Company: IMCR
Filing Date: 2025-02-26
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001671927-25-000006
Chunk: 142

Company: Immunocore Holdings plc
Filing Date: 2025-02-26
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 142
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, our business and competitive position may be harmed.

In addition to the protection afforded by patents, we rely upon unpatented trade secret protection, unpatented know-how, proprietary information and continuing technological innovation to develop and maintain our competitive position. With respect to the building of our ImmTAX platform, we consider trade secrets and know-how to be one of our primary intellectual property assets. We seek to protect our proprietary technology and processes, in part, by entering into confidentiality agreements with our collaborators, scientific advisors, employees, CROs and consultants, and invention assignment agreements with our consultants and employees. We may not be able to prevent the unauthorized disclosure or use of our technical know-how or other trade secrets by the parties to these agreements, however, despite the existence generally of confidentiality agreements and other contractual restrictions. Monitoring unauthorized uses and disclosures of trade secrets and other confidential information is difficult, and we do not know whether the steps we have taken to protect our proprietary technologies will be effective. If any of the collaborators, scientific advisors, employees, CROs and consultants who are parties to these agreements breaches or violates the terms of any of these agreements, we may not have adequate remedies for any such breach or violation, and we could lose our trade secret protection as a result. In addition, we cannot guarantee that we have entered into such agreements with each party that may have or have had access to our trade secrets or proprietary technology and processes. Enforcing a claim that a third party illegally obtained and is using our trade secrets, like patent litigation, is expensive and time-consuming, and the outcome is unpredictable. In addition, some courts, especially outside the United States, are sometimes less willing to protect trade secrets. We also seek to preserve the integrity and confidentiality of our data and trade secrets by maintaining physical security of our premises and physical and electronic security of our information technology systems. While we have confidence in these individuals, organizations and systems, agreements or security measures may be breached, and we may not have adequate remedies for any breach.

Our trade secrets could otherwise become known, obtained or independently discovered by our competitors or other third parties, who could purchase our products and product candidates and attempt to replicate some or all of the competitive advantages we derive from our development efforts, willfully infringe, misappropriate or otherwise violate our intellectual property rights, design around our protected technology or develop their own competitive technologies that fall outside of our intellectual property rights. If any of our trade secrets were to be lawfully obtained or independently developed by a competitor or other third party, we