Compugen Ltd (CGEN) 2009 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Compugen Ltd. First Quarter 2009 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). As a reminder, this conference is being recorded May 12th, 2009.

With us on the line today are Martin Gerstel, CEO, Mr. Dov Hershberg, Chairman of the Board, Ms. Dikla Czaczkes Axselbrad, CFO, Ms. Anat Cohen-Dayag, Vice President, R&D, and Mr. Yossi Cohen, CTO. I would like to remind everyone that the Safe Harbor language contained in today's press release also pertains to all content of this conference call. If you have not received a copy of today's release and would like to do so, please contact Dikla Czaczkes Axselbrad at telephone number 972-376-58595.

Mr. Gerstel, would you like to begin?

Yes, thank you very much. Hello and thanks for participating. We're going to do things a little differently in our call today. After these, and believe it or not, my remarks are going to be very brief, we will -- Dikla will highlight a few key financial factors, and then the remainder of the prepared remarks will be provided by Anat Cohen-Dayag, our Vice President of R&D, and Yossi Cohen, our Chief Technology Officer. Then all of us, including Dov Hershberg, our Chairman, will be available for any Q&A.

Also, please be aware, and bear with us, that we are doing this call today from two different locations. Yossi is with me in New York City and Dov, Anat and Dikla are in Tel Aviv. Hopefully, this won't create any technical difficulties.

Since the beginning of this year, Compugen has announced product candidate discoveries in three very important fields of industry interest, angiogenesis, fibrotic disease and pre-clinical toxicity, based on three different and unique Compugen discovery platforms, DAC blockers, GPCR ligands and drug-induced toxicity markers.

Currently, we are now in a series of meetings with pharma and biopharma companies, and I'm pleased to say that the continuing and accelerating demonstration of the power and broad applicability of our in-silico prediction and selection discovery methodologies, as highlighted by these three announcements during the past quarter, has clearly had a very positive impact on the view and understanding of Compugen within the industry.

Our industry collaborations to date fall into two categories. First are agreements covering the licensing out of product candidates that have already been discovered by us as of the time of agreement. An example of this is our agreement with Merck Serono for a specific anti-inflammatory peptide. The other type of agreement that we have entered into is the utilization of an existing Compugen discovery platform to address a specific discovery requirement of a partner.

Examples of this are our agreement with Merck based on our GPCR peptide ligand platform and our agreement with Medarex based on our monoclonal antibody target platform. However, it is clear that a third type of broader and more strategic collaboration, based more on the general capabilities of the Company and not just the initial products or platforms would more fully leverage our unique discovery capabilities for the benefit of both us and our partners.

To date, we have not entered into any agreements of this type. However, this has been set as a key corporate objective for 2009, which we are now actively pursuing. An obvious question is why only now, and not in the past? As has been mentioned a number of times, there exists a great deal of skepticism in the industry about the value of product discovery based on in-silico predictive modeling and for very good reason.

During the past decade or so, many companies with far greater resources than Compugen attempted to create more systematic drug discovery with all kinds of approaches, platforms, technologies, et cetera, but with only a very limited impact, and that in very specific areas. However, the continuing accomplishments of Compugen, as highlighted by the three announcements this past quarter, appeared to be significantly addressing this skepticism, at least with respect to Compugen.

With this in mind, we decided to devote most of today's call to providing you with more of an understanding of the significance of these three recent announcements. This will be done following Dikla's brief talk, by Yossi discussing in more detail each of the three platforms and Anat each of the three specific product candidates.

I will now turn the call over to Dikla.

Thank you, Martin. As stated a number of times in the past, our anticipated primary source of future revenues will be milestone and revenue sharing payments from the three types of collaborations just mentioned by Martin. Accordingly, and as previously projected, we had no revenues for the first quarter of 2009.

Research and development expenses of $1.4 million for the most recent quarter, compared to $2 million for the first quarter of 2008, remain our largest expense, representing more than 60% of total operating expenses for both quarters. These amounts are before the deduction of governmental and other grants, which start at approximately $109,000 for the first quarter, ending March 31st, 2009, compared with approximately $166,000 for the corresponding quarter in 2008.

With respect to liquidity, we entered the first quarter in 2009 with $4.3 million in cash and cash-related accounts. Our cash and cash-related accounts do not include the market value of the 2.150 million Evogene shares held by the Company, worth at today's market price approximately $5 million. This means that as previously stated, cash on hand, plus the current market value of the Evogene shares, would be sufficient throughout mid 2010. Assuming no significant markdowns, account fees or additional capital from any other source was obtained previous to such times.

And now, I will turn the call over to Yossi and Anat. Yossi?

Thank you, Dikla. We will start with the outlook of discovery platform. In order for a protein to be active, it has to fold properly. Therefore, interfering with the folding of a protein associated with a disease is a way to achieve a therapeutic benefit. The problem is that even after both industry and academia have put a great deal of effort to understand and predict the folding of proteins, predicting protein folding remains a key problem in molecular biology.

Our DAC blockers platform was developed to predict new therapeutic peptides and is based on a set of algorithms that predict the part of protein folding which relates to cases where two segments of the protein interact with each other in the folded protein. If such a interaction occurs, it's plausible that one of the interacting segments, when synthesized artificially as a peptide, will block the protein from folding into its disease-associated conformation.

The prediction of two segments of the protein interacting once it's folded is based on two main capabilities that were developed at Compugen. The first is to predict single amino acid residues that interact with each other in the folded protein, and based on that, to predict potential interacting segments, composed of many interacting single residues.

The second is to select the cases with the highest prediction reliability of interacting segments. Once this discovery platform became operational, we ran it computationally on thousands of proteins and found many instances of predicted segment interactions. Of these instances, we have so far selected for experimental validation a dozen proteins where we have been able to predict a peptide that could block disease activity. One of them is CGEN-25017.

CGEN-25017 was the third therapeutic peptide predicted and selected by the DAC blockers discovery platform to undergo experimental validation. CGEN-25017 peptide is the blocker of the Angiopoietin/Tie-2 pathway. This pathway and its modulation are involved in angiogenesis, the growth of new capillary blood vessels in the body.

Angiogenesis is an important natural process for healing and reproduction. However, abnormal blood vessel growth is recognized as a common underlying cause for various diseases, including cancer and inflammation. Therefore, targeting angiogenesis is one of the most intensely studied approaches to cancer treatment. This is why discovering a novel peptide with the ability to inhibit angiogenesis is an important achievement. Our novel CGEN-25017 peptide has shown inhibitory effects in the model of angiogenesis.

This activity was tested using a widely recognized model to examine compounds affecting angiogenesis, the chorioallantoic membrane, or CAM, model. In this model, CGEN-25017 demonstrated potent dose-dependent anti-angiogenic activity. These findings further support the previous data we obtained for CGEN-25017 in an in vitro multicellular assay of angiogenesis. These initial results support the potential use of this normal peptide for the treatment of angiogenesis-related diseases, such as cancer, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.

We will continue with the GPCR peptide ligands discovery platform. Broadly speaking, drugs work by modulating one or more specific targets, in most cases, protein targets. The GPCR family of membrane proteins receptors is the largest family of known drug targets and is of high interest in the pharmaceutical industry.

At least 40% of prescription drugs currently available are thought to act on GPCRs. In addition, newly discovered GPCR peptide ligands have in the past shown a high probability of being successfully developed into new drugs. This was the motivation for the development of our GPCR peptide ligand discovery platform.

This platform works by integrating marketable computational discovery capabilities, developed by Compugen. One of these computational discovery capabilities is to predict novel naturally occurring peptides. Since peptides are formed by being cleaved of [percosal] proteins, we developed a machine learning system to predict novel cleavage sites in percosal proteins and, as a consequence, to predict novel endogenous peptides.

We refer to this list of predicted endogenous peptides as the human peptidome. Then, we developed another machine learning system to identify within this whole predicted human peptidome a smaller subgroup of peptides that are more likely to be GPCR related. In addition, the prediction of novel peptides is also based on looking for novel cleavage sites in novel proteins, predicted by our leads infrastructure platform, which provides a well-annotated predicted proteome.

As an example, CGEN-25009, a Relaxin receptor modulator, was predicted and selected by the GPCR peptide ligands discovery platform. It is important to note that both leads and the capability to predict novel cleavage sites are being used in the development of other discovery platforms.

As Yossi just stated, CGEN-25009 is a Relaxin receptor modulator. The Relaxin receptor is the third G protein peptide receptor for which Compugen-discovered peptide ligands have shown therapeutic potential in disease models. Following the in-silico prediction and selection of CGEN-25009, we were able to demonstrate the ability of this novel peptide to activate the Relaxin receptor LGR7 in cell-based assays.

Unlike the known Relaxin peptides, which is a complex marker, CGEN-25009 is a simple linear peptide, which suggests easier production of the compound. With these positive results in hand, we then turned to test the therapeutic effect in an animal model of pulmonary fibrosis. We selected pulmonary fibrosis, a major unmet medical need, from among several therapeutic properties that are linked to Relaxin and the LGR7 receptor.

Substantial worldwide research efforts have recently demonstrated that the peptide hormone Relaxin is multifunctional and displays therapeutic properties in very specific physiological conditions such as infertility, pregnancy and labor complications, cardiovascular diseases, inflammatory disorders, wound healing and various fibrotic diseases.

With respect to our pulmonary fibrosis test of CGEN-25009, following two weeks of administration of the CGEN-25009 peptide to mice induced with lung fibrosis, there was a complete reduction in fibrosis. This improvement was evident both by histology staining and by measuring the pressure at the airway opening, where levels were comparable to those observed in healthy mice.

These results suggest that CGEN-25009 prevents pulmonary fibrosis in diseased animal models and therefore could have a potential therapeutic utility to treat pulmonary fibrosis and other fibrosis-related conditions, such as chronic renal failure in humans. To the best of our knowledge, these results are the first report on the therapeutic effectiveness of an agonist of LGR7 different from Relaxin. In view of the increasing interest in Relaxin as a possible drug, these results are very promising.

We will finish with the drug-induced toxicity discovery platform. Worldwide efforts to identify biomarkers for various purposes are enormous and rapidly increasing. We at Compugen target three major fields in diagnostics, which are biomarkers for disease diagnosis, biomarkers for drug response prediction and biomarkers for the identification of drug-induced toxicity.

Our predicted markers are either proteins, peptides, RNA markers or DNA variations longer than SNPs. The drug-induced toxicity platform which has been developed by us was firstly directed at finding pre-clinical drug-induced toxic effects to the kidneys, a common type of drug-induced toxicity also referred to as nephrotoxicity. This is an important need in the pharmaceutical research.

Our work in this field has been in collaboration with Teva Pharmaceuticals, which supplied us with pre-clinical samples relevant for the discovery of such markers. We extracted large computational data sets of biological raw data from these pre-clinical tissue samples, which were then analyzed by us by our discovery platform.

The result was the discovery of CGEN-60001, an RNA-based test composed of six RNA molecules for early detection of drug-induced nephrotoxicity. The RNA molecules in the test were predicted and selected by a two-stage approach analysis involving machine learning analysis of the raw data set extracted from the tissue samples and, later on, RNA expression levels of a selection of transcripts. Four of the six molecules in the test are proprietary splice variants of genes predicted by leads.

As Yossi said, predicting nephrotoxicity is an important need in pharmaceutical research. Accurate and timely prediction of nephrotoxicity in the pre-clinical setting can prevent later failures in human trials in case the drug is toxic or can salvage drugs falsely identified as toxic, and therefore it continues.

After our discovery of the CGEN-60001 biomarker combination, its diagnostic potential was experimentally tested in a blind evaluation study with rats treated with drugs that had previously failed in pre-clinical trials due to nephrotoxic effects. In this study, the biomarker combination accurately identified the nephrotoxic drugs after a short period of exposure to the drugs.

Using this combination, we were able to identify the toxic effect within five days of exposure, compared with up to 28 days required for visible histopathological damage. Histopathology and clinical blood tests, such as blood urea nitrogen and some creatinine levels, are the traditional diagnostic methods for the detection of kidney function.

These currently used methods, as observed in this study as well, showed significant results only after substantial kidney injury had occurred. In addition to its early detection characteristics, our biomarker combinations successfully predicted the relative levels of toxicity of the compounds that were tested. These findings strengthened the diagnostic potential of this biomarker combination as a tool not only for early identification, but also for prioritization and ranking of toxic compounds in pre-clinical development stages.

Thank you, Yossi and Anat. I hope this more complete discussion of these platforms and products was of interest to our participants. As a scientifically based company, we thought it would be useful to at least try once to get into these areas in a little bit more depth.

I now will open the call to questions and answers.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we'll begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions).

Our first question is from the line of Ronald Urvater with Ormed Capital. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, everybody, and thank you. That was very illuminating and very helpful. My question speaks specifically in the first category, the DAC platform where you talked about protein folding and emission, one of the areas where I would think this might have some great applicability is in the neuroscience area, where there are a lot of degenerative diseases that are a function of inaccurate protein folding problems. Do you have any plans, or can you discuss the neuroscience applicability here, and whether you're talking to any potential partners in that area?

There are, I think two -- this is Yossi. I think there are two main considerations that relate to neuroscience. One is if we find or predict reliable segment interaction in relevant proteins, because segment interaction, they are not a part of each and every protein folding, just part of them. And we don't just need to identify such. We also want to take forward the cases where the prediction is of certain reliability. So, this is one thing that means that not necessarily we can work on any protein relevant in neuroscience and protein folding.

And the second thing is, which is relevant, I think, is another difficulty with neuroscience, which is the blood-brain barrier. Since our compounds in this platform are peptides, there is the issue of penetrating the blood-brain barrier, and at least in first rounds of the platform, we are naturally going after the low-hanging fruits, so this is not like a natural first for us to start.

So, we identified folding of -- we identified neuroscience as a potential field. We are aware of many different protein folding diseases that are being characterized by the literature, and this is part of the considerations where we select the targets to continue with in our internal pipeline.

Okay, thank you. The second question is, of course, on everybody's mind is given how far you've traveled with this science and given your balance sheet, can you just discuss in any kind of general terms what kinds of potential deals you'd attempt to structure in the remaining of 2009, particularly as it relates to some of these molecules you've just talked about? I think it's on everybody's mind now, and you haven't really talked about it, so can you give any general -- provide any general remarks regarding --

Let me say that as of now, we're on two pretty completely separate paths. One path is the negotiating the different types of collaborations and arrangements with the industry, some product related, some platform, but now we're beginning to talk about these broader types that I've discussed. That's one path. We are -- that path, though, there's -- the sole interest in that path is to make the best deals possible for the Company, and by the best deals I mean the deals that are going to give us the greatest future, milestone and royalty income.

The second path is the financial path, which says that we need to be assured that at the appropriate time the capital resources that are going to be necessary to continue the operations of the Company are going to be available. And I say separate. It doesn't mean that the second path couldn't possibly be solved by an achievement on the first path.

However, I think it would be irresponsible of us as a company to be planning on that, and irresponsible because that could easily put us in a situation where we would have to sacrifice the long term for the short term, which after what we've -- after the investments and time that we've put into this place, I have no interest in doing.

So, I am comfortable that we know what we're -- we know what the options are, we know which are the options that are clearly in our control. We know which ones require a third party to -- or let me say an unidentified third party -- to close the deal. And we're -- I think we're proceeding in a very responsible way. But I think it's important to -- for our shareholders to understand that these are separate paths. A goal of our deal making now is not to get -- is not to finance the Company short term. That would clearly be an advantage to any deal, but it would be seen as a -- as I said, as an advantage, not a core requirement.

In other words, on your terms, is what you're saying.

The deals have to be -- I mean, we have a lot to offer the industry, and we're seeing some very, to be honest, surprisingly positive responses now that none of us really from the past really expected. Now, it's a long way from a positive response and identification of mutually interesting areas of interest. It's a long path from there to a signed deal, but I don't want that path to be compromised by a need for short-term capital.

So, we -- as I said, we have a separate path which will provide the capital and obviously, a goal there is to do it in the way which is most beneficial to our existing shareholders. And so, we have a -- obviously, we have a series of alternatives that we continue to look at, both from the standpoint of how good they are and how much time will be required to conclude them. And the only thing I can say is you'll hear from us. We clearly will be doing something.

And one last question -- thanks, Marty. Just on a smaller point, but given the reference to the Evogene shares, I don't track it closely, but like everything there's probably a little volatility there. So, if you include that in your cash reserves by implication, is there some derivative mechanism that you struck just so you can protect your asset value if there is a deterioration in the value of those shares?

Evogene is only on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and has suffered in market value like essentially all the other companies and the Tel Aviv Exchange has been particularly hard hit. So, Evogene's shares are -- don't in my judgment reflect what has been accomplished there over the past year, particularly the very substantial agreement that was entered into with Monsanto. I mean, the -- essentially, the cash on hand and committed to Evogene far exceeds their current market value.

So -- and let me say that the fluctuations have been very modest in Evogene, because there's very few buyers -- there are very few sellers. Monsanto is the largest shareholder. We are the second largest, and then there really aren't any other blocks available. You never can -- until a deal is done, you don't know, but I can tell you that we've been approached by a number of potential buyers who are prepared to pay somewhat of a premium to the market price to get a block of Evogene shares.

There's only one place, and I know that people have approached Evogene to try and buy blocks of new stock and Evogene has publicly stated they have no interest in selling additional equity. I mean, they have all the equity they need for -- probably forever. And so, the only place to buy a reasonable position in the company is through us, and if you followed at all Evogene, it really is becoming the player in the ag-bio world, with not only Monsanto, but just about all the major players.

I mean, they have shown that the predictive biology really works. They're in the fortunate position that when they finish their in-silico work, when they finish their computer predictions, they just throw the genes into plants. Half the plants probably die, but that's not something you worry about in the ag world. Of course, when we reach the same point here with our in-silico predictions, we have to -- as was explained today, we have to prioritize and then one at a time do all kinds of validation and then toxicology, et cetera.

So, it's a long haul for us. On the other hand, the payoff, of course, in the pharmaceutical world far exceeds the type of payoffs that you can get in the ag world. So, it's a longer hurdle for us, but I'm pretty confident we're on the right path.

Great, thank you. Thank you so much.

Thanks.

Thank you. (Operator Instructions).

And our next question comes from the line of [Jeffrey Grossman] with [Bair & Bird]. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good afternoon and good morning to you. My first question concerns Relaxin receptor peptide ligands. I read your press release. I thought this was perhaps the most exciting product candidate that you've announced to date. The press release concerning this candidate related specifically to pulmonary fibrosis. Am I mistaken when I believe, I am led to believe, that this molecule, this candidate, might also have applicability to cirrhosis of the liver induced by alcohol abuse or hepatitis C? And also fibrosis of the kidney resulting from hypertension?

Go ahead, Anat, sorry.

No, you are not mistaken, and actually we selected pulmonary fibrosis as a model, as the proof of concept that's showing that this peptide is active in fibrosis. However, of course, fibrosis can be a mechanism that occurs also in liver, in liver cirrhosis. And there is renal fibrosis that is associated with renal failure in humans, so this is just a model, pulmonary fibrosis, that was selected by us to show that this peptide is active in fibrosis. Of course, it opens many additional indications that we can pursue at this stage.

Are you proceeding in those other directions?

These are now things that are under discussion here at Compugen, exactly where, how and if to proceed.

When we say -- I just want to clarify, when we say if, what Anat is talking about is a key question for us on all of our programs is how far do we take them before we place them with the industry under different types of collaborations? And our goal is to place them as early as possible, because clearly our competitive advantage is not in development, but in discovery, so the earlier we can place things the more things we'll be able to place, the more discoveries we'll be able to make.

On the other hand, you want to -- the more proof you have, sort of the better the deal that you can usually structure, so it's a tradeoff and we're now evaluating. This is a very interesting area. We have some very convincing early data. There clearly is interest in the industry in this area, so we have to sort of make a judgment call as to whether we should continue to look for other indications or we should just package it and attempt to license it, as is.

Okay, but I would certainly think that this particular candidate is producing intense interest from the industry?

This is a candidate of interest. There's no question about that, yes.

Okay, second question, are we still on target, concerning the nephrotoxicity markers, for an agreement in the second half of 2009?

That is still our target. You've heard me many times in the past say that -- and it's true. You never can -- whenever it involves two signatures on a piece of paper, you never can really state -- I've been surprised in both directions in the past. So, yes, that is still our objective. It is a more than reasonable objective, based on where we are now. Will it happen? Only time will tell, but as of now, as I said, it's a very reasonable objective for us to continue to have.

Okay. I understand that in recent days the Company was granted two patents, one with respect to its MCP-1 splice variant, which might have applicability for asthma, and a second patent for breast cancer diagnostic markers. First of all, is this correct? I'm also curious why there were no press releases.

Well, it's not -- we typically don't announce patents unless it's associated with perhaps if we're entering into an agreement with a drug or something, we make comment that we have a patent. But our policy, we just haven't. Maybe that's -- let me just say we'll reconsider that policy, but to date, we have not announced as individual press releases the receipt of a patent.

I wish you would still consider that, because certainly your inventory of patents is something of value. It is also indicative to the investment community of scientific progress, so perhaps you might want to consider that in the future.

Well, you are correct. Anat or Yossi, do you have any specific information about the two patents that Jeffrey was referring to?

No, I think that apart from what you said, the only thing we can say that it's exactly like we have in the other applications that were granted for us, it's propriety information that related to specific candidates, either in breast cancer in this case or for MCP-1.

So, it is -- the report that we got on these two patents, that's accurate, in any event?

Yes.

You're aware of these two -- okay, I wasn't aware of them. I probably should have been. Okay.

Okay, and is there any additional progress being made with the Company's diagnostic candidates? We haven't heard anything about -- well, maybe there was, recently, but anything further that you can specify concerning commercial progress?

I'd just say in general, I think we're a little disappointed by the rate at which -- I think we have a lot of interesting diagnostic discoveries and we have a number of agreements. And just I don't want to get specific, but just in general, lots of things are happening in the industry, mergers, acquisitions, changing people, and unfortunately, we've been caught in the middle of that in a number of our agreements, particularly on the diagnostic side.

So, they're good diagnostics and I hope someday we're going to see them be commercialized, but I have to admit things are going much slower than I had hoped there. And as you can tell, we've really shifted almost all of the commercialization focus, as of now, to the therapy side. And until the diagnostic sort of sorts out a little bit.

Anat, Yossi, you want to add anything to what I've said?

No, thank you, Martin.

Okay, one last question. What should we as investors be looking for over the short term, the next two, three months, in terms of announcements, scientific, commercial, financing. Should we be expecting those?

Yes. That there are a lot of things happening here, and on all of the fronts that you mentioned. And if you think about what's sort of the underlying dynamics of Compugen versus other pharmaceutical companies, it's very different, because in general other pharmaceutical companies, they do a lot at the beginning and then they narrow down to a couple of products which they sort of move forward. So, it's kind of -- it's a wide area at the very beginning and then getting narrower and narrower, and then they got a couple of products that they put most of their resources in.

Ours is kind of -- if you think about the overall dynamics of the Company, we start from just an increasing base of scientific knowledge and out of that comes a continuously increasing number of computational models, tools, platforms, whatever. Out of that, we build more and more discovery platforms and out of that we build more and more -- we discover more and more drugs, not only from new platforms but from the old platforms. So, you really have kind of an ever-expanding dynamic here, which the good news is tremendous opportunities.

Sort of the bad news is the issue of where are we going to focus, where are we going to spend our own resources? And this goes back to what I said earlier, is we've got to find ways to license more stuff out at the earliest possible level, stage, which kind of brings us back to the strategic type of relationships, rather than product-by-product relationships. So with all of this going on, yes, there will be a -- we'll continue to be showing progress, I believe, on all fronts.

Okay, forgive me for just asking one final question. There is much in the news about small biotech companies falling in recent days. My belief, my understanding, I look at Compugen, it's -- I see it as falling in a very, very different category. I wonder if we could have your thoughts, Marty, on this subject.

I didn't understand what you -- I'm not sure I understood the beginning. You said you see reports of what?

In the news, we see reports for example, in the Northeast United States that many, many biotech companies have very limited cash resources and have a few months left to go and they are very much in crisis.

Right, yes.

Compugen is not in that situation?

No, it's unfortunate, but the problem for most of them is that they have, as I said, a couple of relatively early stage products, and if they can find somebody to be interested in one of their products, they can survive. But as of this point in time, there are just so many other there that a lot of them just unfortunately just aren't going to make it.

But, as you said, we're in a very different situation here. I mean, we're not trying to -- our financing doesn't count on somebody liking the Relaxin molecule or one of the other things. I mean, we've got an enormous inventory here of capabilities, of platforms, of products, and many different ways to monetize different things that we have and we're discussing with a number of companies.

I mean, anybody -- you have to consider, I mean you ought to lock me up for whatever. If we run out of money and one of the assets in the Company is a couple million shares of Evogene, all right, we ought to be I don't know what, never allowed to get within a 1,000 miles of a company again in the future, obviously. So it's not -- there isn't any panic situation here.

We're evaluating a number of different alternatives. And, as I said, we've got the other path of talking with companies with respect to different kinds of relationships and I personally, I'd like to see a little bit how those proceed over the next couple of months before selecting which of the -- which, if any, of the capital paths that we will choose.

Okay, Marty, from what I've seen, SEC filings, you have been a buyer of the Company's shares on the open market.

Yes. I can't now because we're -- well, I guess I can start again shortly. We've been in a blackout period, but it's been modest, though, not because -- I mean just certain cash flow issues involved, but I've bought a few hundred thousand shares over the last, I don't know, six months or so.

Great. Thank you very, very much.

Yes.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. Before I ask Mr. Gerstel to go ahead with the closing statement, I would like to remind participants that a replay of this call is scheduled to begin in two hours for a period of 72 hours. In the US, please call plus 1-303-590-3030, internationally.

Mr. Gerstel, would you like to conclude your statement?

Yes, thank you. I think we had an interesting call today. I appreciated the questions which went in all of the key areas. So, obviously, people are -- the shareholders who are following us, they understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. So, I just want to thank you for participating.

If any of you have any strong comments with respect to the way we handled today's call with respect to getting more into the depth of sort of the products, the technology. Like I said, if you have sort of strong comments one way or the other, let us know so that we can plan future calls, again, as to whether or not this is of sufficient interest, to use the quarterly calls now and then to do this.

So, thank you very much and we look forward to our next call in a few months. Bye-bye.

Thank you. This concludes the Compugen Ltd. First Quarter 2009 Financial Results Conference Call. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect.