OmniAb, Inc. (NASDAQ:OABI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

We’ve actually even set up breeding colonies of OmniRat for some of our partners who are spinning up multiple programs a year. So OmniRat, obviously is a large source. In terms of the fastest growing, in terms of percentage growth, I point to OmniChicken. The chicken has advantages largely because of its evolutionary distance. Chickens are evolutionary very distant from humans and mice and rats. That creates a lot of advantages for our partners that they like to leverage. And we’ve been able to really increase the number of partners leveraging OmniChicken by about 10x, since the time it was acquired, and became part of the OmniAb platform technology. And downstream of that, we also see nice growth in the bispecific space, both with our OmniFlic, which is a transgenic rat with a fixed light chain, and OmniClic, which is a transgenic chicken with a common light chain.

If you look across actually our downstream clinical programs that our partners are progressing through the clinic, a large number of those actually are bispecific antibodies. And that’s a growing area of interest for partners as well. Beyond that, I’d also point to OmniTaur. While it’s a small percentage of active programs today, it’s an area that is a lot of interest, a lot of inbound interest as our BD team is talking to new potential partners, given the fact that those cow-inspired antibody structural features have the potential to open up new approaches to antibody-based therapies that many partners say they’ve not been able to access before. So we’re excited about that as well.

Unidentified Analyst: Awesome, I guess that feeds nicely into my second question with regard to how do you typically prioritize partnerships between kind of smaller cap biotech companies to large pharma? Is there kind of a large discrepancy you’re seeing? And then are you generally seeing less BD activity from smaller cap companies as a function of kind of macro R&D budget tightening?

Matt Foehr : Yeah, I’ll make a couple of comments, and Kurt may want to want to add in others as well. We’re coming off a year, last year where we did more new partnerships than we ever have in the history of the technology, right. And a large majority of those partnerships are driven by what I’ll term inbound interest or scientist migration, scientists who’ve had positive experiences at one licensed partner and then moved to a new company and then want to get access. So we see that as interesting and important because I think it also speaks to the opportunity which is why we have been and are expanding our business development team really to manage that increase in inbound interest to get access to cutting edge technologies as the industry has shifted more and more towards antibody-based medicines.

We have — a number of the partners we’ve added have been funded biotechs, earlier in their lifecycle, but many of them have a lot of really interesting biology. We obviously already have existing partnerships with a number of big pharmas. And they are prolific users of our platform. And at any one time we’re always in dialogue with many parties at various stages of development, are always negotiating new license deals or negotiating terms. And those include large pharma players as well who I think understand, especially now post — with our new structure, our commitment to continuing innovation and our commitment to remaining on the cutting edge of antibody discovery. Those are the kinds of things that attract not only biotechs with interesting biology, but the large pharma players as well.

Kurt, I don’t know, if you want to add anything to that or anything else.