Company: IOBT
Filing Date: 2025-03-31
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-047744
Chunk: 186

Company: IO Biotech, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-31
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 186
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 candidates that we may develop. For example, we have entered into collaborative agreements with Merck pursuant to which they provide the pembrolizumab used in certain of our trials. Any of these relationships may require us to incur non-recurring and other charges, increase our near and long-term expenditures, share the data with such collaborators, restrict our ability to utilize certain data arising out of these collaboration arrangements, issue securities that dilute our existing stockholders or take actions that disrupt our management and business. 

In addition, we face significant competition in seeking appropriate strategic partners and the negotiation process is time-consuming and complex. Moreover, we may not be successful in our efforts to establish a strategic partnership or other alternative arrangements for our product candidates because they may be deemed to be at too early of a stage of development for collaborative effort and third parties may not view our product candidates as having the requisite potential to demonstrate safety and efficacy and obtain marketing approval. 

Further, collaborations involving our product candidates are subject to numerous risks, which may include the following: 

•collaborators have significant discretion in determining the efforts and resources that they will apply to a collaboration; 

•collaborators may not pursue development and commercialization of our product candidates or may elect not to continue or renew development or commercialization of our product candidates based on clinical trial results, changes in their strategic focus due to the acquisition of competitive products, availability of funding or other external factors, such as a business combination that diverts resources or creates competing priorities; 

•collaborators may delay clinical trials, provide insufficient funding for a clinical trial, stop a clinical trial, abandon a product candidate, repeat or conduct new clinical trials or require a new formulation of a product candidate for clinical testing; 

•collaborators could independently develop, or develop with third parties, products that compete directly or indirectly with our product candidates; 

•collaborators with marketing and distribution rights to one or more products may not commit sufficient resources to their marketing and distribution; 

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•collaborators may not properly maintain or defend our intellectual property rights or may use our intellectual property or proprietary information in a way that gives rise to actual or threatened litigation that could jeopardize or invalidate our intellectual property or proprietary information or expose us to potential liability; 

•disputes, including contract disputes, may arise between us and a collaborator that cause the delay or termination of the research, development or commercialization of our product candidates, or that result in costly litigation or arbitration that diverts management attention and resources;