And so the opportunities there to help people to treat diseases is enormous. Macrophages play a key role in cancer growth and metastases. And in cancers, the macrophages that dominate in and around the cancers are the kind of wound-healing, so-called pro-tumor types of macrophages that actually act as a kind of force field around the tumors to prevent the body’s natural immune response from attacking the tumors. And so what we and many other organizations are doing across the globe related to specific cancer is we’re looking at therapies that — or treatments that might change the phenotype or the nature of the macrophage and drive them from the wound-healing M2s to the pro-inflammatory M1s. And if you can do that in people who have cancer and in those tumors themselves, you can then rally the body’s immune response to attack the cancer.
And as of May of 2021, to give you an idea of how large these efforts are globally, to do just what I told, there were 606 clinical trials that we’re running or have been completed just to do what I just said related to cancers. It’s a huge field. And you know what’s cool about it is, really, we’re at the forefront of that, not necessarily in the progression of our therapeutic constructs into humans, but in the technology and what our drugs have been show — what we have been able to show they can do in the in vitro or preclinical phases. So we’re right there at the leading edge of this incredibly large opportunity field or space to help patients and to treat a large number of diseases from cancers to others. I can get into that in a moment.
And that patent that Mike referenced was about — was giving us our intellectual property around using our constructs to change the phenotype of the nature of macrophages, as I just described. And yes, there are going to be a whole series of patents that follow suit or applications around that. The fact that we can target macrophages of all type, the M1s, the M2s and everything in between, with our construct means that we can deliver all sorts of cool things, payloads, they’re called loosely, to the macrophage. And we can perturb them and drive them in different directions. And we have a very flexible, adaptable molecule that has all sorts of really great advantages over what almost every other group out there is using. So I’m not just saying that because I work here.
It’s proved. And so we have this great opportunity to be able to really shake up the world in these therapeutic domains. And one of the major thing holding us back as a small company, of course, has been resources, financial resources. So we’re very good at making a lot happen with a little. And so our goal, of course, this year, and you’ve heard it before, but I believe significantly that things are different now than they used to be, our goal is to be fully funded so that we can help drive those things towards first-in-human trials, which is where we can — those kinds of inflection points are opportunities for large investments, whether they be partnering or license deals or whatever, or whatever we might decide to do. So we’re trying to drive them towards that.
So I might have gone astray from what you originally asked, but that patent is very important. There will be others coming along the way that are related. There are some already. You just don’t know about it yet because they’re not published. And this is a very hot and exciting area in not just cancer research but in other diseases. So I’ve mentioned in cancer, you want to drive the M2 or wound-healing pro-tumor type macrophages to M1 pro-inflammatory. In many other diseases, including almost all inflammatory and infectious diseases, you want to do the opposite. You want to take the inflamed pro-inflammatory macrophages that are doing a lot of stuff to try to attack whatever the infectious agent is, but the body has a hard time controlling those things precisely.
