Zymeworks at Goldman Sachs Healthcare: Strategic Partnerships and Innovations

On Wednesday, 11 June 2025, Zymeworks Inc. (NASDAQ:ZYME) presented at the Goldman Sachs 46th Annual Global Healthcare Conference 2025. The company highlighted its strategic focus on partnerships and innovation, discussing both the opportunities and challenges ahead. CEO Ken Galbraith emphasized Zymeworks’ royalty-driven model and its robust R&D pipeline, aiming to generate shareholder value while navigating the complexities of the biotech landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Zymeworks is leveraging partnerships with BeiGene and Jazz Pharmaceuticals to commercialize Zanadatumab, a HER2-targeted therapy approved for biliary tract cancer.
• The company’s RIZEN GA-one Phase III study in gastric esophageal adenocarcinoma is expected to yield results later this year.
• Zymeworks is expanding its innovative pipeline with a focus on solid tumors and autoimmune diseases, including a bispecific antibody for COPD.
• Financially, Zymeworks expects revenue from milestones and royalties, with a cash runway extending to the second half of 2027.
• The company is advancing multiple programs into clinical studies, including ADCs and T-cell engagers, with an emphasis on differentiation and clinical response.

Financial Results

• Revenue Model: Zymeworks is focusing on a royalty-based revenue model, choosing not to commercialize its own innovations initially.
• Equity Financing: The company has not engaged in equity financing since January 2022.
• Cash Runway: Zymeworks has guided its cash runway to extend into the second half of 2027.
• Milestones and Royalties: Expected revenue streams include milestones and royalties from partnerships with Zahira, JNJ, and BeiGene.

Operational Updates

• Zanadatumab (Zahira): Approved by the FDA for second-line biliary tract cancer. The Phase III RIZEN GA-one study in gastric esophageal adenocarcinoma is anticipated to report results in the latter half of the year.
• Partnerships: Collaborations with BeiGene in Asia Pacific and Jazz Pharmaceuticals globally for commercialization.
• Pipeline Expansion: Focus on solid tumors with three antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and T-cell engagers. Recent clinical entries include a folate receptor alpha ADC and a mesothelin bispecific T-cell engager.
• Autoimmune Program: A bispecific antibody targeting IL-4R alpha and IL-33 for COPD is expected to enter clinical studies next year.

Future Outlook

• Zanadatumab Expansion: Potential for broader application in the HER2 space through additional clinical studies.
• Pipeline Development: Clinical data from the five by five pipeline will guide attrition and partnering opportunities.
• New Clinical Studies: The DLL3-targeted tri-specific T-cell engager and the Fly6E targeted ADC are set to progress, with the latter seeking a partnership for advancement.
• Capital Strategy: Focus on resource prioritization, partnering, and non-dilutive financing to enhance shareholder value.

Q&A Highlights

• Zanadatumab Data: Phase 2 study results showed a median overall survival of 36.5 months in gastric esophageal adenocarcinoma.
• Economics of Zahira: Profit-sharing arrangements with Jazz and BeiGene are structured around milestones and royalties.
• Program Differentiation: Discussed the strategic and competitive differentiation of programs 190 and 171 in their respective landscapes.
• Safety and Efficacy: The safety profile of the DLL3-targeted tri-specific T-cell engager was elaborated, emphasizing minimal off-tumor activation.

In conclusion, Zymeworks’ presentation at the Goldman Sachs conference underscores its commitment to strategic partnerships and innovation. For a detailed account, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs 46th Annual Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for being here. My name is Laura Khan. I’m a Vice President in our Healthcare Investment Banking Group. And I’m joined today by Ken Galbraith, CEO of ZymWorks.

Ken, thanks so much for being here. Let’s go ahead and dive right in. It’s of course been an exciting year at ZymWorks. A ton of progress with BTC approval in November for Zahira, and significant progress made on continuing to advance the pipeline. Certainly a lot going on.

Maybe could you start by giving us an overview of the strategy overall, key focus areas for Zyme, especially as you think about having the commercial stage asset that’s partnered out, and then this earlier stage pipeline behind it?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having us here again this year. Not having a monsoon in the middle of a conference. That’s great. Yeah, Zymax started life as a protein engineering company, really focused around the thesis that multifunctional therapeutics, which means designing more than one mechanism of action into a single biologic structure might be able to deliver some clinical responses you couldn’t see with more traditional antibodies or small molecules.

And so that led us to focus on bispecific antibodies and ADCs, bispecific ADCs, now trispecific antibodies, entirely in solid tumors, but now a little bit more breadth into looking at our bispecific structures and autoimmune, our agent outside of that next year going to clinic for COPD and also in hematological tumors. So, but we really believe that by multiple mechanisms of action being designed in a single biologic structure might unleash some additional mechanisms which drive clinical responses you can’t see with other agents. And we started our experiment with that by designing a bi specific or bi per topic HER2 antibody called danadatumab. That’s the agent we made. It’s the product we put in clinical studies.

And of course right now we’re on 100% track record because that agent was approved last year by FDA for second line biliary tract cancer. So really exciting for us to see a validation of what we thought scientifically that you would see different responses in these patient populations that you couldn’t see because of the nature of the way we designed and engineered multi functional therapeutics. And so the combination of what we designed with zanadatumab provides clinical responses in HER2 expressing patient populations, at least what we’ve proven in biliary tract cancer and what we hope to prove in gastric esophageal adenocarcinoma with our Phase III reading out this year that you just hadn’t seen before. And so we’re so delighted that our product that went into clinical studies was approved. We definitely took a different approach to the commercialization of that agent.

So we decided we would find partners to commercialize that as opposed to continue to develop the business to commercialize our own agents. So we brought in Beijing as an Asia Pacific partner a number of years ago, and in 2022 brought in Jazz to commercialize in the rest of the world. So we don’t have a commercial presence with Sanadatumab now that’s approved. But with the structure of the arrangement we have through milestones and royalties, we’ve been able to keep a good share of success for our shareholders from that innovation without the risk and cost of capital of the commercialization approach. And we still think that’s a really valid business model for biotech.

And we’re quite excited obviously to see the results of our phase three study reading out this year. The RIZEN GA-one study which could be extremely important for patients, could be practice changing for this group of patients with gastric esophageal adenocarcinoma that’s HER2 overexpressing. As well as financially important for both Beijing and Jazz, our commercial partners as well as ourselves and our own shareholders. And with that we also have a really innovative R and D portfolio behind that of our own agents which are all unpartnered at this point. Trying to find a way to keep our 100% track record alive if that’s possible.

Our business of only putting products into clinical studies which really have a differentiated response and improving that in the clinic and then trying to get that to patients as quickly as we can again.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Yeah. We’d love to see the 100% success rate going Maybe just double clicking on Zahira for a minute. Recently, Jazz presented long term outcomes from the phase two study of Danny plus chemo in line GEA at ASCO. That looked very impressive with a median OS of thirty six and a half months, I believe. Very exciting.

Could you talk about that data and how you think about it with the upcoming phase three Horizon study? And maybe touch on kind of the bar for success with PFS and OS?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, mean, it’s a couple of years ago now. But I remember sitting in the offices of Zymorx in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty two, looking into the readout of our registration study in second line biliary tract cancer, where there wasn’t a HER2 indicated medicine for patients. And that was the time that it really hit us that we just saw clinical evidence of a completely different response from zanadatumab than any other HER2 agent that had been utilized before. And that’s the time we saw that this might be something that might be more promising than maybe we contemplated at that time. And since that data announcement, we’ve continued to report additional data sets in multiple tumor indications, either as monotherapy or in combination with other agents with enadatumab.

And every time we do, we get even more and more confidence about this differentiated clinical response. That’s different than the standards of care that you might have seen in the HER2 space for some time period or even things that are developing now. And at ASCO we saw this again with our longer term follow-up in biliary tract cancer where we just see that data getting better and better. We just see extended survival time. We see amazing quality of life for patients.

We see it as a tolerable therapy that patients can continue on with to maintain a response. And we have obviously a significant Phase III clinical trial readout coming up in the second half of this year in the GA population, which is the largest opportunity I think in the HER2 space beyond metastatic breast cancer. And we just have such confidence from the continued disclosure of our data sets. We’re very optimistic about what that clinical readout might mean for patients. We also think it’s going to be significant for our partners Jazz and Beijing and for ourselves.

And I hope it’s a really positive catalyst for the sector in what can occur when you do really innovative and scientific work with emerging tools and develop those in the right way to get them to patients. I think that would just be validation of everything that’s good in biotech. And it’s going to be financially important for our company, but it’s not the end of what we’re doing. I think there’s additional clinical studies in Zahira that are ongoing, which might find even a broader presence in the HER2 space. And behind that we’re still working on our own innovative portfolio, which has now reached clinical stage to see if we can do that again with different types of approaches of multifunctional therapeutics.

And at the same time, we had a great disclosure at ASCO by one of our early stage partners, Johnson and Johnson, J and J Innovative Medicines, as I’ll call them, who put out the phase one clinical data on their KLK2 CD3 T cell engager in prostate cancer. Very novel target. And that’s something that we designed with them using our asymmetric platform of making bispecific antibodies. And that data was extremely impressive. And I know that they’ve indicated publicly they’re going to move quickly forward into multiple registration studies with that.

And that’s another validation of our approach of how we think about engineering multifunctional therapeutics. But also financially rewarding for us because of our involvement with it. We have a strong financial stake in the success of that program. So we’re really excited that might give us another approved product eventually that came from our Azimetric platform.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: And you touched on this briefly, but maybe could you talk a little bit more about kind of economics to Zymeworks with the upcoming readouts and potential approval in GEA, and maybe other indications down the road, given the partnerships?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, think our approach that we took was that I think we were better positioned to have someone else try to commercialize enadatumab as our agent. So we had Beijing already as a partner in Asia Pacific, and we brought on Jazz as a partner in 2022. We felt maybe that was the right step, but we wanted to make sure that we were compensated appropriately for the innovation that we made. And so we structured arrangements with both Jazz and Beijing, which let them do the great commercial work that they’re able to do. But ensure that we shared in the success of zanadatumab in commercial markets.

And I think we’ve been able to craft an arrangement through payments we’ve already received, but also future milestones and royalties, which should provide a pretty healthy projected future cash flow for us. And when you add to something like KOK2C3 T cell engager by J and J, which also will provide a stream of milestones and royalties, We start to think that a part of the company then, because we’re not commercializing our own innovations to start with, looks more like a royalty company inside ZYME. And so we’re gonna try to embrace that because I think that might be a really good way to create value for shareholders without having to make an evolution to commercialize our own products at some point and all that goes with that. So we think that financial model we’ve generated for Zahira and potentially other agents actually is not a bad model for generating shareholder returns. Especially shareholder returns when you think about them on a per share basis, which is usually a problem our sector.

So really excited about what that might bring to us. Obviously the GEA readout in the second half of this year can provide a pretty good source of revenue potential for Beijing and Jazz and obviously our share of that. So really excited about that near term and really excited about the other clinical studies that are currently underway by Jazz and Beijing to continue to broaden the potential of Zahira in a way that’s probably beyond what we would have been able to do as a biotech company if we had maintained that ourselves.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Yeah, maybe switching gears a little bit to the five by five pipeline. It’s been a lot of innovation, very exciting to see the continued advancement there. Two programs entered the clinic this past year, 190 with the folate receptor alpha ADC, and then 171, which is the mesothelin bispecific T cell engager, both entering increasingly crowded spaces in terms of competitive landscape. Could you maybe start by discussing the design and strategy for both, and then also kind of touch on the differentiation?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, back in 2022, we decided we would put this five by five strategy in place. And again, we do have a strong belief that biotech should build a broad portfolio around their scientific platforms. And so we decided to do that with five different agents, three antibody drug conjugates, which we thought were the next generation of antibody conjugates. And then beyond that, our T cell engager approach, which has now gone from bispecific to trispecific. So we just believe this broad R and D portfolio and trying to invest across that portfolio is the right approach.

And as we move these into clinical studies, I think clinical data will tell us where there should be attrition in our pipeline. It will also give us some partnering opportunities created by positive clinical data catalysts. But trying to think about managing a portfolio from our scientific platform as opposed to focused on an individual asset. And so we started that process back at the end of twenty twenty two. And so far we’ve moved two of those programs into clinical studies, are ongoing now.

A one is on its way very quickly. And then we have two more behind that. And so I think it just allowed us to build some diversity in the portfolio because we are developing antibody conjugates and T cell engagers at the same time. We’ve got some diversity of patient populations in that portfolio as well. And so we just like what the value of that portfolio could be in the future where it may transition from being unpartnered, where it’s all of our capital right now, to being a mix of partnered and unpartnered programs where we’re then utilizing other people’s capital and looking at freezing our investment in things and looking at it as more of a return analysis the way we did with Sahira.

And beyond that, we’ve already started to think about where we go next. And in addition to the 5x5 solid tumor program, we did also develop our autoimmune asset, which is a bispecific against IL-four receptor, IL-thirty three together in COPD, which we think is really interesting. Same technology platform, same scientific premise, same great protein engineering skills, just a different patient population that happens to be outside of oncology. So we managed to move six things forward Were we only intended with five? And that’s just because of the productivity that we had and the ability to reach into our preclinical portfolio and find quality products to move forward.

And behind that, we’ve been able to develop a really great productive R and D group who has a pretty good substrate of additional preclinical programs underneath that with more diversity, more novelty, more breadth outside solid tumors. And so really excited to think about those as well. And we did start to present some of those at AACR earlier this year. But most of the focus of the company is in continuing to move forward and develop the five by five plus one as we call it now. And just understand what, how we can drive those to clinical data catalysts, which would then tell us these should still continue to be worked on, or there should be attrition in the portfolio.

And if we’re going to continue to work on it, to what extent do we do that in more of a partnered model than an unencumbered model, which is what we’re working on right today?

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Yeah. You mentioned IND submission that’s coming for two fifty one later this year. Could you speak to maybe the preclinical data that influenced you to prioritize two fifty one, which the Glypican three targeted ADC, over two twenty, which was the NaPi2b ADC? And then also, how do you envision its role in treating HCC?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, so I think the original context we had was that we wanted build our own kind of mini portfolio of ADCs. In this case it was three. And using the same payload, the same linker strategy, the same thought around that as certain antibody characteristics would be really important in ABC construct. So this internalization and tumor penetration characteristics that we optimize for and build our own little portfolio. And then we did provide some diversity in that between the type of DAR we would use, between how validated the target was, how crowded the space was.

For our ADC at end of the clinic, ZW-one hundred ninety one was a folate receptor alpha ADC, which had obviously been validated with the approval of MERV, as well as others who were in the space. And then behind that we had ZW251, which is a little bit more novel as a GPC3 targeted ADC. I think GPC3 is a well validated target in HCC, maybe more from radioligand standpoint or CAR T or antibody space. But we thought that we had enough protein engineering and characteristics to build an ADC to be utilized in regimens for HCC, which is not currently available for that patient population. And with the same thought that if we can make these ADCs be extremely tolerable, drive good single agent activity, we could open up the possibility for combinations to move to earlier line settings and maybe really drive a substantial benefit for patients over and above standard of care.

So I think GPC3 is well validated biology. I think our ADC approach fits well with the patient population we’re trying to treat in HCC. And we would hope as we get clinical experience with this agent, we’d find ourselves in a position with a tolerable enough ADC to combine with A plus B immunotherapy plus VEGF. So we think that’s a really interesting construct. And of course it’s not crowded with lots of other people trying to do this.

We think our particular approach to designing ADCs might allow us to fit into this patient population where there aren’t ADCs used in HCC today. So in our ADC portfolio and overall portfolio, different levels of novelty and diversity, different levels of trying to be different where there are others. And in some cases trying to be on our own, trying to really move the needle scientifically on an approach that maybe hasn’t been tried or accomplished successfully before. When you do that in an overall portfolio approach, can take some variety like that in the portfolio, which is what we’ve certainly done with both ADCs and our T cell engagers.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Yeah, and I think you touched on this briefly, but you recently presented two zero nine data at AACR, which is the DLL3 targeted tri specific T cell engager, which has the integrated CD28 co stimulation. Could you elaborate on how the cyst binding of CD28 contributes to the safety profile and the off tumor minimizing off tumor activation?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, I think we’ve been spending the last number of years trying to, again, do what others have been trying to do. Try to find a way to get more efficiency out of T cell engagement process, but also more durability where we can. And those are the two things that we thought we could improve upon. I think for many, was trying to find a way to combine a CD3 T cell engager with another bispecific. So a number of our peers have been trying to find a way to combine two different bispecific antibodies together in a patient population and have them be able to be tolerable together.

We being protein engineers, think multi functionality, we thought if we could make a tri specific and just use three arms of an antibody to build another capability or mechanism in with the CD3 that might be a preferred way to do that. So we came up with this idea of building in a co stimulatory factor, in this case CD28, into what would look like a normal bispecific T cell engager. In this case, the one going in clinic is DLL3. And what we found is the ability to engineer it in certain constructs, which allows this to not be an independent signal on its own, but something that’s only activated when CD3 is activated, allows you to potentially get more efficiency out of the CD3 process and also more durability so these T cells won’t get so tired so quickly. We felt building that into a single molecule gave us much more control over how those three arms work together in a way that’s different than combining a CD3 bispecific with a CD28 bispecific in a patient population, which some have done.

So our preclinical data suggests that that’s a good approach. And so we’re putting our DLL3 try TCE into clinical studies next year. To hopefully clinically see the types of responses that we’re encouraged by from our preclinical data. And so I think if we’re able to solve this, it’s pretty, it’s been a tough engineering challenge for others who have tried this in a tri specific structure. We hope we got the geometry and the different elements right to work together.

Our preclinical data on tolerability and activity tells us we’re on the right track. So really excited to put this in clinical studies and see if that is a way to get more out of a T cell engager by combining a arm or the co stimulatory factor into what looks like a traditional bispecific. That’s different than what others are trying to do. That’s a part of our business. Hopefully this ends up having differentiated responses from doing this as opposed to a combination.

Hopefully it gives you an improvement over a traditional T cell engager and obviously Tarlatumab is a DL3 targeted T cell engager, which is now approved. So if we can find a way to get more efficiency and durability to improve upon that bispecific structure. So really excited about the science we’ve worked on for a few years to put us in this position and really excited with the all three being the of what might be several try specific approaches to do this with a co stimulatory factor, two twenty eight built into the molecule. And interested to see what that mechanism provides us in clinical response.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Yeah, great. And then recently I think you announced three twenty seven, which is the Fly6E targeted ADC with, I believe, a novel payload. Could you talk a little bit about the insights that you’ve gained from the NHP models on its therapeutic window and potential for a clinical translation?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, really interesting. Mean we had a hard time picking our little mini ADC portfolio, which we ended up with folate receptor alpha, NaPi2b, and GPC3 as the three targets that we wanted to build ADCs against and move into clinical studies. And we had some others that we thought were interesting. LI6E was one of them. So it didn’t make it into the three.

But as usual, our scientists continued to work on it and progress. There was a prior ADC with an LI6E antibody, which was put in the clinic by Genentech. It was okay. It just didn’t meet their standard to go forward. And again, I don’t think the payload linker strategy of that was correct.

We decided we would try and optimize a different Y6E antibody that maybe had characteristics that would make it a better ADC and then pair it with our topo payload and our linker strategy. Very difficult to optimize an antibody for LI6E, which I think is why you don’t see a lot of them. We were able to overcome that with our protein engineering experience inside the company, come up with a really interesting antibody, which when paired with our STILL five nineteen payload and synlinker strategy looks pretty interesting in a broad set of potential tumor indications. So we talked about that at AACR for a little while. For us, we probably need some help from a partner to move that one forward into clinical studies.

It’s really interesting. But again, have to be careful about taking on too much from a capital perspective, too much from a time perspective and focus. So we’re really interested in seeing if that can be a ADC that we can add from any ADC portfolio. But rather than doing that on our own with our own capital, we probably need someone to help us move and progress that one forward. Again, very unique.

We have some validation of the biology from the prior program from Genentech, which makes us excited about trying it. It’s very difficult to design a live 60 ADC. So there might be some uniqueness for us, at least for some time period in this busy crowded marketplace. And really excited about the ability to even broaden the patient population beyond what we see with our three ADCs, which are currently in our portfolio. So just stay tuned for that one to see how we can progress that.

It’s pretty interesting to be able to add to the portfolio beyond what we talked about a number of years ago as buildings.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Maybe last question on pipeline. So it’s been exciting to see the expansion beyond oncology, as you mentioned, with 1528, which is the dual cytokine bispecific targeting IL 4R alpha and IL33. Can you talk a little bit about how this bispecific approach kind of compares to existing therapies in modulating both type two and non type two inflammation in COPD?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, I think we’ve obviously used our asymmetric platform to design multi civic antibody approaches, both for ourselves and others. Denodatumumab was done that way. It’s approved now. KLK2CD3 was done that way. We thought, what if we can find a way to get a multifunctional therapeutic for COPD that combines the power of DUPIXENT in one arm, is now the biologic approved for COPD, and also combines another target which might be nice to pair with that.

In this case, we picked IL-thirty three just because there’s good validation I think from clinical studies which have been conducted. And we think the combination of those two could be pretty interesting in a bispecific format and might address some of the issues of the segmentation of the COPD clinical population, which has been segmented by current smokers, former smokers, type two inflammation, mixed inflammation. And of course, Dupi addresses a part of that marketplace. IL-thirty three might address a different part of that marketplace in a bi specific structure where you combine both of those mechanisms in a single biologic might be able to address a broader market. And there might be some complementarism between IL-thirty three and IL-four receptor together.

And hopefully we see what we saw with the ANI, which is the mechanism becomes quite different than looking at the combination of the two antibodies separately. And that’s what our preclinical data shows. So we’re interested to see if in clinical studies in that population, maybe we can treat a broader population with one single biologic, which gets you both those mechanisms. Might get you a little bit more because of the bispecific nature of how those two will work together in the construction. So really interested in that.

And in COPD, we’ve got the biologic with Dupixent, which is great. I think there are other routes we can take to try to improve the standard of care for COPD patients, which is still in desperate need of more innovative therapies. And so we’re really excited about putting our bispecific approach in autoimmune into clinical studies next year. That COPD population won’t be the last one that we do that way. We do believe this multifunctional approach is better than trying to think about combining two biologics separately in that patient population.

I think this will hopefully show that we can accomplish these different clinical responses where it can’t be. And broaden out the patient population might make it easier for understanding how you might treat these patients by not having to segment them as much because of the nature of the target that you’re pursuing.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: You mentioned this earlier, and you’ve talked in the past about having a finite amount of clinical development capacity internally with all of these INDs that you’ve already submitted and are planning to do in the next year. And you mentioned also, of course, the LIES exceed potentially partnering that out. How do you think about prioritizing resources across all of these programs?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, absolutely. I think having been in this business a long time, innovation doesn’t matter unless you can create value for shareholders on a per share basis. And so you need to pay it to that. So it’s great to do world leading research. It’s great to have your molecule which goes in the clinic be approved.

That’s fantastic. But we need to find a way to make a business out of this that rewards our investors on a per share basis from innovation we make. And the only way you can do that is by having extremely high scientific quality standards, having a pretty big substrate to pick agents from, making sure you give yourself a broad chance but not lose too much focus. Make sure your capital can be reallocated and reorganized, that your people can be reorganized around the agents which then give you the clinical responses which seem to justify continued investment. So we love all five agents of solid tumors that were in the clinic or moving to the clinic.

We really like the bispecific approach we have in COPD. And all those are moving forward. But at some point we will have to have partnering attrition, be able to reallocate based on different priorities so that we can actually progress the innovative parts of the company. But at the same time, make sure we can build an appropriate investment return for our shareholders for that on a per share basis. So it’s not surprising we talk about that.

We haven’t done an equity financing the company since January 2022. So we’ve been able to run most of the company under capital so far based off the partnership with Zahira and other income that comes in from our other programs that we have partnerships for. And in the future, can still continue to do that through more of a partnership model than relying too much on equity. So we’re a lot of value in Zahira, other agents, this unpartnered portfolio, but making sure we build that value on an innovation per share basis the way we think about it. That’s an important element of biotech that I think gets overlooked.

Gets overlooked more when capital markets are easy. People pay attention more when capital markets are more difficult as they are today. We’ve always taken that approach at this company since 2022 at least. And I think we’ll find a way forward to move interesting products forward in clinical development, move interesting science into clinical development, and be able to do that with the right capital strategy, capital location, partnership input. And build what hopefully is a really great company with multiple products that are helping patients, but can also be seen as financially successful for rewarding our investors who helped us along the way with returns on a per share basis that compensate them for the risk capital they provided.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: And maybe on that point, you’ve guided to, I think, the second half of twenty twenty seven in terms of cash runway. I think that includes maybe some certain milestone payments. Where does that take you with respect to the pipeline? How do you think about that?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: I think right now it takes us far enough. I think people focus a little bit too much on this cash runway. And our business is all about optionality. So I have what I think is a really high quality, unencumbered, wholly owned pipeline, which gives me optionality over how I construct that with potential partner involvement and bring more capital into the business. And obviously with Sahira, it obviously looks like it could be a more promising product overall from a peak sales potential than maybe we even contemplated when we went into our clinical study with that agent.

And then sometimes along comes something like the KLK2 CD3 T cell engager from JNJ Innovative Medicines which could provide additional financial interest to us. So I think from our perspective, I think we have the right R and D strategy. I think we have the right capital strategy behind it. I think we can find a way to have a share of our success from the commercializations they hear in other medicines at the same time as being an innovative R and D company and still ensure that we can provide some returns for shareholders at the end of the day on a per share basis. And I think biotechs need to make sure that they can see that business or investment model underlying the R and D strategy that we have that we’re always so excited about in biotech companies like Zymorx.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Maybe with our last couple of minutes here, I’d love to touch on your azimetric and effect platforms. Maybe could you talk about the challenges associated with developing bispecific and trispecifics? You’ve sort of touched on this already, but particularly kind of in terms of manufacturability and then the clinical translation and then the advantages that your platforms have over traditional antibody engineering approaches?

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Yeah, started life as a computational platform company. So we were using AI before we called it AI, and we still do. It’s just a part of what we do every day. We don’t talk a lot about it, but these computational methods we think are really important. And on that we’ve layered kind of asymmetric, which provides us an amazing platform to test all sorts of things in a biologic structure.

So we’re able to go from something that looks like a basic antibody to something that looks like multi specific, whether it’s bispecific or tri specific, and still seems to operate like it is a monospivac antibody. And so that all these issues around manufacturability and immunogenicity, etcetera, tend to be things we don’t worry as much about. But what’s really important is us being able to test all sorts of different formats, whether it’s geometry of how we align the different arms of the antibody, valency, relative affinities, all sorts of other things, and do it in a way that I wouldn’t say it’s high throughput, but allows us to test a pretty large amount of geometries computationally to get a direction. How we found ZANI as the perfect structure, how we found the KLK2 CD3 is the perfect structure among the bunch. It’s how we designed all the molecules we put in the clinic, including the bispecific antibody for COPD.

So we’re hoping that those capabilities we’ve honed over many years with the same team is going to be able to create a range of approaches which can go into clinical studies and hopefully come out the other as approved agents. Not sure we can keep 100% record in the company, but I think we’re going to do our best.

Laura Khan, Vice President, Healthcare Investment Banking Group: Well, it’s been exciting to see. I think that’s all the time we have. Thank you so much for the discussion today.

Ken Galbraith, CEO, ZymWorks: Oh, thank you very much for having us here. I appreciate it.

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