Cytos Biotechnology capitalizes on its expertise in immunology, the in-depth knowledge of its versatile vaccine technology and a solid intellectual property position. Our business strategy is focussed on the innovative and research-intensive part of the pharmaceutical value chain and on partnering product candidates aimed at mass markets with leading pharmaceutical companies for late-stage development and marketing. In addition, we seek to fully develop product candidates addressing niche markets on our own and to establish the required infrastructure for late-stage development and commercialization.
Our strategy aims at developing a pipeline of several Immunodrug™ candidates towards clinical proof-of-concept in phase II. This diversification allows us to manage the inherent risk of drug development, namely the risk that one or the other candidate will fail due to lack of efficacy or unacceptable side effects. At the same time, we can leverage synergies among the different programs, e.g. in GMP drug manufacturing, formulation development and other areas.
In the recent past, our research and development on several Immunodrug™ candidates have shown that the underlying proprietary technology platform has consistently produced the desired immune responses against the antigens tested so far in a safe and well tolerated manner. Given the potential broad applicability not only in chronic disease management but also in traditional vaccine development, we therefore intend to give pharmaceutical companies access to this technology in well defined, target-specific licensing arrangements outside the scope of our own programs. We entered such a target-specific collaboration with Pfizer in 2008, focusing on human vaccine programs. Such collaborations are devoid of development risks for Cytos Biotechnology and should allow to further enhance the return on our R&D investments via a second complementary pillar of our partnering strategy.
