Company: BOLT
Filing Date: 2025-03-24
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-043873
Chunk: 20

Company: Bolt Biotherapeutics, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-24
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 20
---
. provisional patent application, 6 are PCT applications that have yet to enter the national phase in one or more countries, 16 are U.S. nonprovisional patent applications, and 108 are foreign patent applications. The issued patents and the pending U.S. and foreign patent applications, if issued, are expected to expire between 2035 and 2045 excluding any extension of patent term that may be available.

The patents and patent applications licensed from Stanford are subject to retained rights by Stanford to allow academic and non-profit research institutions to practice the licensed technology and patents for non-commercial purposes. For more information regarding our license agreement with Stanford, please see “—License Agreements.” 

Some of our pending patent applications in the United States are provisional patent applications. Provisional patent applications are not eligible to become issued patents until, among other things, we file a non-provisional patent application within 12 months of filing of one or more of our related provisional patent applications. If we do not timely file any non-provisional patent applications, we may lose our priority date with respect to our provisional patent applications and any patent protection on the inventions disclosed in our provisional patent applications. While we intend to timely file non-provisional patent applications relating to our provisional patent applications, we cannot predict whether any such patent applications will result in the issuance of patents that provide us with any competitive 

8

advantage. 

The terms of individual issued patents extend for varying periods depending on the date of filing of the patent applications or the dates of patent issuance and the legal term of patents in the countries in which they are obtained. Generally, utility patents issued for applications filed in the United States are granted a term of 20 years from the earliest effective filing date of a non-provisional patent application, assuming the patent has not been terminally disclaimed over a commonly owned patent or a patent naming a common inventor, or over a patent not commonly owned but that was disqualified as prior art as the result of activities undertaken within the scope of a joint research agreement. The life of a patent, and the protection it affords, is therefore limited and once our issued patents have expired, we may face competition, including from other competing technologies. In addition, in certain instances, the term of a U.S. patent can be extended to recapture a portion of the delay by the USPTO in issuing the patent as well as a portion of the term effectively lost as a result of the FDA regulatory review period. However, as to the FDA component,