Company: LENZ
Filing Date: 2025-03-19
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001815776-25-000019
Chunk: 97

Company: LENZ Therapeutics, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-19
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 97
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 with CORXEL Pharmaceuticals (formerly known as Ji Xing Pharmaceuticals Hong Kong Limited) (“CORXEL”) to develop product candidates in Greater China and are developing regulatory strategies and intend to opportunistically seek partnerships for Europe, Canada, and other markets. For more details, see the subsection entitled “License and Collaboration Agreement with CORXEL.” We believe our presbyopia program, if approved and successful, can serve as a cornerstone for building a suite of ophthalmology biopharmaceuticals. As a result, we may acquire other products or product candidates that we believe can make a substantial impact on vision and yield high user satisfaction. We may seek to maximize the commercial infrastructure and relationships with ECPs that we are currently building for our presbyopia program, to potentially offer a broad portfolio of ophthalmology biopharmaceuticals to our users to drive growth and operating leverage.

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Table of Contents

Presbyopia

Background

Presbyopia is the inevitable loss of near vision associated with aging. It impacts the daily lives of nearly all people over 45. As people age, the crystalline lens in their eyes gradually hardens and becomes less able to change shape. This loss of elasticity of the lens reduces the ability of the lens to focus incoming light from near objects onto the retina. Adults over age 50 lose on average 1.5 lines of near vision every six years. Although the progression of presbyopia is gradual, presbyopes often experience an abrupt change in their daily life as the symptoms become more pronounced starting in their mid-40s, when reading glasses or other corrective aids are suddenly necessary to read text or conduct close-up work. Presbyopia is typically self-diagnosed and self-managed with over-the-counter reading glasses, or managed, after evaluation by an ECP, with prescription reading or bifocal glasses or multifocal contact lenses. Currently, the only approved and marketed pharmaceutical treatment for presbyopia is marketed by AbbVie under the brand name Vuity.

As illustrated in the figure below, contraction of the ciliary muscle allows the flexible lens in a healthy eye (center panel) to increase its curvature and refractive power and focus incoming light for near vision onto the retina in a process known as accommodation. As the lens hardens with age, the presbyopic lens (right panel) loses its flexibility and ability to accommodate and, despite contraction of the ciliary muscles, the incoming light for near vision no longer focuses on the surface of the retina, resulting in blurry