Company: HCWB
Filing Date: 2025-04-07
Form Type: S-1
Source: 0001193125-25-073723
Chunk: 64

Company: HCW Biologics Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-04-07
Form: S-1
Chunk 64
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 legal questions.
Changes in either patent laws or their interpretation in any jurisdiction where we seek patent protection may diminish our ability to protect our inventions, maintain and enforce our intellectual property rights, and more generally may affect the
value of our intellectual property, including the narrowing of the scope of our patents and any that we may license.

Failure to protect
or to obtain, maintain or extend adequate patent and other intellectual property rights could materially adversely affect our ability to develop and market our product candidates.

We may become involved in lawsuits to protect or enforce our issued patents relating to one or more of our product candidates or our internally-developed platform, which could ultimately render our patents invalid or unenforceable and adversely affect our competitive position. Intellectual property litigation or other legal proceedings could cause us to spend substantial resources and distract our personnel from their normal responsibilities.

Competitors may infringe our patents or other
intellectual property that relate to our immunotherapy platform technology and product candidates, their respective methods of use, manufacture, and formulations thereof. Third parties may in the future claim that our operations infringe their
intellectual property rights. To defend against such claims, protect our competitive position and counter infringement or unauthorized use, we may from time to time need to resort to litigation to enforce or defend any patents or other intellectual
property rights owned or licensed by us by filing infringement claims. We may be subject to further litigation in the future, involving claims that we have misappropriated or misused other parties’ trade secrets or information. To the extent we
gain greater market visibility, we face a higher risk of being the subject of intellectual property infringement claims, which is not uncommon with respect to the biopharmaceutical industry.

As enforcement of intellectual property rights is difficult, unpredictable, time-consuming, and expensive, we may fail in enforcing our
rights, in which case our competitors may be permitted to use our technology without being required to pay us any license fees. In addition, litigation involving our patents carries the risk that one or more of our patents will be held invalid (in
whole, in part, or on a claim-by-claim basis) or held unenforceable. Such an adverse court ruling could allow third parties to commercialize our product candidates or
methods, or our immunotherapy platform technology, and then compete directly with us, without payment to us.

Even if resolved in our
favor, such litigation and other legal proceedings may cause us to incur significant expenses and would be likely to divert significant resources from our core business, including distracting our technical