abcl-10k_20221231.htm

lll

UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM 10-K

(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022

Commission File Number 001-39781

AbCellera Biologics Inc.

(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its Charter)

British Columbia Not Applicable

2215 Yukon Street Vancouver, BC V5Y 0A1

(Address of principal executive offices)

Registrant’s telephone number, including area code: (604) 559-9005

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Title of each class Trading Symbol(s) Name of each exchange on which registered

Common shares, no par value per share ABCL The Nasdaq Stock Market

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act. Yes ☐No☒

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to submit such files). Yes☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

Large accelerated filer ☒ Accelerated filer ☐

Non-accelerated filer ☐ Smaller reporting company ☐

Emerging growth company ☐

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒

Ifsecurities areregistered pursuant toSection 12(b)oftheAct,indicate bycheckmarkwhether thefinancial statements oftheregistrant included inthefilingreflectthecorrection ofanerrortopreviously issued financial statements. ☐

Indicate bycheckmarkwhether anyofthoseerrorcorrectionsarerestatementsthatrequired arecoveryanalysis ofincentive-based compensation received byanyoftheregistrant’sexecutive officers during therelevant recovery period pursuant to§240.10D-1(b). ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ☒

The aggregate market value of the Registrant’s Common Stock held by non-affiliates of the Registrant based on the closing price of the Registrant’s Common Stock as reported on the Nasdaq Stock Market on June 30, 2022, the last business day of the Registrant’s most recently completed second quarter, was approximately $2,404,551,632.

The number of shares of Registrant’s Common Stock outstanding as of February 17, 2023 was 287,686,199.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

The registrant’s definitive proxy statement relating to the annual meeting of shareholders will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days after the close of the registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2022 and is incorporated by reference in Part III to the extent described herein.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K includes “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and “forward-looking information” within the meaning of Canadian securities laws, or collectively, forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include statements that may relate to our plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events, future revenue or performance, capital expenditures, financing needs and other information that is not historical information. Many of these statements appear, in particular, under the headings “Business,” “Risk Factors,” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. Forward-looking statements can often be identified by the use of terminology such as “subject to”, “believe,” “anticipate,” “plan,” “expect,” “intend,” “estimate,” “project,” “may,” “will,” “should,” “would,” “could,” “can,” the negatives thereof, variations thereon and similar expressions, or by discussions of strategy. In addition, any statements or information that refer to expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, performance or other characterizations of future events or circumstances, including any underlying assumptions, are forward-looking. In particular, these forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to:

• companies and technologies in our industry that compete with our business;

• our operating results and financial performance;

• our ability to obtain additional financing in future offerings;

• the volatility of the trading price of our common shares;

• our expectations regarding the use of our cash resources;

• our expectations about market trends; and

• our ability to predict and adapt to government regulation.

We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Actual results or events could differ materially from the plans, intentions, and expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements. We have included important factors in the cautionary statements included in this Annual Report, particularly in “Risk Factor Summary” below and “Risk Factors”, that we believe could cause actual results or events to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. We operate in a competitive and rapidly changing environment and new risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and

uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report. Our forward-looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, collaborations, joint ventures, or investments we may make or enter into.

You should read this Annual Report and the documents that we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, with the understanding that our actual future results may differ materially from what we expect. The forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report are made as of the date of this Annual Report, and we do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law or regulation.

In addition, statements that “we believe” and similar statements reflect our current beliefs and opinions on the relevant subject. These statements are based upon information available to us as of the date of this Annual Report, and while we believe such information forms a reasonable basis for such statements, such information may be limited or incomplete. Our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all potentially available relevant information. These statements are inherently uncertain and investors are cautioned not to unduly rely upon these statements.

This Annual Report includes statistical and other industry and market data that we obtained from industry publications and research, surveys, and studies conducted by third parties as well as our own estimates of potential market opportunities. All market data used in this Annual Report involves a number of assumptions and limitations, and you are cautioned not to give undue weight to such data. Industry publications and third-party research, surveys, and studies generally indicate that their information has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, although they do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of such information. Our estimates of the potential market opportunities for our product candidates include several key assumptions based on our industry knowledge, industry publications, third-party research, and other surveys, which may be based on a small sample size and may fail to accurately reflect market opportunities. While we believe that our internal assumptions are reasonable, no independent source has verified such assumptions.

We express all amounts in this Annual Report on Form 10-K in U.S. dollars, except where otherwise indicated. References to “$” and “US$” are to U.S. dollars and references to “C$” and “CAD$” are to Canadian dollars.

Except as otherwise indicated, references in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to “AbCellera,” the “Company,” “we,” “us” and “our” refer to AbCellera Biologics Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries.

Table of Contents

Page

PART I

Item 1. Business 1

Item 1A. Risk Factors 28

Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments 69

Item 2. Properties 69

Item 3. Legal Proceedings 69

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures 70

PART II

Item 6. Reserved. 72

Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk 92

Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data 92

Item 9A. Controls and Procedures 93

Item 9B. Other Information 93

Item 9C. Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections 93

PART III

Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance 94

Item 11. Executive Compensation 94

Item 14. Principal Accounting Fees and Services 94

PART IV

Item 15. Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules 95

iii

Summary of the Material and Other Risks Associated with Our Business

Our business is subject to numerous material and other risks and uncertainties. You should carefully consider the following information about these risks, together with the other information appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report, including our financial statements and related notes hereto. The occurrence of any of the following risks could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and future growth prospects. The risks and uncertainties described below may change over time and other risks and uncertainties, including those that we do not currently consider material, may impair our business. These risks include, but are not limited to, the following:

Investing in our common shares involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the following risks and uncertainties, together with all other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including our consolidated financial statements and related notes and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations,” as well as our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, before investing in our common stock. Any of the risk factors we describe below could adversely affect our business, financial condition or results of operations. The market price of our common stock could decline if one or more of these risks or uncertainties were to occur, which may cause you to lose all or part of the money you paid to buy our common shares. Additional risks that are currently unknown to us or that we currently believe to be immaterial may also impair our business. Certain statements below are forward-looking statements. See “Forward-Looking Information” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

PART I

Item 1. Business.

OVERVIEW

We are a team of scientists, engineers, creatives, and business professionals addressing the barriers of conventional antibody drug development. Motivated by our mission to bring better antibody drugs to patients faster, we focus on solving general problems to catalyze a transformation in how antibody drugs are discovered. To maximize the value and impact of our work, we partner with companies of all sizes – from innovative biotechnology companies to leading pharmaceutical companies – propelling programs to the clinic, together.

We have several core beliefs that impact how we think about our business:

3. People are the foundation of success.

After a decade of building our Company and working on over 100 drug discovery programs, we have grown from six entrepreneurial founders in a laboratory, to a high-performing team of approximately 500 people spread across four countries and three continents. We continue to invest in improving the efficiency of our business to increase the precision and speed by which we can bring new therapies to the clinic. We aspire to be recognized as the biotechnology industry’s most powerful engine for antibody discovery and development, spanning the path from target to the start of clinical testing.

Drug development timelines are long

We understand that the challenges and opportunities in biotechnology are different from those of other sectors. The process of developing drugs is complex and highly regulated, and as a result product development timelines are long. Historically, it has taken more than 10 years for the average biologic drug to go from early discovery to reach the market, at a cost of well over $1 billion (inclusive of the research and development costs of drugs which do not reach the market).

Because of the inherently complex regulatory regime governing the testing, approval, and marketing of a drug candidate, drug developers may commit large amounts of time and resources toward the development of a particular drug. For this reason, we believe that drug developers need to ensure they have optimal drug candidates from the beginning.

Our strategy is based on two basic elements

We focus on the development of antibody-based drugs and are committed to improving the way these drugs are discovered and developed. As business operators, we think deeply about capital allocation and strive to maximize long-term value while mitigating the risks that are inherent in drug development and in scaling a company. This balance is reflected in our business model and investments. We look for opportunities where we believe low-risk investments in building technology and operational efficiency can create a sustained competitive advantage and drive long-term value by making antibody drug development faster and more efficient.

Our basic strategy is simple and has remained unchanged since the founding of our Company:

Our business model is capital-efficient and based on partnering

We build and apply our engine to solve long-standing problems in drug discovery. As we do, we convert investments in talent and technology into intellectual capital: intellectual property, know-how, optimized workflows, expertise, and data. We believe this continued accumulation of intellectual capital makes our engine increasingly effective at discovering and developing future antibody drugs. Our teams and technology get stronger as we solve each new problem. Improved capabilities enable and attract new program opportunities.

Partners seeking a competitive advantage approach us with ideas for new antibody drugs and specific problems that need to be solved. We deliver optimized clinical antibody candidates for further preclinical development and IND-enabling studies. Our typical partner-initiated discovery agreements, include near-term payments, clinical and commercial milestones, and royalties on net sales. While upfront fees generally cover our initial costs, the majority of the value of each deal is associated with downstream stakes that accrue in our portfolio. All together, we believe that these dynamics allow us to deploy capital efficiently.

As of December 31, 2022, we had 174 programs under contract with 40 unique partners, 149 of which include downstream participation in the form of milestones and royalty (and equivalent) stakes. We have started over 100 of these programs. At the portfolio level, we reduce risk through diversification across discovery programs, therapeutic areas, and partners, making our portfolio risk significantly lower than the binary risk that is typical of single drug development programs. We select partners and programs to include in our portfolio based on our assessment of their likelihood of success, thereby creating a slice of the market that we believe is enriched for its best parts. We also work to expand the capabilities of our engine in areas of high value. These self-initiated technology-development efforts may produce wholly owned assets for partnering.

We are well-positioned to execute on our business strategy

We have been characterized as part of a new category of company called “tech-enabled biotech” or “techbio”. We believe that companies in this space – including ours – should be evaluated not on the promise of their technology, but on the output of their platforms. We believe evidence of a successful platform includes:

Since our incorporation in 2012, we have accumulated over 10 years of experience in discovering therapeutic antibody candidates and have built substantial capabilities, scale, and expertise. We estimate that we have invested over $500 million in our engine and – with over 40 partnerships, approximately 500 employees, and over 650,000 square feet in facilities available or under construction – we believe we have earned a significant competitive advantage in the maturity of our technology and the scale of our operations. We have worked on more than 100 different programs and have succeeded in discovering antibodies against recognized difficult targets. We have also validated our engine both clinically and commercially. Since 2012, we have generated over $425 million in cumulative earnings and with approximately $900 million in liquidity, we believe we are well-placed to continue executing on our strategy.

We do not expect to receive further royalties from our COVID-19 program, which were the driver of our recent profitability and positive operating cash flows. Therefore, we expect to generate losses and negative operating cash flow in the near-to-medium term, a period of continued investments in our engine ahead of revenues generated from milestone payments and royalties in the longer term.

OUR COMPANY AND ENGINE

The development of antibody-based drugs comes with unique challenges

Antibodies are specialized proteins, adept at binding biological and non-biological targets with high specificity and potency. This gives antibodies potential tolerability advantages relative to small-molecule-based drugs and makes therapeutic antibodies central to the precision-medicine toolkit. In addition, the success rates of antibodies in the clinic are driving drug developers of all sizes to invest in antibody drug development. Together, these factors contribute to the rapid growth of the therapeutic antibody market.

As proteins, antibodies are larger and more complex than small-molecule drugs. This creates unique challenges for drug developers. For example, antibodies and other protein-based drugs are more costly and time-consuming to manufacture compared to small molecules. Similarly, obtaining the right antibody for a particular program requires highly specialized capabilities relating to

immunization, screening, high-throughput analytics, functional and biophysical characterization, protein engineering, and optimization. Efficient development of antibody therapies requires the integration of highly specialized skills, technology, and infrastructure – something that few firms are able to do successfully. For this reason, we believe there is a serious structural challenge in the biotechnology industry that makes it difficult to turn biological insights into drugs that are ready for clinical testing.

These problems, which are inherent in developing new drugs, are hard to solve. As the biotechnology industry matures and becomes increasingly competitive, the problems are getting harder. Solving these problems would open new areas of drug development and has the potential to unlock additional value.

Our founding idea and insight

Our Company was founded to deliberately re-think the optimal approach to discovery and development of new antibody drugs. This idea originated from deep insights into the structure of our industry and the three essential steps of drug development, which are:

We believe there has been chronic underinvestment in developing product-creation capabilities for antibody drug development. We also believe this step represents significant opportunities for learning and the development of capabilities that are transferable between different drug development projects. Finally, we believe this is the place where investments in technology can most effectively drive value.

Our integrated engine for accelerated drug discovery

Our founders had a vision of building an antibody discovery and development engine based on sound process-engineering and design principles. Functionally, the goal of this engine is to systematically produce therapeutic antibodies that meet the many requirements for proceeding into clinical testing. Over the past decade, we have worked to achieve this vision, deliberately building our engine (Figure 1) to break the barriers of conventional antibody discovery and to deliver optimal clinical candidates to partners with both precision and speed.

Our engine discovers antibodies from natural immune responses, which are pre-enriched for antibodies with higher target-binding specificity and developability than those generated by synthetic methods. Through proprietary immunization strategies and single-cell screening, we maximize the search space to generate a wide range of diverse antibodies. Using robust characterization and developability assessments, we downselect these antibodies to optimal clinical candidates.

Figure 1: Our integrated engine for drug discovery.

Our engine integrates expert teams, technology, and facilities with data science and automation to support the optimized workflows that are necessary to move therapeutic programs from concept through to the clinic. Today, our engine allows us to take discovery and development programs through to the delivery of optimal clinical candidates. To expand our capabilities, we are integrating process development, manufacturing, and regulatory capabilities into our engine. When complete, our engine will be able to advance programs from targets to delivery of investigational drug products, complete with data and the regulatory documents necessary to start clinical testing.

Our engine brings together data and computational tools

A key pillar of our engine is the integration of modern software and data science infrastructure. Across many sectors, data science has revolutionized business performance, but many of its most promising applications have yet to be exploited by biotechnology.

The primary motive of our data science efforts is to make our business more efficient and scalable. We achieve this through deep integration of software and data architectures with our experimental work into a much larger engine.

Our engine integrates the collection, standardization, and storage of data with a suite of computational tools and an interactive interface that allows our scientists to quickly explore and interpret complex antibody data sets. Data from every experiment is securely stored in a central database designed to maintain the relationships that exist between different measurement types, samples, protocols, metadata, and antibodies. Because we do not rely on third-party data, we are able to maintain strict data quality assurance and standardization.

We believe this approach provides an advantage that increases the value of the data resulting from discovery programs, as we can extract informative insights by uncovering relationships that are hidden within the data. We believe that managing data and leveraging the proprietary datasets in this way allows us to continually refine our approach to antibody drug development and leverage the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods.

Our data science infrastructure allows us to make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) generally refers to advanced computational methods and algorithms that enable the discovery of data features, patterns, or associations within large and complex data sets that can be used to classify data sets, make predictions, and solve problems.

We currently use AI and machine learning methods extensively in our engine, with an emphasis on the automation and scaling of data operations associated with our experimental workflows. While we believe AI has tremendous potential to accelerate antibody discovery through the prediction, engineering, and potentially even de novo design of antibodies with improved therapeutic properties, it is our view that many of the claims associated with AI drug discovery are ahead of current capabilities. What we believe is missing, in most cases, is the data and the experimental capabilities needed to iterate and learn. Ultimately, we believe it is only through the accumulation of large, complex, and high-quality data sets that the full promise of AI in drug discovery will be realized.

We believe a strong foundation that integrates large-scale experimentation with software and data infrastructure will be required to successfully apply AI and machine learning methods to biological data sets. We believe this is the only way the necessary data sets can be captured and standardized, while also maintaining the integrity of relationships between different data types. We also believe the importance and difficulty of developing the necessary robust software and data infrastructure is widely underestimated.

We invest significant resources to build the necessary foundations for using AI and machine learning methods successfully. We generate large amounts of data throughout each program and can capture these large data sets because we (i) prioritize investing in the experimental capabilities and their necessary integrations with software and data science and (ii) use these capabilities frequently in real drug discovery and development programs. We believe these features of our business will position us to be a leader in the application of advanced computation to antibody drug development.

We aim to be the best in the world in going from target to clinic

Already, we find that seamless data capture along an integrated end-to-end workflow allows us to improve our efficiency and ability to predict early in the discovery process how antibodies will behave later in development and manufacturing (Figure 2). Today, we integrate data from the start of a program right through to comprehensive characterization of antibody candidates. We are also investing in our engine to connect program data from program launch through to manufacturing and regulatory submissions for clinical testing. We believe that the additional insights to result from these data may also allow us to select and advance antibody candidates that are more potent or more easily manufactured.

Figure 2: Our integrated engine and capabilities create a virtuous cycle.

We have active construction projects on three buildings that will expand our facilities by more than 500,000 square feet when completed. These expanded facilities will allow us to scale up operations and support cell-line development, process development, and GMP manufacturing of antibody therapeutics. In April 2020, in support of this effort, we received a commitment for CAD $175.6 million ($129.7 million as of December 31, 2022) in financing from the Government of Canada. Upon completion of this facility, we expect to be able to support our partners from program-initiation to fill-finish. We believe that the integration of an optimized manufacturing process with our discovery and protein-engineering capabilities will create synergies in speed and efficiency and will allow us to more rapidly test and validate new antibody therapeutic formats, including bispecific antibodies and antibody conjugates. We expect to complete this facility and to have GMP manufacturing capabilities in use in 2025.

Using this approach to workflow optimization – alongside the continuous elimination of inefficiencies across the operations of our engine – we can meaningfully accelerate the speed of antibody drug discovery. At full scale, we believe our engine will allow us to reduce by half the time required to go from an idea to an antibody drug candidate ready for clinical testing, from three to five years today to under two years.

To date, we estimate that we have invested more than $500 million in building our engine and expanding its capabilities. We have also successfully used our engine to overcome some of the hardest problems in the biotechnology industry. As an example, our engine discovered two antibody therapies for patients with COVID-19 (under emergency use authorization in 2020 and 2022), in what we believe was one of the most competitive and time-sensitive drug development efforts in history. We continue to invest in expanding and improving our engine, with approximately two-thirds of our total research and development spend applied to platform development.

OUR PEOPLE

Our people are critical to our success

We believe that great and enduring companies are built by strong teams of exceptional people. For this reason, team-building is a top priority in our business. We see talent and team-development as an opportunity to build a competitive advantage that amplifies every dimension of our business. We see investments in our people as investments that are necessary for the success of our Company.

We build systems to support our people

We believe a strong corporate culture is essential for the recruitment, development, and retention of exceptional employees and teams. Although leaders must model corporate values and desired behaviors, we do not believe culture can be invented or enforced from above. Instead, we see the responsibility for building and stewarding our culture as shared across our entire organization. We believe culture starts from individuals with shared core values and a common sense of purpose, and that culture emerges and is strengthened through a network of interactions and relationships built on mutual trust and appreciation.

Building a winning culture requires investment and continuous diligent effort. Our Company and our Talent Development team works to develop and deliver the necessary processes, training programs, and events that we believe are essential for our culture to thrive. These are designed to:

• Encourage relationship-building across interdisciplinary teams;

Through these and related activities we believe our Talent Development team plays a critical role in creating an effective organization that our teams are proud to be a part of.

Our philosophy for hiring and recruitment

Our philosophy for hiring is based on insights gained over more than a decade of building and managing interdisciplinary teams. First, we recognize that the success of a large and complex organization depends on the contributions of people with broad and complementary sets of technical expertise and aptitudes. Second, we prioritize the long-term potential of candidates and invest in our team’s continued development. We believe this framework has allowed us to build an exceptional team at all levels and to develop strong leaders that drive the continued growth of our business in the long term.

How we structure our pay and compensation packages

We believe our long-term success depends on our ability to compete for top talent. To attract and retain top talent, we aim to offer total compensation that is competitive for any given role, as determined by market data on local, regional, or global conditions, as appropriate. In addition to competitive salaries, equity awards, and performance bonuses, our compensation includes comprehensive healthcare benefits, fitness and active-lifestyle benefits, and retirement-savings contributions.

We grant equity awards, comprising stock options and restricted stock units, to all employees. We do this because we believe that shared ownership promotes employee retention, creates alignment, and promotes a sense of shared ownership in the long-term success of our Company.

As discussed above, we also recognize that our ability to compete effectively for talent also depends on us maintaining a strong corporate culture, that our programs for training and development remain strong, and that we can continue to offer attractive working conditions. We further stress the importance of guidelines and cultural norms that encourage each team-member to find their optimal work-life synergy, aiming for productivity and constant improvement that is sustained over time. Finally, we believe that our strategy of using technology to positively impact the lives of patients is attractive to top talent who want to spend their days well and who value challenging work with a clear sense of purpose.

Our discovery engine requires interdisciplinary talent

Interdisciplinarity is a core feature of our business. The nature of our work in technology development and drug discovery requires a workforce that is exceptionally interdisciplinary in its scientific, engineering, and professional skills. After more than a decade of technology development at the nexus of science, engineering, and computation, we believe we are effective at assembling and integrating strong cross-functional teams. As of December 31, 2022, our research and development team comprised approximately 47% scientists, 36% business professionals, and 17% engineers and data scientists. Over 50% of our team members have either a Master’s degree and/or a Ph.D.

Our geographic locations give us an advantage in recruitment

Attracting and retaining large teams of highly trained scientists and engineers is one of the most critical challenges in executing on our strategy. We believe that we have a significant recruitment advantage by virtue of our largest research facilities being in Vancouver, Canada, and Sydney, Australia. Both the Vancouver and Sydney regions are consistently ranked amongst the most liveable cities in the world. Both also have world-class universities that train large pools of talent in fields relevant to our work, including computer science, biochemistry, genomics, engineering, cell biology, and immunology. We believe the combination of (i) these regions providing access to large talent pools and less-developed biotechnology sectors, and (ii) our willingness to hire for potential and invest in employee training and development are key factors contributing to our success in discovering, attracting, and retaining top talent. Our facilities in Vancouver and Sydney are complemented by smaller specialized research teams in biotechnology hubs including Boston, United States, and Cambridge, United Kingdom.

We foster and enjoy high levels of employee engagement

We see employee engagement and retention as two important measures of the health of a company. We take regular measurements of our employee engagement and our ability to retain professional talent. In 2022, we had a voluntary turnover rate of less than 4%.

Over the past year, our team has grown by 28%, from 386 to 495 full-time employees. As of December 31, 2022, we had 495 full-time employees in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, representing over 50 nationalities.

OUR MARKET OPPORTUNITY

We believe the biotechnology sector will be one of the most important opportunities for growth and investment over the next 30 years. The large size and rapid growth of the market for therapeutic antibodies combined with the capabilities of our engine represents a large opportunity for our business to make a difference for patients and partners by catalyzing a change in how antibody drugs are discovered.

Therapeutic antibodies are one of the largest and fastest growing classes of drugs

Antibodies are one of the largest and fastest growing classes of drugs and are used across multiple therapeutic areas, such as oncology, inflammation, infectious disease, ophthalmology, cardiovascular disease, autoimmunity, and neurodegeneration.

In 2022, therapeutic antibodies generated almost $250 billion in global sales. This market is expected to grow to over $350 billion by 2027, representing a five-year compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, of 9%. In 2022, over 40 antibody therapeutics achieved blockbuster status, defined as achieving annual with sales in excess of $1 billion. In 2021, therapeutic antibodies also represented 4 out of the world’s 10 top-selling pharmaceutical products.

The mean peak-year sales for currently marketed monoclonal antibody drugs and monoclonal conjugate antibody drugs are estimated at approximately $3 billion. In 2022, there were over 140 approved antibody therapeutics, with more than 220 in Phase 3 clinical trials worldwide.

Historically, the time for antibody discovery projects to reach Phase 1 clinical trials from target selection has been approximately 5.5 years. On average, antibody drugs have taken between seven and ten years to reach market-authorization from the start of Phase 1 clinical trials. Each year, around 220 antibody therapeutics enter Phase 1 clinical trials. Between 2017 and 2022, this number grew at an 11% CAGR.

Our approach to expanding markets and creating value

We believe the best way for companies to create value is by providing solutions that empower their industry broadly. We seek to align our business objectives with those of our partners. By making antibody drug development faster, doing things that have not been done before, and leveling the playing field for our partners, we believe that our engine creates value for our industry in three main ways:

OUR PARTNERS

We have extensive experience in forging partnerships with emerging biotechnology companies, leading pharmaceutical companies, and non-profit and government organizations. Our partners are specialist scientific ideators and skilled product testers that are predominantly based in the United States and Europe. They seek increased speed and probability of success of their drug development programs. As of December 31, 2022, we had a total of 40 unique partners for whom we have conducted or are conducting antibody discovery activities.

Our partnership agreements commonly include: (i) near-term payments for access, research, and intellectual property rights; (ii) downstream payments in the form of clinical and commercial milestones; and (iii) royalties on net sales of therapeutics. We also structure agreements with additional approaches to capture value, including through equity in our business partners and various options for deeper investment in moving therapeutic candidates forward. We believe the long-term value of our business will be driven by downstream milestone payments and royalties on the net sales of a resulting therapeutic.

As our Company has grown and developed, we have strategically emphasized agreements where we add more value for partners beyond the initial discovery work. These programs include more-valuable downstream terms and help maximize the value of our portfolio.

Our partners are specialists who come to us for help to develop clinical candidates

Our partners are specialists with deep knowledge and understanding of their targets. They seek to use this understanding of target and disease biology to develop therapeutic products for the ultimate benefit of patients. Biotechnology companies that do not have internal antibody discovery capabilities partner with us to help discover and develop clinical candidates at greater speed, with higher quality, and with a fraction of the capital outlay that has historically been associated with internal discovery efforts. Leading biopharmaceutical companies with well-developed internal discovery capabilities partner with us to help solve discovery problems that have proven intractable using their platforms.

The capabilities of our engine have made us a preferred partner in the biotechnology industry

We believe we have become a preferred partner in the biotechnology industry, as our integrated engine aims to improve the speed and probability of success of antibody drug development. We leverage our partners’ specialist insights into target biology and use our engine to generate what we believe are optimal clinical candidates for downstream development. Our investments in full integration also allow us to take a big-picture perspective on antibody drug discovery, starting with the end in mind and optimizing for the final developability of antibodies from the start. This approach is intended to increase our partners’ probabilities of success in developing an antibody candidate, with a commensurate improvement in their return on investment.

We take the selection of our partners seriously

We take a deliberate and strategic approach to selecting partners. We believe successful antibody drugs are developed in collaboration with partners who have skills and experience complementary to our own. We look for partners with innovative and impactful ideas, strong leadership teams, and the continued ability to raise the capital needed to fund the development of a product candidate. Being a preferred partner in our industry also allows us to work on the programs that mean the most to partners.

Our agreements emphasize participation in the success of antibody therapeutics

Our agreements emphasize participation in the success and upside of the future antibody therapeutics we help to discover and develop. Typical partnership agreements for partner-initiated discovery programs include (i) near-term payments for access, research, and intellectual property rights; (ii) downstream payments in the form of clinical and commercial milestones; and (iii) royalties on net sales of therapeutics. Agreements may include alternative approaches to capture value, including equity in our business partner and various options for deeper investment in moving drug candidates forward.

As of December 31, 2022, we had 174 partnered programs under contract that were either completed, in progress, or pending target nomination by the partner. Of these, 149 programs have the potential for milestone and royalty payments. Our partnership agreements are typically terminable at will with 90 days’ notice prior to identification of a target, after which point they may only be terminated for cause. A summary of publicly disclosed partnerships is included in the table below.

Table 2: Summary Partnership Agreements with Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Companies that include downstream participation from 2016 to 2022*

AbbVie Inc. Up to 5 targets, multi-year Undisclosed December 15, 2022

Empirico Inc. 2 additional targets Undisclosed May 3, 2022

Tachyon Inc. Single target Oncology August 3, 2021

Angios GmbH Multi-target, multi-year Ophthalmology May 6, 2021

Empirico Inc. 5 targets, multi-year Undisclosed April 14, 2021

Gilead Sciences, Inc. 8 targets, multi-year Undisclosed April 1, 2021

Abdera Therapeutics Inc. 9 targets, multi-year Oncology January 14, 2021

Invetx, Inc. Multi-target, multi-year Animal Health November 19, 2020

Kodiak Sciences Inc. Multi-target, multi-year Ophthalmology October 29, 2020

Undisclosed Single target Bispecific June 3, 2020 *

Invetx, Inc. Multi-target, multi-year Animal health February 23, 2020

Undisclosed Multi-target, multi-year Cell therapy September 25, 2019 *

Gilead Sciences, Inc. Single target Infectious disease June 13, 2019

Novartis AG Up to 10 targets, multi-year Undisclosed February 14, 2019

Autolus Therapeutics plc Single target Cell therapy (CAR-T) November 29, 2018

Denali Therapeutics, Inc. Single target Neurological diseases June 12, 2018

Pfizer Inc. Multi-target, multi-year Membrane protein January 5, 2017

Kodiak Sciences Inc. Single target Ophthalmology August 24, 2016

Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. Undisclosed Undisclosed February 2, 2016

* Effective date of agreement

Most of the programs with our partners will generate milestone payments to us if our partners reach certain preclinical, clinical, regulatory, and commercial milestones. In addition, programs that generate drug candidates which become commercial products may generate royalty payments to us on the net sales of those products. We also have other forms of downstream economic participation, including equity and equity-like positions, and options to co-invest. The following table represents the range of royalty (and equivalent) rates and the hypothetical maximum value of the milestone payments included in our partnership agreements as of December 31, 2022:

Table 3: Downstream Participation

Milestones (in billions)1 Royalty on net sales, 5th to 95th percentile range2

Regulatory $1.26

Commercial $4.26 Other downstream participation

Total $6.55 Equity/equity-like positions

Options to co-invest

1 All programs under contract, not probability adjusted

2 Includes range of royalty (and equivalent) rates of each contract, considering step-downs, if any

OUR INDUSTRY STRUCTURE

Ideas for new antibody drugs can come from anywhere

We believe that sound biological insights and new ideas for new antibody drugs are a key input of our work. As product creators, we compete with other companies for access to ideas. The complexity and vastness of disease biology means that there is no universal approach to generating ideas for new drugs. Good ideas can come from anywhere. Academic institutions, venture capital groups, non-government organizations, small biotechnology companies, and large biopharmaceutical companies all have a role to play in driving ideation in our industry. To us, this dynamic suggests that broad partnerships are essential for connecting with the decentralized ecosystem of ideators that are the source of ideas for new antibody drugs.

The standard model for turning ideas into antibody drugs is inefficient

The conventional model for turning ideas into drugs requires biotechnology companies to independently recruit the teams, build the infrastructure, and acquire the technologies needed for product creation. If these companies end up building such capabilities internally, we estimate that up to $50 million could be spent per company in pursuit of such efforts. Because these companies would build these capabilities separate from their core area of focus, and because such businesses have limited time to develop these capabilities, we believe that such decentralized capabilities are unable to approach the state of the art in our industry.

Ideation is dominated by innovative biotechnology companies

Industry-wide, ideation is dominated by small biotechnology companies. Between 2011 and 2021, over 50% of new-drug approvals in the United States originated with smaller biotechnology companies with annual revenues below $500 million. For blockbuster therapeutics, the probability of the idea originating with a smaller biotechnology company increases to over 60%. These early-stage companies are often rich in ideas but low on capital and lack the necessary capabilities to efficiently pursue their ideas. In the absence of a centralized engine that operates at the highest level, these companies are forced to develop and to use suboptimal technology, or to piece together fragmented point solutions and contract services. Spread across a number of smaller biotechnology companies, we believe that the costs to advance their ideas – both in capital and in opportunity – can create serious economic barriers and inefficiencies that artificially restrict innovation and damage productivity in our industry.

Our integrated engine levels the playing field and enables new therapies

We believe our engine and business model improves efficiencies in our industry in three main ways:

1. We prioritize integration over the accumulation of stand-alone tools

We believe that drug development cannot be broken down into a series of independent steps and see the development of new drugs as a single process with one end goal – the rapid delivery of successful antibody drugs to patients. We prioritize the outcome of an integrated end-to-end workflow over the accumulation of stand-alone tools. Where other providers in our industry may offer partial solutions or stand-alone instruments, we offer an integrated engine for the creation of new antibody drugs. By delivering complete and optimized solutions to our partners, we think this perspective gives us a competitive advantage relative to providers of modular solutions.

2. We level the playing field to empower a more diverse set of innovators

As our centralized infrastructure for antibody drug discovery lowers the barriers to entry in our industry, we create the conditions for smaller biotechnology companies to focus on what is unique and valuable in their businesses, and to compete on the merits of their ideas. We believe this dynamic has the potential to catalyze a structural change in how antibody drugs are developed. By leveling the playing field to create opportunities for a more-diverse set of innovators, we believe that our engine has the potential to expand the ecosystem and make our industry more efficient.

3. We enable new types of antibody therapies

The differentiated capabilities of our engine make more and new kinds of antibody discovery possible. For instance, we believe our engine gives us a unique advantage in the discovery of antibodies that modulate the function of difficult transmembrane protein targets, such as G-protein-coupled receptors (“GPCRs”) and ion channels. These are two large and well-validated families of drug targets for which antibody discovery using traditional techniques has been extremely difficult. By unlocking access to these and other types of targets with antibodies, we believe that our engine has the potential to grow the market for antibody therapies.

COMPETITION

We operate in the global market for solutions that enable the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies. The solutions and applications offered by companies operating in this market vary in size, breadth, and scope. These solutions are restricted by significant intellectual property barriers.

Given the broad promise of antibody therapeutics, we face competition from a number of sources, including companies that provide antibody discovery services such as contract research organizations (“CROs”) and companies that provide specialized solutions to antibody discovery using proprietary technologies or platforms.

Many emerging and established life sciences companies have also been built around technologies that focus on one or a limited number of steps in antibody discovery and development. These companies provide technological point-solutions that can be integrated into antibody discovery workflows within our partners’ laboratories or at CROs.

An example of a company that provides a technological point-solution that is integrated into antibody discovery workflows is Berkeley Lights, Inc. (“Berkeley Lights”). They and similar tool-providers place instruments with our potential customers and with

CROs that compete with us for business. Such point-solution companies commonly earn revenues on the sale of machines and proprietary reagents, and in some cases also perform discovery services with fees and royalties that compete with our business. For example, Twist Bioscience markets and provides antibody discovery services using the Berkeley Lights Beacon platform to its customers.

OUR APPROACH TO CAPITAL ALLOCATION

We think like owners when making investments and have historically been profitable

Our founders, leadership team, and employees own a significant portion of the equity in our Company. Our teams think like owners when making decisions to allocate time and capital across our business activities. Cognizant of the specific challenges that characterize biotechnology as a sector, we specialize in addressing hard but tractable engineering problems and avoid staking our fortunes on high-risk science projects. We believe this is the best way for us to create value, and to do so reliably. Historically, our business has been both high-growth and capital-efficient. We have generated positive operating cash flow cumulatively since our inception in 2012 and in every successive year since 2018. However, as we do not expect to receive further royalties from our COVID-19 program, which were the driver of our recent profitability and positive operating cash flows, we expect to generate losses and negative operating cash flow in the near-to-medium term. We are thus anticipating a period of continued investments in our engine ahead of revenues generated from milestone payments and royalties in the longer term.

We invest with a long-term perspective

We allocate capital with a long-term perspective and our largest investments are in the intellectual capital and infrastructure that comprise our engine. Using our engine, we make capital-efficient investments in the early development of new antibody drugs, with the largest value tied to their long-term success. In many cases, this results in cash flows that are further in the future. We do this because we believe that our emphasis on milestone payments and royalty positions will result in stakes that substantially exceed in value the price we could command upfront for access to our engine. In the long run, we believe this approach has the potential to yield exceptional rates of return.

Consistent with the long timelines for drug product development and testing, we expect the most meaningful additional royalty revenues from our portfolio to begin after 2030. As our royalty positions mature, we believe that the layering of programs in our portfolio will result in a long-lived stream of strong cash flows and a high rate of return on invested capital. We accept that royalty-driven cash flows will only result when we have created value for patients, i.e. when the drug candidates that compose our portfolio reach the market as successfully commercialized antibody drugs.

Our engine helps us build a valuable portfolio with capital efficiency

Our engine is a focal point of our capital-allocation strategy. We make investments in infrastructure and intellectual capital, improving our discovery and development engine. This engine in turn generates our growing portfolio of valuable stakes in drug candidates in a capital-efficient manner.

By using our engine and its differentiated capabilities to attract business from our partners across the biotechnology industry, we believe that discovery partnerships can be used to grow our portfolio without significant capital outlay apart from the investments we make in expanding the capabilities and capacity of our engine.

We select opportunities and partners to maximize the value of our portfolio

As business operators, we understand the value of active portfolio management and how it can be used to enhance value in an industry where not all ideas are equally likely to succeed. With our dedication to discovery and development, we do not claim any specific expertise in ideation or selecting targets. Instead, we focus our efforts on connecting with strong partners whom we believe have compelling ideas for therapeutics and the capabilities to clinically develop the drug candidates that we discover.

The largest risk to our portfolio is not wasted effort, but rather the opportunity cost of missing out on potential future blockbuster therapeutics. To maximize our chances of investing in the most promising opportunities in our industry, we make the required substantial investments in our engine that make us a preferred partner in the biotechnology industry and an attractor of ideas for new antibody drugs.

Thinking like investors, we believe active management is most impactful when used to screen out weak opportunities. When partnering, we look for companies with what we believe are innovative and impactful ideas, strong leadership teams, and the

continued ability to raise the capital needed to support a drug candidateon its way to and through the clinic. Being a preferred partner in our industry also allows us to collaborate on the programs that mean the most to partners, where product quality and the speed to the clinic really matter. We think this strategy allows us to enrich our portfolio for programs with above-average potential to deliver commerciallysuccessful therapeutics.

We seek to maximize the net present value of our portfolio of stakes

Contractual rights to royalties and commercial milestones are financial stakes in the commercial success of the drug candidates that we help develop. We negotiate these stakes as part of our agreements with partners.

We believe the near-term and clinical milestone payments we earn from programs are only a small proportion of the expected total value that we ascribe to an individual program. Instead, for a given program that undergoes clinical development, obtains marketing approval, and is successfully commercialized, we expect the bulk of the revenues to result to be associated with our downstream royalty rights and commercial milestone payments. Figure 3 shows the distribution of revenues associated with our COVID-19 program by revenue category over time. We believe the dominance of royalty revenues as a category as seen in this program is broadly characteristic of a typical antibody discovery program that ultimately produces a successfully marketed drug. We do, however, recognize that our COVID-19 program was realized on a very compressed timeline (owing to the dynamics of a global pandemic) which is unlikely to be repeated by other programs.

Our approach is to maximize the expected net present value of our stakes in future antibody drugs. We believe this approach will maximize free cash flow in the long term and the value of our business overall.

Figure 3: Revenue profile for our COVID-19 program – a successful pre-partnered program.

Our portfolio is built using three distinct program types

By partnering, we generate opportunities to leverage our engine’s power to contribute value to drug discovery efforts. As of December 31, 2022, we have entered contracts for 174 antibody discovery and development programs. The economics we earn on partnered programs scale with the value we bring to each program. Typically, these economics take the form of near-term payments, clinical and commercial milestone payments, and royalties on the net sales of a resulting therapeutic.

We increase the value of our portfolio and our business in three ways – by partnering on additional drug development programs; by contributing more value to the drug development programs we work on; and by capturing more of the value we contribute to a program. In addition to the partner-initiated discovery program model which we have entered since the founding of our Company, we have introduced additional program structures. These aim to unlock additional partnering opportunities, to allow us to develop and deploy additional value-creating capabilities, and to enhance the potential economics in programs where the value we add is particularly large.

Our programs now fall into three different categories:

Partner-Initiated Discovery

In partner-initiated discovery programs, partners come to us with a target in mind and work with us to turn their idea into an antibody drug product. This is our first category of program, dating back to 2014.

The volume of programs in this category is high. As of December 31, we had started 94 partner-initiated discovery programs. Of these, 69 programs include downstream milestones or royalty stakes. Through new and expanded partnerships, we continue to add programs to this portfolio.

We work closely with our partners on these programs, leveraging their insight and expertise into target and disease biology while using the discovery and development capabilities of our engine to create value. Depending on the terms of the program, we may perform work from target specification as far as the delivery of a final drug candidate. For some large or well-enabled partners, we will hand our work off at an earlier stage, allowing our partner to work with our panel of characterized antibodies while leveraging their own proprietary data.

The royalties on net sales in our typical discovery program are in the low-to-mid-single-digit-percentage-point range. Because the research fees we earn on the work generally more than cover our marginal costs of running these programs, the potential return on our incremental investment in these programs is high. In the long term, as our portfolio matures and results in approved therapies, we believe our aggregate economic position in this category has the potential to produce large revenues at near-100% margin.

Partner-Initiated Co-Development

In partner-initiated co-development programs, we work with targets picked or nominated by partners. We announced our first co-development partnership in 2021. As of December 31, 2022, we had started six partner-initiated co-development programs.

Our co-development programs represent a further amplification of our business model, as they enhance the potential economics in our portfolio by giving us the option – but not the obligation – to co-invest in the development of drug candidates. We begin discovery with a 50% stake in the program and have the option to invest to retain our ownership position on a stage-by-stage basis. Some programs in this category also include equity investments in partner companies.

The investments we make under this type of program are in the form of cost-sharing, where we initially contribute to discovery and development costs in proportion to our level of program ownership. After completing the initial work phases (typically to identify a development candidate), we have the option – but not the obligation – to continue co-funding further development of the drug candidate in return for a maintained ownership share.

As a co-owner of these programs, we have complete visibility on data and progress. We believe this preferential insight into program potential and viability puts us in an attractive position to make the decision on exercising our option to continue to invest. If we exercise our option to continue co-development in a program, we invest at cost and at what we believe to be at a discount to the intrinsic value of the incremental stake.

In cases where we do not exercise our option to continue to invest, our stake typically converts to a royalty-and-milestones position, with royalty rates reflecting the value of our contributions to that point. For each staged investment we make in a co-development program, our effective royalty position is increased. The royalty rates for these programs are generally higher than for our partner-initiated discovery programs.

The potential for us to assume deeper ownership stakes through a co-development agreement allows us to capture more value from programs to which our engine can make an outsized contribution and from programs in which we have a particularly high level of conviction.

Pre-Partnered Programs Associated with Technology Development

Our pre-partnered programs have the potential to generate wholly owned assets discovered in connection with long-range technology development projects that seek to unlock new areas in antibody drug development. While the primary objective of our pre-partnered work is technology development to demonstrably expand the capabilities of our engine, an additional benefit of these efforts could be assets with the potential to be advanced as first-in-class or best-in-class therapeutics.

In our technology development work, we prioritize areas where we believe there are multiple high-value therapeutic opportunities to explore. We believe doing this work on widely recognized real-world problems with large commercial potential is critical both to the development and validation of our engine. To date, we have undertaken three such technology development efforts:

The majority of our pre-partnered programs are still at an early stage. A subset of programs is more advanced, and we anticipate the first of these progressing to selection of therapeutic antibody candidates for IND-enabling studies within the near-to-medium term.

Assets that potentially result from our technology development-associated pre-partnered programs are wholly owned by us, and we intend to license them to partners for clinical development and commercialization. Given the high technical barriers these programs need to overcome, and our selection of targets that are widely sought after, we anticipate that any such deals could achieve significant economics in the form of large near-term payments and above-average downstream participation through milestones and royalties.

Precedent suggests that the important assets which we target with our pre-partnered programs can be partnered on attractive economic terms. For example, in 2020, we partnered with Lilly to develop and commercialize COVID-19 antibody assets resulting from pre-partnered work using our pandemic-response platform. As of December 31, 2022, we have earned over $900 million in combined royalties from commercial sales of bamlanivimab and bebtelovimab.

Our portfolio is well-diversified

We believe the optimal portfolio is diversified, long-term, and robust. Diversification reduces the binary risk associated with individual drug development programs. Because the capabilities of our engine are broadly applicable to antibody-based drug development, we can access the full depth and breadth of programs in the biotechnology industry through our partnering approach. Our resulting portfolio of programs is well-diversified across therapeutic areas (Figure 4), modalities, and partner types. We believe the current distribution of programs in our portfolio broadly reflects the overall distribution of programs in our industry.

Figure 4: Our large, diversified portfolio of stakes in next-generation antibody therapies.

Drivers of value in our portfolio

The value of our portfolio is driven by several factors, which we believe include:

• The probability of success of a drug discovery program;

• The expected resulting commercial sales if a program is successful;

We invest in and operate our business with the belief that we can favorably impact each driver of value in our portfolio:

Program starts. Each program that we start has the potential to turn an idea into a new marketed therapy. The investments we make in our engine and our capabilities and capacity for business development allow us to connect with, and credibly pursue, an increasing number of therapeutic ideas in our industry. We believe that our ability to connect with and pursue such ideas is reflected in the growth in our cumulative number of partners and our cumulative number of program starts.

We believe our ability to accelerate drug development timelines and to unlock new types of targets put us in a position to continue driving business development growth. In pursuing the growth of our portfolio, we are mindful of the strong connection between commercial success of our programs and our largest payouts, as well as of opportunity costs. We do not aim to simply maximize our number of program starts. Instead, we choose to engage with partners and on programs that we believe have the potential to deliver first-in-class and best-in-class antibody therapeutics with strong commercial prospects.

Probability of success. For a drug development program to ultimately achieve commercial success, several conditions generally need to be met: the therapeutic hypothesis must be valid; the drug candidate must be optimal-for-purpose (e.g. effective, safe, manufacturable); the clinical trials must be designed and run appropriately; a significant medical need must be met; regulatory, logistical, and commercial matters must be handled well; and good organizational and financial support must be established and maintained throughout. Failure on any one factor often leads to program-failure overall. Historically, such failures have resulted in success rates for drug development programs estimated to be in the mid-single-digit percentage range.

Through our investments and engine-based approach, we aim to raise the probability of success of the programs in our portfolio. The investments we make in our engine are primarily driven by our goal of finding and developing optimal drug candidates and enhancing the likelihood that a program will succeed on this critical factor. Our investments include the technology development efforts we make to repeatedly deliver successful drug candidates in areas where particularly high technical challenges and high unmet medical needs exist, such as those associated with T-cell engagers, GPCRs, ion channels, and rapid pandemic response.

Information on the other success factors may be uncertain and limited (or unavailable to us) at the time of program inception. However, our approach to partner selection and program selection includes an evaluation of all available information with the aim of steering our work toward programs that do not raise concerns on these factors. As a result, we believe that we are enriching our portfolio for programs with an above-industry-average probability of success.

Timelines. Development of a commercialized drug from program start is estimated to commonly take from eight to fourteen years, followed by approximately over a decade of patent-protected potential sales. Within this overall time frame, drug discovery and preclinical development is estimated to typically take three to five years with the remainder taken up largely by clinical development.

With our ongoing investments in the integrated target-to-clinic capability of our engine we are aiming to substantially reduce the time required for discovery and development, with a stated goal of – in the future – repeatedly moving from target nomination to an IND filing in two years or less.

Accelerating drug development – beyond the obvious benefit for patients – positively impacts the value of an ultimately successful drug in two ways. First, it increases the therapeutic’s chance of being first (or next) to market with a large and lasting impact on market share. Second, it brings forward all positive cash flows from a program with a corresponding impact on their net present value.

Notably, some programs in our portfolio may progress faster than average for reasons beyond the speed of our engine. This can be the case for therapeutics against rare disease; those with breakthrough designation; drugs that are best-in-class and following a well-understood development path; in a pandemic response situation (as demonstrated by bamlanivimab and bebtelovimab); and in animal therapeutics.

Commercial sales. Today’s antibody therapeutics generate average peak sales of approximately $3 billion, following several years of ramping sales after commercialization. Substantial annual sales typically continue until the therapeutic patents expire. The average sales of therapeutics are derived from a long-tailed distribution of peak sales. This distribution includes some therapeutics with sustained annual sales of tens of billions of dollars and many with annual sales over $1 billion (so-called “blockbusters”), as well as many that have more-limited commercial success.

We aim to position our portfolio with particular exposure to therapeutics with high and very high commercial potential. We believe that we can achieve this in three ways:

Royalty rates. Royalties are the economic expression of our win-win approach to partnering, tying our financial success in a program to that of our partner and to the benefit that the commercialized drug brings to patients. Royalties on net sales are nearly 100%-margin revenue to the recipient, less volatile than a share of profits, and inherently protected against inflation.

The level of royalties to us which our partners agree to directionally depends on:

• The value we add to the program;

• Our partner’s appreciation of the value we add to the program;

• Our investment in the program; and

We add more value to a program when we overcome challenging obstacles, accelerate the program, avoid costs for our partner, and improve the program’s chances of success, e.g. by providing superior drug candidates. The investments in the capabilities of our engine – including its forward integration along the value chain – all serve to enhance the opportunity and ability to add more value to programs.

A partner’s recognition of the value we add to their program grows with each successful demonstration of our capabilities, either when we are able to show results from our work, particularly from pre-partnered programs, or during the inaugural programs we complete with them.

Our investments in programs depend on the program type. Investments are minimal in the case of partner-initiated discovery programs, where we typically cover the marginal cost of our work with near-term payments. For pre-partnered programs, the investments we make in the form of our initial technology development (and the subsequent advancement of development work for a particular program) are more substantial. When we enter into a partner-initiated co-development program, the initial investment we make during discovery and development is limited. However, the option to keep investing at cost in consecutive stages of development provides us with the opportunity to achieve a deeper royalty (or equivalent) position. All else equal, a greater investment by us generally translates into a higher royalty rate for a program.

For commercial reasons, we do not disclose the specific economic terms of each partnership agreement, which are generally bespoke. Instead, we report on the average and distribution of royalty rates in our portfolio.

Our average royalty rates reflect the increasing value we create for our industry

The range and progression of our royalty (and equivalent) positions reflect the value that we create and our ability to capture that value.

As of December 31, 2022, we had started 75 partner-initiated programs with downstream participation and partnered one pre-partnered program. These 76 programs have a mean royalty rate of 3.6%. The average negotiated rate for such programs has increased over time, reflecting the dynamics discussed above. Between 2015 and 2019, we agreed to a mean royalty rate of 2.4% across 37 partner-initiated programs with downstream participation contracted in the period; we note that contracts often include multiple program slots that represent potential future program starts. Between 2020 and 2022, we negotiated an increased mean royalty rate of 4.1% across the 111 partner-initiated programs with downstream participation signed in the period and our agreement to partner our COVID-19 antibody assets to Lilly. A quarter of these programs signed in the 2020 to 2022 period can achieve royalty rates above 5%.

Our position in a partner-initiated co-development program generally reflects our proportionate contribution to the program. The royalty (or equivalent) rates that apply at each point where we have the option to continue our co-investments depend on our cumulative contribution to the funding of the program. Even at an early point, the rates we stand to earn from such a program generally exceed the agreed-to royalty rates of our partner-initiated discovery programs. As of December 31, 2022, we continue to co-invest with our partners in all of the six co-development programs that we have started to date.

Other downstream economic stakes. In addition to royalty positions, we have included and expect to continue to include other downstream stakes in our agreements for programs.

As is customary in our industry, because drug development and testing spans many years, we typically negotiate clinical and commercial milestone payments as deferred compensation to recognize future value inflection points arising from our work. For our portfolio of programs under contract and not adjusted for the probability of success, as of December 31, 2022, the total hypothetical value of our clinical and commercial milestone payments was $6.6 billion.

On a case-by-case basis, we may negotiate additional means of capturing value in addition to a reasonable royalty position, including equity or equity-like positions, options for deeper investment, or larger near-term payments.

OTHER MATTERS

Impact of COVID-19

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have taken steps to protect our employees, business partners, vendors, and contractors. To address the multiple dimensions of the pandemic, we have been continuously monitoring the global situation, executing mitigation activities whenever and wherever required, following guidance from provincial and federal health authorities, and incorporating a hybrid working environment. We have not been required to stop research activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic and will adapt and apply new measures as required and as directed by local health authorities.

Intellectual Property

We strive to protect the proprietary technologies that we believe are important to our business, including seeking and maintaining patent protection intended to cover the compositions of matter of our product candidates, their methods of use, related technology, and other inventions that are important to our business.

Our success depends in part on our ability to obtain and maintain intellectual property protection for the components of our discovery and development engine and products arising from the same; to defend and enforce our patents, to preserve the confidentiality of our trade secrets, and to operate without infringing valid and enforceable patents and other proprietary rights of third parties; and to identify new opportunities for intellectual property protection.

As of December 31, 2022, we owned or exclusively licensed over 80 issued or allowed patents and over 80 pending patent applications worldwide, which includes over 40 issued U.S. patents and over 20 pending U.S. patent applications. We own registered trademarks and trademark applications for AbCellera, Celium, Trianni, and the Trianni Mouse in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe.

Obtaining patent protection is not the only method that we employ to protect our proprietary rights. We also utilize other forms of intellectual property protection, including trademark, copyright, internal know-how and trade secrets, when those other forms are better suited to protect a particular aspect of our intellectual property. Our belief is that our proprietary rights are strengthened by our comprehensive approach to intellectual property protection. It is our policy to require our employees, consultants, outside scientific collaborators, sponsored researchers and other advisors to execute confidentiality and invention assignment agreements upon accepting employment or consulting relationships with us. These agreements provide that all confidential information concerning our business or financial affairs developed or made known to the individual during the course of the individual’s relationship with us is to be kept confidential and not disclosed to third parties except in specific circumstances. In the case of employees, the agreements provide that all inventions conceived by the individual, and which are related to our current or planned business or research and development or made during normal working hours, on our premises or using our equipment or proprietary information, are our exclusive property. We are diligent in taking precautions that our proprietary information is not released to third parties through the use of security measures. Our trade secrets encompass certain reagent compositions and concentrations, nucleic acid vector sequences and immunization protocols.

Data Rights

Our product to partners is data on the composition of matter of antibodies and their properties. We enter into contracts that allow us rights to use the data that we generate for the purpose of improving our discovery and development engine and fueling machine-learning algorithms. We maintain strict firewall protocols so target-specific data derived from a partner cannot be used to inform the discovery on another project by a different partner.

Patent Portfolio

We have developed an expansive patent portfolio with claims related to multiple aspects of our discovery and development engine, beginning with our first patent applications exclusively licensed from UBC, in 2013. We continuously assess new ways to improve our technology platform through license or acquisition of third-party patent portfolios, as was the case with our acquisitions of Lineage in 2017 and the OrthoMab platform from Dualogics LLC, or Dualogics, in 2020, our acquisition of Trianni, Inc., or Trianni, in 2020, our acquisition of TetraGenetics, Inc. in 2021, and our license agreements with Alloy Therapeutics LLC, or Alloy Therapeutics.

Our patent prosecution strategy encompasses the pursuit of protection for our discovery and development engine and tangentially related methods.

UBC License

In December 2013, we executed a license agreement with UBC, or the UBC License, to gain a worldwide, exclusive license to certain patents, or the UBC Patents, patented at UBC by Dr. Hansen and his team for the later of 20 years from the start date of the UBC License, or the expiry date of the last patent licensed under the UBC License. Under the terms of the UBC License, we have the right to sublicense a subset of the UBC Patents and a worldwide, exclusive license to UBC Improvements and/or Joint Improvements on these Patents solely in the antibody field of use. In addition, for a second subset of the UBC Patents, we have a worldwide, exclusive license to use and sublicense solely within the antibody field of use.

Under the terms of the UBC License, we paid a CAD $0.1 million initial license fee and pay annual license fees to UBC during the term of the UBC License. We also pay UBC a low single-digit royalty on our revenue and a single-digit royalty of our sublicensing revenue during the term of the UBC License. UBC was also granted a single-digit percent equity position in our company.

Under the terms of the UBC License, in consultation with UBC we manage the filing, maintenance and prosecution of the licensed patents and we pay all costs associated with the same while we control all litigation associated with the licensed patents.

UBC may terminate the license under certain circumstances, including in the case of our insolvency, winding up or liquidation, if a court or similar process is levied on the rights under the agreement or on money due to UBC that is not released, if the subject technology becomes subject to a security interest that is not released, if we or any of our directors or officers have materially breached or failed to comply with securities laws, or in the event of certain breaches of, or failure to perform, our obligations under the license or other agreements between us and UBC. Either party may terminate the license for any breach which is not remedied within certain specified time periods.

The UBC Core Patents

The UBC Core Patent license includes a patent family directed toward certain systems, devices and methods for microfluidic cell culture. This patent family includes five issued U.S. patents and one pending U.S. non-provisional patent application. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire as early as July 2031, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

The UBC Core Patent license also includes a patent family directed toward systems and methods for assaying binding interactions between a protein produced by a single cell, e.g., an antibody produced by a single B cell, and a second biomolecule (e.g., antigen) in microfluidic chambers and devices. This patent family includes thirteen issued U.S. patents and one pending U.S. non-provisional patent application. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in July 2031, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

A patent family directed toward methods for assaying functional properties exhibited by a protein produced by a single cell, e.g., an antibody produced by a single B cell, and a second biomolecule (e.g., antigen) in microfluidic chambers and devices is also included in the UBC Core Patent license. This patent family includes patents issued in the U.S. and Australia and granted in Europe, as well as one pending U.S. non-provisional patent application and nine pending foreign counterpart patent applications. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in March 2034, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Lastly, the UBC Core Patent license includes a patent family directed toward methods for determining lymphocyte receptor chain pairs, for example, antibody heavy and light chain pairs. This patent family includes two issued U.S. patents and two granted patents in Europe, as well as one pending U.S. non-provisional patent application and two pending foreign counterpart patent applications. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in May 2035, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Lineage

The Lineage patent portfolio complements our single-cell microfluidic intellectual property with downstream methods of sequencing reaction preparation, immune RepSeq and analysis. The immune repertoire patents and applications that we obtained from Lineage form the basis for the sequencing technologies that we currently use in our discovery and development engine.

Stanford License

Through our acquisition of Lineage, we obtained an exclusive license from Stanford University to patents and patent applications directed toward immune RepSeq. Our Stanford license includes one patent family directed toward methods of characterizing an immune repertoire. This patent family includes four issued U.S. patents, one issued in Canada, and one granted patent in Europe, as well as one pending U.S. non-provisional patent application. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in May

2031, absent any disclaimers or extensions available. The Stanford license also includes another patent family directed toward methods of characterizing immune response and vaccine selection. This patent family includes two issued U.S. patents and one pending U.S. non-provisional patent application. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in February 2034, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Under the terms of the Stanford license, we are required to pay Stanford a yearly license maintenance fee, as well as certain milestone payments in an aggregate amount not to exceed $0.1 million. We are also required to pay Stanford low single-digit royalties on net sales of licensed products as well as a portion of non-royalty sublicensing revenues. The term of the Stanford license runs until the last licensed patent expires, and our obligation to pay royalties will continue so long as there is a valid claim of a licensed patent. Stanford may terminate the agreement governing the license if we are in material default in the provision of any report or payment of any amounts due to Stanford under the agreement, we do not use commercially reasonable efforts to develop or commercialize licensed products, we do not achieve certain diligence milestones, we are in material breach of any provision of the agreement, or if we provide any materially false report to Stanford. We may terminate the agreement at any time upon at least 30 days’ notice to Stanford.

In addition to the Stanford license, the acquisition of Lineage included a patent portfolio comprising four patent families. One patent family is directed toward methods of determining the immune repertoire of a subject. This patent family includes three granted patents in Europe, one issued patent in China, and one issued patent in Hong Kong. This patent family also includes two pending foreign counterpart patent applications. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in March 2034, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed toward tagging target oligonucleotides. This patent family includes three issued U.S. patents, one issued patent in China, and two granted patents in Europe. This patent family also includes one pending U.S. non-provisional patent application and one pending foreign counterpart patent application. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in March 2034, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

An additional patent family is directed toward methods for detection of isotype profiles as signatures for disease. This patent family includes patents issued in Japan and China, as well as a patent granted in Europe and a patent issued in Canada. This patent family also includes one pending foreign counterpart patent application. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in September 2032, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Lastly, the Lineage patent portfolio includes a patent family directed toward compositions and methods for analyzing heterogeneous samples. This patent family includes a granted patent in Europe and an issued patent in Hong Kong. This family also includes one pending foreign counterpart application. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in September 2032, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

OrthoMab

As part of our agreement to purchase certain assets from Dualogics related to its OrthoMab bispecific antibody platform, we were assigned Dualogics’ interests and rights to that certain Exclusive License Agreement between Dualogics and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, effective February 22, 2019, or the UNC Agreement. Under the UNC Agreement, we have an exclusive license to UNC’s rights under three patent families.

One patent family is directed toward methods of producing an antigen-binding fragment, or Fab. This patent family includes three issued U.S. patents and one patent granted in Europe. Issued patents from this patent family are expected to expire in March 2034, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed toward IgG bispecific antibodies and processes for preparation. This patent family includes one issued U.S. patent, one pending U.S. non-provisional patent application, and one foreign counterpart patent application. Any patents that issue from this patent family are expected to expire in January 2036, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

The last patent family is directed toward methods for producing Fabs and IgG bispecific antibodies. This patent family includes one pending U.S. and one pending foreign counterpart patent applications. Any patents that issue from this patent family are expected to expire in December 2037, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Under the terms of the OrthoMab asset purchase, we granted Dualogics a sublicense under the three patent families to develop, market, sell and otherwise commercialize its existing programs related to the OrthoMab technology.

Under the terms of the UNC Agreement, we are required to pay UNC an annual license maintenance fee, low single-digit royalties on net sales of clinically approved and other products as well as sublicense fees. The term of the license and our obligation to pay

royalties runs until the last licensed patent expires. UNC may terminate the agreement governing the license if there is a material breach by us of the agreement and we fail to cure such breach, which breaches include but are not limited to our failure to deliver payment to UNC when due, to provide progress reports, to meet or achieve performance milestones or to possess and maintain insurance, or the execution of a sublicense that complies with the terms of the agreement. We may terminate the agreement at any time upon at least 60 days’ notice to UNC.

Trianni

Through our acquisition of Trianni, we acquired all existing intellectual property including issued patents and pending applications worldwide relating to the flagship Trianni mouse and new platforms in development. We also acquired Trianni’s trademarks including the terms “Trianni” and “Trianni Mouse”, that have been issued in the United States and various other jurisdictions worldwide.

The Trianni intellectual property portfolio includes issued patents and pending applications in the U.S. and certain jurisdictions around the world.

In one patent family, the patents are directed to transgenic animals and methods of use. This patent family includes ten issued patents including in the U.S., Australia, the Russian Federation, Europe, India, Israel, Canada, China and Japan. There are two pending applications, one in the U.S. and one in Japan. Patents issuing from this family are expected to expire in July 2031, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to enhanced production of immunoglobulins. This patent family includes two issued patents including in the U.S. and Japan. There are seven pending applications including one in the U.S. and six in pending foreign counterparts, including Australia, Canada, Europe, Israel, Japan, and Korea. Any patents that issue from this family are expected to expire in February 2037, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is also directed to enhanced production of immunoglobulins. This patent family includes eight pending applications, including one in the U.S. and seven in pending foreign counterparts including Australia, Canada, Europe, Israel, Japan, China, and Korea. Any patents that issue from this family are expected to expire in August 2035, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to enhanced immunoglobulin diversity. This patent family includes one issued patent in the U.S. and two pending applications, including one in the U.S. and one in Europe. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in December 2035, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to transgenic mammals that express canine-based immunoglobulins. This patent family contains one issued U.S. patent and one pending application in the U.S. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in July 2031, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to transgenic mammals that express bovine-based immunoglobulins. This patent family contains one issued U.S. patent. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in July 2031, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to enhanced production of immunoglobulins. This patent family includes one pending application in the U.S. Any patents that issue from this family are expected to expire in August 2035, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to transgenic mammals that express canine-based immunoglobulins. This patent family contains eight pending applications, including in the U.S., Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Israel, Japan, and Korea. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in July 2039, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to transgenic mammals that express bovine-based immunoglobulins. This patent family contains eight pending PCT applications, including in the U.S., Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Israel, Japan, and Korea. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in July 2039, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to single chain VH and heavy chain antibodies. This patent family includes four issued patents including in the U.S., Australia, Europe, and Japan. There are four pending applications, including one in the U.S. and Canada, China, and Israel. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in July 2037, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to long germline DH gene and long HCDR3 antibodies. This patent family contains one issued patent in Europe and one pending application in the U.S. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in October 2037, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to transgenic mammals and methods of use. This patent family contains two pending applications including one in the U.S. and one in Europe. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in August 2039, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to Adam6 knockin mice. This patent family contains one issued patent in Europe and one pending application in the U.S. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in August 2039, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

Another patent family is directed to heavy chain-only antibodies. This patent family contains one pending application in Europe. Issued patents from this family are expected to expire in September 2040, absent any disclaimers or extensions available.

AbCellera

We also aim to continue developing our product portfolio. We currently own several recently filed pending U.S. non-provisional patent applications directed toward methods for high throughput screening of multispecific antibody libraries and anti-coronavirus antibodies and methods of use.

The term of individual patents depends upon the legal term of the patents in the countries in which they are obtained. In the countries in which we file, the patent term is 20 years from the earliest non-provisional filing date, subject to any disclaimers or extensions. The term of a patent in the United States can be adjusted due to any failure of the United States Patent and Trademark Office following certain statutory and regulation deadlines for issuing a patent.

In the United States, the patent term of a patent that covers an FDA-approved drug may also be eligible for patent term extension, which permits patent term restoration as compensation for a portion of the patent term lost during the FDA regulatory review process. The Hatch-Waxman Act permits a patent term extension of up to five years beyond the original expiration of the patent. The protection provided by a patent varies from country to country, and is dependent on the type of patent granted, the scope of the patent claims, and the legal remedies available in a given country.

For a discussion of the risks we face relating to intellectual property, see “Risk Factors—Risks Related to our Intellectual Property—If we are unable to obtain and maintain sufficient intellectual property protection for our technology, including our platform and Celium, our proprietary antibody visualization software, or if the scope of the intellectual property protection obtained is not sufficiently broad, our competitors could develop and commercialize technologies or a platform similar or identical to ours, and our ability to successfully sell our data packages may be impaired.”

Government Regulation

Our focus is on the discovery of antibodies that our partners use to improve the speed and success of their antibody discovery efforts; however, we ourselves are not currently involved in antibody discovery, do not manufacture any products and do not conduct any clinical trials. As such, while we are subject to a number of regulations, such as those governing our laboratory facilities as well as regulations that apply to businesses in the private sector generally, we are not subject to many of the types of regulations that ordinarily apply to companies in the life sciences, biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors and industries. However, we believe that the long-term success of our business depends, in part, on our partners’ ability to successfully develop and sell products using the antibodies that we discover. The regulations that govern our pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners are those we therefore believe have the most significant impact on our business.

Government authorities in the United States, at the federal, state and local level, and in the European Union, or E.U., and other countries and jurisdictions, extensively regulate, among other things, the research, development, testing, manufacturing, quality control, approval, labeling, packaging, storage, record-keeping, promotion, advertising, distribution, post-approval monitoring and reporting, marketing and export and import of pharmaceutical products, including biological products such as those that our partners develop. The processes for obtaining marketing approvals in the United States and in foreign countries and jurisdictions, along with subsequent compliance with applicable statutes and regulations and other regulatory authorities, require the expenditure of substantial time and financial resources.

Our partners will be subject to a variety of regulations in applicable jurisdictions governing, among other things, clinical studies and any commercial sales and distribution of their products. Whether or not our partners obtain approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, or the European Commission for the E.U. for a product, they must obtain the requisite approvals from regulatory authorities in foreign countries prior to the commencement of clinical studies or marketing of the product in those countries. The requirements and process governing the conduct of clinical studies, product licensing, coverage, pricing and reimbursement vary from country to country.

One such regulatory authority that is applicable to certain of our partners is the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services’ authority to authorize unapproved medical products to be marketed in the context of an actual or potential emergency that has been designated by government officials. The COVID-19 pandemic has been designated such an emergency. After an emergency has been announced, the Secretary of Health and Human Services may authorize the issuance of, and the FDA Commissioner may issue Emergency Use Authorizations, or EUAs, for the use of specific products based on criteria established by statute, including that the product at issue may be effective in diagnosing, treating, or preventing serious or life-threatening diseases when there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives. An EUA is subject to additional conditions and restrictions and is product-specific. An EUA terminates when the emergency determination underlying the EUA terminates. An EUA is not a long-term alternative to obtaining FDA approval, licensure, or clearance for a product. The FDA may revoke an EUA where it is determined that the underlying health emergency no longer exists or warrants such authorization, so it is not possible to predict how long an EUA may remain in place.

Similar to the United States, Canada has developed a mechanism to authorize unapproved medical products to be marketed in the context of certain emergencies. In particular, under the Food and Drugs Act (Canada), the federal Minister of Health may make an Interim Order if the Minister believes that immediate action is required to deal with a significant risk to health, safety or the environment. The Minister has made various Interim Orders in the context of the COVID- 19 pandemic. These Interim Orders provide the Minister with the authority to permit the sale of a COVID-19 drug in Canada via multiple new mechanisms, including authorizing a COVID-19 indication for a new drug with a modified set of application requirements with the potential for additional terms and conditions, as well as the possibility of authorizing a drug based on certain elements already being authorized by a foreign regulatory authority. Each Interim Order is valid for no longer than a one-year term and an authorization for importation and sale issued under an Interim Order is only valid for as long as the Interim Order is in effect. As is the case with EUAs in the United States, authorizations issued under an Interim Order are not a long-term alternative to obtaining Health Canada licensure for a product. Health Canada is currently considering various options to minimize disruptions for the ongoing authorization of drugs upon the expiry of an Interim Order with the intent to implement transition as needed.

Additional Regulation

In addition to the foregoing, provincial, state and federal U.S. and Canadian laws regarding environmental protection and hazardous substances affect our business. These and other laws govern our use, handling and disposal of various biological, chemical and radioactive substances used in, and wastes generated by, our operations. If our operations result in contamination of the environment or expose individuals to hazardous substances, we could be liable for damages and governmental fines. We believe that we are in material compliance with applicable environmental laws and that continued compliance therewith will not have a material adverse effect on our business. We cannot predict, however, how changes in these laws may affect our future operations.

Anti-Corruption Laws

We are subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, or the FCPA, the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the U.S. Travel Act, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Canadian Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and possibly other state and national anti-bribery and anti-money laundering laws in countries in which we conduct activities, such as the UK Bribery Act 2010 and the UK Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, or collectively, Anti-Corruption Laws. Among other matters, such Anti-Corruption Laws prohibit corporations and individuals from directly or indirectly paying, offering to pay or authorizing the payment of money or anything of value to any foreign government official, government staff member, political party or political candidate, or certain other persons, in order to obtain, retain or direct business, regulatory approvals or some other advantage in an improper manner. We can also be held liable for the acts of our third party agents under the FCPA, the Canadian Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, the UK Bribery Act 2010 and possibly other Anti-Corruption Laws. In the healthcare sector, anti-corruption risk can also arise in the context of improper interactions with doctors, key opinion leaders and other healthcare professionals who work for state-affiliated hospitals, research institutions or other organizations.

Available Information

Our website address is www.abcellera.com. Our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, including exhibits, proxy and information statements and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a), 14, and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, are available through the “Investors” portion of our website free of charge as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. Information on our website is not part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any of our other filings with the SEC unless specifically incorporated herein by reference. In addition, our filings with the SEC may be accessed through the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. All statements made in any of our filings with the SEC or documents available on our website, including all forward-looking statements or information, are made as of the date of the document in which the statement is included, and we do not assume or undertake any obligation to update any of those statements or documents unless we are required to do so by law.

Our code of conduct, corporate governance guidelines and the charters of our Audit Committee, Compensation Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee are available through the “Investors” portion of our website.

Item 1A. Risk Factors.

Risks Related to Our Business and Strategy

We have incurred losses in certain years since inception and we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to maintain profitability.

We expect to continue investing in our business. We expect to experience fluctuations in revenue and expenses which makes it difficult to evaluate our business. We may incur losses that are materially larger than what we have previously incurred. We have incurred losses in certain years since our inception and anticipate that we may incur significant losses for the foreseeable future. We expect that our operating expenses will continue to increase significantly, including as we:

• market our solutions to new and existing partners;

• acquire businesses or technologies to support our business;

• attract, hire and retain qualified personnel;

• prosecute and defend our ongoing and any future patent litigation;

• build our new GMP manufacturing facility;

• experience any delays or encounter issues with any of the above.

Our expenses could increase beyond expectations for a variety of reasons, including our growth strategy and the increase in our operations. Since our inception, we have financed our operations primarily from royalty revenue, revenue from upfront payments generated through our receipt of technology access fees and discovery research fees through the performance of service contracts with our partners, payments from partners upon the satisfaction of clinical milestones, government funding and one-off government grants, the incurrence of indebtedness, and from private placements of our common and convertible preferred shares. Given our strategy and plans to invest in enhancing and scaling our business, we will need to generate significant additional revenue to achieve and sustain future profitability. Even though we have achieved profitability, we cannot be sure that we will remain profitable for any sustained period of time. We may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to sustain profitability and our recent and historical growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance.

Our revenue has fluctuated from period to period, and our revenue for any historical period may not be indicative of results that may be expected for any future period.

During the years ended December 31, 2020, 2021, and 2022, we received payments from our partnership contracts generated upon the satisfaction of clinical milestones, licensing revenue derived from use of the Trianni platform, research fees for research performed for our partners, and royalty payments on sales of bamlanivimab and bebtelovimab. In 2022, we continued to receive royalty payments primarily on sales of bebtelovimab. Upfront technology access fees are generated upon execution of our partnership agreements. Research and discovery fees are generated by research activities that we perform for our partners, the timing and nature of which are dictated by the commencement of antibody discovery campaigns selected by our partners. Clinical milestone payments are generated upon the achievement of development milestones by our partners with respect to the antibodies that we deliver. We are also eligible to receive royalty payments upon net sales of antibodies that we have discovered for our partners. In 2020, 2021, and 2022, these royalty payments related to our partnership with Lilly upon sales of bamlanivimab and bebtelovimab, antibodies designed to treat and prevent COVID-19. Therefore, royalty payments that we have received in recent periods are derived from a compound developed in a single partnership, and there can be no assurance that the revenues we have generated in such periods will be replicated in future periods. For example, in November 2022, the FDA announced bebtelovimab was no longer authorized for emergency use in any U.S. region and, as a result, we do not expect to generate significant revenue from royalties associated with Lilly’s sales of our COVID-19 antibodies. We currently do not generate significant recurring revenue and, until such time as we establish significant recurring revenue, if at all, we will be prone to regular fluctuations in our revenue dependent on the timing of our entry into partnership agreements, our partners initiating discovery programs, and our partners achieving development milestones or commercial sales with respect to drug candidates utilizing antibodies discovered using our discovery and development engine. We do not expect to generate significant recurring revenue unless and until such time as we secure additional programs under contract that, in the aggregate, result in regular and continuous execution of new partnership contracts, research discovery activities, achievement of

development milestones or commencement of commercial sales. However, we are unable to predict whether and the extent to which the minimum annual payments under our partnership agreements will be exceeded, or the timing of the achievement of any milestones under these agreements, if they are achieved at all. In some cases, the timing and likelihood of payments to us under these agreements is dependent on our partners’ successful utilization of the antibodies discovered using our discovery and development engine, which is outside of our control. Because of these factors, our operating results could vary materially from quarter to quarter from our forecasts.

Our quarterly and annual operating results have fluctuated significantly in the past and may fluctuate significantly in the future, which makes our future operating results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations.

Our quarterly and annual operating results have fluctuated in the past and may fluctuate in the future, which makes it difficult for us to predict our future operating results. These fluctuations may occur due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control, including, but not limited to:

• the timing and nature of any future acquisitions or strategic partnerships;

• future accounting pronouncements or changes in our accounting policies; and

For example, 2020 was the first year in which we received payments from a partner beyond upfront fees. The antibody, bamlanivimab developed by Lilly, has undergone clinical testing and has received EUA from the FDA, and we have received associated milestone payments and royalties on net sales in 2020, 2021, and 2022. Lilly progressed into these clinical trials at a greatly accelerated pace as a result of the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program, which is a special emergency program for possible coronavirus therapies created by the FDA in 2020 to expedite the development of potentially safe and effective life-saving treatments to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. With respect to other or future product candidates, there is no assurance that any of our partners or collaborators will be able to advance a product candidate through clinical development on this timeframe again in the future, or at all. We initiated our partnering program in 2015 and have only had three AbCellera discovery programs and three Trianni programs result in milestone or royalty payments to us to date, and we have not yet had a program receive marketing approval. There is no guarantee that we will continue to generate the levels of revenue, particularly milestone and royalty revenues, from our partnerships as we have experienced in recent periods. In addition, we have only recently begun to generate licensing revenue from our Trianni humanized rodent platform. There can be no assurance that we will continue to generate or expand our licensing revenue from this product offering in future periods.

The effect of one of the factors discussed above, or the cumulative effects of a combination of factors discussed above, could result in large fluctuations and unpredictability in our quarterly and annual operating results. As a result, comparing our operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful. Investors should not rely on our past results as an indication of our future performance.

We may need to raise additional capital to fund our existing operations, improve our discovery and development engine or expand our operations. If we are unable to raise additional capital on terms acceptable to us or at all or generate cash flows necessary to maintain or expand our operations, we may not be able to compete successfully, which would harm our business, operations, and financial condition.

Based on our current business plan, we believe our existing cash and cash equivalents, marketable securities, and anticipated cash flows from operations, will be sufficient to meet our working capital and capital expenditure needs over at least the next 36 months following the date of this report. If our available cash resources together with our anticipated cash flow from operations are insufficient to satisfy our liquidity requirements including because of lower demand for our antibody discovery and development engine, or the realization of other risks described in this annual report, we may be required to raise additional capital prior to such time through issuances of equity or convertible debt securities, entrance into a credit facility or another form of third party funding or seek other debt financing. Such additional financing may not be available on terms acceptable to us or at all.

In any event, we may consider raising additional capital in the future to expand our business, to pursue strategic investments, to take advantage of financing opportunities or for other reasons. For example, this may include reasons such as to:

• fund development and marketing efforts of our current and future programs;

• acquire, license or invest in technologies;

• acquire or invest in complementary businesses or assets; and

• finance capital expenditures and general and administrative expenses.

Our present and future funding requirements will depend on many factors, including:

• our ability to achieve revenue growth;

• the effect of competing technological and market developments;

• the economic and geopolitical impact of the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine;

• costs related to any domestic and international expansion.

The various ways we could raise additional capital carry potential risks. If we raise funds by issuing equity securities, dilution to our shareholders would result. Any preferred equity securities issued also would likely provide for rights, preferences or privileges senior to those of holders of our common shares. If we raise funds by issuing debt securities, those debt securities would have rights, preferences and privileges senior to those of holders of our common shares. Debt financing and preferred equity financing, if available, may also involve agreements that include covenants restricting our ability to take specific actions, such as incurring additional debt, selling or licensing our assets, making product acquisitions, making capital expenditures, or declaring dividends. For example, our agreement with the Strategic Innovation Fund, or SIF, requires us to obtain consent in the event that an individual or company (or two or more of them acting in concert) acquires the direct or indirect beneficial ownership of 20% or more of our voting securities. In the event consent is not obtained, the agreement may be terminated and we will be obligated to repay all or a portion of the contribution amounts from SIF.

If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us, if we require it, our ability to continue to pursue our business objectives and to respond to business opportunities, challenges, or unforeseen circumstances could be significantly limited, and could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects.

Unstable market and economic conditions may have serious adverse consequences on our business, financial condition, and stock price.

From time to time, the global credit and financial markets have experienced extreme volatility and disruptions, including severely diminished liquidity and credit availability, declines in consumer confidence, declines in economic growth, increases in unemployment rates and uncertainty about economic stability. There can be no assurance that future deterioration in credit and financial markets and confidence in economic conditions will not occur. Our general business strategy may be adversely affected by any such economic downturn, volatile business environment or continued unpredictable and unstable market conditions. The financial markets and the global economy may also be adversely affected by the current or anticipated impact of military conflict, including the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, terrorism or other geopolitical events. Sanctions imposed by the United States and other countries in response to such conflicts, including the one in Ukraine, may also adversely impact the financial markets and the global economy, and any economic countermeasures by the affected countries or others could exacerbate market and economic instability. If the current equity and credit markets deteriorate, it may make any necessary debt or equity financing more difficult, more costly and more dilutive. Failure to secure any necessary financing in a timely manner and on favorable terms could have a material adverse effect on our growth strategy, financial performance and stock price. In addition, there is a risk that one or more of our current service providers, manufacturers and other partners may not survive an economic downturn, which could directly affect our ability to attain our operating goals on schedule and on budget.

Our commercial success depends on the quality of our antibody discovery and development engine and technological capabilities and their acceptance by new and existing partners in our industry.

We utilize our antibody discovery and development engine to identify antibodies for further development and potential commercialization by our partners. As a result, the quality and sophistication of our discovery and development engine is critical to our ability to conduct our research discovery activities and to deliver more promising molecules and to accelerate and lower the costs of discovery as compared to traditional methods for our partnerships. In particular, our business depends, among other things, on:

• our partners’ and potential partners’ willingness to adopt new technologies;

• prices we charge for our data packages and the discoveries that we make;

• our ability to develop new solutions for partners;

• the impact of our investments in innovation and commercial growth;

There can be no assurance that we will successfully address any of these or other factors that may affect the market acceptance of our discovery and development engine. If we are unsuccessful in achieving and maintaining market acceptance of our discovery and development engine, our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects could be adversely affected.

Failure to execute our business strategy could adversely impact our growth and profitability.

Our strategy is on the development of antibody-based drugs and improving the way these drugs are discovered and developed. Our strategy assumes a certain degree of capital and capacity growth development. Factors such as insufficient capital, inflation, supply chain interruptions, inadequate forecasting, increases in construction material costs, or labor shortages could interfere with the successful execution of our strategy and our ability to timely build infrastructure to satisfy capacity needs and support business growth. If we are unable to successfully execute on this strategy, this could negatively impact our future results of operations and market capitalization. For additional discussion of our business strategy, please see the section entitled “Item 1. Business” included elsewhere in this Form 10-K.

If we cannot maintain and expand current partnerships and agreements and enter new partnerships that generate discovery programs for antibodies, our business could be adversely affected.

Our primary focus is on the discovery of antibodies for targets that are selected by our partners. Our partners then use the data packages provided by us to develop their own drug candidates without our involvement. As a result, our success depends on our ability to expand the number and scope of our partnerships. Many factors may impact the success of these partnerships, including our ability to perform our obligations, our partners’ satisfaction with our data packages, our partners’ ability to successfully develop, secure regulatory approval for and commercialize drug candidates using antibodies discovered using our discovery and development engine, our partners’ internal priorities (including fluctuations in research and developments budgets), our partners’ resource allocation decisions and competitive opportunities, disagreements with partners, the costs required of either party to the partnerships and related financing needs, and operating, legal and other risks in any relevant jurisdiction.

In our partnership programs, we maintain rights to large unique data sets that connect information at the level of single-cell measurements, DNA sequence and protein function. We use this data to create an accelerating flywheel of learning: data generation from our partnership business provides the basis for AI modules that lead to expanded capabilities and faster data generation which supports our partnership business. As a result, in addition to reducing our revenue or delaying the development of our future solutions, the loss of one or more of these relationships may reduce our exposure to such information, thus hindering our efforts to further our technological differentiation and improve our discovery and development engine. In certain of our partnership programs, we may elect to make additional investments in certain partnership agreements at progressive stages of preclinical development, clinical development, and commercialization in exchange for an increased share of product sales. Because of the inherent uncertainties in drug development described elsewhere in these Risk Factors, there can be no assurance that any additional investments we may elect to make would yield meaningful return, if at all.

We engage in conversations with companies regarding potential partnerships on an ongoing basis. These conversations may not result in a commercial agreement. Even if an agreement is reached, the resulting relationship may not be successful, including due to our inability to discover any usable antibodies for the selected targets or the antibodies that we do discover may not be successfully developed or commercialized by our partners. In such circumstances, we would not generate any substantial revenues from such a collaboration in the form of discovery research fees, milestone payments, royalties or otherwise. Speculation in the biotechnology industry about our existing or potential partnerships can be a catalyst for adverse speculation about us, or our data packages, which can adversely affect our reputation and our business.

A reduction in demand and research and development activities by current and prospective partners may adversely affect our business.

Our business could be adversely affected by any significant decrease in drug research and development expenditures by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as by government agencies or private foundations. Similarly, economic factors and industry trends that affect our partners in these industries also affect their research and development budgets and, consequentially, our business as well.

Our partners include researchers at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Our ability to continue to grow and win new business is dependent in large part upon the ability and willingness of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to continue to spend on molecules in the non-clinical phases of research and development (and in particular discovery and development assessment) and to outsource the products and services we provide. Furthermore, our partners continue to search for ways to maximize the return on their investments with a focus on lowering research and development costs per drug candidate. Fluctuations in the expenditure

amounts in each phase of the research and development budgets of these researchers and their organizations could have a significant effect on the demand for our products and services. Research and development budgets fluctuate due to changes in available resources, mergers of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, spending priorities (including available resources of our biotechnology partners, particularly those that are cash-negative, who may be highly focused on rationing their liquid assets in a challenging funding environment), general economic conditions, institutional budgetary policies and the impact of government regulations, including potential drug pricing legislation. Available funding for biotechnology partnersin particular may be affected by the capital markets, investment objectives of venture capital investors and priorities of biopharmaceutical industry sponsors.

In recent periods, we have depended on a limited number of partners for our revenue, the loss of any of which could have an adverse impact on our business.

In recent periods, a limited number of partnerships accounted for a significant portion of our revenues. For example, royalty revenue for years ended December 31, 2020, 2021, and 2022, have come exclusively from our partnership with Lilly. Milestone payments and licensing revenue for the years ended December 31, 2020, 2021, and 2022, have come exclusively from our partnership with Lilly and use of the Trianni platform. Because a significant portion of our revenue in 2020, 2021, and 2022 was derived from sales of bamlanivimab and bebtelovimab, the reduction in sales of these compounds that we have experienced in recent periods have reduced our royalty revenues attributed to sales of this compound. If these reductions are not offset by increases in other sources of revenue, our results of operations for future periods may be materially and adversely affected.

Our existing partnerships cover a large number of current programs under contract, and therefore represent a large portion of potential downstream value. In addition, our partnership agreements are typically terminable at will with 90 days’ notice prior to identification of a target, after which point they may only be terminated for cause. As a result, if we fail to maintain our relationships with our partners or if any of our partners discontinue their programs, our future results of operations could be materially and adversely affected.

Development of a biological molecule is inherently uncertain, and it is possible that none of the antibody-drug candidates discovered using our antibody discovery and development engine that are further developed by our partners will receive marketing approval or become viable commercial products, on a timely basis, or at all.

We use our discovery and development engine to offer antibodies to partners who are engaged in antibody discovery and development. These partners include large cap pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies of all sizes and non-profit and government organizations. While we receive upfront payments generated through our receipt of technology access fees and discovery research fees for performing research activities for our partners, we estimate that the vast majority of the economic value of the contracts that we enter into with our partners is in the downstream payments that are payable if certain milestones are met or approved products are sold. As a result, our future growth is dependent on the ability of our partnerships to successfully develop and commercialize therapies based on antibodies discovered using our discovery and development engine. Due to our reliance on our partners, the risks relating to product development, regulatory clearance, authorization or approval and commercialization apply to us derivatively through the activities of our partners. While we believe our discovery and development engine is capable of identifying high quality antibodies, there can be no assurance that our partnerships will successfully develop, secure marketing approvals for and commercialize any drug candidates based on the antibodies that we discover. As a result, we may not realize the intended benefits of our partnerships. We initiated our partnering program in 2015 and have only had three AbCellera discovery programs and three Trianni programs result in milestone or royalty payments to us to date, and we have not yet had a program receive clinical marketing approval.

Due to the uncertain, time-consuming and costly clinical development and regulatory approval process, there may not be successful development of any drug candidates with the antibodies that we discover, or we and our partners may choose to discontinue the development of these drug candidates for a variety of reasons, including due to safety, risk versus benefit profile, exclusivity, competitive landscape, commercialization potential, production limitations or prioritization of their resources. It is possible that none of these drug candidates will ever receive regulatory approval and, even if approved, such drug candidates may never be successfully commercialized. For example, under our research agreement with Lilly, we are eligible to receive and have received payments upon the achievement of certain development milestones and are eligible to receive royalties resulting from sales of both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 products that incorporate antibodies we discovered. While we have received milestone and royalty payments from this collaboration, there can be no assurance that we will receive additional milestone payments or any royalties in the future. Furthermore, there can be no assurance that Lilly will be successful in its further development of bebtelovimab.

In addition, even if these drug candidates receive regulatory approval in the United States, the drug candidates may never obtain approval or commercialize such drugs outside of the United States, which would limit their full market potential and therefore our ability to realize their potential downstream value. Furthermore, approved drugs may not achieve broad market acceptance among physicians, patients, the medical community and third-party payors, in which case revenue generated from their sales would be limited. Likewise, we or our partners have to make decisions about which clinical stage and preclinical drug candidates to develop and

advance, and we or our partners may not have the resources to invest in all of the drug candidates that contain antibodies discovered using our discovery and development engine, or clinical data and other development considerations may not support the advancement of one or more drug candidates. Decision-making about which drug candidates to prioritize involves inherent uncertainty, and our partners’ development program decision-making and resource prioritization decisions, which are outside of our control, may adversely affect the potential value of those partnerships. Additionally, subject to its contractual obligations to us, if one more of our partners is involved in a business combination, the partner might deemphasize or terminate the development or commercialization of any drug candidate that utilizes an antibody that we have discovered. If one of our strategic partners terminates its agreement with us, we may find it more difficult to attract new partners.

We are also subject to industry-wide FDA and other regulatory risk. The number of new drug applications, or NDAs, and biologics license applications, or BLAs, approved by the FDA varies significantly over time and if there were to be an extended reduction in the number of NDAs and BLAs approved by the FDA, the biotechnology industry would contract and our business would be materially harmed.

The failure to effectively advance, market and sell suitable drug candidates with the antibodies that we discover could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects, and cause the market price of our common shares to decline. In addition to the inherent uncertainty in drug development addresses above, our ability to forecast our future revenues may be limited.

The failure of our partners to meet their contractual obligations to us could adversely affect our business.

Our reliance on our partners poses a number of additional risks, including the risk that they may not perform their contractual obligations to us to our standards, in compliance with applicable legal or contractual requirements, in a timely manner or at all; they may not maintain the confidentiality of our proprietary information; and disagreements or disputes could arise that could cause delays in, or termination of, the research, development or commercialization of products using our antibodies or result in litigation or arbitration.

In addition, certain of our partners are large, multinational organizations that run many programs concurrently, and we are dependent on their ability to accurately track and make milestone payments to us pursuant to the terms of our agreements with them. Any failure by them to inform us when milestones are reached and make related payments to us could adversely affect our results of operations.

Moreover, some of our partners are located in markets subject to political and social risk, corruption, infrastructure problems and natural disasters, and are often subject to country-specific privacy and data security risk as well as burdensome legal and regulatory requirements. Any of these factors could adversely impact their financial condition and results of operations, which could impair their ability to meet their contractual obligations to us, which may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We may be unable to manage our current and future growth effectively, which could make it difficult to execute on our business strategy.

Since our inception in 2012, we have experienced rapid growth and anticipate further growth in our business operations. This growth requires managing complexities across all aspects of our business, including complexities associated with increased headcount, integration of acquisitions, expansion of international operations, expansion of facilities, including our new GMP facility, execution on new lines of business and implementations of appropriate systems and controls to grow the business. Our growth has required significant time and attention from our management, and placed strains on our operational systems and processes, financial systems and internal controls and other aspects of our business.

We expect to continue to increase headcount and to hire more specialized personnel in the future as we grow our business. We will need to continue to hire, train and manage additional qualified scientists, engineers, laboratory personnel, client and account services personnel and sales and marketing staff and improve and maintain our technology to properly manage our growth. We may also need to hire, train and manage individuals with expertise that is separate, supplemental or different from expertise that we currently have, and accordingly we may not be successful in hiring, training and managing such individuals. For example, if our new hires perform poorly, if we are unsuccessful in hiring, training, managing and integrating these new employees, or if we are not successful in retaining our existing employees, our business may be harmed. Improving our technology and processes have required us to hire and retain additional scientific, engineering, sales and marketing, software, manufacturing, distribution and quality assurance personnel. As a result, we have experienced rapid headcount growth, resulting in approximately 500 employees as of December 31, 2022. We currently serve partners around the world and plan to continue to expand to new international jurisdictions as part of our growth strategy, which will lead to increased dispersion of our employees. Moreover, we expect that we will need to hire additional accounting, finance and other personnel in connection with our efforts to comply with the requirements of being a public company. As

a public company, our management and other personnel need to devote a substantial amount of time towards maintaining compliance with these requirements. A risk associated with maintaining this rate of growth, for example, is that we may face challenges integrating, developing and motivating our rapidly growing and increasingly dispersed employee base.

We may not be able to maintain the quality, reliability or robustness of our discovery and development engine, or the expected turnaround times of our solutions and support, or to satisfy customer demand as we grow. Our ability to manage our growth properly will require us to continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls, as well as our reporting systems and procedures. If we are unable to manage our growth properly, we may experience future weaknesses in our internal controls, which we may not successfully remediate on a timely basis or at all. To effectively manage our growth, we must continue to improve our operational and manufacturing systems and processes, our financial systems and internal controls and other aspects of our business and continue to effectively expand, train and manage our personnel. The time and resources required to improve our existing systems and procedures, implement new systems and procedures and to adequately staff such existing and new systems and procedures is uncertain, and failure to complete this in a timely and efficient manner could adversely affect our operations and negatively impact our business and financial results.

We have invested, and expect to continue to invest, in research and development efforts that further enhance our antibody discovery and development engine. Such investments in technology are inherently risky and may affect our operating results. If the return on these investments is lower or develops more slowly than we expect, our revenue and operating results may suffer.

We use our discovery and development engine for the discovery of antibodies and, since our inception, we have dedicated a substantial portion of our resources on the development of our engine and the technology that we incorporate to further enhance our antibody discovery and development engine. These investments may involve significant time, risks, and uncertainties, including the risk that the expenses associated with these investments may affect operating results and that such investments may not generate sufficient technological advantage relative to alternatives in the market which would, in turn, impact revenues to offset liabilities assumed and expenses associated with these new investments. The industry in which we operate changes rapidly as a result of technological and drug developments, which may render our solutions less desirable. We believe that we must continue to invest a significant amount of time and resources in our discovery and development engine to maintain and improve our competitive position. If we do not achieve the benefits anticipated from these investments, if the achievement of these benefits is delayed, or if our discovery and development engine is not able to accelerate the process of antibody discovery as quickly as we anticipate, our revenue and operating results may be adversely affected.

Our partners have significant discretion in determining when and whether to make announcements, if any, about the status of our partnerships, including about clinical developments and timelines for advancing collaborative programs, and the price of our common shares may decline as a result of announcements of unexpected results or developments.

Our partners have significant discretion in determining when and whether to make announcements about the status of our partnerships, including about preclinical and clinical developments and timelines for advancing antibodies discovered using our discovery and development engine. We do not plan to disclose the development status and progress of individual drug candidates of our partners, unless and until those partners do so first. Our partners may wish to report such information more or less frequently than we intend to or may not wish to report such information at all, in which case we would not report that information either. In addition, if partners choose to announce a collaboration with us, there is no guarantee that we will recognize research discovery fees in that quarter or even the following quarter, as such fees are not payable to us until our partner begins discovery activities. The price of our common shares may decline as a result of the public announcement of unexpected results or developments in our partnerships, or as a result of our partners withholding such information.

Our partners may not achieve projected discovery and development milestones and other anticipated key events in the expected timelines or at all, which could have an adverse impact on our business and could cause the price of our common shares to decline.

From time to time, we may make public statements regarding the expected timing of certain milestones and key events, as well as regarding developments and milestones under our partnerships, to the extent that our partners have publicly disclosed such information or permit us to make such disclosures. Certain of our partners have also made public statements regarding their expectations for the development of programs under partnership with us and they and other partners may in the future make additional statements about their goals and expectations for partnerships with us. The actual timing of these events can vary dramatically due to a number of factors such as delays or failures in our or our current and future partners’ antibody discovery and development programs, the amount of time, effort, and resources committed by us and our current and future partners, and the numerous uncertainties inherent in the development of drugs. As a result, there can be no assurance that our partners’ current and future programs will advance or be completed in the time frames we or they expect. If our partners fail to achieve one or more of these milestones or other key events as planned, our business could be materially adversely affected and the price of our common shares could decline.

Our future success is dependent on the eventual approval and commercialization of products developed by our partners for which we have no control over the clinical development plan, regulatory strategy or commercialization efforts.

Our business model is dependent on the eventual progression of therapeutic candidates discovered or initially developed utilizing our discovery and development engine into clinical trials and commercialization. This requires us to attract partners and enter into agreements with them that contain obligations for the partners to pay us milestone payments as well as royalties on sales of approved products for the therapeutic candidates they develop that are generated utilizing our discovery and development engine. Given the nature of our relationships with our partners, we do not control the progression, clinical development, regulatory strategy or eventual commercialization, if approved, of these therapeutic candidates. As a result, our future success and the potential to receive milestones and royalties are entirely dependent on our partners’ efforts over which we have no control. Additionally, unless publicly disclosed by our partners, we do not have access to information related to our partners’ preclinical studies or clinical trial results, including serious adverse events, or ongoing communications with the FDA or other regulatory authorities regarding our partners’ development strategy, which limits our visibility into how such programs may be progressing. If our partners determine not to proceed with the future development of a drug candidate discovered or initially developed utilizing our discovery and development engine, or if they implement preclinical, clinical or regulatory strategies that ultimately do not result in the further development or approval of the therapeutic candidate, we will not receive the benefits of our partnerships, which may have a material and adverse effect on our operations.

ABCL US Equity

ABCL · 10-K · period ended 2022-12-31

Item 1. Business.

Item 1A. Risk Factors.

ABCL US Equity☆

ABCL · 10-K · period ended 2022-12-31

Item 1. Business.

Item 1A. Risk Factors.

ABCL US Equity