Codexis at Cantor Global Healthcare: Scaling siRNA Production

On Thursday, September 4, 2025, Codexis (NASDAQ:CDXS) presented at the Cantor Global Healthcare Conference, outlining its strategic focus on enzymatic synthesis for siRNA therapeutics. The company highlighted its ECO Synthesis™ platform as a scalable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional chemical methods. While Codexis aims to secure long-term partnerships, it also faces challenges in meeting the projected surge in siRNA demand.

Key Takeaways

• Codexis’s ECO Synthesis™ platform offers a scalable, cost-effective solution for siRNA manufacturing.
• The company is shifting its intellectual property strategy to protect its enzymatic process as trade secrets.
• Codexis is actively engaging with over 40 potential partners, with contracts growing steadily.
• The company has over $60 million in cash, supporting its expansion plans.
• Codexis plans to commission a GMP facility to enhance its manufacturing capabilities.

Operational Updates

• Codexis’s ECO Synthesis™ platform addresses limitations of chemical synthesis, which is inefficient and costly at scale.
• The platform runs in water, reducing infrastructure needs and environmental impact.
• Codexis has seen a steady increase in contracts, with one in 2024, one in Q1, two in Q2, and four expected in Q3 of this year.
• The company is actively showcasing its technology at industry events like Tides.

Demand for siRNA Therapeutics

• Global demand for siRNA medicines is expected to reach 50 metric tons per year, far exceeding current chemical synthesis capacity.
• Codexis aims to meet this demand with its fully enzymatic synthesis, which it sees as crucial for large-scale production.
• The company is targeting partnerships with firms developing siRNA drugs for major indications like cardiovascular and neurological diseases.

Technology and Intellectual Property

• Codexis is transitioning from patenting individual enzymes to safeguarding its process as trade secrets.
• The company is cautious about revealing specifics of its enzymatic methods to protect against reverse engineering.
• Advancements in chiral control are expected to enhance the potency and safety of siRNA therapeutics.

Future Outlook

• Codexis plans to commission a GMP facility, a significant milestone in its manufacturing strategy.
• The company is focused on building a pipeline of future value through strategic partnerships.
• Demonstrations of chiral control in siRNA synthesis are anticipated to be groundbreaking.

Financials

• Codexis closed the last quarter with over $60 million in cash, providing a solid financial foundation for its growth initiatives.
• The company is investing in its GMP facility and future development stages to strengthen its market position.

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

Full transcript - Cantor Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Okay, good afternoon, everybody. This is Kristen Klaska at Kantar. Very excited to host Dr. Stephen Dilly, the CEO of Codexis. Thanks so much for being here today.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Great to be here. Thanks for having us.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Of course. Just to start, I wanted to see if you can give us a very brief overview, and then we’ll get into some more details.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Codexis is a company that traditionally has been in the area of protein engineering and biocatalysis. We have a track record around providing biocatalysis solutions for some pretty important small molecule medicines, particularly Januvia for Merck, Paxlovid for Pfizer, and others. More recently, we’ve been focused on enzymatic synthesis of oligonucleotides, particularly focused on the coming wave of siRNA therapeutics, which we’re super excited about.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Okay. Yeah, I think people have a lot of excitement around the siRNA space. It’s quite literally in the news every week, usually with a positive headline coupled with it. I don’t think people have taken the time to understand the work that goes into making these products, right? Hopefully we can gain some thoughts from you. Up until now, how have these therapeutics really been produced at scale up? When we think about chemical synthesis methods, what’s the benefits and drawbacks?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: As you note, siRNA medicines to date have been made chemically, and the technical term for that is phosphoramidite chemistry. This is a process that is very effective at small scale. It’s conducted in organic solvents such as acetonitrile and toluene. The challenges are that it’s very volumetrically inefficient, very expensive, and actually quite onerous to set up the technology. It runs in stainless steel tanks for obvious reasons around those kinds of solvents. There are challenges of explosive reagents. There are challenges of something like 5,000 kilos of raw material to make a single kilo of drug. It’s labor intensive, it’s infrastructure intensive, and the biggest challenge of all is limited in scale, largely because of the chromatography step that’s necessary in the purification. A big batch of phosphoramidite chemistry produced material would be five kilos. We believe we have a solution that can address all of those problems.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: We talked about the fact that it’s done well for small scale, and that makes sense because when we think about what’s on the market today, for the most part, these are smaller prevalent indications. How did that kind of frame into this work? You know, we’re seeing this new wave with siRNA. There’s probably a lot of potential and interest in larger indications. How did you think about that and also the supply side problem that we might face in the coming years?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: We started off on this journey about two and a half years ago, and we looked at the number of drugs in development and the kind of indications they were at. We extrapolated a number to say, if the worldwide demand for siRNA medicines in 2023 was about 100 kilos, it was going to be at least 10 metric tons by the end of the decade. Since then, as you noted, the news has usually been good, and our estimates have gone way up, actually. Even as recently as this week, you saw Novartis with a couple of announcements around big deals they’ve done with their siRNA pipeline. Probably most interesting of all was the announcement of a company called CureVac coming out of stealth mode and projecting a demand of 25 metric tons per year of their drug, right?

That is way beyond the capacity of all the phosphoramidite chemistry facilities in the world to supply. One of the things that their CEO has said from the outset is the only solution to that kind of supply chain is enzymatic. We now have upped our estimates to say, rather than 20 metric tons, we think it’s more like 50 metric tons. It could go beyond that as we move into preventive medicines, we move into high volume indications, cardiovascular, neurological, and so on. We have total conviction around the demand curve and also the real challenge to meet that by conventional means.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Okay, thank you so much. With Codexis, there’s several ways that a customer can utilize your actual ECO Synthesis™ platform. What are these ways and how are they appropriate in terms of the different scenarios?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Yeah, so we have what we call a toolbox of solutions that we can engage with customers. The first and simplest is very like our heritage business, which we call the ligation platform, where we will make an enzyme to stitch together what we refer to as shortmers, which are pieces of siRNA molecules. The reason to do this is the yield of small fragments is much better with phosphoramidite chemistry. There are fewer impurities, but also the ligation step itself helps with purification and can reduce the downstream costs. That has been a process of moving from chemical to what’s now called chemoenzymatic. We have multiple customer engagements around that, including one drug that is now moving into phase 3. What we’re offering there is a solution that plugs into the existing platform and makes it better.

We have the ability to go right at the other end, start off with an early phase compound, and build an enzymatic process to optimize the manufacture of that molecule. That’s where we have our first few customers engaged, where we’re demonstrating the feasibility of the platform and the scalability of the platform. We can sign them on early and grow as they go through development. The challenge there is signing up enough that we can thrive despite the inevitable attrition. There will be some of those agents, because not all of them will make it through development. Not all of the ones that get to commercial will be successful. We think if we can fill the pipeline wide enough in the early stages, we can do very well over the long term.

We’re offering people at one extreme ligation, at the other extreme end-to-end enzymatic synthesis, and every version of hybrid in between, depending on what’s optimal for their molecule.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: When you have these initial conversations, you’re learning what the potential customer is interested in building. From a high level, what evidence do you then have to show them about your capabilities?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Right. It’s different for each customer. It’s different for each offering. A few examples would be when we’re talking about the ligase. We can demonstrate the capabilities of our ligase. That’s great. We’ll show them the step, we’ll show them the improvement in cost and yield and all the rest of it. Quite often what they do is they wander off and test other people’s ligases, which are less exquisitely engineered. Usually after three months, they come back and say, yep, yours is better and sign on for the next stage. That is a supply agreement where we synthesize the amount of ligase they need and we supply it to them as a reagent to use in their process, as I say. In the enzymatic synthesis arena, what we’re doing is taking a fragment often that they’ve already made chemically, and they’ll say, okay, make this enzymatically.

We’ll do that, send it back to them. They will compare and contrast and say, okay, we like this, now make the whole molecule. It’s an iterative process. It’s about looking at the feasibility and the cost of standing up our technology as opposed to existing technology in a conventional CDMO. That process takes six to nine months or even a year to go through all those steps.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Okay. I know a big part of your effort to talk to partners has been related to presence at some pretty important industry conferences. Every time there’s a Tides conference, I could tell the enthusiasm from the entire team. It’s probably some of your favorite time of the year.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Yep.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Can you tell us about these events? Who are the people that go to these conferences and the types of decisions that get made by companies there?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Tides, for those that haven’t been, is short for Nucleotides. It’s a really very technical conference where all the people from around the world are coming to compare their technologies, everyone that’s in the field. It’s big innovator companies, the, yeah, Alnylams and Novartis of this world, all the way to CDMOs and then companies with new technology like Codexis really showing their wares, showing their capabilities. It’s very exciting because it’s a check-in on who we are and where we are. One of the reasons that I’ve been so excited is watching the progress of interest in the field. Two or three years ago, this was a small meeting, not particularly well attended, and we were in back rooms. The recent Tides U.S. in San Diego, our technology was a plenary presentation with standing room only. People were leaning in.

The number of customer contacts and leads to follow up from that has been quite remarkable. We’re always excited, and we use it as a forcing function to say, what do people want to see next? A couple of things that we were showing at recent Tides meetings, one of them was when we showed our ability to make Inclisiran, the Novartis drug, by all those different methods that I mentioned, from chemical segments and ligation, end-to-end enzymatic synthesis, enzymatic synthesis of some chunks and chemical, others ligate them together, all enzymatic chunks ligate them together. That showed the toolbox works. Then we showed in Tides U.S. the ability to control the chirality of the molecule. That really got some people thinking about, okay, for existing molecules that could be interesting, but also what about for new chemical entities? Now what people are asking us about are, brass tacks, scalability.

Show me you can scale. By and large in this arena, people are willing to extrapolate tenfold from what you can already do. We’ve been at the 10 gram scale, and people are saying, okay, I believe you can make 100 grams. Our intent is to place 100 grams on the table at the other Tides Europe meeting later this year. That will allow people to have clear visibility on what it takes to build a kilogram. At that point, you’re in the clinic. That’s the kind of levels people need. It’s really been using it to show, okay, here’s the next step, here’s the next step. The reaction we’ve had is people thought this was three to five years off. It’s now, right? They’re really having to commit now. If I can just talk about the cadence of our customer engagement, because this is dramatic.

We went from signing our first contract, which was a ligation contract in 2024. We signed our first ECO Synthesis™ contract in Q1 of this year. We signed two more contracts in Q2. We’re going to have four more in Q3. That is a pretty interesting mathematic progression, you know, one, two, four, and so on. What we’re looking at now with more than 40 ongoing conversations is being able to really start to choose the characteristics of companies we want to work with, right? I’m very focused on signing up those early phase assets that have a great chance of becoming massive drugs that we can supply and thrive on, right? If you’re assessing a biotech company, what do you look at? You look at the management team. Do they have credibility? You look at, do they have the ability to raise money? Is the drug likely to work?

Is the drug likely to work in a big indication, right? Can we make it, right? I dropped a name earlier that ticks all those boxes, right? It’s a great management team, funding, pointed to the big indication with a very credible, validated approach that if it works, will be absolutely massive. That’s the archetype for who we want to work with. If we can have, you know, five or six or ten CureVac-like companies signed up within the next year or so, it will be, I think, a compelling value creation story at that point.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Sounds like a lot of the work that I do when I give research recommendations.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: We read your work. Yeah.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Maybe just to take a step back, do you mind just reminding folks what you mean by signing contracts? I think it’s important, especially because no two of them are going to look identical either, right?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Yeah, some of them are very simple. Like when we’re signing a contract for a supply agreement around a ligase, it’s the price point per gram for the ligase, right? Built into that is the value it creates and all the rest of it. There is some scaling function, but it’s all pretty simple. When we’re talking about early stage signing up partners for the long term with the ECO Synthesis™ platform, it really has to be tailored to the needs of the customer. With big cash-rich pharmaceutical companies, the one thing we know they hate is paying royalties to tiny companies like us. It’s much more about building it into the cost per run and really a very sort of grounded consideration like that. With early stage companies, they often have a lot of great science and less cash.

Therefore, being more cost-effective in the early days, but actually sharing in the upside and even royalties on the back end, right? One of the reasons why it takes so long to get this finalized is people know that once they adopt the enzymatic process in development, it would be really hard to go back to chemical because the impurity profile is so much better with the enzymatic process. We don’t have the side chain reactions that you get with chemical processes, so we can make very tight specifications. That’s terrific, but it means that you really are talking about a long-term commitment.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Okay. I know you’re not disclosing all of these companies and contracts, but I know that because you get to be picky and choosy here, is it fair to say that these are the companies that have deep expertise in the space and are kind of ones you would think of?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Yeah, I think that that’s absolutely fair. It’s also sometimes companies that are trying to accelerate their presence into the arena. Some that have been around a long time have already sort of worked out the next wave. If you were to look at the first few drugs to hit the market that are going to be big, all public domain knowledge, Inclisiran I think was $760 million of revenue last year. Novartis has done a great job of identifying conventional facilities to supply that market. Alnylam with Amvotra, they have a route to manufacturing that. They’ve set that up. We’re talking about the next wave where, if the big leaders, the bad news is they have a way for us is they already know how to supply their drug. The good news for us is by doing that, they’ve locked up all the current supply, right?

It’s the new ones coming with aspirations to be big that need a way of scaling. One of the real attractions of our platform is how fast it is to set up because the hard work is done by the enzymes. It runs in water. You don’t need all that enormous infrastructure around solvent handling. It’s much simpler in terms of the sheer technical infrastructure you need. We believe it took Agilent about four years to set up their big plant in Colorado. The time to set up an equivalent ECO plant will be about half that and about a third the cost. If you’re looking at holistically supplying your drug into the future, we think that the ECO proposition is a very attractive one.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Okay, you mentioned you’re looking for partners for the long term. Help us to understand from a revenue-generating perspective how that business or part of it can grow as you work with these companies over the long term.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: In the early stages, we need to, you know, be made whole and get paid and keep the lights on and all that kind of stuff. It’s really about building the long-term value. It all gets very simple when they need a metric ton of siRNA and we can, you know, charge them appropriately, you know, in competitive prices to what they would have been paying for the chemical alternative that isn’t available to them. In the early stages, it’s about more modest economics around developing the process, demonstrating feasibility, then milestones as they get through each stage of development. Of course, drug supply agreements, but the drug supply part of it only gets interesting when you get to big quantities, right? Think of it as much more of a development partnership set of economics out of the gate.

A couple of years down the line, as they start to move through the stages of clinical development, then it really ramps up and becomes very compelling as a story. What we’re having to do, even with our investor base, is move from a story they’re very used to, which is we make biocatalysts and we supply them at huge quantities and there’s a steady revenue, to we are locking in a future revenue stream, which is absolutely compelling in terms of the value creation it has. It takes time for these drugs to move through development and being very realistic. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to switch an existing marketed asset from chemical to enzymatic until enzymatic has been in the clinic multiple times and, you know, even associated with commercial products. We have to get here to get there, right?

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: In terms of how you’re going to disclose this in the future, will you say things like we have X number of this stage programs just so we can kind of keep up with that growth as it happens?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: I think we will be saying that. I think we’ll also be saying, you know, we’re at capacity or we’re approaching capacity.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Sure.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: I think it’s helpful for you to know the sort of cadence of the number of customers we’re talking to, how successful we’re being in converting them. Currently, our success rate in keeping them once they’re engaged with us is very good. It’s that kind of thing. I don’t want to get into the world of people tracking individual contracts in the short term.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: You also mentioned, you know, sometimes some potential customer conversations, they take a look at what you do, they then go to chemical, and then they end up coming back, right, as well?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Yeah, that absolutely happens. Or they go to alternate enzymatic solutions and come back, right?

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Sure.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: We’re happy to see them when they do because that’s validating to our technology. One of the questions that we’re asking ourselves internally is the difference between notional value and realizable value and the most efficient way to get there, right? This is a very large opportunity in terms of the total addressable market. It’s a question about how much we do ourselves and how much we partner through what we’ve called scaling partners. We have a number of very advanced conversations with scaling partners. There’s a consideration, which is we are very aware that we need to guard our technology as we move forward. We do not want to distribute it promiscuously too early. We want to have a happy balance between having enough partners that we can scale and address the market versus holding things really close.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: On the point of guarding technology, how do you go about actually protecting from a patent and know-how technology stuff?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Yeah, I mean, this is something that has changed even in my tenure as CEO of Codexis. The traditional thing that Codexis did was filing IP around enzymes and enzymatic sequences, and you maybe put a hundred structures around the one that you’re actually claiming. That has gone from being a sort of ring fence around your asset to a training set for artificial intelligence. AI is good enough now that it can use those kinds of structure activity relationships that are in IP, reverse engineer something with very low sequence homology that has the same function. We are looking at it that patenting individual enzymes is a dying opportunity. It’s a temporary thing. If we make you a beautiful ligase and you want to buy it from us, we’re delighted to do that and we’ll move on to the next one. These are temporary assets.

The thing we’ve got here is a suite of enzymes with an incredibly well-defined and carefully built process. It’s a lot of know-how, it’s a lot of trade secrets, and it’s a cascade of enzymes that we are, you know, a little bit cagey about saying exactly what they are and exactly how it works. This is why the more we can do behind the curtain for as long as possible, while we get everyone locked up, the better off we are in the long term. You know, AI is scary in both directions.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Yeah, I hear you. Every day I’m wondering if they’re going to start writing research reports on that. Thinking ahead, you’ve given us a little bit of context about the cadence of some contracts, partnerships, et cetera. Are there any other near-term technical advancements that we should be looking out for at conferences? I know every Tides you have something new out of the gate and people are climbing over each other to get a look at it.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: This Tides is all about scale, and really demonstrating the very clear path to manufacture of GMP drug at quantities needed for clinical trials. We have an internal milestone we’ve talked about a little bit, which is the commissioning of our own GMP facility.

That’ll be important because being able to show customers, you know, this is where we will make your drug for the next few years. They can visualize it rather than say, okay, we can do this, we can set it up in a partner, whatever. That’s really important. There are some demonstrations of the capability of our technology to go beyond siRNA to some of the adjacent modalities. There is the demonstration of making a completely chirally controlled molecule at both ends associated with the differential biological activity of each of those constructs. We think that will be pretty ground changing for the field because, you know, having chiral control allows you to match what’s already out there.

It also allows you to make things that cannot be made chemically that will be more potent, could be safer, could have real clinical advantages, and be sort of much harder to genericize. We’re super excited about that in the long term.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Okay. To close, may I ask what your current financial situation is? I’ll open the floor to you. Anything else our audience should take away today?

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Currently, I think the last quarter we published just over $60 million in cash. We have the resources to stand up our GMP facility and go through the next stages. What I’d like people to be focused on is building that pipeline of future value. I think it’s about the company that we keep and the organizations we become associated with. Look at the change in the way people are talking about the technology. A company I haven’t mentioned, Hongjin, did a presentation at Tides where they talked about Generation One, which was chemical synthesis. Generation Two is chemoenzymatic. Generation Three is fully enzymatic, and that is the only way to address the demand when it gets above about five or ten metric tons. That’s where we believe we are firmly in the lead. That’s us.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: Thank you so much, Stephen. Really appreciate your time.

Stephen Dilly, CEO, Codexis: Thank you.

Kristen Klaska, Host, Kantar: We’re rooting for you.

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