Company: ABUS
Filing Date: 2025-05-14
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001447028-25-000099
Chunk: 35

Company: Arbutus Biopharma Corp
Filing Date: 2025-05-14
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part I, Item 1
Chunk 35
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-delivered ribonucleic acid interference (RNAi) therapeutic, and AB-101, our proprietary oral PD-L1 inhibitor, for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B (cHBV).  

We continue to protect and defend our intellectual property, which is the subject of our ongoing lawsuits against Moderna Therapeutics, Inc. (Moderna) and against Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE (collectively, Pfizer/BioNTech) for their use of our patented lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery technology in their COVID-19 messenger ribonucleic acid interference (mRNA)-LNP vaccines. With respect to the Moderna lawsuit in the United States, a trial date has been set for September 29, 2025. With respect to the Pfizer/BioNTech lawsuit, the claim construction hearing occurred in December 2024. The court is expected to provide its ruling on the Pfizer/BioNTech lawsuit claim construction and issue a further scheduling order, including the date for trial, in 2025. On March 3, 2025, we announced that, along with Genevant Sciences Ltd. (Genevant), we have filed five international lawsuits against Moderna in connection with the use of our LNP technology in Moderna’s COVID-19 mRNA-LNP vaccines and, in the Unified Patent Court, also Moderna’s respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines.

During 2024, we streamlined the organization to focus our efforts on advancing the clinical development of imdusiran and AB-101, and therefore ceased all discovery efforts, discontinued our IM-PROVE III clinical trial and reduced our workforce by 40%.  In the first quarter of 2025, we announced the appointment of five new members of our Board of Directors (our Board) to replace all of the former directors, as well as the appointment of a new President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairperson of our Board and a new Chief Financial Officer. Additionally, our Board took action to reduce our workforce by an additional 57% resulting in a total workforce after reductions of 19 employees. Our Board also decided to exit our corporate headquarters in Warminster, Pennsylvania and to discontinue in-house scientific research. In connection with these actions, we incurred a one-time restructuring charge in the first quarter of 2025 of $12.4 million. With these organizational changes and our ongoing cost management efforts, we expect to significantly reduce our net cash burn in 2025 when compared to 2024