Manufacturing-related expenses for the year ended December 31, ’22 were also reduced by $935,000 as a result of a payment we received in July 2022 from one of our service providers in connection with the resolution of a difference of views regarding the service provider agreement. Our general and administrative expenses for 2023 were approximately $6.0 million, up slightly from $5.9 million for 2022. The increase was primarily attributable to increases in payroll and compensation expense and other professional fees. Our R&D expenses continue to exceed our G&A expenses by a strong margin, reflecting our focus on advancing our product candidates and pipeline. For the full year 2023, net loss was approximately $15.96 million or $1.47 per share compared to $14.3 million or $1.31 per share for 2022.
Our loss from operations in the 2023 calendar year was partially offset by interest income and other income net, totaling approximately $1.9 million. Our cash position, which includes cash equivalents and marketable securities, was approximately $41.3 million as of December 31, 2023. We anticipate this balance will provide us with a cash runway into at least Q3 of 2025. Importantly, we believe our solid financial position will fuel continued growth and evolution of our RADR AI platform, accelerate the development of our portfolio of targeted oncology drug candidates and allow us to introduce additional targeted programs and collaboration opportunities in a capital-efficient manner. As of December 31, 2023, we had 10,721,192 shares of common stock outstanding, outstanding warrants to purchase 177,998 shares and outstanding options to purchase 1,091,196 shares.
These warrants and options, combined with our outstanding shares of common stock, give us a total fully diluted shares, outstanding of approximately 11.99 million shares as of year-end 2023. In November of ’23, we were able to reduce our outstanding share count through the purchase of 145,348 shares of Lantern common stock at a purchase price of $3.44 per share. Our team continues to be very productive under a hybrid operating model. We currently have 21 employees and 3 FTE consultants focused primarily on leading and advancing our research and drug development efforts. We see this number expanding slightly in coming quarters as we add additional experienced and talented individuals to help advance our mission. I’ll now turn the call back over to Panna for an update on some of our development programs.
Panna?
Panna Sharma: Thank you, David. As we mentioned earlier in the call, one of the areas that we’re very excited about is Starlight Therapeutics. We hired Dr. Marc Chamberlain, during the fourth quarter, and he’s made excellent progress on advancing our clinical trial design in both adult and pediatric CNS cancers, and we expect to launch the initial adult trial during the second half of this year. This is incumbent on getting the type of safety and early efficacy signal from our current ongoing LP-184 trial, which is in Phase I and it’s, at this point, over halfway enrolled. We will share more on the progress of this clinical trial in the coming weeks. Now Starlight’s focus on CNS cancers came from initial screens to look at cancers that exhibited exquisite preclinical and in silico-based evidence of sensitivity to LP-184.
It was essentially born from billions of data points and we had not yet gone to in vitro and in vivo observations. We naturally moved quickly to in vitro and in vivo observations as it was clear that the data was suggesting that GBM and actually several other brain cancers should be very sensitive given the genomic profile, given the interactome design and given the levels of DNA damage repair or PTGR1 we saw in those brain cancers. Let me share some background about the Starlight, which is 100% owned by Lantern, putting, of course, our shareholders. And we believe we’ll have the potential to be another very positive impact on our investors as we monetize this unique asset, the patents and, of course, the insights. Starlight Therapeutics is targeted on several cancers, both adult and pediatric.
The 5-year survival rate in many of these cancers is super low despite advances in cancer therapies. We think globally, there are over 500,000 patients that we can target. We have an Orphan Designation already for GBM and ATRT. We also have a Rare Pediatric Disease Designation. We have world class collaborators with Hopkins, UT Health San Antonio and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network, which is one of our newer collaborators. Additionally, there are over 120 types of central nervous system in brain cancer. So it’s a wide open area. Although 50% of them do tend to be GBM and other high-grid gliomas, and we will be enrolling some of those patients in the early Phase Ia study to determine maximum tolerated dose. There are many other brain cancers, both primary and secondary that Starlight has an option of going after.
And we think this can be a pivotal drug startup 001 in the future of brain cancer therapies. Now let’s talk a little bit about the trials that are planned for STAR-001. As I mentioned, the Phase I will be done by Lantern. The dosage and safety data obtained in the Phase I trial, which is now about halfway through, will be used to advance the indications for a future Phase Ib/II trial to be sponsored jointly by Lantern and our wholly owned subsidiary, Starlight Therapeutics. The markets we think globally are in excess of $5 billion, and this brings the total market for LP-184 indications, both in CNS and in other solid tumors to being in the range of about $10 billion to $12-plus billion. So you can see why we’re particularly excited about this molecule, why we spent a lot of time understanding its molecular profile, understanding the triggers of patient response, understanding the indications where it’ll be most sensitive and then also developing patents around combining this unique drug with other therapies.
So this is one of the most well characterized molecules prior to even getting into the Phase I let alone now once we receive the Phase I data. We’re very excited about this molecule, and we’ll have data this year on the Phase I trial. And more importantly, we’ll have data that allow us to go into combination trials and into CNS with Starlight Therapeutics. Let’s go after another area that our team has been working on and this is the highly promising area of antibody drug conjugates. This is a very expensive area, which we believe we’re going to crush the cost not only in early-stage development, perhaps but also in later stage development. It’s a high-growth area for oncology. Earlier this year, we announced our advancements of the ADC program that we’re working on in combination with the University of Bielefeld in Germany.
Much of this work was accomplished in late ’23 at Dr. Sewald’s lab as part of the Magicbullet Consortium. We were able to take our cryptophycin antibody drug conjugate, and advanced it not only in proven synthesis and bioconjugation, but developed a preclinical proof of concept that it worked really well in an area of high unmet need, which is moderate HER2 expression. Our kill rates with this cryptophycin drug-payload averaged 80% across a number of cancer cell lines. And more importantly, we saw that it was about 10 times more potent than some of the existing ADCs that used a very common payload MMAE. This is a very, very efficient antitumor activity, and it was more importantly, gave us EC-50 values that means we’re about 50% of the cells or the cancer cells of interest are killed in the picomolar to actually single-digit nanomolar range even in the more challenging cancers.
We’re now doing additional studies to develop and further validate these findings. And most importantly, do what we really think is most critical in these studies to obtain a deeper understanding of the genomic and biomarker correlates of payload efficacy. This is really one of the most important things is to understand what is driving that kind of response. How can we repeat it, how can we pinpoint it? And what other things do we need to be aware of as we go after these cancers? So again, we’re taking a data first approach. We think this is going to save us a lot of time, energy and money. It can be an asset that we believe can be very licensable, partnerable or even spin out after we do Starlight. So again, we’ve got a lot of great assets that are following up to our existing clinical trial assets that are now in Phase II and Phase I.
I also want to take some time on this call to update you on some critical informational updates. A major part of our business is to inform, educate and share with the general public and with the oncology community and with our stakeholders, details about our programs and efforts. It’s an area that we want to be better at. It’s an area we want to focus on. And we launched an effort that we’re calling Webinar Wednesday. So our first webinar series will be rolled out. We’re going to have a webinar as part of this effort, with Dr. Joseph Treat of Fox Chase Cancer Center. This will be on LP-300. Dr. Treat is a leading expert in lung malignancies, and he will be hosting our first webinar in the series in the coming month. This will be followed by a webinar on Starlight from our very own Dr. Marc Chamberlain.
He’s a tremendous resource of virtually human encyclopedia and store of knowledge about CNS and brain cancers, CNS trials, history of drugs in CNS and brain cancers, history of drug regimens, failed and successful across both pediatric and adult CNS cancers. We’re very fortunate to have him and he’ll be hosting our second webinar focused on Starlight, and that will be followed by another webinar about our LP-184 clinical trial, which again is about halfway enrolled, and that will be with Dr. Igor Astsaturov of Fox Chase and will focus heavily on pancreatic and other cancers, challenging tumors that seem to be very responsive to our drug candidate. In fact, it seems that the more aggressive these cancers are recurrent, they have higher levels of PTGR1.
