Company: CRNX
Filing Date: 2025-02-27
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-029050
Chunk: 205

Company: Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-27
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 205
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 or patent applications with claims to materials, formulations, methods of manufacture or methods for treatment related to the use or manufacture of our product candidates. 

As the biopharmaceutical industry expands and more patents are issued, the risk increases that our product candidates may be subject to claims of infringement of the patent rights of third parties. Because patent applications are maintained as confidential for a certain period of time, until the relevant application is published, we may be unaware of third-party patents that may be infringed by commercialization of any of our product candidates, and we cannot be certain that we were the first 

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to file a patent application related to a product candidate or technology. Moreover, because patent applications can take many years to issue, there may be currently pending patent applications that may later result in issued patents that our product candidates may infringe. In addition, identification of third-party patent rights that may be relevant to our technology is difficult because patent searching is imperfect due to differences in terminology among patents, incomplete databases and the difficulty in assessing the meaning of patent claims. There is also no assurance that there is not prior art of which we are aware, but which we do not believe is relevant to our business, which may, nonetheless, ultimately be found to limit our ability to make, use, sell, offer for sale or import our products that may be approved in the future, or impair our competitive position. In addition, third parties may obtain patents in the future and claim that use of our technologies infringes upon these patents. Any claims of patent infringement asserted by third parties would be time consuming and could: 

•result in costly litigation that may cause negative publicity; 

•divert the time and attention of our technical personnel and management; 

•cause development delays; 

•prevent us from commercializing any of our product candidates until the asserted patent expires or is held finally invalid or not infringed in a court of law; 

•require us to develop non-infringing technology, which may not be possible on a cost-effective basis; 

•subject us to significant liability to third parties; or 

•require us to enter into royalty or licensing agreements, which may not be available on commercially reasonable terms, or at all, or which might be non-exclusive, which could result in our competitors gaining access to the same technology. 

Although no third party has asserted a claim of patent infringement against us as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, others may hold proprietary rights that could prevent our product candidates from being marketed once approved