Mark Emalfarb
Analyst · NOBLE Capital
Thank you, Ping. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining our third quarter conference call. I hope that you and your family are safe and healthy and are staying out of harm's way. This has been and continues to be a very exciting year for Dyadic. And Q3 has produced results and has gotten us closer to meeting our collective scientific and business objectives.
We continued to advance our proprietary C1 gene expression platform into a safe and efficient expression system with improved properties, impressive scientific results. Our business development pipeline continues to grow with additional interest from both new and previously engaged collaborators, which we believe will accelerate the adoption and use of our C1 gene expression platform toward the goal of commercialization.
In addition to our COVID-19 initiatives, we signed 6 new and expanded collaborations with human and animal health companies. Additionally, we are expanding our presence in the Asia Pacific region with the signing of a research collaboration agreement with Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine, the largest pharmaceutical company in China by market capitalization and our previously announced nonexclusive research collaboration with WuXi Biologics, a leading global CDMO.
The agreement with Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine highlights C1's potential value proposition to address demand for more efficient biomanufacturing processes of biologic drugs and vaccines.
In October, Dyadic entered into a nonexclusive technology agreement with Epygen Biotech of India, who after obtaining required funding, expects to produce cGMP clinical trial material at their facility and conduct trials in India using Dyadic's C1 expressed RBD antigen of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. This agreement demonstrates how potential collaborators globally can develop and manufacture vaccines and drugs on a regional basis that are affordable, safe and effective.
With respect to our COVID-19 programs, we are currently working with 9 groups, including the Israel Institute for Biological Research, IIBR; the European ZAPI scientists; scientists from Oxford University, among others. And we anticipate that up to 10 animal trials will be completed by or shortly after year-end. This is in addition to the Frederick National Laboratory project that we announced in June, which is ongoing and showing encouraging expression data.
Importantly, there will be trials with mice, hamsters and H2 transgenic mice, including challenge studies. We anticipate additional animal data to be generated to evaluate the best path forward for the potential clinical trial in humans.
Interim results from a recent additional mice study further supports the C1 expressed SARS-CoV-2 RBD. In addition to generating excellent immunogenicity responses with very high titers and neutralizing antibodies against the COVID-19 virus, it also has the potential to stimulate a memory cellular immune response inducing human cells with a SARS-CoV-2 virus. We are in discussions with certain parties and have provided samples to those who have expressed additional interest in evaluating C1 to express SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in antibodies and for potential use for C1 expressed protein for diagnostic applications.
As we previously mentioned, we have signed fully funded agreements with all 4 leading animal health companies as well as a fifth global animal health company to evaluate C1. The results from certain of our animal health programs have been very promising and therefore, we anticipate in 2021, one or more of the analog products we are working on will go into animal studies. And if successful, it will move towards commercialization. ZAPI has reported that they will continue to work on antigens for both the Schmallenberg, SBV, and Rift Valley Fever, RVFV viruses. ZAPI reported that they will conduct additional challenge studies in animals, which is expected to start before the end of the year with expected readouts in 2021.
On the human health side, we signed 4 new and expanded collaborations with global pharmaceutical companies during the quarter. In some of these cases, we have moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage, and our collaborators have identified specific proteins for which they believe our C1 technology could be very beneficial to their commercialization efforts. In addition to entering into 2 fully human health collaborations today with top-tier global pharmaceutical companies, we are in various stages of discussions with other global pharmaceutical companies that we anticipate will lead to additional fully funded research collaborations and/or potential funded research agreements with negotiated license terms.
The company continues to make progress in terms of stability and productivity in its glycoengineering and nonglycoengineering of its C1 cell lines to broaden the potential applications of the C1 gene expression platform for its use in developing and manufacturing vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and other therapeutic proteins.
We continue to successfully advance our strategy through fully funded collaborations with leading pharma and biotech companies complemented by our solid cash and investment-grade securities of $30.5 million. Overall, we remain disciplined and opportunistic regarding capital allocation.
The at-the-money, ATM, offering we put in place adds to our financial flexibility should we want to accelerate existing programs and pursue additional opportunities that leverage the broad and growing potential applications of C1. However, to date, we have not sold, and we are not obligated to sell, any shares under the ATM agreement and we have no immediate plans to sell any securities under this agreement to fund our near-term business plan.
In closing, I believe that each quarter, we are making solid progress towards further establishing Dyadic's C1 gene expression platform as an alternative to CHO, baculovirus and other traditional expression technologies currently used in the development and manufacturing of biologic vaccines and drugs for use in animal and human health and to help combat infectious diseases. With that, I will turn the call over to Ping to review the financials.