultants do not use the proprietary information or know-how of others in their work for us, we may become subject to claims that we, our employees or consultants inadvertently or otherwise used or disclosed trade secrets or other proprietary information of their former employers or their former or current clients. Litigation may be necessary to defend against these claims. If we fail in defending any such , in addition to paying monetary , we may intellectual property rights, which could affect our business. Such intellectual property could be awarded to a third party, and we could be required to obtain a license from such third party to commercialize our drugs and combination therapies and such license would not necessarily be available on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. Even if we are in these , could result in substantial costs and be a to our management team. Any of the foregoing would have a material effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.
If we are unable to obtain, maintain and enforce intellectual property protection directed to our current and any future technologies that we develop, others may be able to make, use or sell drugs or combination therapies substantially the same as ours, which could adversely affect our ability to compete in the market.
Our success depends, in part, upon our ability to maintain a competitive position in the development and protection of technologies and any future single agent or combination therapy candidates for use in the market for pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals and upon our ability to obtain, maintain and enforce our intellectual property rights. We seek to obtain and maintain patents and other intellectual property rights to restrict the ability of others to market products that misappropriate our technology and/or infringe our
intellectual property to unfairly and illegally compete with any of our product candidates. If we are unable to protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights, our competitive position and our business could be harmed, as third parties may be able to make, use or sell products that are substantially the same as any single agent or combination therapy candidates we may sell without incurring the sizeable development and licensing costs that we have incurred, which would adversely affect our ability to compete in the market. We use a combination of patents, trademarks, know-how, confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions to protect our proprietary technology. However, these protections may not be adequate and may not provide us with any competitive advantage. For example, patents may not issue from any of our currently pending or any future patent applications, and our issued patents and any future patents that may issue may not survive legal challenges to their scope, validity or enforceability or provide significant protection for us.
To protect our proprietary position, we file patent applications in the United States and abroad related to our product candidates that we consider important to our business. The patent application and approval process are expensive, time-consuming and complex. We may not be able to file, prosecute and maintain all necessary or desirable patent applications at a reasonable cost or in a timely manner or in all jurisdictions. It is also possible that we will fail to identify patentable aspects of our research and development output before it is too late to obtain patent protection. Moreover, depending on the terms of any future license or collaboration agreements to which we may become a party, we may not have the right to control the preparation, filing, and prosecution of patent applications, or to maintain the patents, covering technology licensed from third parties. Therefore, these patents and patent applications may not be prosecuted and enforced in a manner consistent with the best interests of our business.
Furthermore, the patent position of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies generally is highly uncertain. No consistent policy regarding the breadth of claims allowed in biotechnology and pharmaceutical patents has emerged to date in the United States or in many foreign jurisdictions. The standards applied by the USPTO and foreign patent offices in granting patents are not always applied uniformly or predictably. In addition, the determination of patent rights with respect to biological and pharmaceutical products commonly involves complex legal and factual questions, which have in recent years been the subject of much litigation. As a result, the issuance, scope, validity, enforceability and commercial value of our patent rights are highly uncertain. Thus, we cannot offer any assurances about which, if any, patents will issue, the breadth of any such patents, whether any issued patents will be found invalid and unenforceable or will be threatened by third parties or whether any issued patents will effectively prevent others from commercializing competing technologies and product candidates.
The USPTO, international patent offices or judicial bodies may deny, or significantly narrow claims made under our patent applications, and our issued patents may be successfully challenged, may be designed around or may otherwise be of insufficient scope to provide us with protection for our drugs or combination therapies. Further, the USPTO, international trademark offices or judicial bodies may deny our trademark applications and, even if published or registered, these trademarks may not effectively protect our brand and goodwill. Like patents, trademarks also may be successfully opposed or challenged.
We cannot be certain that the steps we have taken will prevent unauthorized use or unauthorized reverse engineering of our product candidates. Moreover, third parties may independently develop technologies that are competitive with ours and such competitive technologies may or may not infringe our intellectual property. The enforcement of our intellectual property rights also depends on the success of any legal actions we may take against these infringers in the respective country or forum, but these actions may not be successful. As with all granted intellectual property, such intellectual property may be challenged, invalidated or circumvented, may not provide protection and/or may not prove to be enforceable in actions against specific alleged infringers.
Even if our patents are determined by a court to be valid and enforceable, they may not be interpreted sufficiently broadly to prevent others from marketing products similar to ours or designing around our patents. For example, third parties may be able to make products that are similar to ours but that are not covered by the claims of our patents. Third parties may assert that we were not the first to make the inventions covered by our issued patents or pending patent applications. The claims of our issued patents or patent applications when issued may not cover our product candidates or any future drugs or combination therapies that we develop. We may not have freedom to commercialize unimpeded by the patent rights of others. Third parties may have patents that dominate, block or are otherwise relevant to our technology. There may be prior public disclosures or other art that could be deemed to invalidate one or more of our patent claims. Further, we may not develop additional proprietary technologies in the future, and, if we do, they may not be patentable.
We may not be able to correctly estimate or control our future operating expenses in relation to obtaining intellectual property, enforcing intellectual property and/or defending intellectual property, which could affect operating expenses. Our operating expenses may fluctuate significantly in the future as a result of a variety of factors, including the costs of preparing, filing, prosecuting, defending and enforcing patent and trademark claims and other intellectual property-related costs, including adverse proceedings and litigation costs.
We may be involved in lawsuits to protect or enforce our patents, which could be expensive, time consuming, and unsuccessful. Further, our issued patents could be found invalid or unenforceable if challenged in court.
Competitors may infringe our intellectual property rights. To prevent infringement or unauthorized use, we may be required to file infringement claims, which can be expensive and time-consuming. In addition, in a patent infringement proceeding, a court may decide that one or more patents of ours or any of our future licensors is not valid or is unenforceable, in whole or in part, or may refuse to stop the other party from using the technology at issue on the grounds that our patents do not cover the technology in question. An adverse result in any litigation or defense proceedings could put one or more of our patents at risk of being invalidated or interpreted narrowly, which may curtail or preclude our ability to exclude third parties from making and selling similar or competitive products and could put our patent applications at risk of not issuing. If we or any of our potential future were to initiate legal proceedings a third party to enforce a patent that covers our products, the could that our patent is and/or unenforceable in whole or in part. In patent in the United States, and/or unenforceability are commonplace. Grounds for a validity include an to meet any of several statutory requirements, including of novelty, obviousness or non-enablement. Grounds for an unenforceability assertion could also include an that someone connected with of the patent withheld relevant information from the USPTO or made a statement during . Third parties may also raise similar validity before the USPTO in post-grant proceedings such as ex parte reexaminations, inter partes review or post-grant review, or or similar proceedings outside the United States, in parallel with or even outside the context of .
If a defendant were to prevail on a legal assertion of invalidity or unenforceability of our patents covering one of our product candidates, we could lose a part, and perhaps all, of the patent protection covering such candidate.
Competing products may also be sold in other countries in which our patent coverage might not exist or be as strong. Any of these circumstances could adversely affect our competitive business position, business prospects and financial condition.
The outcome following legal assertions of invalidity and unenforceability is unpredictable, and prior art could render our patents invalid. Similar mechanisms for challenging the validity and enforceability of a patent exist in ex-U.S. patent offices and may result in the revocation, cancellation, or amendment of any ex-U.S. patents we hold in the future. For the patents and patent applications that we may license in the future, we may have limited or no right to participate in the defense of any licensed patents against challenge by a third party. If a defendant were to prevail on a legal assertion of invalidity and/or unenforceability, we would lose at least part, and perhaps all, of the patent protection on such product candidate. Such a loss of patent protection would have a material impact on our business.
Even if we establish infringement, the court may decide not to grant an injunction against further infringing activity and instead award only monetary damages, which may or may not be an adequate remedy. Furthermore, because of the substantial amount of discovery required in connection with intellectual property litigation, there is a risk that some of our confidential information could be compromised by disclosure during this type of litigation. We may not be able to prevent, alone or with our potential licensors, misappropriation of our intellectual property rights, particularly in countries where the laws may not protect those rights as fully as in the United States. There could also be public announcements of the results of hearings, motions or other interim proceedings or developments. If securities analysts or investors perceive these results to be negative, it could have a material adverse effect on the price of our common stock.
Even if we ultimately establish infringement and an injunction is granted against further infringing activity, it may be too late to avoid a material adverse effect on our ability to raise the funds necessary to continue our clinical trials, continue our research programs, license necessary technology from third parties or enter into development or manufacturing partnerships that would help us bring our products to market.
We may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights throughout the world.
We have a number of international patents and patent applications and expect to continue to pursue patent protection in many of the significant markets in which we intend to do business. However, filing, prosecuting and defending patents on product candidates in all countries throughout the world would be prohibitively expensive, and the laws of some foreign countries do not protect intellectual property rights to the same extent as federal and state laws in the United States. The requirements for patentability may differ in certain countries, particularly in developing countries. Consequently, we have not pursued or maintained, and may not pursue or maintain in the future, patent protection for our product candidates in every country or territory in which we may, following regulatory approval, sell our drugs and combination therapies and we may not be able to prevent third parties from practicing our inventions in all countries outside the United States, or from selling or importing products made using our inventions in and into the United States or other jurisdictions. Competitors may use our technologies in jurisdictions where we have not obtained patent protection to develop their own products and may export otherwise infringing products to territories where we have patent protection but enforcement is not as as that in the United States and where our ability to enforce our patents to stop activities may be . These products may compete with any current or future product candidates we may sell, and our patents or other intellectual property rights may not be or sufficient to prevent them from competing.
Many companies have encountered significant problems in protecting and defending intellectual property rights in foreign jurisdictions. The legal systems of certain countries, particularly certain developing countries, do not favor the enforcement of patents and other intellectual property protection, particularly those relating to pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals, which could make it difficult for us to stop the infringement of our patents or marketing of competing products in violation of our proprietary rights generally.
Moreover, our ability to protect and enforce our intellectual property and proprietary rights may be adversely affected by unforeseen changes in foreign intellectual property laws. Additionally, the laws of some countries outside of the United States and Europe do not afford intellectual property protection to the same extent as the laws of the United States and Europe. Many companies have encountered significant problems in protecting and defending intellectual property and proprietary rights in certain foreign jurisdictions. The legal systems of some countries, including, for example, India, China and other developing countries, do not favor the enforcement of patents and other intellectual property or proprietary rights, particularly those relating to biotechnology products, which could make it difficult for us to stop the infringement, misappropriation or other violation of our patents or other intellectual property or proprietary rights. For example, many foreign countries have compulsory licensing laws under which a patent owner must grant licenses to third parties. Consequently, we may not be able to prevent third parties from practicing our in certain countries outside the United States and Europe. In addition, many countries limit the enforceability of patents government agencies or government contractors. In these countries, the patent owner may have limited remedies, which could materially the value of such patent. If we are to grant a license to third parties with respect to any patents relevant to our business, our competitive position may be , and our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects may be affected.
Proceedings to enforce our patent rights in foreign jurisdictions could result in substantial costs and divert our efforts and attention from other aspects of our business, could put our patents at risk of being invalidated or interpreted narrowly and our patent applications at risk of not issuing and could provoke third parties to assert claims against us. We may not prevail in any lawsuits that we initiate, and the damages or other remedies awarded, if any, may not be commercially meaningful. Accordingly, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights around the world may be inadequate to obtain a significant commercial advantage from the intellectual property that we develop or license.
We may not identify relevant third-party patents or may incorrectly interpret the relevance, scope or expiration of a third-party patent, which might adversely affect our ability to develop and market our single-agent and combination therapies.
We cannot guarantee that any of our patent searches or analyses, including the identification of relevant patents, the scope of patent claims or the expiration of relevant patents, are complete or thorough, nor can we be certain that we have identified each and every third-party patent and pending application in the United States and abroad that is relevant to or necessary for the commercialization of our product candidates in any jurisdiction. The scope of a patent claim is determined by an interpretation of the law, the written disclosure in a patent and the patent’s prosecution history. Our interpretation of the relevance or the scope of a patent or a pending application may be incorrect, which may negatively impact our ability to market our product candidates. We may incorrectly determine that our product candidates are not covered by a third-party patent or may incorrectly predict whether a third-party’s pending application will issue with claims of relevant scope. Our determination of the expiration date of any patent in the United States or abroad that we consider relevant may be incorrect, which may impact our ability to develop and market our product candidates. Our to identify and correctly interpret relevant patents may impact our ability to develop and market our product candidates.
One aspect of the determination of patentability of our inventions depends on the scope and content of the “prior art,” information that was or is deemed available to a person of skill in the relevant art prior to the priority date of the claimed invention. There may be prior art of which we are not aware that may affect the patentability of our patent claims or, if issued, affect the validity or enforceability of a patent claim. Further, we may not be aware of all third-party intellectual property rights potentially relating to our product candidates or their intended uses, and as a result the impact of such third-party intellectual property rights upon the patentability of our own patents and patent applications, as well as the impact of such third-party intellectual property upon our freedom to operate, is highly uncertain. Because patent applications in the United States and most other countries are confidential for typically a period of 18 months after filing, or may not be published at all, we cannot be certain that we were the first to file any patent application related to our product candidates. As a result, the issuance, scope, validity, enforceability and commercial value of our patent rights are highly uncertain. Furthermore, for U.S. applications in which all claims are entitled to a priority date before March 16, 2013, an proceeding can be by a third party or instituted by the USPTO to determine who was the first to any of the subject matter covered by the patent of our applications. For U.S. applications containing a claim not entitled to priority before March 16, 2013, there is a level of uncertainty in the patent law in view of the passage of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, or the AIA, which brought into effect significant changes to the U.S. patent laws, including new procedures for pending patent applications and issued patents.
Obtaining and maintaining patent protection depends on compliance with various procedural, document submission, fee payment and other requirements imposed by governmental patent agencies, and our patent protection could be reduced or eliminated for non-compliance with these requirements.
The USPTO and various foreign governmental patent agencies require compliance with a number of procedural, documentary, fee payment and other provisions during the patent process. Periodic maintenance fees, renewal fees, annuity fees and various other governmental fees on patents and/or applications will be due to be paid to the USPTO and various governmental patent agencies outside of the United States in several stages over the lifetime of the patents and/or applications. We employ reputable professionals and rely on such third parties to help us comply with these requirements and effect payment of these fees with respect to the patents and patent applications that we own, and we may have to rely upon our licensors to comply with these requirements and effect payment of these fees with respect to any patents and patent applications that we may license in the future. In many cases, an inadvertent lapse can be cured by payment of a late fee or by other means in accordance with the applicable rules. However, there are situations in which non-compliance can result in abandonment or lapse of a patent or patent application, resulting in partial or complete loss of patent rights in the relevant jurisdiction. In such an event, competitors might be to enter the market earlier than would otherwise have been the case.
Even if we obtain patent protection covering our product candidates, patent terms may be inadequate to protect our competitive position on our product candidates for an adequate amount of time.
Patents have a limited lifespan. In the United States and most other jurisdictions, if all maintenance fees are paid timely, the natural expiration of a patent is generally 20 years from its earliest non-provisional filing date. Various extensions may be available, but the life of a patent, and the protection it affords, is limited. Even if patents covering our product candidates are obtained, once the patent life has expired, we may be open to competition from competitive products, including generics. Given the amount of time required for the development, testing and regulatory review of new product candidates, even considering extensions that may be available to us, patents protecting such candidates might expire before or shortly after such candidates are commercialized. As a result, our owned and licensed patent portfolio may not provide us with sufficient rights to exclude others from commercializing products similar or identical to ours.
Depending upon the timing, duration and specifics of FDA marketing approval of our product candidates, one or more of our U.S. patents may be eligible for limited patent term restoration under the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984, or the Hatch-Waxman Amendments. The Hatch-Waxman Amendments permit a patent restoration term of up to five years as compensation for patent term lost during product development and the FDA regulatory review process. A maximum of one patent may be extended per FDA-approved product as compensation for the patent term lost during the FDA regulatory review process. A patent term extension cannot extend the remaining term of a patent beyond a total of 14 years from the date of product approval and only those claims covering such approved drug product, a method for using it or a method for manufacturing it may be extended. Patent term extension may also be available in certain non-U.S. countries upon regulatory approval of our product candidates. However, we may not be granted an extension because of, for example, failing to apply within applicable deadlines, failing to apply prior to expiration of relevant patents or otherwise failing to satisfy applicable requirements. Moreover, the applicable time period or the scope of patent protection afforded could be less than we request. If we are to obtain patent term extension or restoration or the term of any such extension is less than we request, our competitors may obtain approval of competing products following our patent expiration, and our revenue could be reduced, possibly materially. Further, if this occurs, our competitors may take of our investment in development and trials by referencing our clinical and preclinical data and launch their product earlier than might otherwise be the case.
Changes in patent law in the U.S. or in other countries could diminish the value of patents in general, thereby impairing our ability to protect our product candidates.
As is the case with other pharmaceutical companies, our success is heavily dependent on intellectual property, particularly patents. Obtaining and enforcing patents in the pharmaceutical industry involves both technological and legal complexity and is therefore costly, time consuming and inherently uncertain. Our patent rights may be affected by developments or uncertainty in U.S. or ex-U.S. patent statutes, patent case laws in USPTO rules and regulations or in the rules and regulations of ex-U.S. patent offices. There are a number of recent changes to the U.S. patent laws that may have a significant impact on our ability to protect our technology and enforce our intellectual property rights. For example, on September 16, 2011, the AIA was signed into law. The AIA includes a number of significant changes to U.S. patent law. These include provisions that affect the way patent applications will be prosecuted and may also affect patent litigation. In particular, under the AIA, the United States transitioned in March 2013 to a “first to file” system in which the first inventor to file a patent application will be entitled to the patent. Third parties are allowed to submit prior art before the issuance of a patent by the USPTO and may become involved in post-grant proceedings including , derivation, reexamination, inter partes review or proceedings our patent rights or the patent rights of others. An determination in any such submission, proceeding or could reduce the scope or enforceability of, or , our patent rights, which could affect our competitive position. This could have a impact on some of our intellectual property and could increase uncertainties surrounding obtaining and enforcement or defense of our issued patents.
In addition, Congress may pass patent reform legislation that is unfavorable to us. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on several patent cases in recent years, either narrowing the scope of patent protection available in certain circumstances or weakening the rights of patent owners in certain situations. In addition to increasing uncertainty with regard to our ability to obtain patents in the future, this combination of events has created uncertainty with respect to the value of patents once obtained. Depending on decisions by Congress, the federal courts and the USPTO, the laws and regulations governing patents could change in unpredictable ways that would weaken our ability to obtain new patents or to enforce our existing patents and patents we might obtain in the future. Similarly, statutory or judicial changes to the patent laws of other countries may increase the uncertainties and costs surrounding the prosecution of patent applications and the enforcement or defense of issued patents. We cannot predict future changes in the interpretation of patent laws or changes to patent laws that might be enacted into law by U.S. and international legislative bodies. Those changes may materially affect our existing or future patents and patent applications and our ability to obtain additional patents in the future.
If our trademarks and trade names are not adequately protected, then we may not be able to build name recognition in our markets of interest and our business may be adversely affected.
Our current or future trademarks or trade names may be challenged, infringed, circumvented or declared generic or descriptive determined to be infringing on other marks. We may not be able to protect our rights to these trademarks and trade names or may be forced to stop using these names, which we need for name recognition by potential partners or customers in our markets of interest. During trademark registration proceedings, we may receive rejections of our applications by the USPTO or in other foreign jurisdictions. Although we would be given an opportunity to respond to those rejections, we may be unable to overcome such rejections. In addition, in the USPTO and in comparable agencies in many foreign jurisdictions, third parties are given an opportunity to pending trademark applications and to seek to registered trademarks. or proceedings may be filed our trademarks, and our trademarks may not survive such proceedings. If we are to establish name recognition based on our trademarks and trade names, we may not be to compete effectively, and our business may be affected. We may license our trademarks and trade names to third parties, such as distributors. Though these license agreements may provide guidelines for how our trademarks and trade names may be used, a of these agreements or of our trademarks and tradenames by our licensees may our rights in or the goodwill associated with our trademarks and trade names.
Moreover, any name we have proposed to use with our product candidates in the United States must be approved by the FDA, regardless of whether we have registered it, or applied to register it, as a trademark. Similar requirements exist in Europe. The FDA typically conducts a review of proposed product names, including an evaluation of potential for confusion with other product names. If the FDA (or an equivalent administrative body in a foreign jurisdiction) objects to any of our proposed proprietary single-agent or combination therapy names, we may be required to expend significant additional resources in an effort to identify a suitable substitute name that would qualify under applicable trademark laws, not infringe the existing rights of third parties and be acceptable to the FDA. Furthermore, in many countries, owning and maintaining a trademark registration may not provide an adequate defense against a subsequent infringement claim asserted by the owner of a senior trademark. At times, competitors or other third parties may adopt trade names or trademarks similar to ours, thereby impeding our ability to build brand identity and possibly leading to market confusion. In addition, there could be potential trade name or trademark brought by owners of other registered trademarks or trademarks that incorporate variations of our registered or unregistered trademarks or trade names. If we assert trademark , a court may determine that the marks we have asserted are or unenforceable, or that the party whom we have asserted trademark has rights to the marks in . In this case, we could ultimately be to use of such trademarks.
If we are unable to protect the confidentiality of our trade secrets, our business and competitive position would be harmed.
We rely on the protection of our trade secrets, including unpatented know-how, technology and other proprietary information. We have taken steps to protect our trade secrets and unpatented know-how, including entering into confidentiality agreements with third parties, and confidential information and inventions agreements with employees, consultants and advisors. Despite these efforts, we cannot provide any assurances that all such agreements have been duly executed, and any of these parties may breach the agreements and disclose our proprietary information, including our trade secrets, and we may not be able to obtain adequate remedies for such breaches. In addition to contractual measures, we try to protect the confidential nature of our proprietary information using commonly accepted physical and technological security measures. Even though we use commonly accepted security measures, the criteria for protection of trade secrets can vary among different jurisdictions. Additionally, such security measures may not provide adequate protection for our proprietary information, for example, in the case of misappropriation of a trade secret by an employee, consultant, customer or third party with authorized access.
Recourse we take against such misconduct may not provide an adequate remedy to fully protect our interests. Monitoring unauthorized uses and disclosures is difficult, and we do not know whether the steps we have taken to protect our proprietary information will be effective. Unauthorized parties may also attempt to copy or reverse engineer certain aspects of our product candidates that we consider proprietary.
Enforcing a claim that a party illegally disclosed or misappropriated a trade secret is difficult, expensive and time- consuming, and the outcome is unpredictable. In addition, some courts inside and outside the United States are less willing or unwilling to protect trade secrets. Further, we may need to share our proprietary information, including trade secrets, with our current and future business partners, collaborators, contractors and others located in countries at heightened risk of theft of trade secrets, including through direct intrusion by private parties or foreign state actors, and those affiliated with or controlled by state actors. Moreover, third parties may still obtain this information or may come upon this or similar information independently, and we would have no right to prevent them from using that information to compete with us. Trade secrets will over time be disseminated within the industry through independent development, the publication of journal articles and the movement of personnel skilled in the art from company to company or academic to industry scientific positions. Though our agreements with third parties typically restrict the ability of our advisors, employees, , licensors, suppliers, third-party contractors and consultants to publish data potentially relating to our trade secrets, our agreements may contain certain limited publication rights. If any of our trade secrets were to be lawfully obtained or independently developed by a competitor, we would have no right to prevent such competitor from using that technology or information to compete with us, which could our competitive position. Because from time to time we expect to rely on third parties in the development, manufacture, and distribution of our product candidates, we must, at times, share trade secrets with them. employing the contractual and other security precautions described above, the need to share trade secrets increases the risk that such trade secrets become known by our competitors, are incorporated into the technology of others, or are or used in of these agreements. If any of these events occurs or if we otherwise protection for our trade secrets, the value of this information may be reduced, and our competitive position would be . If we do not apply for patent protection prior to such publication or if we cannot otherwise maintain the confidentiality of our proprietary technology and other confidential information, then our ability to obtain patent protection or to protect our trade secret information may be .
Intellectual property rights do not necessarily address all potential threats to our competitive advantage.
The degree of future protection afforded by our intellectual property rights is uncertain because intellectual property rights have limitations and may not adequately protect our business or permit us to maintain our competitive advantage. For example:
others may be able to make product candidates that are similar to ours but that are not covered by the claims of the patents that we own or have exclusively licensed;
we or our future licensors or collaborators might not have been the first to make the inventions covered by the issued patents or pending patent applications that we own or have exclusively licensed;
we or our future licensors or collaborators might not have been the first to file patent applications covering certain of our inventions;
others may independently develop similar or alternative technologies or duplicate any of our technologies without infringing our intellectual property rights;
it is possible that our owned or licensed pending patent applications will not lead to issued patents;
issued patents that we own or have exclusively licensed may be held invalid or unenforceable, as a result of legal challenges by our competitors;
our competitors might conduct research and development activities in countries where we do not have patent rights and then use the information learned from such activities to develop competitive products for sale in our major commercial markets;
we may not develop additional proprietary technologies that are patentable;
we cannot predict the scope of protection of any patent issuing based on our owned or licensed patent applications, including whether the patent applications that we own or in the future in-license will result in issued patents with claims that cover our product candidates or uses thereof in the United States or in other foreign countries;
the claims of any patent issuing based on our owned or licensed patent applications may not provide protection against competitors or any competitive advantages, or may be challenged by third parties;
if enforced, a court may not find that our owned or licensed patents are valid, enforceable and infringed;
we may need to initiate litigation or administrative proceedings to enforce and/or defend our patent rights, which will be costly whether we win or lose;
we may be required to coordinate with licensors on enforcement of our patents;
we may choose not to file a patent application in order to maintain certain trade secrets or know-how, and a third party may subsequently file a patent application and secure an issued patent covering such intellectual property;
we may fail to adequately protect and police our trademarks and trade secrets; and
the patents of others may have an adverse effect on our business, including if others obtain patents claiming subject matter similar to or improving that covered by our patents and patent applications.
Should any of these events occur, they could significantly harm our business, results of operations and prospects.
In the future, we may license or otherwise have access to patent rights from third-party owners. Such licenses or other arrangements may be subject to early termination if we fail to comply with our obligations in our agreements with third parties, which could result in the loss of valuable rights or technology.
We may in the future become party to licenses and other agreements that give us rights to third-party intellectual property that are necessary or useful for our business. Under any such agreements, we may be obligated to pay the counterparties fees, which may include annual license fees, milestone payments, royalties, a percentage of revenues associated with the applicable technology and a percentage of sublicensing revenue. If we were to fail to comply with any such obligations and fail to cure our breach within a specified period of time, the counterparty may have the right to terminate the applicable agreement, in which event we could lose valuable rights and technology.
In addition, we may in the future rely on third parties from whom we license proprietary technology to file and prosecute patent applications and maintain patents and otherwise protect the intellectual property we license from them. We may have limited control over these activities or any other intellectual property that may be related to any intellectual property that we in-license. For example, we could not be certain that such activities by these licensors would be conducted in compliance with applicable laws and regulations or would result in valid and enforceable patents and other intellectual property rights. We may have limited control over the manner in which future licensors initiate an infringement proceeding against a third-party infringer of the intellectual property rights, or defend certain of the intellectual property that may be licensed to us. It is possible that the licensors’ infringement proceeding or defense activities may be less vigorous than if we conduct them ourselves.
We may jointly own certain patent rights with third parties. Our ability to out-license these patent rights, or to prevent the third party from out-licensing these patent rights, may be limited in certain countries.
We may jointly own patents and patent applications with third parties in the future. Unless we enter into an agreement with the joint owner, we will be subject to certain default rules pertaining to joint ownership. Certain countries require the consent of all joint owners to license jointly owned patents, and if we are unable to obtain such consent from the joint owner, we may not be able to license our rights under these patents and patent applications. In certain other countries, including the United States, the joint owner could license its rights under these patents and patent applications to another party without our consent and without any duty of accounting to us. Any of the foregoing could have a material adverse effect on our competitive position, business, financial conditions, results of operations and prospects.
We may in the future need to obtain additional licenses of third-party technology that may not be available to us or are available only on commercially unreasonable terms, and which may cause us to operate our business in a more costly or otherwise adverse manner that was not anticipated.
We currently own intellectual property directed to our product candidates and other proprietary technologies. Other pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions may also have filed or are planning to file patent applications potentially relevant to our business. From time to time, in order to avoid infringing these third-party patents, we may be required to license technology from additional third parties to further develop or commercialize our product candidates. Should we be required to obtain licenses to any third-party technology, including any such patents required to manufacture, use or sell our product candidates, such licenses may not be available to us on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. The inability to obtain any third-party license required to develop or commercialize any of our product candidates could cause us to abandon any related efforts, which could seriously harm our business and operations.
The licensing or acquisition of third-party intellectual property rights is a competitive area, and several more established companies may pursue strategies to license or acquire third-party intellectual property rights we may consider attractive or necessary. These established companies may have a competitive advantage over us due to their size, capital resources and greater clinical development and commercialization capabilities. In addition, companies that perceive us to be a competitor may be unwilling to assign or license rights to us.
Risks Related to Government Regulation
Even if we obtain regulatory approval for a product candidate, our products will remain subject to regulatory scrutiny.
If our product candidates are approved, they will be subject to ongoing regulatory requirements for manufacturing, labeling, packaging, storage, advertising, promotion, sampling, record-keeping, conduct of post-marketing studies and submission of safety, efficacy and other post-market information, including both federal and state requirements in the United States and requirements of comparable foreign regulatory authorities.
Manufacturers and manufacturers’ facilities are required to comply with extensive FDA and comparable foreign regulatory authority requirements, including ensuring that quality control and manufacturing procedures conform to cGMP regulations. As such, we and our contract manufacturers will be subject to continual review and inspections to assess compliance with cGMPs and adherence to commitments made in any approved marketing application.
Accordingly, we and others with whom we work must continue to expend time, money and effort in all areas of regulatory compliance, including manufacturing, production and quality control. In addition, following potential approval of any of our current or future product candidates, the FDA or other comparable regulatory authorities may impose significant restrictions on a product’s
indicated uses or marketing or impose ongoing requirements for potentially costly and time consuming post-approval studies, post-market surveillance or clinical trials to monitor the safety and efficacy of the product. The FDA may also require a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS, as a condition of approval, which could entail requirements for a medication guide, physician communication plans or additional elements to ensure safe use, such as restricted distribution methods, patient registries and other risk minimization tools.
We will have to comply with requirements concerning advertising and promotion for any future products. Promotional communications with respect to prescription drugs and biologics are subject to a variety of legal and regulatory restrictions and must be consistent with the information in the product’s approved label. We may not promote products for indications or uses for which they do not have approval. The holder of an approved application must submit new or supplemental applications and obtain approval for certain changes to the approved product, product labeling or manufacturing process. We could also be asked to conduct post-marketing clinical trials to verify the safety and efficacy of our products in general or in specific patient subsets. An unsuccessful post-marketing study or failure to complete such a study could result in the withdrawal of marketing approval.
If a regulatory agency discovers previously unknown problems with a product, such as adverse events of unanticipated severity or frequency, or problems with the facility where the product is manufactured, or disagrees with the promotion, marketing or labeling of a product, such regulatory agency may impose restrictions on that product or us, including requiring withdrawal of the product from the market. If we fail to comply with applicable regulatory requirements, a regulatory agency or enforcement authority may, among other things:
issue warning letters;
impose civil or criminal penalties;
suspend or withdraw regulatory approval;
suspend any of our clinical trials;
refuse to approve pending applications or supplements to approved applications submitted by us;
impose restrictions on our operations, including closing our contract manufacturers’ facilities; or
seize or detain products, or require a product recall.
Any government investigation of alleged violations of law could require us to expend significant time and resources in response and could generate negative publicity. Any failure to comply with ongoing regulatory requirements may significantly and adversely affect our ability to commercialize and generate revenue from any future products. If regulatory sanctions are applied or if regulatory approval is withdrawn, the value of our company and our operating results will be adversely affected.
In addition, the FDA’s and other regulatory authorities’ policies may change and additional government regulations may be enacted that could prevent, limit or delay regulatory approval of our product candidates. We also cannot predict the likelihood, nature or extent of government regulation that may arise from future legislation or administrative action, either in the United States or abroad. If we are slow or unable to adapt to changes in existing requirements or the adoption of new requirements or policies, or if we are not able to maintain regulatory compliance, we may be subject to enforcement action and we may not achieve or sustain profitability.
The successful commercialization of our product candidates will depend in part on the extent to which governmental authorities and health insurers establish adequate coverage, reimbursement levels and pricing policies. Failure to obtain or maintain coverage and adequate reimbursement for our product candidates, if approved, could limit our ability to market those products and decrease our ability to generate revenue.
The availability and adequacy of coverage and reimbursement by governmental healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, private health insurers and other third-party payors are essential for most patients to be able to afford prescription medications such as our product candidates, assuming FDA approval. Our ability to achieve acceptable levels of coverage and reimbursement for products by governmental authorities, private health insurers and other organizations will have an effect on our ability to successfully commercialize our product candidates.
Assuming we obtain coverage for our product candidates by a third-party payor, the resulting reimbursement payment rates may not be adequate or may require co-payments that patients find unacceptably high. We cannot be sure that coverage and reimbursement in the United States, the EU or elsewhere will be available for our product candidates or any product that we may develop, and any reimbursement that may become available may be decreased or eliminated in the future.
No uniform policy for coverage and reimbursement for products exists among third-party payors in the United States. Therefore, coverage and reimbursement for products can differ significantly from payor to payor. As a result, the coverage determination process is often a time-consuming and costly process that will require us to provide scientific and clinical support for the use of our product candidates to each payor separately, with no assurance that coverage and adequate reimbursement will be applied consistently or obtained in the first instance. Furthermore, rules and regulations regarding reimbursement change frequently, in some cases on short notice, and we believe that changes in these rules and regulations are likely.
Third-party payors increasingly are challenging prices charged for pharmaceutical products and services, and many third-party payors may refuse to provide coverage and reimbursement for particular drugs or biologics when an equivalent generic drug, biosimilar or a less expensive therapy is available. It is possible that a third-party payor may consider our product candidates as substitutable and only offer to reimburse patients for the less expensive product. Even if we show improved efficacy or improved convenience of administration with our product candidates, pricing of existing third-party therapeutics may limit the amount we will be able to charge for our product candidates. These payors may deny or revoke the reimbursement status of a given product or establish prices for new or existing marketed products at levels that are too low to enable us to realize an appropriate return on our investment in our product candidates.
Outside the United States, international operations are generally subject to extensive governmental price controls and other market regulations, and we believe the increasing emphasis on cost-containment initiatives in Europe and other countries have and will continue to put pressure on the pricing and usage of our product candidates. In many countries, the prices of medical products are subject to varying price control mechanisms as part of national health systems. Other countries allow companies to fix their own prices for medical products, but monitor and control company profits. Additional foreign price controls or other changes in pricing regulation could restrict the amount that we are able to charge for our product candidates. Accordingly, in markets outside the United States, the reimbursement for our product candidates may be reduced compared with the United States and may be insufficient to generate commercially-reasonable revenue and profits. Moreover, increasing efforts by governmental and third-party payors in the United States and abroad to cap or reduce healthcare costs may cause such organizations to limit both coverage and the level of reimbursement for newly approved products and, as a result, they may not cover or provide adequate payment for our product candidates. We expect to experience pricing pressures in connection with the sale of our product candidates due to the trend toward managed health-care, the increasing influence of health maintenance organizations and additional legislative changes. The downward pressure on healthcare costs in general, particularly prescription drugs and biologics and surgical procedures and other treatments, has become intense. As a result, increasingly high are being erected to the entry of new products.
Changes in healthcare policies, laws and regulations may impact our ability to obtain approval for, or commercialize our product candidates, if approved.
In the United States, the European Union and other jurisdictions, there have been, and we expect there will continue to be, a number of legislative and regulatory changes and proposed changes to the healthcare system that could affect our future results of operations. In particular, there have been and continue to be a number of initiatives at the U.S. federal and state levels that seek to reduce healthcare costs and improve the quality of healthcare. For example, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, or collectively the ACA, substantially changed the way healthcare is financed by both governmental and private insurers. Among the provisions of the ACA, those of greatest importance to the pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and biotechnology industries include the following:
an annual, non-deductible fee payable by any entity that manufactures or imports certain branded prescription drugs and biologic agents (other than those designated as Orphan Drugs), which is apportioned among these entities according to their market share in certain government healthcare programs;
a new Medicare Part D coverage gap discount program, in which manufacturers must agree to offer 70% point-of-sale discounts off negotiated prices of applicable brand drugs to eligible beneficiaries during their coverage gap period, as a condition for the manufacturer’s outpatient drugs to be covered under Medicare Part D;
an increase in the statutory minimum rebates a manufacturer must pay under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program to 23.1% and 13.0% of the average manufacturer price for branded and generic drugs, respectively;
a new methodology by which rebates owed by manufacturers under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program are calculated for drugs that are inhaled, infused, instilled, implanted or injected;
extension of a manufacturer’s Medicaid rebate liability to covered drugs dispensed to individuals who are enrolled in Medicaid managed care organizations;
expansion of eligibility criteria for Medicaid programs by, among other things, allowing states to offer Medicaid coverage to certain individuals with income at or below 133% of the federal poverty level, thereby potentially increasing a manufacturer’s Medicaid rebate liability;
a licensure framework for follow-on biologic products;
a new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to oversee, identify priorities in, and conduct comparative clinical effectiveness research, along with funding for such research; and
establishment of a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, to test innovative payment and service delivery models to lower Medicare and Medicaid spending, potentially including prescription drug spending.
Since its enactment, there have been judicial, Congressional and executive branch challenges to certain aspects of the ACA. On June 17, 2021 the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the most recent judicial challenge to the ACA brought by several states without specifically ruling on the constitutionality of the ACA. Thus, the ACA will remain in effect in its current form. Further, prior to the
U.S. Supreme Court ruling, President Biden issued an executive order to initiate a special enrollment period from February 15, 2021 through August 15, 2021 for purposes of obtaining health insurance coverage through the ACA marketplace. The executive order also instructed certain governmental agencies to review and reconsider their existing policies and rules that limit access to healthcare, including among others, reexamining Medicaid demonstration projects and waiver programs that include work requirements, and policies that create unnecessary barriers to obtaining access to health insurance coverage through Medicaid or the ACA.
In addition, other legislative changes have been proposed and adopted in the United States since the Affordable Care Act was enacted. In August 2011, the Budget Control Act of 2011, among other things, led to aggregate reductions of Medicare payments to providers of 2% per fiscal year. These reductions went into effect in April 2013 and, due to subsequent legislative amendments to the statute, will remain in effect through 2030, with the exception of a temporary suspension from May 1, 2020 through March 31, 2022, unless additional action is taken by Congress. In addition, in January 2013, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 was signed into law, which, among other things, further reduced Medicare payments to several types of providers, including hospitals, imaging centers and cancer treatment centers, and increased the statute of limitations period for the government to recover overpayments to providers from three to five years. These new laws or any other similar laws introduced in the future may result in additional reductions in Medicare and other health-care funding, which could negatively affect our customers and, accordingly, our financial operations.
Moreover, payment methodologies may be subject to changes in healthcare legislation and regulatory initiatives. For example, CMS may develop new payment and delivery models, such as bundled payment models. In addition, recently there has been heightened governmental scrutiny over the manner in which manufacturers set prices for their marketed products, which has resulted in several U.S. Congressional inquiries and proposed and enacted federal and state legislation designed to, among other things, bring more transparency to drug pricing, reduce the cost of prescription drugs under government payor programs, and review the relationship between pricing and manufacturer patient programs. We expect that additional U.S. federal healthcare reform measures will be adopted in the future, any of which could limit the amounts that the U.S. federal government will pay for healthcare products and services, which could result in reduced demand for our product candidates or additional pricing pressures.
Individual states in the United States have also become increasingly active in passing legislation and implementing regulations designed to control pharmaceutical and biological product pricing, including price or patient reimbursement constraints, discounts, restrictions on certain product access and marketing cost disclosure and transparency measures, and, in some cases, designed to encourage importation from other countries and bulk purchasing. Legally-mandated price controls on payment amounts by third-party payors or other restrictions could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. In addition, regional healthcare authorities and individual hospitals are increasingly using bidding procedures to determine what pharmaceutical products and which suppliers will be included in their prescription drug and other healthcare programs. This could reduce the ultimate demand for our product candidates or put pressure on our product pricing.
In the European Union, similar political, economic and regulatory developments may affect our ability to profitably commercialize our product candidates, if approved. In addition to continuing pressure on prices and cost containment measures, legislative developments at the European Union or member state level may result in significant additional requirements or obstacles that may increase our operating costs. The delivery of healthcare in the European Union, including the establishment and operation of health services and the pricing and reimbursement of medicines, is almost exclusively a matter for national, rather than EU, law and policy. National governments and health service providers have different priorities and approaches to the delivery of healthcare and the pricing and reimbursement of products in that context. In general, however, the healthcare budgetary constraints in most EU member states have resulted in restrictions on the pricing and reimbursement of medicines by relevant health service providers. Coupled with ever-increasing EU and national regulatory burdens on those wishing to develop and market products, this could prevent or delay marketing approval of our product candidates, restrict or regulate post-approval activities and affect our ability to commercialize our product candidates, if approved. In markets outside of the United States and EU, reimbursement and healthcare payment systems vary significantly by country, and many countries have instituted price ceilings on specific products and therapies.
We cannot predict the likelihood, nature or extent of government regulation that may arise from future legislation or administrative or judicial action in the United States, the European Union or any other jurisdiction. If we or any third parties we may engage are slow or unable to adapt to changes in existing requirements or the adoption of new requirements or policies, or if we or such third parties are not able to maintain regulatory compliance, our product candidates may lose any regulatory approval that may have been obtained and we may not achieve or sustain profitability.
Changes in structure of or funding for the FDA and other government agencies could hinder their ability to hire and retain key leadership and other personnel, or otherwise prevent new products and services from being developed or commercialized in a timely manner, which could negatively impact our business.
The ability of the FDA to review and approve new products can be affected by a variety of factors, including government budget and funding levels, ability to hire and retain key personnel, the maintenance of regulatory review timelines, and statutory, regulatory, and policy changes. Average review times at the agency have fluctuated in recent years as a result. In addition, government funding of
other government agencies that fund research and development activities is subject to the political process, which is inherently fluid and unpredictable.
Disruptions or reorganizations at the FDA and foreign regulatory authorities may also slow the time necessary for new drugs to be reviewed and/or approved by necessary government agencies, which would adversely affect our business. In addition, over the last several years, the U.S. government has shut down several times and certain regulatory agencies, such as the FDA, have had to furlough critical employees and stop critical activities. If a prolonged government shutdown occurs, it could significantly impact the ability of the FDA to timely review and process our regulatory submissions, which could have a material adverse effect on our business.
Separately, in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, on March 10, 2020, the FDA announced its intention to postpone most foreign inspections of manufacturing facilities and products through April 2020, and subsequently, on March 18, 2020, the FDA temporarily postponed routine surveillance inspections of domestic manufacturing facilities. On July 10, 2020 the FDA announced its intention to resume certain on-site inspections of domestic manufacturing facilities subject to a risk-based prioritization system. The FDA intends to use this risk-based assessment system to identify the categories of regulatory activity that can occur within a given geographic area, ranging from mission critical inspections to resumption of all regulatory activities. Additionally, on April 15, 2021, the FDA issued a guidance document in which the FDA described its plans to conduct voluntary remote interactive evaluations of certain drug manufacturing facilities and clinical research sites. According to the guidance, the FDA intends to request such remote interactive evaluations in situations where an in-person inspection would not be prioritized, deemed mission-critical, or where direct inspection is otherwise limited by travel restrictions, but where the FDA determines that remote evaluation would be appropriate. Regulatory authorities outside the United States may adopt similar restrictions or other policy measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. If a prolonged government occurs, or if global health continue to prevent the FDA or other regulatory authorities from conducting their regular inspections, reviews or other regulatory activities, it could significantly impact the ability of the FDA or other regulatory authorities to timely review and process our regulatory submissions, which could have a material effect on our business.
If we develop a small molecule product candidate that obtains regulatory approval, additional competitors could enter the market with generic versions of such drugs, which may result in a material decline in sales of affected products.
Under the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984, or the Hatch-Waxman Act, a pharmaceutical manufacturer may file an abbreviated new drug application, or ANDA, seeking approval of a generic version of an approved, small molecule innovator product. Under the Hatch-Waxman Act, a manufacturer may also submit a new drug application, or NDA, under section 505(b)(2) of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that references the FDA’s prior approval of the small molecule innovator product. A 505(b)(2) NDA product may be for a new or improved version of the original innovator product. The Hatch-Waxman Act also provides for certain periods of regulatory exclusivity, which preclude FDA approval (or in some circumstances, FDA filing and review) of an ANDA or 505(b)(2) NDA. In addition to the benefits of regulatory exclusivity, an innovator NDA holder may have patents claiming the active ingredient, product formulation or an approved use of the drug, which would be listed with the product in the FDA publication, “Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations,” known as the Orange Book. If there are patents listed in the Orange Book for a product, a generic or 505(b)(2) applicant that seeks to market its product before expiration of the patents must include in their applications what is known as a “Paragraph IV” certification, the validity or enforceability of, or non- of, the listed patent or patents. Notice of the certification must be given to the patent owner and NDA holder and if, within 45 days of receiving notice, either the patent owner or NDA holder for patent , approval of the ANDA or 505(b)(2) NDA is stayed for up to 30 months.
Accordingly, if we choose to develop a small molecule product candidate, and the product is approved, competitors could file ANDAs for generic versions of our small molecule drug products or 505(b)(2) NDAs that reference our small molecule drug products. If there are patents listed for our small molecule drug products in the Orange Book, those ANDAs and 505(b)(2) NDAs would be required to include a certification as to each listed patent indicating whether the ANDA applicant does or does not intend to challenge the patent. We cannot predict which, if any, patents in our current portfolio or patents we may obtain in the future will be eligible for listing in the Orange Book, how any generic competitor would address such patents, whether we would sue on any such patents, or the outcome of any such suit.
We may not be successful in securing or maintaining proprietary patent protection for products and technologies we develop or license. Moreover, if any of our owned or any future in-licensed patents that are listed in the Orange Book are successfully challenged by way of a Paragraph IV certification and subsequent litigation, the affected product could immediately face generic competition and its sales would likely decline rapidly and materially.
Our business operations and current and future relationships with investigators, healthcare professionals, consultants, third-party payors, patient organizations and customers will be subject to applicable healthcare regulatory laws, which could expose us to penalties.
Our business operations and current and future arrangements with investigators, healthcare professionals, consultants, third-party payors, patient organizations and customers, may expose us to broadly applicable fraud and abuse and other healthcare laws and regulations. These laws may constrain the business or financial arrangements and relationships through which we conduct our operations, including how we research, market, sell and distribute our product candidates, if approved. Such laws include:
the U.S. federal Anti-Kickback Statute, which prohibits, among other things, persons or entities from knowingly and willfully soliciting, offering, receiving or providing any remuneration (including any kickback, bribe, or certain rebate), directly or indirectly, overtly or covertly, in cash or in kind, to induce or reward, or in return for, either the referral of an individual for, or the purchase, lease, order or recommendation of, any good, facility, item or service, for which payment may be made, in whole or in part, under U.S. federal and state healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. A person or entity does not need to have actual knowledge of the statute or specific intent to violate it in order to have committed a violation;
the U.S. federal civil and criminal false claims laws, including the civil False Claims Act, which, among other things, impose criminal and civil penalties, including through civil whistleblower or qui tam actions, against individuals or entities for knowingly presenting, or causing to be presented, to the U.S. federal government, claims for payment or approval that are false or fraudulent, knowingly making, using or causing to be made or used, a false record or statement material to a false or fraudulent claim, or from knowingly making a statement to avoid, decrease or conceal an obligation to pay money to the U.S. federal government. In addition, the government may assert that a claim including items and services resulting from a of the U.S. federal Anti- Statute constitutes a or claim for purposes of the Act;
the federal civil monetary penalties laws, which impose civil fines for, among other things, the offering or transfer of remuneration to a Medicare or state healthcare program beneficiary if the person knows or should know it is likely to influence the beneficiary’s selection of a particular provider, practitioner, or supplier of services reimbursable by Medicare or a state healthcare program, unless an exception applies;
HIPAA, which imposes criminal and civil liability for, among other things, knowingly and willfully executing, or attempting to execute, a scheme to defraud any healthcare benefit program, or knowingly and willfully falsifying, concealing or covering up a material fact or making any materially false statement, in connection with the delivery of, or payment for, healthcare benefits, items or services; similar to the U.S. federal Anti-Kickback Statute, a person or entity does not need to have actual knowledge of the statute or specific intent to violate it in order to have committed a violation;
the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which prohibits, among other things, the adulteration or misbranding of drugs, biologics and medical devices;
the U.S. Physician Payments Sunshine Act and its implementing regulations, which require certain manufacturers of drugs, devices, biologics and medical supplies that are reimbursable under Medicare, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program to report annually to the government information related to certain payments and other transfers of value to physicians, as defined by such law, and teaching hospitals, as well as ownership and investment interests held by the physicians described above and their immediate family members. Effective January 1, 2022, the U.S. federal physician transparency reporting requirements will extend to include transfers of value made during the previous year to certain non-physician providers such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners;
federal consumer protection and unfair competition laws, which broadly regulate marketplace activities and activities that potentially harm consumers;
analogous U.S. state laws and regulations, including: state anti-kickback and false claims laws, which may apply to our business practices, including but not limited to, research, distribution, sales and marketing arrangements and claims involving healthcare items or services reimbursed by any third-party payor, including private insurers; state laws that require pharmaceutical companies to comply with the pharmaceutical industry’s voluntary compliance guidelines and the relevant compliance guidance promulgated by the U.S. federal government, or otherwise restrict payments that may be made to healthcare providers and other potential referral sources; state laws and regulations that require drug manufacturers to file reports relating to pricing and marketing information, which requires tracking gifts and other remuneration and items of value provided to healthcare professionals and entities; and state and local laws that require the registration of pharmaceutical sales representatives; and
similar healthcare laws and regulations in the EU and other jurisdictions, including reporting requirements detailing interactions with and payments to healthcare providers.
Ensuring that our internal operations and future business arrangements with third parties comply with applicable healthcare laws and regulations will involve substantial costs. It is possible that governmental authorities will conclude that our business practices, including our relationships with physicians and other healthcare providers, some of whom are compensated in the form of stock options for consulting services provided, may not comply with current or future statutes, regulations, agency guidance or case law involving applicable fraud and abuse or other healthcare laws and regulations. If our operations are found to be in violation of any of the laws described above or any other governmental laws and regulations that may apply to us, we may be subject to significant penalties, including civil, criminal and administrative penalties, damages, fines, exclusion from government-funded healthcare programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid or similar programs in other countries or jurisdictions, integrity oversight and reporting obligations to resolve of non-compliance, , individual , contractual , reputational ,
diminished profits and the curtailment or restructuring of our operations. If any of the physicians or other providers or entities with whom we expect to do business are found to not be in compliance with applicable laws, they may be subject to criminal, civil or administrative sanctions, including exclusions from government funded healthcare programs and imprisonment, which could affect our ability to operate our business. Further, defending against any such actions can be costly, time-consuming and may require significant personnel resources. Therefore, even if we are successful in defending against any such actions that may be brought against us, our business and our ability to sell our products may be materially harmed.
Changes in and actual or perceived failures to comply with applicable data protection, privacy and security laws, regulations, standards and other requirements could adversely affect our business, results of operations, and financial condition.
We and our partners may be subject to federal, state and foreign laws and regulations that govern data privacy and security. In the United States, numerous federal and state laws and regulations govern the collection, use, disclosure, and protection of personal information, including state data breach notification laws, federal and state health information privacy laws, and federal and state consumer protection laws. Each of these laws is subject to varying interpretations by courts and government agencies, creating, complex compliance issues. Data privacy and security legislation is quickly evolving with many laws recently enacted and others under consideration. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) went into effect on January 1, 2020. The CCPA creates individual privacy rights for California consumers and increases the privacy and security obligations of entities handling certain personal information. The CCPA also provides for civil penalties for certain violations, as well as a private right of action for certain type of data breaches. If we fail to comply with applicable laws and regulations we could be subject to penalties or sanctions, including criminal penalties if we obtain or individually identifiable health information from a covered entity in a manner that is not authorized or permitted by HIPAA or applicable state laws.
We are also or may become subject to rapidly evolving data protection laws, rules and regulations in non-U.S. jurisdictions. For example, in Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May 2018 and imposes strict requirements for processing the personal data of individuals within the European Economic Area (EEA). Companies that must comply with the GDPR face increased compliance obligations and risk, including more robust regulatory enforcement of data protection requirements and potential fines for noncompliance of up to €20 million or 4% of the annual global revenues of the noncompliant company, whichever is greater. Among other requirements, the GDPR regulates transfers of personal data subject to the GDPR to third countries that have not been found to provide adequate protection to such personal data, including the United States; in July 2020, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) limited how organizations could lawfully transfer personal data from the EU/EEA to the United States by invalidating the Privacy Shield for purposes of international transfers and imposing further restrictions on the use of standard contractual clauses (SCCs). As supervisory authorities issue further guidance on personal data export mechanisms, including circumstances where the SCCs cannot be used, and/or start taking enforcement action, we could additional costs, and/or regulatory or , and/or if we are otherwise to transfer personal data between and among countries and regions in which we operate, it could affect the manner in which we provide our services, the geographical location or segregation of our relevant systems and operations, and could affect our financial results..
Further, since the beginning of 2021, we may also be subject to the UK data protection regime, which imposes separate but similar obligations to those under the GDPR and comparable penalties, including fines of up to £17.5 million or 4% of a noncompliant company’s global annual revenue for the preceding financial year, whichever is greater. As we continue to expand into other foreign countries and jurisdictions, we may be subject to additional laws and regulations that may affect how we conduct business.
Compliance with applicable data privacy and security laws, rules and regulations could require us to take on more onerous obligations in our contracts, require us to engage in costly compliance exercises, restrict our ability to collect, use and disclose data, or in some cases, impact our or our partners’ ability to operate in certain jurisdictions. Each of these constantly evolving laws can be subject to varying interpretations. If we fail to comply with any such laws, rules or regulations, we may face government investigations and/or enforcement actions, fines, civil or criminal penalties, private litigation or adverse publicity that could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
The FDA and other regulatory agencies actively enforce the laws and regulations prohibiting the promotion of off-label uses.
If any of our product candidates are approved and we are found to have improperly promoted off-label uses of those products, we may become subject to significant liability. The FDA and other regulatory agencies strictly regulate the promotional claims that may be made about prescription products, if approved. In particular, while the FDA permits the dissemination of truthful and non-misleading information about an approved product, a manufacturer may not promote a product for uses that are not approved by the FDA or such other regulatory agencies as reflected in the product’s approved labeling. If we are found to have promoted such off-label uses, we may become subject to significant liability. The federal government has levied large civil and criminal fines against companies for alleged improper promotion of off-label use and has enjoined several companies from engaging in off-label promotion. The government has also imposed consent decrees, corporate integrity agreements or permanent under which specified promotional conduct must be changed or . If we cannot manage the promotion of our product candidates, if
approved, we could become subject to significant liability, which would materially adversely affect our business and financial condition.
Changes in tax laws and regulations may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
New income, sales, use or other tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations or ordinances could be enacted at any time, which could affect the tax treatment of any of our future domestic and foreign earnings. Any new taxes could adversely affect our domestic and international business operations, and our business and financial performance. Further, existing tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations or ordinances could be interpreted, changed, modified or applied adversely to us.
The U.S. government may enact significant changes to the taxation of business entities including, among others, an increase in the corporate income tax rate, the imposition of minimum taxes or surtaxes on certain types of income, significant changes to the taxation of income derived from international operations, and an addition of further limitations on the deductibility of business interest. While certain draft legislation has been publicly released and is under development in Congress at this time, the likelihood of these changes being enacted or implemented is unclear. We are currently unable to predict whether such changes will occur. If such changes are enacted or implemented, we are currently unable to predict the ultimate impact on our business and therefore there can be no assurance our business will not be adversely affected.
Our ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards and certain other tax attributes may be limited.
As of December 31, 2021, we had federal net operating loss carryforwards, or NOLs, of $106.9 million, and state NOLs for California of $0.4 million, Massachusetts of $34.1 million, and New Hampshire of $2.7 million. Under Sections 382 and 383 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, if a corporation undergoes an “ownership change,” generally defined as a greater than 50 percentage point change (by value) in its equity ownership by certain stockholders over a three-year period, the corporation’s ability to use its pre-change net operating loss carryforwards, or NOLs, and other pre-change tax attributes (such as research and development tax credits) to offset its post-change income or taxes may be limited. We may have experienced ownership changes in the past and may experience ownership changes as a result of subsequent shifts in our stock ownership (some of which are outside our control). As a result, our ability to use our pre-change NOLs and tax credits to offset future taxable income, if any, could be subject to limitations. Similar provisions of state tax law may also apply. As a result, even if we attain profitability, we may be unable to use a material portion of our NOLs and tax credits.
We are subject to U.S. and certain foreign export and import controls, sanctions, embargoes, anti-corruption laws, and anti-money laundering laws and regulations. Compliance with these legal standards could impair our ability to compete in domestic and international markets. We can face criminal liability and other serious consequences for violations, which can harm our business.
We are subject to export control and import laws and regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, U.S. Customs regulations, various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Controls, the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, or FCPA, the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the U.S. Travel Act, the USA PATRIOT Act, and other state and national anti-bribery and anti-money laundering laws in the countries in which we conduct activities. Anti-corruption laws are interpreted broadly and prohibit companies and their employees, agents, contractors and other collaborators from authorizing, promising, offering or providing, directly or indirectly, improper payments or anything else of value to recipients in the public or private sector. We currently engage third parties to conduct clinical trials outside of the United States and to obtain necessary non-U.S. permits, licenses, patent registrations and other regulatory approvals, and may continue to do so in the future, as well as to market and sell our products outside the United States once we obtain regulatory approval. We have direct or indirect interactions with officials and employees of government agencies or government-affiliated hospitals, universities and other organizations. We can be held liable for the or other activities of our employees, agents, contractors and other , even if we do not explicitly authorize or have actual knowledge of such activities. Any of the laws and regulations described above may result in substantial civil and and , , the of export or import privileges, , tax , of contract and , reputational and other consequences.
Risks Related to Our Common Stock
Our stock price may be volatile, and you may not be able to resell shares of our common stock at or above the price you paid.
The trading price of our common stock may be highly volatile and could be subject to wide fluctuations in response to various factors, some of which are beyond our control. In particular, the trading prices for pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have been highly volatile. These factors include those discussed in this “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K and others such as:
announcements of regulatory approval or disapproval of our current or any future product candidates;
failure or discontinuation of any of our research and development programs;
announcements relating to any future licensing, collaboration or development agreements;
public misperception regarding the use of our product candidates or public concern about the safety of our product candidates;
acquisitions and sales of new products or product candidates, technologies or businesses;
manufacturing and supply issues related to our product candidates for clinical trials or future product candidates for commercialization;
quarterly variations in our results of operations or those of our competitors;
changes in earnings estimates or recommendations by securities analysts;
announcements by us or our competitors of new products or product candidates, significant contracts, commercial relationships, acquisitions or capital commitments;
our commencement of, or involvement in, litigation;
changes in financial estimates or guidance;
any major changes in our board of directors or management;
market conditions in the pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors;
political instability or war, including for example, from military invasions such as Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine and related sanctions, supply interruption and increases in costs; and
general economic conditions in the United States and abroad, including as a result of an economic recession or depression, economic sanctions, and market volatility related to the COVID-19 pandemic or another pandemic and global health or political concerns.
In addition, the stock markets in general, and the markets for pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and biotechnology stocks in particular, have experienced extreme volatility that may have been unrelated to the operating performance of the issuer. These broad market fluctuations may adversely affect the trading price or liquidity of our common stock.
If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or reports about our business, or if they issue an adverse or misleading opinion regarding our stock, our stock price and trading volume could decline.
The trading market for our common stock will be influenced by the research and reports that industry or securities analysts publish about us or our business. There are currently five research analysts that cover Imago. If any of the analysts who cover us issue an adverse or misleading opinion regarding us, our clinical results or prospects, regulatory prospects, business model or prospects, our intellectual property or our stock performance, or if our clinical trials and operating results fail to meet the expectations of analysts, our stock price would likely decline. If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of us or fail to publish reports on us regularly, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which in turn could cause our stock price or trading volume to decline. In addition, fluctuations in our quarterly results could result in our failing to meet the expectations of industry or financial analysts or investors for any period. If our revenue or operating results or timelines fall below the expectations of analysts or investors or below any forecasts or guidance we may provide to the market, or if the forecasts or guidance we provide to the market are below the expectations of analysts or investors, the price of our common stock could substantially. Such a stock price could occur even when we have met any previously publicly stated revenue or earnings or timeline guidance we may provide.
Sales of a substantial number of shares of our common stock in the public market could cause our stock price to fall.
If we or our existing stockholders sell, or indicate an intention to sell, substantial amounts of our common stock in the public market the trading price of our common stock could decline. As of March 11, 2022, we had outstanding a total of 33,706,657 shares of common stock.
The lock-up agreements pertaining to our initial public offering expired on January 11, 2022, and shares of our pre-IPO investors, except for directors, executive officers and other affiliates who are subject to Rule 144 under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Securities Act, became freely tradable without restriction under the Securities Act, except for such shares purchased by affiliates. Sales of securities by these stockholders could have a material adverse effect on the trading price of our common stock.
In addition, shares of common stock issued or issuable upon exercise of outstanding options or reserved for future issuance under our equity incentive plans will become eligible for sale in the public market to the extent permitted by the provisions of various vesting schedules, and Rule 144 and Rule 701 under the Securities Act.
We may from time to time issue additional shares of common stock at a discount from the current trading price of our common stock. As a result, our stockholders would experience immediate dilution upon the purchase of any shares of our common stock sold at such discount. In addition, as opportunities present themselves, we may enter into financing or similar arrangements in the future, including the issuance of debt securities, preferred stock or common stock. If we issue common stock or securities convertible into common stock, our common stockholders would experience additional dilution and, as a result, our stock price may decline.
Provisions in our charter documents and under Delaware law could discourage a takeover that stockholders may
consider favorable and may lead to entrenchment of management.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws contain provisions that could delay or prevent changes in control or changes in our management without the consent of our board of directors. These provisions include the following:
a classified board of directors with three-year staggered terms, which may delay the ability of stockholders to change the membership of a majority of our board of directors;
no cumulative voting in the election of directors, which limits the ability of minority stockholders to elect director candidates;
the exclusive right of our board of directors to elect a director to fill a vacancy, however occurring, including by an expansion of the board of directors, which prevents stockholders from being able to fill vacancies on our board of directors;
the ability of our board of directors to authorize the issuance of shares of preferred stock and to determine the price and other terms of those shares, including voting or other rights or preferences, without stockholder approval, which could be used to significantly dilute the ownership of a hostile acquiror;
the ability of our board of directors to alter our amended and restated bylaws without obtaining stockholder approval;
the required approval of at least 66 2/3% of the shares entitled to vote at an election of directors to adopt, amend or repeal our amended and restated bylaws or repeal the provisions of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation regarding the election and removal of directors;
a prohibition on stockholder action by written consent, which forces stockholder action to be taken at an annual or special meeting of our stockholders;
the requirement that a special meeting of stockholders may be called only by the board of directors, which may delay the ability of our stockholders to force consideration of a proposal or to take action, including the removal of directors; and
advance notice procedures that stockholders must comply with in order to nominate candidates to our board of directors or to propose matters to be acted upon at a stockholders’ meeting, which may discourage or deter a potential acquiror from conducting a solicitation of proxies to elect the acquiror’s own slate of directors or otherwise attempting to obtain control of us.
We are also subject to the anti-takeover provisions contained in Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law. Under Section 203, a corporation may not, in general, engage in a business combination with any holder of 15% or more of its capital stock unless the holder has held the stock for three years or, among other exceptions, the board of directors has approved the transaction. For a description of our capital stock, see the section titled “Description of Capital Stock.”
Claims for indemnification by our directors and officers may reduce our available funds to satisfy successful third party claims against us and may reduce the amount of money available to us.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws provide that we will indemnify our directors and officers, in each case to the fullest extent permitted by Delaware law.
In addition, as permitted by Section 145 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, our amended and restated bylaws and our indemnification agreements that we have entered into with our directors and officers provide that:
we will indemnify our directors and officers for serving us in those capacities or for serving other business enterprises at our request, to the fullest extent permitted by Delaware law. Delaware law provides that a corporation may indemnify such person if such person acted in good faith and in a manner such person reasonably believed to be in or not opposed to the best interests of the registrant and, with respect to any criminal proceeding, had no reasonable cause to believe such person’s conduct was unlawful;
we may, in our discretion, indemnify employees and agents in those circumstances where indemnification is permitted by applicable law;
we are required to advance expenses, as incurred, to our directors and officers in connection with defending a proceeding, except that such directors or officers shall undertake to repay such advances if it is ultimately determined that such person is not entitled to indemnification;
we will not be obligated pursuant to our amended and restated bylaws to indemnify a person with respect to proceedings initiated by that person against us or our other indemnitees, except with respect to proceedings authorized by our board of directors or brought to enforce a right to indemnification;
the rights conferred in our amended and restated bylaws are not exclusive, and we are authorized to enter into indemnification agreements with our directors, officers, employees and agents and to obtain insurance to indemnify such persons; and
we may not retroactively amend our amended and restated bylaw provisions to reduce our indemnification obligations to directors, officers, employees and agents.
While we maintain a directors’ and officers’ insurance policy, such insurance may not be adequate to cover all liabilities that we may incur, which may reduce our available funds to satisfy third-party claims and may adversely impact our cash position.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws provide that the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware will be the exclusive forum for certain disputes between us and our stockholders, which could limit our stockholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us or our directors, officers or employees.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws provide that the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware (or, in the event that the Court of Chancery does not have jurisdiction, the federal district court for the District of Delaware or other state courts of the State of Delaware) is the exclusive forum for any derivative action or proceeding brought on our behalf, any action asserting a claim of breach of fiduciary duty, any action asserting a claim against us arising pursuant to the Delaware General Corporation Law, our amended and restated certificate of incorporation or our amended and restated bylaws, or any action asserting a claim against us that is governed by the internal affairs doctrine; provided that, the exclusive forum provision will not apply to suits brought to enforce any liability or duty created by the Exchange Act or any other claim for which the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction; and provided further that, if and only if the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware any such action for of subject matter jurisdiction, such action may be brought in another state or federal court sitting in the State of Delaware. Our amended and certificate of incorporation and amended and bylaws provide that the federal district courts of the United States of America will be the forum for the resolution of any asserting a cause of action us or any of our directors, officers, employees or agents and arising under the Securities Act. Nothing in our amended and certificate of incorporation and amended and bylaws stockholders that assert under the Exchange Act from bringing such in state or federal court, subject to applicable law.
This choice of forum provision may limit a stockholder’s ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum that it finds favorable for disputes with us or any of our directors, officers, other employees or stockholders, which may discourage lawsuits with respect to such claims, although our stockholders will not be deemed to have waived our compliance with federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder. In addition, this choice of forum provision may result in increased costs to stockholders to bring a claim for any such disputes. Furthermore, the enforceability of similar choice of forum provisions in other companies’ certificates of incorporation has been challenged in legal proceedings, and it is possible that a court could find these types of provisions to be inapplicable or unenforceable. While the Delaware courts have determined that such choice of forum provisions are facially valid, a stockholder may nevertheless seek to bring a claim in a venue other than those designated in the exclusive forum provisions, and there can be no assurance that such provisions will be enforced by a court in those other jurisdictions. If a court were to find the choice of forum provision that will be contained in our amended and certificate of incorporation and amended and bylaws to be inapplicable or unenforceable in an action, we may incur additional costs associated with resolving such action in other jurisdictions, which could affect our business and financial condition.
We do not currently intend to pay dividends on our common stock, and , consequently, your ability to achieve a return on your investment will depend on appreciation in the price of our common stock.
We do not currently intend to pay any cash dividends on our common stock for the foreseeable future. We currently intend to invest our future earnings, if any, to fund our growth. Therefore, you are not likely to receive any dividends on your common stock for the foreseeable future. Since we do not intend to pay dividends, your ability to receive a return on your investment will depend on any future appreciation in the market value of our common stock. There is no guarantee that our common stock will appreciate or even maintain the price at which our holders have purchased it.
General Risk Factors
We may be subject to securities litigation, which is expensive and could divert our management’s attention.
In the past, companies that have experienced volatility in the market price of their securities have been subject to securities class action litigation. We may be the target of this type of litigation in the future. Regardless of the merits or the ultimate results of such litigation, securities litigation brought against us could result in substantial costs and divert our management’s attention from other business concerns.
We have incurred and will continue to incur significantly increased costs as a result of operating as a public company, and our management is required to devote substantial time to new compliance initiatives.
As a public company, we have incurred and will continue to incur significant legal, accounting and other expenses that we did not incur as a private company. We are subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, which require, among other things, that we file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, annual, quarterly and current reports with respect to our business and financial condition. In addition, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as
well as rules subsequently adopted by the SEC and Nasdaq to implement provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, impose significant requirements on public companies, including requiring establishment and maintenance of effective disclosure and financial controls and changes in corporate governance practices. Further, in July 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, or the Dodd-Frank Act, was enacted. There are significant corporate governance and executive compensation-related provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act that require the SEC to adopt additional rules and regulations in these areas such as “say on pay” and proxy access. Recent legislation permits emerging growth companies to implement many of these requirements over a longer period and up to five years from the pricing of our initial public offering. We intend to take advantage of this new legislation, but cannot guarantee that we will not be required to implement these requirements sooner than budgeted or planned and thereby incur unexpected expenses. Stockholder activism, the current political environment and the current high level of government intervention and regulatory reform may lead to substantial new regulations and disclosure obligations, which may lead to additional compliance costs and impact the manner in which we operate our business in ways we cannot currently anticipate.
Additionally, legislatures, government agencies and listing exchanges have mandated or proposed, and others may in the future further mandate, certain environmental, social and governance, or ESG, disclosure or performance. For example, board diversity and inclusion is an ESG topic that is receiving heightened attention from lawmakers and listing exchanges. The State of California, where we currently maintain our principal executive offices, has enacted laws requiring companies to meet stated gender and diversity requirements on their boards of directors by specific deadlines. In addition, the Nasdaq Stock Market LLC, where our common stock is currently listed, requires most Nasdaq-listed companies to meet specified board diversity requirements within a defined compliance period and face potential delisting if they do not explain any failure to meet the requirements. If we are unable to recruit, attract and/or retain qualified members of our board of directors to maintain compliance with the diversity requirements of applicable mandates within the prescribed timelines, we could be exposed to costly fines and penalties. Failure to comply with ESG-related laws, exchange policies or stakeholder expectations could materially and impact our reputation, the value of our stock and related cost of capital and limit our ability to fund future growth.
The rules, regulations and investor expectations applicable to public companies could substantially increase our legal and financial compliance costs, make some activities more time-consuming and costly and divert the attention of our management and personnel from other business concerns. The impact of these requirements could also make it more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified persons to serve on our board of directors, our board committees or as executive officers.
We are an “emerging growth company” and “smaller reporting company” and, as a result of the reduced disclosure and governance requirements applicable to emerging growth companies and smaller reporting companies, our common stock may be less attractive to investors.
We are an “emerging growth company,” as defined in the JOBS Act and a “smaller reporting company,” as defined in the Exchange Act and we take advantage of certain exemptions from various reporting requirements that are applicable to other public companies that are not emerging growth companies or smaller reporting companies, including, but not limited to, not being required to comply with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404, reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements, and exemptions from the requirements of holding a nonbinding advisory vote on executive compensation and stockholder approval of any golden parachute payments not previously approved. In addition, as an “emerging growth company,” the JOBS Act allows us to delay adoption of new or revised accounting pronouncements applicable to public companies until such pronouncements are made applicable to private companies. We have elected to use this extended transition period under the JOBS Act. As a result, our consolidated financial statements may not be comparable to the financial statements of issuers who are required to comply with the effective dates for new or revised accounting standards that are applicable to public companies, which may make comparison of our financials to those of other public companies more difficult.
Investors may find our common stock less attractive because we rely on these exemptions. If some investors find our common stock less attractive as a result, there may be a less active trading market for our common stock and our stock price may be more volatile. We may take advantage of these reporting exemptions until we are no longer an emerging growth company. We will remain an emerging growth company until the earlier of (1) December 31, 2026; (2) the last day of the fiscal year in which we have total annual gross revenue of at least $1.07 billion; (3) the last day of the fiscal year in which we are deemed to be a “large accelerated filer” as defined in Rule 12b-2 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, which would occur if the market value of our common stock held by non-affiliates exceeded $700 million as of the last business day of the second fiscal quarter of such year; or (4) the date on which we have issued more than $1 billion in non-convertible debt securities during the prior three-year period. We will remain a smaller reporting company until the last day of the fiscal year in which: (1) the market value of our common stock held by non-affiliates exceeds $250 million as of the end of that year’s second fiscal quarter, and our annual revenues exceed $100 million during such fiscal year; or (2) our annual revenues do not exceed $100 million during such fiscal year, and the market value of our common stock held by non-affiliates exceeds $700 million as of the end of that year’s second fiscal quarter.
If we fail to implement and maintain proper and effective internal control over financial reporting, our ability to produce accurate and timely financial statements could be impaired, investors may lose confidence in our financial reporting and the trading price of our common stock may decline.
Pursuant to Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley, our management will be required to report upon the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting beginning with the annual report for our fiscal year ending December 31, 2022. When we lose our status as an “emerging growth company,” our independent registered public accounting firm will be required to attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. The rules governing the standards that must be met for management to assess our internal control over financial reporting are complex and require significant documentation, testing and possible remediation.
To comply with the requirements of being a reporting company under the Exchange Act, we will continue to implement additional financial and management controls, reporting systems and procedures and hire additional accounting and finance staff.
We cannot assure you that there will not be material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting in the future. Any failure to implement and maintain internal control over financial reporting could severely inhibit our ability to accurately report our financial condition, results of operations or cash flows. If we are unable to conclude that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, or if our independent registered public accounting firm determines we have a material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, the market price of our common stock could decline, and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by Nasdaq, the SEC or other regulatory authorities. Failure to remedy any material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting, or to implement or maintain other control systems required of public companies, could also restrict our future access to the capital markets.
Item 1B. Unresolve d Staff Comments.
None.
Item 2. Pro perties.
Our corporate headquarters are located in South San Francisco, California, where we lease and occupy approximately 100 square feet of office and laboratory space. The term of our lease is for automatically renewing three month periods, unless earlier terminated with 60 days prior written notice.
We believe our existing facilities are sufficient for our needs for the foreseeable future. To meet the future needs of our business, we may lease additional or alternate space, and we believe suitable additional or alternative space will be available in the future on commercially reasonable terms.
