Abcellera at Bloom Burton: Strategic Shift in Biotech Development

On Monday, 05 May 2025, Abcellera Biologics (NASDAQ:ABCL) presented a strategic overview at the Bloom Burton & Co. Healthcare Investor Conference 2025. While the company faces challenges with its stock performance since its IPO, it remains optimistic about its future. Abcellera is transitioning from a service-based model to developing its own therapeutic antibody pipeline, demonstrating both resilience and innovation in the biotech industry.

Key Takeaways

• Abcellera plans to bring two molecules, ABCL-635 and ABCL-575, into clinical trials this quarter.
• The company holds $650 million in cash and $200 million in committed government funding.
• A new GMP manufacturing facility in Vancouver is nearing completion, with clinical batches expected by 2026.
• Strategic partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies, such as AbbVie, are a focus area.
• Abcellera aims to introduce two molecules to the clinic annually.

Financial Results

• Cash Position:

- $650 million in cash available.

- $200 million in committed capital from government sources.

• IPO and Stock Performance:

- IPO in 2020 at $20 per share, with initial trades around $70.

- Current trading price is approximately $2.50.

Operational Updates

• GMP Manufacturing Facility:

- Nearing completion, slightly over budget.

- First engineering runs planned by the end of the year.

- Clinical batches expected in 2026.

• Pipeline Development:

- Two molecules set for Phase 1 trials this quarter.

- 20 internal programs in progress.

- Aim to bring two molecules to the clinic each year.

• Partnerships:

- Focus on collaborations with companies like Lilly, AbbVie, and Regeneron.

- New deal announced with AbbVie in the T-cell engager space.

Future Outlook

• 2025 Expectations:

- Completion of GMP facility.

- Disclosure of new molecules for IND-enabling studies.

- Targeting first-in-class molecules against challenging targets.

• Clinical Trial Readouts:

- Phase 1 results anticipated in the next 18-24 months.

• Portfolio Expansion:

- Continued goal of introducing two molecules to the clinic annually.

Q&A Highlights

• Collaboration Impact:

- Transition to proprietary programs has not hindered existing collaborations.

• OX40 Ligand Differentiation:

- Focus on half-life and dosing frequency for differentiation.

• OX40 Target Selection:

- Targeting the ligand is believed to yield similar results to targeting the receptor.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript provided below.

Full transcript - Bloom Burton & Co. Healthcare Investor Conference 2025:

Operator: We’re going to get started with the first presentation of the morning. So our first presenter I am very excited to present is Andrew Booth, the Chief Financial Officer of Absella Biologics.

Andrew Booth, Chief Financial Officer, Absella Biologics: Andrew, take it away. Do you put them on the screens? There we go. Perfect. Is this the excellent.

Okay. A real pleasure to be here today. And actually, I wanna thank, first of all, Brian and Jollian and the whole Bloomberg team for having this conference every year. It’s it feels like being a Canadian biotech company, being able to present to you in a Canadian investor conference, it feels like family in here. I probably know half of the people in the room, so it’s, it’s always a pleasure.

And thanks as always for your support. The regular disclaimer here, I’ll be making certain forward looking statements, and please refer to all of our SEC filings. I’ll start with a little bit of history with Abceloroso. We’re a company out in Vancouver. And, for those of you who have been following the story, you may remember we went public on the Nasdaq in 2020.

We went public at a twenty dollar share price and our first trade I think was about 70. We closed the day at and basically since that first trade it’s been a pretty character building journey since then over the last good number of years. We ended the first day you know in the high fifties and then we’re trading now somewhere about 2 and a half dollars. And they’re really and I’ve been to many of these investor conferences including Bloomberg over the years and many of the very thoughtful investors that we encounter, they often ask you know, hey in this volatile time and certainly a time with the share price and all biotech we don’t feel particularly special. Think all biotech have really faced challenges in the public markets.

We are actually some of the fortunate ones and I’ll come and talk about that in a minute. But many of the thoughtful investors just ask you know, hey how’s the team being held together? How’s the team doing? We now are a team of several hundred people growing out capabilities and really focused still on discovery and now into development. And when you ask how the team is doing, we are incredibly fortunate that we have a strong and visionary and charismatic leader like Carl Hansen, who is the founding CEO.

Originally the company came out of Carl’s lab, as many of you know. And Carl recently did a talk at he was invited down to UATX, University of Austin, Texas and gave a talk about an hour long undergraduates and I highly recommend that you go and listen to that talk. He’s real he’s an excellent speaker and a real visionary and I think when you listen to that talk you’ll really understand that the vision of what the company is trying to do, what our employees get exposed to all the time through Carl’s words and I’ll try and just briefly summarize. He takes about an hour, I’ll try and take five minutes or less. But again, Karl Hansen, UATX talk to listen to it.

But really he talks about four things and one is that we are at this watershed moment in biotech, that drug development is possibly one of the hardest things out there to do. Only thing harder is to try and build a company that sustainably develops drugs. And there’s a reason why we do it because of the incredible impact it can have on human life. And for the first point that we’re at this watershed moment, some of you may know that actually Carl and I met each other doing our undergraduate work in engineering physics at UBC many many years ago. And Carl draws this parallel to historical moment in time with physics in the Solvay conference in the nineteen twenties and you probably everyone’s probably seen this picture, it’s it’s sometimes published as the most intelligent picture ever taken.

I think it’s about 30 people. Over half of them have got the Nobel Prize. There’s Einstein and Schrodinger and Mary Curie and Max Planck and everyone who are the names, the who’s who that you hear about in physics. And Carl goes on to say, hey if you were to take a Solvay conference pitcher today or in biotech, it would be taken around today. All of those pioneers who understood the fundamentals of physics back in the twenties that laid the groundwork for what afterwards was an explosion in productivity in the world of atoms and subsequently in microprocessors and the world of bits.

All of the progress that we have been experiencing, that is what is happening today in biotech. And Watson and Crick, of course, with the double helix, Watson is still around, Till and McCullough, Till is still around in Toronto. And of course, Carrie Mullis with PCR, cloning IVF, the sequencing of the genome, all of these things have happened in our lifetimes. And that picture with Yamanaka for stem cell factors, Jamie Thompson, Jennifer Doudna, those that picture for a Solve Conference for biotech could be taken today and it is a sign of like the incredible progress that we’re going to be making over the coming decade. The big question is there’s probably 10 seats missing that are still figuring out who who those people are gonna be, that are gonna get the the that contribute to this in the future.

And Carl goes on to say, talk about drug development where we are really struggling in productivity. People would say it costs too much, it takes too much time, it fails too often and this is the challenge that we have in trying to develop a drug. First of all, you’re required to get this insight into biology and then go through the Herculean task to deliver a molecule that actually or develop a molecule that delivers on that insight, manufacture it, and unlike engineering, there’s no such thing as minimum viable product. You have to bring this right to a product because it’s going to go into humans, you have to have it ready for safety, efficacy, there is this herculean task of clinical trials which is not for the faint of heart and only one and maybe a 20 of these attempts even succeeds. And the only thing harder than developing that drug is developing a company that develops drugs and if you consider that, let’s say escape velocity of a sustainable biotech or pharma company comes when you’ve got a series of drugs and maybe a market cap over 20,000,000,000, there are only 35 companies that have done it and 29 of them are like a hundred years old or the majority of them are a hundred years old.

There’s only six that have been made in the last forty years. So you’ve got Regeneron, you’ve got Vertex, you’ve got Gilead, then it came Alnylam and then you would say that BioNTech and Argenx have done it, let’s say, the last twenty years. So this is very rarefied error, probably maybe the most difficult thing that’s possible to to to undertake. And if you because drug development is inherently you develop a drug and you don’t have either the capabilities, maybe even the ambition, but certainly not the capital to go and do anything other than to sell that drug to a larger pharma who have already invested in the late stage clinical trials, perhaps the commercial force, it’s very difficult to try and go that full distance. So the regular mode of investing and selling and company creation and exits are to bring those companies and those drugs to as much clinical validation as you can in order to sell them off.

And very few companies that try even have the ambition to try and do what Argenx has done, do what Alnylam has done or Gilead or Vertex in the last forty years, Regeneron. And that is something that, you know, we definitely aspire to do and especially speaking in front of a Canadian audience, there are very few Canadian companies who have tried and as many of you are aware, we’re the only company or the only country I think in the G seven, G 10 maybe that doesn’t have a major pharmaceutical company. And so it is something that, you know, we’re we’re definitely aspiring to do, and the data will tell us if we get there because we’re gonna take it one step at a time. And lastly, though, what Carl says in this, in his talk is that we do this because these are actually miracles of modern science. That Keytruda can cure cancer, that even a drug like Dupixent can take what is a debilitating disease and make it tolerable or treatable.

And, somebody once said at a conference that while we’re here, we’re ambitious people, we’re trying to do a hundred things, if you’re sick, you’re trying to do one thing. And that really gets us motivated, I think, and keeps the company very healthy and focused. So with that, so I invite you to watch that talk. It’s an excellent talk and Carl is a really an inspirational leader. So that gets us to where we are with Absella.

So hopefully many of you are familiar with the story. We’re out in Vancouver. We’re about 600 people right now. We have been laser focused on therapeutic antibody development, so we have been investing in tools, technologies, teams and infrastructure to go from target all the way to the clinic for antibody therapeutics. We started this the company by providing this capability for our partners.

We would get paid for doing the work that we did and we would also collect and participate in the success of the molecules that we discovered through a royal typically through a downstream milestones and royalties, a very typical biotech model. And we have done that at some scale, having done over a hundred programs for our partners and the investments have been in the technology, the team, the infrastructure, the platform in order to do this scalably and repeatedly. We’ve done this with over a good number of partners. Many of those names that you’ll recognize have provided great validation capital for us to continue to invest. And we have taken many, many molecules through early stage, through through discovery and handed them back to our partners.

A number of those, say 16, have made it to phase one clinical trials, most notably in those were the two molecules that we developed for Eli Lilly, that were Eli Lilly’s COVID molecules, antibodies and that went on to treat over two and a half million patients and to, by our estimation, saved hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of lives. But the rest of the portfolio is still very early. So either in preclinical work, only a dozen or so molecules that are in phase one and they continue to progress. We do have good disclosures on these molecules and this portfolio in our 10 k that I would point you to to find more details. Over the years actually, we started by providing the capabilities in order to do the discovery.

We take increasingly larger positions in the molecule, so typically in the form of a royalty. We then modified that to a co ownership position, where we’d own the drug fiftyfifty and then we have evolved that since in order to wholly own the molecules and the focus of the company right now is really in advancing that wholly owned pipeline. We have also made significant investments in the Vancouver area, if you go to Vancouver hopefully you’ll notice those investments, so we have a beautiful lab office building where we have holding everybody in a single building, and also we have a group down in Australia. Actually Carl at the moment is down in Australia at an antibody development conference with the team down in Australia. We’ve also built a GMP manufacturing facility where we received some funds from the Canadian government in order to do that.

That facility is nearly complete. We will be doing our first runs, engineering runs at the end of this year and our first runs that will be clinical batches in 2026. And I would say that that project miraculously over four or five years is on time and only slightly above budget, which for a large project like that is saying quite something. And the feedback that I get as well from investors is that it’s great that we have the validation, they love it that we’ve turned our attention developing our own pipeline because that’s how you really develop value in biotech and in pharma. And they also love our liquidity position.

So we’ve been fortunate in the time when we went public and as well the economics we had on the COVID molecules to fill up our balance sheet to have the the wherewithal to take on this incredible task of developing drugs and moving them forward to the clinic. We’ve also negotiated with the government of Canada and the province of British Columbia, so a certain co funding for us to advance a portfolio of assets through phase one and do the discovery, the development, the GMP manufacturing and also the phase one clinical trials here in Canada. We have about $650,000,000 of cash on our balance sheet and close to 200,000,000 in the committed capital from these government funding sources in order to keep prosecuting these drugs. And what we hear from investors is they love the cash position and they know we’re going to turn that cash into drugs and the feedback I get is, I sure hope you pick good targets and good things to work on. And we’ve been holding our cards pretty close to our chest with regards to that over a good number of years and I’m happy to say that in this quarter, we will bring our first two molecules to the to the clinic and when we select these targets, because target selection is so important, we actually have developed internally, I would say quite a good framework for this.

We have to love this. It might sound obvious when you spell it out, but if you’re keeping yourself honest to all of these criteria is actually quite important. We have to love the science, so the target biology we believe is very well validated and we have an angle on why our capabilities can crack the scientific problem. We have to like the commercial opportunity, a big market, ideally or a market that is, certainly worth the effort. We have to have an angle on the differentiation and finally, there has to be a very clear clinical development plan.

So normally that means for not very much money, we get some dispositive clinical data typically in our phase one trial that really tells us if we have something that is going to be a drug. And it is difficult to get, back to the fact that developing drugs is an extremely difficult task. It is difficult to get a perfect score on all four of these dimensions all in one. When you do, you know you have a really good winner. It’s not always the case.

There’s usually one of these is kind of the the weak element of any one of the drugs that we bring forward and we’re trying to be quite transparent and open about that and I think we can afford to do that because we are advancing an entire portfolio. If you have only one drug, you have to love it in all its entirety and if you have a portfolio, I think you can be a little bit more sober about what the opportunities are in front of you. We have, first of all, a b c l six three five. So we’ve disclosed these first two molecules, a b c l six three five and a b c l five seven five, are going to reach the clinic in phase two or at least have a CTA applied. We are on track for that and dosing would start in the third quarter.

We both believe that both of them are molecules that will find clinical results in the first half of twenty twenty six, fairly straightforward phase one trial. For ABCL six thirty five, I’d say we are going to the target is undisclosed, but I’m happy to announce that on on Thursday during our earnings call, we’re gonna finally disclose this target, and we can start talking about it. We expect the patent to publish sometime next week, which is why if you were paying attention, you’d be able to figure it out on your own. So we instead, we’re gonna disclose it at our earnings call on Thursday. It’s a it’s a best in first in class antibody against a difficult target, so we would say that’s an ion channel and GPCR target.

It’s in the area of metabolic and endocrine and just to be clear, not weight loss, just because everyone is developing things in weight loss, it is not in weight loss. We believe the total addressable market is north of 2,000,000,000, so this would have the opportunity to have a, let’s say, blockbuster status. And the development path, are very excited about this one. The development path we believe will have some great data that will give us a strong indication of not only its safety but its efficacy in the phase one trial. So, stay tuned on this one and just in a few days we’ll be revealing more information.

The other one is, ABCL five seventy five. It’s an antibody against ox 40 ligand. It’s a molecule that we originally developed partnership with EQRx, where their business model was a fast follower, model. They are, of course, following Sanofi’s molecule, amlatilumab, which is scheduled for a phase three readout, focused on atopic dermatitis, but also is implicated in all sorts of other eye and eye conditions. They have a a number of other phase two trials that are reading out in the coming, coming quarters, and, and we will be bringing this in and hoping to hoping to have an opportunity to differentiate based on half life.

But this one is where the opportunity for differentiation is probably the weakest of those four metrics that I mentioned before. Amlutilimab is gonna leader here with this molecule from Sanofi. It’s a molecule they purchased off of Kymab. And, but we do believe because atopic dermatitis is such a gigantic market, there’s gonna be opportunity for this molecule, for subsequent molecules and and followers followers that could even themselves be blockbusters. So please keep, stay tuned on this one.

Probably most notably for this drug, we will be giving a quite comprehensive preclinical data package at the upcoming Society for Investigational Dermatology that is happening later in May. So with that, we have, the beginnings of what I hope over the years as we come back here year and year again at at Bloom Burton will be the developing pipeline. We target to be bringing a couple of molecules into the clinic, every year. That will start with disclosure of what our development candidates are and confirmation we’ve entered IND enabling studies. We have a portfolio of some 20 programs internally that we have started and it’s from that pool that we’ll be selecting the most promising candidates under those metrics that I mentioned earlier to be bringing forward into preclinical studies and ultimately into phase one clinical trials, starting here in Canada, by filing the CTA.

So, just what we can expect for 2025. I realize I’ve I’ve flown through this presentation, but there’s quite a crowd here, so we’ll take some questions afterwards. You can expect that, we’ll start these phase one trials for June and May. You can expect our GMP facility to be complete, and you can expect, the disclosure of a couple of more, molecules to IND enabling studies. Our expectation would be that those molecules will be against this difficult target space, more typical of where our investment thesis has been in technology to find these first in class molecules against the ion channel and GPCR.

Particularly in the ion channel space, if if successful, I would I would expect the r and d team to be quite enthusiastic of finding some of the first functional antibodies against ion channels. And with luck, because it’s still drug development, anything can happen. But if if successful, I think we’d have quite robust scientific disclosure about that, because that’d be quite a feat of of the the engineering and biology and protein engineering that the team has done. And I think in the next, eighteen to twenty four months, you can expect our phase one readouts. You can expect, the next molecules to be entering, into the clinic.

And with that, I’m happy to, leave ten minutes for questions.

Operator: Okay. Do we have any questions from the audience? We have about ten minutes. People are rather shy this morning, I suppose. Maybe I’ll just kick off with an easy one, but, well, what I hope is easy.

So there’s a lot of, discovery programs you have in your pipeline. Do you have any thoughts about, you know, timelines for those, or is this kind of something you’re keeping close to the chest?

Andrew Booth, Chief Financial Officer, Absella Biologics: Well, as I mentioned, the, the internal pipeline, we have some 20 programs that we’ve started. We’d expect to be bringing on average or our goal is to bring on average two of those to the clinic every year. That means that we’ll bring two to the IND to development candidate and IND enabling studies at about that same pace. It’s quite expensive to do the IND enabling studies, invest in the manufacturing. We’re optimistic that this the next molecules will be manufactured in our own facility.

I think the the fur the next one or two might still be manufactured at CDMO in Asia, but the subsequent ones would be manufactured at our facility in Vancouver at the pace of about two a year.

Unidentified speaker: Has your transition to doing your own programs had a negative impact on your collaborations and your partnerships? And with your new facility, will you be producing on a contract basis for any of those programs as a field of clearinghouse molecules?

Andrew Booth, Chief Financial Officer, Absella Biologics: That’s a great question. So, I would say that, over the last four years or so, I think in 2021, we made a a conscious decision to be focusing on strategic partnerships. So that’s typically with big pharma, the Lilly’s, the AbbVie’s, the Regeneron’s, that and in those, we’re doing so we’re doing fewer of those, but our own internal efforts have not I don’t believe have dampened that those relationships at all. Quite quite the opposite. In in some case, we’ve made an investment over the last number of years, and I I didn’t speak about it today, but in the T cell engagers.

So couple of years ago, we turned our attention to, developing a and characterizing a portfolio of ways to engage T cells largely through anti c d three antibodies, that can I think everybody agrees that for fighting cancer, it seems like T cells, radioisotopes, antibody drug conjugates are kind of the modalities of choice? In t cells, what seems to be missing is a is a comprehensive portfolio for managing and activating t cells and also presenting them to tumor cells. We did a lot of that work on our own, including looking for more and more validation by pairing up with a tumor targeting antibody and getting, preclinical or animal data. And then recently, that data and those efforts on our own caught the attention of AbbVie. We signed a deal with AbbVie that we announced, just in this year for us to advance more in the t cell space on a couple of programs with them.

Similarly, some of our programs like the aux 40 ligand as an example, this is a program which likely is, better under the stewardship of a company with a franchise in I and I, to do the phase three phase two and phase certainly the phase three. It’s a molecule where many companies, big pharma companies are looking at us. They’re happy we’re doing the phase one. We actually have a low cost of capital position to do the phase one here in Canada, thanks to the government contributions we have. And that with that clinical data, we’d be able to partner that.

And many of those partners, the best place to look is places where we have those established relationships in order to there’s already a respect of the science and the rigor and the clinical development and the executive relationship to actually do that transaction. So I’d say those things are all synergistic in in the way we run the business, not competing. And I think that we would see that also I’d be surprised if you didn’t hear that same response from our partners, particularly in the difficult target space. That’s typically what our big partners come to us for. They come to us when they’re stuck.

Lilly, Regeneron, extremely experts, extremely qualified and smart people and experts at in antibody discovery. They come to us for when they get stuck on very difficult problems. If we have molecules against some of those indications, we cannot advance all of them ourselves, and we’d be happy to partner them with them and because of our existing relationships can have earlier conversations with them. And absolutely, I would imagine that in the event of any such partnership, we would be happy to manufacture that molecule and the partner would be happy for us to manufacture that molecule at our facility. And I’d say that certainly for those that we might out license, but even more so for those strategic partners who’ve asked us to do the discovery, they’re happy for us also to do the manufacturing.

So I I’d say we it is the plan that we will manufacturing, but only for antibodies where we have done the discovery, not on kind of a strict CDMO basis.

Operator: Got one more question at the back.

Joshi Ramanjado, Apogee Pharma: Joshi Ramanjado, Apogee Pharma. Two questions. What is the key differentiating aspect for your OX40 ligand project? I didn’t I didn’t catch it.

Andrew Booth, Chief Financial Officer, Absella Biologics: Yeah. I would say that, well, you’re from Apogee, so you must know this molecule quite well. So, or the the target. I’d say the the key, as I mentioned, differentiation, because there are several molecules including from Apogee and also from amlutilimab obviously, the key opportunity for differentiation is going to be in half life and so in dosing. So less frequent dosing.

And I we would believe that as a monoclonal antibody treatment, so not in combination, that we may have a best in class molecule, most different with the opportunity for differentiation in the half life that we have. And as I mentioned, we’re revealing that preclinical data at the Society of Investigational Dermatology later this month that will put a lot of the data around exactly what does that mean. And there’s still a question as to whether that’s going to be important. Amlutilimab may in fact get quarterly dosing. And once you have quarterly dosing, does it even matter if you’re on semi annual dosing or even maybe annual dosing?

But we won’t know that until we see the data. And the data we would get from our phase one would be on safety, but also the PK data and give us a better indication if there is any angle on the dosing differentiation.

Joshi Ramanjado, Apogee Pharma: Second question, what are your thoughts on not going after the ox 40 receptor rather than ligand?

Andrew Booth, Chief Financial Officer, Absella Biologics: Sorry?

Joshi Ramanjado, Apogee Pharma: What are your thoughts on going after the receptor?

Andrew Booth, Chief Financial Officer, Absella Biologics: Ox the ligand instead of ox 40. I think rocotilimab by Amgen is after oxy 40. Honestly, and, again, Karl has given a a great talk about this. If you our views on the biology is that if you block either of them, it should give the similar same or similar result. Rockitilimab is also a depleting antibody, so it had other impacts, because it’s a depleting antibody.

However, you know, the science would suggest that if you block either, you should have the same result. And we’re gonna see it in the data if that actually that hypothesis holds true. And I think that’s why one of the most important things that can happen for our own five seventy five program are the confirmations of that biology from the readouts of what Sanofi is going to be getting and what the competitive readouts are going to be. Which is a different story than the first in class molecules, which we expect to be the caricature of the ones that come behind the ox 40 ligand molecule.

Operator: So thank you all for joining this talk. Unfortunately, we’re at the end of the time. So if you have any questions, please find Andrew outside. Thank you and please give me a round of applause.

Andrew Booth, Chief Financial Officer, Absella Biologics: Thank you.

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