AbCellera Biologics Inc. (ABCL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. We're kicking off our next session here at the BofA Tech-enabled Drug Discovery Conference. Thank you for joining us. My name is Mike Ryskin. I'm on the life science tools and diagnostics team. Joining me here is the senior analyst on the team, Derik De Bruin. And for our next session, we're excited to have AbCellera Biologics joining us. With us, we have CEO and Co-Founder, Carl Hansen. Carl, thank you for being here.

My pleasure. Thanks, Michael.

Great. And to get going here, we're going to have a brief presentation to start, where Carl will take us through some of the background and then we'll go to a fireside chat format after that. So Carl, kicking it up to you.

Thanks, Michael. And thanks, everyone, for joining today. It's a pleasure to be here. Today, I'd like to take the first 20 minutes that we have here to introduce to you our company, AbCellera, which was founded 10 years ago, nearly, with a very different lens on biotechnology and what technology can do to help accelerate productivity. From a high level, we founded AbCellera with the basis on an insight that in drug development, it is not necessary to be the company that does everything. You don't need to do the fundamental biology, the discovery, the manufacturing, the clinical development and the commercial development. Rather, we saw an opportunity to disaggregate that value chain and focus our efforts on developing best-in-class technologies and capabilities that allow us to more quickly go from basic scientific insight to therapeutic candidates that are suitable for development in the clinic. Not only do we intend to do that faster and to open up new therapeutic opportunities but we intend to bring that to the market at scale by setting up a centralized antibody discovery capability and engine and striking deals with partners that span the entire industry to help them more quickly get to their goals while at the same time, structuring deals so that we participate in the success of those molecules as they go through clinical development through milestones and also commercial success through royalties. At the bases of that, is an emphasis on technology development and technology capabilities. We're a relatively new public company. In fact, we went public just last December on the NASDAQ. And the first line on the S1 in the business section states very plainly that we are a technology company. In fact, that was a single line that was debated at great length with the bankers because at some level, it seemed like a throwaway, but for us, it was much more. It was a statement about philosophy. From a big picture, technology rightly defined, means being able to put together people and ideas, technology, facilities, resources, capital, to be able to do things that have not been done before, that are of value or to do more with less. If we look at our societies, over the last 200 years, all the advancements that we have before us are the product of technologies in different domains. We've seen advancements in telecommunications, electronics, in vaccines, even metallurgy over the last 200 years. And what is common to all of those is that advances in technology have increased productivity. That certainly has been true historically of the pharmaceutical industry, but in recent years, we're starting to see cracks in the technological bases. So over the last 10 years or more, there has been an ongoing trend where productivity in drug development has gone down. Today, we face a reality where the average cost of a drug, all-in, is somewhere between $1.5 billion and $3 billion. It still takes us over a decade to get new drugs to the clinic. And most importantly, the failure rate is well over 90%. We believe there are many reasons for that, but one of the core reasons has been that the technologies that were put in place -- that first lifted up the biotech sector have reached their limits. And now we have a situation where the easy problems have been picked off and the harder problems require new technologies that can get us into new spaces and push back the frontier of what's possible. At the same time, the success of biotech has attracted a tremendous amount of new innovation and new entrepreneurs and capital to the space and these smaller companies, which are based on innovations or insights into biology find themselves without access to the technologies they need to advance their goals. AbCellera exists to push back technology on those 2 axes. First, to push back what is possible; and second, to do that at scale and to bring it to the industry to help increase and improve productivity. We are specifically focused on the therapeutic antibody market. The development of drugs that are comprised of antibodies, either as single molecules or increasingly in new modalities, which include things such as cell therapy and conjugates. As of 2019, that was a $120 billion industry, and it's an industry that has been growing at over 10% for almost 3 decades. We believe that in order to sustain that growth, the best things that we can do, as a company, is to push back what's possible in capabilities to open up new target classes and to help the many smaller companies to more quickly and effectively reach their goals. Our technology efforts are focused on unlocking the power of natural antibody responses or unlocking the natural antibody database. Natural antibody responses are the crowning achievement of evolution. They have been optimized over approximately 500 million years of evolution and they have unmatched capability of taking diversity within each of us, the potential to make trillions of different antibodies. And then selecting and optimizing that diversity to create a large number of antibodies that specifically recognize a target and that can connect into the immune system to help to eliminate disease. Over the past 2 decades, there have been competing approaches on how to find antibodies. One, relying on synthetic libraries, so DNA sequences that are converted into antibodies without ever passing through a natural immune system. And two, using the naturally generated power of immune responses through immunization or through natural infection and then searching through those data bases to find the antibodies with that, exactly the properties that you want, being effective, being safe and also being manufacturable as drugs. That experiment, now run for 20 years, has shown unequivocally that antibodies derived from natural immune systems are superior. And in fact, about 92% of all approved antibody drugs have come from natural immune responses. The challenge is that the core of the technologies that are still being used to harness the power of natural immune systems were built based on the tools of the day back in the '80s and '90s. Those technologies have continued to be refined and improved, but they have now hit their limits. And given the massive advances in many of the underlying technologies that we now have today in biotechnology, in computation and engineering, we saw a new opportunity to rethink and reinvent that process. So we exist to revitalize antibody drug discovery by taking modern technologies, both by looking out in the world and finding technologies that we can bring in through M&A and also through now over a decade of internal R&D. And then combining those with the appropriate tools in software to aggregate and store that data. And computation and artificial intelligence to take that data and be able to make well-informed and more accurate predictions of molecules that will most likely be successful drugs and move quickly through preclinical development, manufacturing and into the clinic. That vision is something -- or that is a project that we started working on back in 2012 when we founded the company. Our first technology was a microfluidic-based single cell secretion assay, which is shown in the search step on the diagram above. That technology allows us to take a sample with immune cells, and in an afternoon, to screen through millions of different immune cells, on that same day, we can use a combination of imaging, engineering and machine vision to identify which of those cells have exactly the properties that are suitable for an antibody development project. But when we started the company, we made a conscious decision that we were not going to be a tools provider. We were instead going to make our product the collection of innovation and technologies that bridge the entire gap from idea to drug. Based on that, we have, for now, 10 years, been working on building a fully integrated stack that continues to add and develop and integrate new technologies that at each step, we believe, give us a compounding advantage in the productivity of each therapeutic discovery program. Some of the highlight technologies that exist in that stack at the front end where we generate the source of antibodies, include high-end membrane protein biochemistry, well-optimized immunization technologies that allow us to address difficult protein targets. And last year, through the acquisition of a company called Trianni, for $90 million, we now control a state-of-the-art transgenic animal that is capable of making fully human antibody responses. From those responses, we then use our microfluidics screening platform to, within days, screen through millions of cells, the result of which is hundreds to thousands of cells that have been recovered each into a separate well that are passed on to the third step, which we call Find, which is a genomic step in which we have combined automation and optimized microbiology protocols as well as bioinformatics to be able to quickly break open cells and decipher the DNA code that tells us how to make those antibodies in the lab. Using that technology within 3 days of doing the screen, we can add hundreds to thousands of unique antibody sequences that we know have properties that are suitable for therapeutic development, at least on the first pass through the screen. And then we can expand around those with immune Repertoire Sequencing, which allows us to make a full inventory of the remaining diversity that exists within those tissues. From that, we then select panels of hundreds to perhaps 1,000, which are moved forward to the next step, which is called Analyze. That comprises a series of industrial molecular biology and protein biochemistry assays, which allow us to convert the DNA chains into physical protein samples and then to run them across a battery of tests, both in the lab and in silico to predict, which antibodies are likely to have the properties most suitable for therapeutic development. The final step is to pass those on to an engineering step where we either optimize those sequences further or we reformat them to allow them to address therapeutic problems in new ways, most notably having a proprietary technology for bispecific antibodies called the OrthoMab Technology that we also acquired last year. What I want to emphasize on this slide is that it is not just a series of technologies that stand or stand toe-to-toe with or define the state-of-the-art. We believe that the power of this process comes with the integration of these into a seamless workflow. That includes the protocols and importantly, the data science that allows you to collect the hundreds and millions of data points along this workflow to keep everything straight and to help to gain efficiency in both the discovery and in the decisions that are made. We're not done building the stack and our current efforts are now focused on the last step of forward integration that will complete the project of going from idea to clinical testing that we began about a decade ago. That work right now is focused on building teams and technologies and capacity in translational science, in CMC development and in GMP manufacturing. This project is a 2.5-year project, which is currently on track and would allow us to be making GMP product in Q1 of 2024 provided that we don't run into any delays on that. Once we've done that, our vision is to have integrated the full value chain from idea through to but not including clinical testing. And to find opportunities both through technology and logistics and integration to compress the time lines of therapeutic antibody discovery and development with a stretch goal of allowing us to do, from beginning to IND filing, within 18 months, which would be half of the time that is currently done in the industry. We don't just want to achieve that once, but to build a centralized discovery engine that can do that at scale. And if we succeed or when we succeed at that goal, we will have made a dramatic increase or a step change in the capabilities of doing therapeutic development, not just for the world's biggest companies but also for great innovation that is currently stranded without the capabilities that they need. We believe that one of the powers of our business model is that we have decided consciously to focus on the discovery and to work broadly with the industry. We do that through a centralized model. Essentially, how this works is that by doing this and working on the hardest problems with the best clients and investing in technologies and capability, we can distance ourselves from the rest of the field. By investments in technology, we bring on more partnerships. Those partnerships drive data and learning, proprietary data sets and increased knowledge and technology development as well as know-how that exists within the workforce that we have at AbCellera. That allows us to be faster and to be more efficient at our discovery, which allows us to get more business, to invest in facilities and to build on a technology advantage. And by disaggregating the discovery, the complex workflow of discovery from the rest of the process, we believe we can free up resources for the rest of the field, so that the smaller companies can focus on their innovation and not have to spend time trying to cobble together or reinvent what is already done at world-class scale at AbCellera. Because of that, our business model emphasizes a high volume of therapeutic programs that run through the platform. Over the coming years, we expect to work on hundreds of different therapeutic programs. And as of last quarter, had 138 programs that were currently under contract with over 30 partners. We strike our deals to include -- or historically, we have structured our deals to include 3 components: some early revenue, which comes through technology access and research discovery fees. This has allowed us to have a capital-efficient business and to scale the company, but primarily emphasizing value in the success of molecules, thereby aligning our interest with those of our partners and also with the patients they serve. That is typically done through milestone payments, which occur at various stages of clinical development, Phase I, II, III and approval as well as commercial milestones. And most importantly, we structure our deals to include royalty payments on the net sales of successful products. When we look at our models for the value in these deals, we believe that the vast majority of value in deals lies in milestones and royalties and that typically, the value is dominated by the royalty position. Over time, our vision is to build a large and diversified portfolio that shares in the success of the industry and to be the centralized de facto provider of antibody discovery that supports a large fraction of the future growth of this sector. In addition to those standard deals, which include upfront payments, royalties and milestones, we have recently found opportunities to innovate around the business as well. And in particular, with smaller private companies, where we're not just bringing technology and capabilities, but also saving them years of time and capital in trying to assemble the capabilities internally that they would need to prosecute their programs. In those situations, increasing royalty positions can become an encumbrance to those businesses. So we found ways to flex up and capture value in other mechanisms, which recently have included taking equity positions or equity-like positions in private biotech companies, as well as finding deal structures or crafting deal structures that include an option for AbCellera to invest but not to participate in the clinical development of those programs, thereby allowing us to deepen our royalty positions and to build up a sub portfolio within the larger group of partnerships that we have, that has an economic upside that is similar to an internal pipeline that you would normally associate with the biotech company. Over the past years, as I mentioned, we have crafted deals with well over 30 different partners. What I want to emphasize on this slide is the exceptional quality of these partners. We have worked with many of the most enabled and innovative companies across the industry, companies like Eli Lilly, like Regeneron, like Gilead and Novartis as well as with innovative biotech companies, both in the small cap up to mid-cap and even large cap companies like Moderna most recently, and even companies that are advancing not just innovation in science and technology, but also innovation in business models such as our recent announcement with EQRx. Through that work, we are building a diverse portfolio that covers at this point, nearly every indication for which therapeutic antibodies are being developed. As of last quarter, as I mentioned, we had 138 programs under contract. Those programs are directed towards indications, which largely reflect what is being worked on across the industry. And those include oncology, neurodegeneration, pain, infectious disease, ophthalmology, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, inflammation and beyond. Furthermore, we have emphasized, since the beginning, not just working on the programs that everyone can work on, but also being able to push back the envelope and open up new target space that has traditionally been out of reach for most companies due to technology reasons. For that reason, we have a substantial amount of our portfolio that is directed towards difficult target classes. Those include multi-pass transmembrane proteins, high homology targets and peptide-MHC targets. I'll note that just most recently, in fact, last week, we announced the acquisition of a biotech company in Boston called TetraGenetics. Through that acquisition, we have gained access to a proprietary membrane protein expression and production capability, which we believe further bolsters what is already best-in-world capabilities in the development of therapeutic antibodies against transmembrane proteins including ion channels and GPCRs. I'd also like to highlight on this slide that in addition to supporting standard antibody-based therapies, our platform is exceptionally versatile. Our technology allows us to find antibodies with a variety of different properties and from a wide variety of different species, including camelids for single chain antibodies. For that reason, in our portfolio today, we have programs that represent all the different isotypes of antibody-based therapies, IgGs, IgMs, notably with the company, IgM, which is the world leader in manufacturing those types of antibodies and IgAs. As I mentioned, we have a proprietary technology in bispecific antibodies, which we acquired last year and which we see as a big driver of growth by opening up new ways to use antibodies, including T cell engagement as well as bispecific antibodies that have biological function that you could not achieve with a monospecific. Beyond that, we have a large number of collaborations or programs focused on single-chain antibodies for a variety of different applications and are working in spaces of radioisotope conjugates, CNS-delivered antibodies, notably with Denali and increasingly in the cell therapy space. Just to finish off before the question period, I'd like to emphasize 2 programs, which have been exceptionally high profile and highly impactful over the past 1.5 years, and those, of course, pertain to our work in COVID-19. In March of last year, we found ourselves in a position with technologies to respond quickly to the pandemic when a patient first arrived in the U.S. And by taking a single blood sample, we're able in the course of 6 weeks, to go from our first screen to a final candidate that went into manufacturing and then went into clinical development under the power of Eli Lilly only 3 months after beginning the program. That was a world record speed in the development or the discovery and development of a therapeutic antibody. And that first antibody bamlanivimab became the frontline solution for therapeutic antibodies and got the first EA in the U.S. To date, that antibody bamlanivimab, along with both alone and in combination with etesevimab has been used in 535,000 patients. And based on what we have seen in the trials, we believe that has prevented well over 20,000 hospitalizations and has saved over 10,000 lives. Bamlanivimab and etesevimab remain highly effective against the Delta variant. And a couple of weeks ago, the U.S. FDA unpaused bamlanivimab, etesevimab and also expanded emergency use authorization for post-exposure prophylaxis. So given the unfortunate uprise in COVID-19 cases around the world and the very likely prospect that COVID-19 is endemic, we believe that bamlanivimab and etesevimab have an important role to play over the coming months. We are equally excited about our second antibody, our second to go into clinical trials within a year for COVID-19 called bebtelovimab, which is now in late-stage Phase II clinical trials and has an ideal profile for a long-lasting solution for COVID-19. Specifically, bebtelovimab to our knowledge, neutralizes not only every variant of concern or of interest, but also is predicted to neutralize every variant for which we have seen any significant genetic data in the world. And its potent enough to be formulated in the long run as a subcutaneous -- as a therapy that could be administered through a subcutaneous shot, thereby increasing the impact and ease and access to patients. For us, these are, of course, important therapeutics for our top line. We've received significant royalties from COVID-19, but much more they emphasize what can happen when you focus on technology. And use that technology in collaboration with terrific partners that have complementary expertise. And of course, that is the core thesis of our entire business. And so with that, I'll pause and take any questions.

Great. I appreciate you going through that. I'm going to hop right into Q&A. And as a reminder, for all clients on the line, you can send them directly to Derik and I via Bloomberg or via e-mail, but there's also the Veracast portal, where you can submit your questions and will throw them in. So first question from an investor came in. You sort of laid out some of the vision of AbCellera as a service platform to partner with biotech companies. Are you seeing opportunities to take share from any customers that may have separate failures or frustrations with internal antibody development, particularly if there's instruments or traditional methods that aren't effective where the service versus tools model really shines?

Sure. So I'm happy to answer that one, maybe on a few levels. First, we normally actually don't even think of ourselves as a service provider, much more as a partner. And that, I think, captures the way that we work with clients and also the way we structure deals. So we're heavily invested not just in doing the work and getting paid. In fact, we've deferred the lion's share of our value to the success of those molecules. In terms of working with partners for which internal programs have failed, this, of course, happens all the time. In fact, if you think about the customer segment that would be the fully enabled or vertically integrated large biopharma, these are innovative companies that have formidable expertise. They come to us, I believe, primarily today because they found high-value problems for which their technologies have hit a limit. And that is sort of the vertical axis of our technology development. Increasingly, we're finding that once we work on those and demonstrate the technology, we're starting to work on other programs that they have technology that may be able to address, but where they believe we can do that either quicker or at higher quality. And in the long run, I believe the main driver with that customer class with the enabled pharma partners will be in showing them that you can make very significant time savings in their programs because that provides a giant competitive advantage in getting a molecule first to clinic. Now the smaller companies have no pride and typically no capabilities. And so there, I would really cast everything that we do as working on programs that they've not been able to do. Now the other part of your question, or at least implied is, can you just buy an instrument or a box from -- that would solve this problem? We absolutely do not believe that's the case. And in fact, what we have built into the entire business model in which we have proven to be true, is that antibody discovery is not one problem, rather antibody-discovery is a whole collection of problems, and it's the integration of technologies across the value chain as well as the capabilities, the workforce and the expertise that allows you to actually solve the problem of bringing a drug candidate forward rather than just solving atomistically 1 technology piece in that workflow.

Got it. That's helpful. And then a couple of other questions coming already. A couple focusing on the COVID antibodies with Lilly, specifically, any color on Phase II readout time line for beptelizumab?

Yes. That's, of course, a very reasonable question. On the last quarterly call, we reiterated what was first communicated by Lilly, which is that we expected a readout in the summer. Of course, we're in September now. So my answer to that would be this could be out any day. And we are anxiously waiting like everyone else. We are confident in that molecule based on what we've seen on therapeutic antibodies across numerous trials now as well as the preclinical data, which has been published online and which has been refreshed lately, in particular, showing potency against the Delta variant. So with that profile and what we know about antibodies, we are very confident and optimistic. But of course, we're waiting for trials to read that out. What I will say there, actually, just to highlight, is that bebtelovimab is a molecule that we see as a very important molecule in the long-term fight against COVID-19. In the early days, there were people that believe that COVID-19 would be a blip. We get vaccinated, it would be gone. I think the overwhelming consensus now across the scientific community is that this is a problem that will be with us for decades and one that is very serious, not just for people that don't get vaccinated, but for those that cannot be sufficiently protected despite the vaccine. Today, we still have a product that has the potential to -- or has the capability, and it's been proven effective in fighting the Delta variant. And so bamlanivimab and etesevimab, we believe is probably the frontline solution for the near term in our contribution to helping patients with COVID-19.

Great. I was actually going to go down exactly that road of sort of how do you see that -- how do you see these antibodies fitting into the broader therapy plan, given the increased prevalence of vaccines, but maybe I'll take it in a different direction then. As you call out sort of the variants and the effectiveness of the various variants of concern, in particular, the Delta variant, do you anticipate having to sort of generate additional antibodies down the road, sort of stay on top of the variants as they come up? Because no indication has them slowing down, of course.

Yes. That's, of course, a great question. I think one thing that pandemic has shown us is that it's very hard to make plans and not be monitoring all the time. Six weeks ago, the dominant variant, we expected to be the Alpha variant. Within 6 weeks, Delta variant has become, I think, 98% of all cases in the U.S. And so things can change rapidly. To date, we have no evidence that bebtelovimab is at risk from an emerging variant or a variant that we're aware of. So there's no reason to do that. If such an event happened, we've already shown, through the discovery of bebtelovimab, that we can apply our technology to boot up a solution again quickly. And the other alternative would be to find appropriate combinations with other very potent antibodies that together would create an even more impregnable bulwark against the emergence of a new variant.

And how would you characterize the competitive landscape in terms of the platform. You're not the only company sort of in this broader ecosystem of improving technology against for antibody drug development and you're not even the only one discussing sort of this platform towards the next-gen biologics. So how do you see the ecosystem evolving and sort of where do you see your particular strength versus the competitors?

Yes. Your -- the video broke up there a second, so I didn't get quite all of the question, but I think I've got enough of it to answer. So first, there are -- I think you're seeing a trend for sure in a new class of companies that are platform companies that have this very heavy emphasis on the combination of experimental capabilities with data science and AI. And AbCellera is absolutely in that breed of companies. But when I look across the landscape of those companies, I don't see any that are addressing the same problems or doing it in the same way. So I think there are many companies that are using, let's say, computation and AI to try to solve small molecule problems or do target identification. These are all important problems to be addressed. AbCellera, in my mind, is unique in the integration of a whole series of best-in-class experimental tools with the data science and computational capabilities to be able to do that at scale and also, frankly, a very unique business model that you don't see very often. In terms of the broader competitive landscape, I think there are some other companies that have recognized the opening in trying to disaggregate discovery from the rest of the process, and some of them are integrated a bit further backward or forward. What distinguishes AbCellera is the focus on innovation and the focus on continuing to improve, not just by throwing people and infrastructure at a problem, but by using the very best technologies in the world to get a competitive edge. And what we're seeing from here is not a flagging advantage, but rather an accelerating advantage, and I think that's proven out.

Got it. And we've actually had -- we had another question coming from a client going back to COVID-19 and the partnership with Lilly. What about oral antivirals, emergence of some potential therapies there, how do you think that's going to fit in versus the injectables in the monoclonal labs?

That's a great question. I mean, we've seen several candidates come up on oral antivirals. To date, they have not proven to be nearly as effective as antibodies. Of course, the oral antivirals have a great advantage in the ease of administration. You can take a pill in many cases. But I view that as a pretty tough problem. And when you look at what we've seen in clinical trials for therapeutic antibodies, particularly in the cases of mild to moderate infection before hospitalization and also prophylaxis, you're seeing reductions of 75% to 85% in hospitalization based on treatment. That's something that, to my knowledge, far eclipses anything we've yet seen from small molecules. It'd be wonderful if we had some molecules to fight COVID. I sincerely hope that, that is the case. For now, we're focused on what we can do, which is in the biologics space.

Got it. And sort of taking a step back to some of your other comments from the slide deck, you highlighted 138 programs in the portfolio, wide range of therapeutic areas. How much bandwidth do you have to keep that growing? I mean, that's a pretty staggering number. Could you give us an indication of sort of how advanced these are? Are they all sort of in early discovery or they're increasing number that's sort of pre-IND phase. And again, just sort of talk to the longer-term ability to scale this over time.

Sure. Yes. I'm actually -- I'm glad you asked that question. It's good to give some color there. So one of the key metrics that we report quarterly is programs under contract. And these are contracts that have put in place terms and agreements for us working on programs with a variety of different partners. Those are often part of collaborations that span not just a few months, but over multiple years. So the 138 includes work that will be done over the next 2 or 3 years. And so it is not the case that we're working today on 138 programs. That's the aggregate since inception of the company, and it includes what you could consider presold slots. We definitely are seeing a very robust uptick in business development. We have not sent any projections of what the targets were, but there were analysts at the start of the year that were -- that were looking at numbers that we have far eclipsed by the second quarter of this year. So that's been a great tailwind. We're making the investments to build capacity. And one of the things that we do have is -- well, first, I'd just say, to date, we have not had the problem where we have to delay starts on programs. So we're keeping up with it. But of course, if business is good, you have to maintain that capacity all the time. One advantage we have is that we have a large fraction of the workforce that continues to work on platform development, and those people have the ability to flex into program execution. So there's a certain amount of resource flexibility or elasticity within the company that allows us to be more nimble in dealing with the ebb and flow. And in this case, it's the flow of deals that have come in recently.

Got it. And also want to touch on the sort of the M&A opportunities as well. You mentioned Trianni, a little bit unique versus the core offering. How do you see capital deployment and just in general, even organic investments in terms of expanding the capability set? Sort of what are your priorities? Are there any particular areas that you feel like you're -- you can make some gains in terms of improving the offering?

Sure. So maybe first, I'll answer the priorities, then capital deployment, and then give you some color on how we think about M&A. First, the priorities in the company today are very clear. It's execution on the partnership business, right from business development through to delivery with partners. It is completing the last step of forward integration on our stack, and that is the translational science, CMC and GMP effort. And third, it is about working on increasingly the integration of all the technologies and capabilities that we currently have. And a big chunk of that, which we haven't talked at length because it is something that's difficult to fit the presentation is the importance of high-end software solutions and data science as an enabling technology to achieve technology and integration. So those are our 3 emphases. In capital deployment, right now, I'd say one of the big areas of capital deployment is in the forward integration, translational science, CMC, GMP. That's the hiring of people as well as building a facility. Now we have managed to get considerable support from the Canadian government in part because this would be the first such capability here in Canada. So I'd say that's a very capital-efficient project and one that we see as strategic and opening up all kinds of possibilities for AbCellera. Now we continue to look at M&A. And our M&A lens has been very much from a technology angle. Historically, we have done a series of those. They have included: first, the acquisition of a company called Lineage Biosciences. Through that, we got a technology in repertoire sequencing. That was in 2017 that we have now used to expand our discovery engine. We acquired Trianni last year. That has been a great acquisition, both by providing a proprietary source of humanized antibodies, which can shrink the time for a discovery program. And also through that, a licensing business that we inherited, that we have not prioritized but we have inherited. And through that business, we've already recaptured a big chunk of the value of the acquisition or the cost of the acquisition as well as seen a big uptick in the business development side of things. Our third acquisition was the OrthoMab platform. It was an asset purchase agreement from Dualogics. That gives us another high-value computational matter that allows us to give clients a full solution for bispecifics. And most recently, the Trianni acquisition. So all of those are, I'd say, small to medium-sized acquisitions where we see big synergy in bringing those technologies into our offering, either by deepening our capabilities or allowing us to access a broader swath of the total addressable market. And a dynamic that we have found that is consistent, is there are a lot of great technologies out there that without the other pieces or without the capacity and the people and the other parts of the platform, are not tremendous businesses. So we see a lot of these acquisitions as value creating both for us and for the companies that were acquired.

Got it. We're almost out of time, Carl. I think maybe just one last one for me. If we again, sort of look at the broader landscape of technology-enabled drug discovery, a number of the other companies in the space have internal R&D pipelines for their own assets. They -- some have a SaaS business or a DAS business, there's a partnership or a JV arm, and there's also an internal pipeline arm. How do you view sort of the relative value adds of those? And is that something you're considering in the future, sort of that opportunity?

Yes. Well, I obviously wouldn't comment on the relative value of the internal programs of our peers. My sort of initial response to that is, first, the concept of partnership or internal programs is a little bit of a false dichotomy. We live in a sector where every road ultimately leads to a big company. So all these companies are partnering at some point. We have emphasized partnering early, and that makes sense for us because that means that we can work on way more programs than we could if we were moving them ourselves through clinical development. And because we can work on many programs, we can justify investments that allow us to stay well ahead of the field in terms of capabilities. All that to say that this business model of doing partnering is not one that we're doing as a means to an end. We see a huge headroom in this business. It's a unique business model, and it fills a gap that I think has been ignored in the space. We are finding deal structures that allow us to get more and more value. I mentioned some of the equity positions or options to invest. And I would not take off the table that we might find ourselves in possession of antibodies that would be assets where we actually initiated the discovery. And in fact, that is what happened with COVID-19 and we have some high-value R&D projects, particularly in the space of some of the difficult targets where that also could happen. But that is a happy by-product of a consistent thesis in technology investment and development.

Got it. That's a great answer. With that, we're out of time unfortunately. I want to thank you for joining us, Carl. Really appreciate the conversation and your overview of the platform. Investors, thank you for listening in. And we'll talk to you soon.

Awesome. Thank you, Mike. It was a pleasure.