Compugen Ltd (CGEN) 2009 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to the Compugen Ltd Fourth Quarter 2009 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants are present 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 call is being recorded February 9th, 2010.

With us online today are Mr. Martin Gerstel, Co-CEO, Dr. Anat Cohen-Dayag, President and Co-CEO, Ms. Dikla Czaczkes Axselbrad, CFO, and Dr. Zurit Levine, VP R&D. 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 972-3-765-8595.

Ms. Czaczkes, would you like to begin?

Thank you. On behalf of my associates here with me today and all the employees of Compugen, welcome to our Year-End 2009 Conference Call. This is a very exciting time for us at Compugen and we look forward to sharing some of this excitement with you in today's call. This is particularly relevant since I note that we have quite a few new participants joining our call today and we want to thank you along with our longer time investors for your interest in our company.

With respect to our financial results, they are very straight forward and in line with previous projections with the exception of the impact of the sales of portion of our averaging shares and our late December equity offering. Therefore, we will not cover the quarterly and annual financial results in today's preferred remarks. But feel free to ask any question that you have regarding them in our Q&A period following our preferred remarks. In addition, as always, you can email me any remaining comments or questions should they not be answered during our call. My email address can be found on our website.

In today's call, Martin Gerstel, Co-CEO, will provide a short overview of our current status. The largest portion of our preferred remarks for today's call will come from Dr. Anat Cohen-Dayag, our Co-CEO and President, describing for you some of the reasons why there is such a high level of excitement within our company. Following Anat, the three of us plus Dr. Zurit Levine, our VP of R&D, will be available to address any questions that you might have.

Martin?

Thank you, Dikla. As Dikla mentioned, in my remarks today I would like to briefly summarize our current status. I'm sure that those of you familiar with the drug and diagnostic industries understand that, at the end of the day, there is only one thing that determines the long-term success or failure of companies in these industries. That is the ability to continue to discover and develop useful and novel products.

All the other issues, such as pricing, manufacturing, marketing, even competition, are almost irrelevant. Further, with sufficient cash, it is not difficult to establish or buy state-of-the-art abilities to develop products. So, the only real issue remaining for long-term growth and profitability is the continuing successful discovery of high probability product candidates addressing unmet medical needs. If a biopharmaceutical company is able to accomplish this, it will be very, very successful. If not, it will likely soon be history.

Those familiar with the drug and diagnostic industries also know that traditional experimental discovery efforts, even the most modern ultra-high throughput methods, are yielding fewer and fewer new products in spite of rapidly growing industry-wide spending on R&D. Compugen's long-term mission is to dramatically change the situation by becoming the world leader in the discovery and licensing of product candidates to the drug and diagnostic industries under milestone and revenue sharing agreements.

Unlike traditional high throughput trial and error experimental-based discovery, our discovery efforts are based on in silico, that is by computer, prediction and selection, utilizing a growing number of field-focused proprietary discovery platforms, accurately modeling for the first time key biological processes at the molecular level. In the past, when speaking with potential investors or collaborators, there were three obvious questions that inevitably arose concerning Compugen's chances of successfully achieving its mission.

First and most fundamental was can it be done? That is can commercially useful models be developed for predictable discovery in life science? And this was a very legitimate question. Furthermore, in view of the many unsuccessful efforts by others involving enormous resources during the past few decades, the most reasonable answer to the question would be no. Therefore, from our initial efforts and predictive biology in late 1996 until about two years ago, this remained the most difficult question for us, particularly with potential collaborators. With respect to the financial world, one had to be a believer to invest in the company and fortunately, we had a few.

Now however, with the growing number of product candidates, discovery platforms in vivo validation experiments, et cetera, being disclosed by us, this question has become much less of an issue. And for those who know us, it is largely behind us. Beginning in 2008, a different question became the focus for many of our investors. That is even if Compugen can create this discovery capability, does the company have a business model that will provide significant financial benefits to the shareholders?

Here there is an easy, but relatively unique answer. Our business model is based on the introduction of an ever increasing number of Compugen-discovered product candidates into the development pipelines of the industry at the cost and risk of our partners and with the right for Compugen to receive milestone payments and royalties for those that are successful.

Fortunately, during the past year or so, we have been demonstrating that this form of collaboration, both for product candidates that we have already discovered and more recently and more importantly, for our unique ability to undertake discovery on demand, is of significant interest to the industry and we are now in discussions with respect to a number of additional such agreements.

Most recently, the key question has been even if this business model is doable and should be highly profitable in the long run, how can it be financed until significant milestones and royalties are achieved? Since our business model primarily focuses on maximizing long-term profitability and since it is in our interest to license out candidates as early as possible, high front-end fees are not reasonable to expect, at least not until some of our product candidates have demonstrated success in later stages of clinical development. And in addition, there is, of course, no way to accurately predict the timing of the receipt of milestones and royalties.

Lastly, the worldwide financial crisis occurring when it did certainly did not help. Today, our financial situation is completely different. As we have stated in the past, our short-term financial objective has been to achieve breakeven cash flow solely on the basis of research revenues by year-end 2011, thus providing both long-term financial viability and the opportunity for milestones and royalties, when received, to flow directly to the bottom line as profits.

Furthermore, in view of our highly efficient computer driven discovery efforts, our annual cash requirements remain very modest. As stated in today's release, the company anticipates maximum gross cash usage of $8.5 million for this year, which will be reduced by any revenues or other cash sources received during the year. And with respect to cash on hand, after completion of our equity offering in late December, we effectively ended 2009 with more than $23 million in cash and cash-related accounts.

Furthermore, this does not include the approximately $4 million market value of our remaining Evogene shareholdings and the company has no outstanding debt of any kind. Therefore, we are confident that the question of how we will finance our business model until significant milestones and royalties are received is no longer a critical issue.

So in summary, here we are in early 2010, taking great pride in having successfully met the three key and very legitimate questions of the past, that is first and foremost, will it be possible for Compugen to create an accurate and broadly applicable predictive product candidate discovery capability for drugs and diagnostics? Second, do we have an appropriate business model for shareholder benefit? And lastly, do we have the necessary capital to provide the needed runway until such time as the business model is profitable?

In this situation, with these questions now behind us, a new but very positive question comes to the fore for the company and its shareholders. That is how big an opportunity can this be?

And with that, I would like to turn the call over to Anat to provide some insight into the underlying basis for the high degree of enthusiasm and excitement now existing at our company. Anat?

Thank you, Martin. As Martin just stated, I would like to share with you some of the reasons for the excitement we now feel within our organization and our enthusiasm for the future of our company. I have grouped my remarks into six critical areas and it is both important and very rewarding to note that in each and every one of these six areas, significant breakthroughs were made by Compugen during 2009.

First and probably most important, is the growing in vivo validation of some of our initial product candidates in different phases of therapy. It is our policy to have in vivo validation studies performed by leading independent experts in the relevant phases of therapy and for these experts to utilize well recognized disease animal models relied on by the industry. This is being done because we want the performance of our predicted molecules to be objectively judged by scientists fully familiar with the relevant phase and competing molecules.

In addition, as a relatively new company utilizing very novel discovery techniques, we want potential pharma partners to be able to evaluate our results without questioning in any way the quality or manner of their testing. We are now getting feedback from these experts and are very proud of the type of assessments that we are receiving. Professor John Penn from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in the US, an expert in ophthalmology, evaluated CGEN-25017, a novel peptide predicted by our DAC Blockers platform to be effective in angiogenesis-related diseases such as cancer, arteriosclerosis, and others.

After testing our molecules in a well-recognized animal model of retinopathy, Professor Penn stated, "The efficacy achieved with your molecules is a fairly rare finding in this model. The result of this molecule fall within the top 10% of all test compounds that have passed through our hands."

CGEN-25007, another novel peptide predicted by our DAC Blockers platform for treatment of inflammation, was evaluated in an animal model of inflammatory bowel disease by Professor Markus Neurath from the University of Erlangen in Germany, who is a well-known expert in the field. A tone evaluation of experiments and results, Professor Neurath stated, "The results achieved with this molecule are very impressive. In the past, we have evaluated numerous molecules in this model, but never saw such dramatic effects."

A third example is CGEN-25009, a novel peptide predicted in silico utilizing our GPCR Ligand Discovery Platform. This molecule was shown to be effective in the treatment of pulmonary fibrosis, an immense and deadly unmet medical need. The molecule was evaluated by Professor Daniele Bani from the University of Florence, a world expert in the Relaxin pathway. Professor Bani stated, "To my knowledge, this would be the first report of therapeutic effectiveness of an analogue of Relaxin." It is also important to note that CGEN-25009 is our third GPCR for which Compugen discovered peptide ligand, have shown therapeutic effect in animal disease models.

The second area I would like to discuss is our unique capability to provide discovery on demand and the state with which we can do so even with respect to new areas where we have not focused in the past. In addition to the more than 10 product candidates discovery platforms in important areas of drug and diagnostic discovery that have created and validated in the past few years, we now have the proven ability to rapidly build new platforms in additional areas of interest to us or that may be desired by potential partners.

Each of these platforms represent the state-of-the-art with respect to the specific areas it is topic on. Of course, this is only possible because of the fact that each new platform typically relies on a number of predictive models and algorithms that we already developed in the past, based on our long-term commitment to obtain deeper understanding of key biological phenomena at the molecular level.

This existing and continuously expanding inventory of in silico capabilities, essentially a predictive discovery toolbox, is perhaps our most important corporate asset. In effect, each new discovery platform is already developed to some significant accent the day we decide to start building it through the mixing and matching of appropriate existing models and algorithms. The discovery platform is then completed by developing its infrastructure, combining the required field-specific in silico algorithm and selection mechanisms.

Our existing validated platform and the ability to rapidly build new ones provides us with our key commercial competitive advantage, what we call product candidate discovery on demand for our partners. Such product candidates can be predicted and discovered for a specific drug target or family of targets or for specific diabetic indications or a specific medical area.

A good example of a discovery on demand agreement for specific targets is the agreement we signed in late December of last year with Pfizer. Under this agreement, Compugen will discover and provide Pfizer with a number of therapeutic peptide product candidates for three drug targets.

The discovery process will take a few months and will be based on various Compugen discovery platforms, one of which has not been disclosed as well as other algorithmic products. This ability to swiftly adapt our discovery platform for the discovery of product candidates in many different areas of interest and rapidly develop whatever additional algorithmic products are required represents a unique and powerful capability in our industry.

The third area I would like to discuss is the continuing improvement in our underlying capabilities and discovery platforms. With traditional high corporate experimental methods of discovery, the process will, in general, get more and more difficult over time as the easiest discoveries are made first and you learn little, if anything, from your failure. On the other hand, experimental result from our predictive model-based discovery platform are always valuable to us, either in the form of new discoveries or new information to improve our predictive platform for the next round of predictions.

This improvement can take the form of a larger number of discoveries, higher validation success rate, or less time required for new discoveries and in most cases, will result in all three. For example, using the first prediction rounds of GPCR Ligand Discovery Platform announcing 2008, we discovered and validated peptide ligand for three GPCRs that have shown therapeutic potential in disease models -- disease animal models.

Since then, this platform was updated and improved and has recently been used to predict more accurately GPCR peptide ligand candidates that can now be synthesized and screened against GPCRs of interest to the pharma industry. We expect that this large virtual library of peptides created in silico will be of high value to the pharma industry in its efforts to identify new peptide ligands for GPCR.

Another example is the continuing development of new applications for our LEADS platform, our first infrastructure platform. For example, last year we announced two discoveries in the area of diagnostic biomarkers based on this continually improving platform and signed research and license option agreements with a leading diagnostic partner, one for the diagnostics of ovarian cancer and the other for early detection of preeclampsia.

Another example is a newly discovered tumor target and its splice variants that are the subject of the collaboration agreement with Bayer-Schering Pharma. And an example of this was announced only recently that is attracting a lot of industry attention is CGEN-15001, which was discovered through the incorporation in Compugen's LEADS platform of additional algorithms specifically designed to predict novel members of the B7/CD28 family of co-stimulatory protein. CGEN-15001 has shown therapeutic potential for autoimmune disorders.

Next, I would like to say a few words about the growing recognition within the pharma industry of our unique discovery capabilities, which is, of course, critical to our commercial success. During the past few years, we have successfully demonstrated the validity and broad applicability of our systematic and predictive approach to driving diagnostic products candidate discovery, which as mentioned earlier has included experimental validation of the growing number of product candidates by recognized world experts.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that we are now seeing an increasing interest in Compugen by leading companies in the industry and also opportunities to present our unique discovery methodologies and specific discoveries at industry conferences worldwide. This recognition and exposure is now paving the way for numerous discussions regarding additional collaborations based both on our individual products candidate discoveries and more importantly on our discovery on demand capabilities.

The fifth area I would like to discuss relates to the continuing demonstration that our capabilities have wide applicability in the pharma and diagnostic world. As mentioned earlier, to date we have created and validated more than 10 product candidate discovery platforms in key drug, drug targets, biomarker and diagnostic areas.

With respect to discovery, just focusing on 2009, we announced the discovery and validation of novel therapeutic molecules or drug targets for epithelial tumors, inhibition of angiogenesis, inflammatory bowel disease, cardiovascular disease, and pulmonary fibrosis, as well as biomarkers for preeclampsia, type 2 diabetes, ovarian cancer, and pre-clinical kidney toxicity. I am certain that this quantity and diversity of discovery capabilities and validated discoveries in areas of such high interest industry is unprecedented and it is clearly -- is only the beginning.

The sixth and final area relates to our business model and our dramatically improved financial situation. Since Martin covered this subject in his remarks, I will only point out that our business model clearly offers our shareholders the potential for both very low risk and extremely high rewards which is a unique situation in our industry.

Furthermore, as described by Martin, during the past year, we began to successfully demonstrate that this model is attractive to potential partners. And most importantly, with respect to our financial situation, at year end 2009, we obtained the needed capital to provide the time we believe would be necessary to fully implement it. For all these reasons, at Compugen, we enthusiastically look forward to 2010 and the next few years as we and the industry continue to benefit from our pioneering and long-term commitment to predictive discovery.

And with that, I thank you for your attention and we will now be glad to answer any questions that you might have.

Thank you. (Operator Instructions).

The first question is from Pamela Bassett of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on the significant progress last year. I'd like to talk a little bit more about the Pfizer arrangement. In your original press release, you talked about delivering compounds to Pfizer in a few months. Can you tell us how that program is coming along?

Yes, sure. Hi, Pamela. Yes. This is something that we were agreeing upon with Pfizer and we are now working on it in order to stand behind the timelines that we've promised. It is going to be infused in the next few months and we will deliver to Pfizer the synthesized peptides that we predicted with our discovery platform.

Pamela, there's no reason to believe that there will be any delay in this program.

Okay, terrific. And once Pfizer receives them, will they need to exercise their option if they want to optimize them?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes. They will -- the only thing that they will do initially is to screen them against their targets of interest and then if they want to go further than that, they need to exercise options.

So, they won't be doing any animal models or --?

Only after exercising.

Okay.

Or maybe I spoke too soon. Do you know?

No, but they have some evaluation program that they will implement and at that point of time, they have to exercise their options.

Oh, so is that specified in the agreement and can you talk a little bit about the timeframe of their process?

There is a fixed timeframe, but I'm afraid we cannot relate to it.

Yes, it wasn't disclosed and also it's one of those things that we're in discussion with a number of other companies, the same issue comes up. So, it's really in our interest not to disclose these, particularly with respect --

Okay.

Exactly. But there is a fixed time in the agreement for them to evaluate these molecules.

Yes, and we're not talking about years and years. I mean, it's -- all right?

Okay, great. And then, with respect to additional discovery on demand agreements, did I hear correctly that -- are you going to -- should we expect disclosure of terms or -- and disclosure of maybe upfront fees or overall deal size or we're not going to know about that until each candidate is entered into a license agreement?

It -- at first, as I mentioned, I think the -- sort of the nature of our business is that we want to license things as early as possible. And so, our focus is much more on significant milestones and royalties rather than upfront fees. I mean, we want to encourage companies to compare our molecules with those that they've developed internally or that they see outside on a level playing field even though they're very early.

I would doubt whether we -- in most cases, our partner won't want us to disclose. And even if they do, it is a -- since we're talking with so many different companies, it's very awkward to start announcing numbers. But we'll just have to deal with that as each case comes up.

I would also just make a general comment and that is that under current accounting rules, front-end payments are typically not -- they don't show up. I mean, look back at -- they don't show up when the deal is signed. I mean, there's all kinds of time issues that are involved there. I would urge you to look at any company -- other companies that you're familiar with and look at their press releases with respect to what they say are their front-end payments. And then, look at their P&L and see if you can identify them. In most cases, you will find it there because of the way these things must be treated under current accounting principles.

So, we should expect that you're going to be spreading these upfront payments out over some period of time related to the discovery process?

Yes.

Or longer.

Well, it depends when the fee comes in. But typically, it will be over the discovery process.

Oh, great. And then with respect to 15001 -- CGEN-15001, the recently discovered proprietary compound, will you be developing that in-house or are there -- or do you have plans to develop it to a certain stage or are you already pursuing a licensing arrangement?

In general, we don't feel that it is an area of expertise of Compugen to move forward with molecules behind these -- them in vivo animal studies, but of course, on a case-by-case basis, we will consider that. Specifically for CGEN-15001, as I mentioned in my talk, there is a significant attention to it in the industry and we will, of course, explore the possibility to move forward with a partner.

And might that include the -- both the compound and the opportunity to develop monoclonal antibodies as well?

The specific -- this is a very good question. The specific molecule, CGEN-15001, is a soluble protein, okay? So, it is a protein that would be tested to serve as the therapeutic protein.

Right.

The molecule that it was derived from, which was also predicted and validated by Compugen, is the membrane protein that would serve as a target for monoclonal antibody therapeutics and can serve for a totally different product out there. So, we are talking from the same molecule that Compugen discovered to different products -- could be moved forward in the industry and of course, this is the subject of discussion with different partners.

Great. Thanks very much.

Thank you, Pamela.

Next question is from [Jay Bagen]. Please go ahead.

Yes, this question is for Martin. Martin, in the past you've commented on once these discovered molecules have been discovered, the time for development and the success rate should be extremely high and the time should be shortened considerably. Can you comment on that?

I -- if you interpreted any of my comments to lead to that conclusion, I either misspoke or you misheard. I think that what we can say about our discoveries are that, if we're talking about therapeutics, because of the way we discover them, because it's done on a predictive basis, we believe that we will see over time a much higher probability of success, that more of our predictive molecules will actually end up getting to the marketplace than the traditional molecules that are found sort of accidentally, experimentally, by observation.

We have -- obviously, at this point in time, no proof whatsoever that that will be the case. But in talking with scientists and people who understand what we're doing, most would agree that there's -- that that's not an unreasonable position to assume. But we don't have any magical shortcuts with respect to how therapeutic products are developed. I can say that right now we are focusing on a couple of areas where the pathway to the marketplace for these classes of products -- not necessarily just ours, but for these classes -- are much better defined and in many cases, faster and with higher probability. That's with, for example, the monoclonal antibodies.

This is one of the reasons why this is perhaps the fastest growing and hottest field in the pharma industry right now because of the fact that you -- that the pathway for development is very clear and the -- and also, there's a high -- from our standpoint what's very nice is that finding the target is a significant part of the overall -- part of the value of the overall process. Whereas typically in -- with small molecules, finding the target isn't necessarily -- it's nice, but the fact is you still have to do an enormous discovery effort to attempt to get a molecule that's going to modulate that target. Whereas with the antibody targets, it's -- there's a very straightforward process to raise the antibodies.

But I don't want to mislead anyone. I think we have -- I believe we have a revolutionary capability with respect to discovery. I would match in -- pretty much in any area that we've focused on, I would match our capability with the best of the companies that have specialized in these fields for many years with respect to discovery. After that, we really have no competitive advantage and we're not intending to build our company based on downstream. We're, as I said, we're intending to build it based on getting the maximum number of our discoveries into the pipelines of other companies and then hopefully see very substantial milestones and royalties.

Thank you. And I didn't mean to put words in your mouth, that was my understanding and it could have been misguided. But continued success. Thank you.

Thank you.

The next question is a follow-up question from Pamela Bassett of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking a follow-up. Can you provide any sort of guidance around revenue or your expense levels going forward for 2010?

Yes, I can say that the -- our expenditures -- cash -- our cash expenditures will be up modestly. Declawed, it's about 15%, 20%. Is that right?

Yes --

In that range.

In that range and we -- as we said in our press release, we are talking about a gross cash out of $8.5 million, not taking into account any revenues.

Yes, so then -- so the cash burn as such during the year will be less than $8.5 million.

Okay. Thank you.

The next question is from Brett Rice of Janney Montgomery Scott. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. The -- I'm listening to all of our comments. Is it a fair statement to say that there's a high probability over the next one to three quarters of similar Pfizer type agreements to be announced?

First, let me just say that I've been in the industry for a long time doing deals of collaborative arrangements and the one thing I've learned is that nothing is ever done until it's done.

Right.

And you can get surprises, both positive and negative. I would feel very comfortable in saying that you will see additional agreements of that type this year. And that does not mean that I don't think we're going to sign anything until the end of the year, but it means that I'm comfortable going on record of saying we will sign additional deals of that sort this year.

Right. This is just kind of a nuance question. I mean, in the -- I've been a shareholder a long time, as you know. In the past, I got the sense that we had to go to the big pharma companies and knock on their door to sell our discovery capabilities. Has the pendulum swung -- are they knocking on your doors? Has it gone -- has it progressed to that state yet?

There's absolutely no doubt that the pendulum is moving.

Okay.

That as Anat said in her last few announcements, we've got a number of companies contacting us and asking to talk, information, whatever. The trend is clearly substantial and in the right direction. But we're still out there knocking also.

Okay. Thank you. Congratulations on the progress. I appreciate it.

Well, thank you very much. Thanks for hanging in there with us.

(Operator Instructions). There are no further questions at this time. Before I ask Mr. Gerstel to go ahead with his 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 1-888-782-4291. In Israel, please call 03-92-55-901. Internationally, please call 972-3-92-55-901.

Mr. Gerstel, would you like to make your concluding statements?

Yes, thank you. We clearly are at a major inflexion point or have just past a major inflexion point for our company. And it is quite amazing how all of these things have kind of come together at one point in time with respect to the validation of the technology, the resources that we need, the -- just the kinds of platforms that are being developed. And we -- actually, we've reached the point in time where it clearly is -- our efforts build on our past efforts and we can just see how we can move forward now in so many different directions and so quickly.

For those of you who know me from the past, I think you can imagine how satisfying this is to me. When I first saw this company, it was -- as those of you who probably don't realize it was a computer company back in the early '90s and had a very unique group of people because the computers that they were making were special purpose computers to analyze biological data.

And I have to admit I really took a risk for which I really didn't have the scientific basis for taking and that was to believe that this was a company that could truly do what so many other companies had tried to do and failed. That is to actually use computers to 100% predict sequences of novel molecules. I mean, this is an amazing thing when you think about it that you have computer models. They predict a sequence of a molecule that has never been seen before and predicts what that molecule should do in a biological system. Basically, when it gets to the human being.

The -- and I felt that there was a opportunity to do this through a combination of the kind of people that had been assembled here in this computer company and what was going on in the world with the genomic revolution. And my sense that most people who were looking at genomics were looking at it solely as -- from the standpoint of reverse engineering, of looking at diseases or systems, whatever, and trying to reverse engineer to understand them.

And I thought that here at Compugen we could take a very different approach and that is to go right down to the basics. Where does life begin? Understand how do genes express transcripts? How do transcripts become proteins? How do proteins become peptides? How to interfere with the folding of proteins. All of the things that -- sort of at the molecular level, how does life -- how does life work?

And over the years, more than a decade in any scientific publications of some of our work, we just continued to build up these individual pieces. In a sense, you can think of them as tiny little pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. And we kept adding -- continuing to add pieces to this jigsaw puzzle. And a couple of years ago, we reached the point where we had enough pieces that you were beginning to be able to see pictures -- a picture. You were beginning to put some of these individual pieces together in a way that you actually could see something and understand something.

Once that happened, there's been an explosion here because now we can -- every discovery we make leads to two or three other discoveries, whatever. And to actually see that this concept -- and a concept that most biologists, most people would have said was largely impossible when we started 10 years ago, it's actually coming to fruition. And case after case now, we're showing that when we synthesize -- we or our partners synthesize molecules that we predict to do something and then you put them into disease models, they actually do what we predicted them to do.

And so, for those of you -- sorry for this long concluding statement -- but I really want to particularly thank -- and I know we have some new shareholders on the line and I don't want to discount your interest in our company and I really welcome you, but I really do have to give a special thanks to those who have hung in there with us through all of the years when the only thing that we could show for our progress was literally science breakthroughs, peer-reviewed papers, whatever, which I don't think people really understood the significance of that. But now hopefully, they will as we continue to move forward on the commercial front.

So, thank you very much and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter.

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