Company: IOBT
Filing Date: 2025-03-31
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-047744
Chunk: 207

Company: IO Biotech, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-31
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 207
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 not sufficiently broad, our competitors could develop and commercialize products similar or identical to ours, and our ability to successfully commercialize our products may be adversely affected.

We rely upon a combination of patents, know-how and confidentiality agreements to protect the intellectual property related to our products and technologies and to prevent third parties from copying and surpassing our achievements, thus eroding our competitive position in our market. 

Our success depends in large part on our ability to obtain and maintain patent protection for our T-win® platform, product candidates and their uses, as well as our ability to operate without infringing the proprietary rights of others. We seek to protect our proprietary position by filing patent applications in the United States and abroad related to our novel discoveries and technologies that are important to our business. We cannot guarantee that our pending and future patent applications will result in patents being issued or that issued patents will afford sufficient protection of our product candidates or their intended uses against competitors, nor can there be any assurance that the patents issued will not be infringed, designed around, invalidated by third parties, or that they will effectively prevent others from commercializing competitive technologies, products or product candidates. 

Obtaining and enforcing patents is expensive and time-consuming, and we may not be able to file and prosecute all necessary or desirable patent applications or maintain and/or enforce patents that may issue based on our patent applications, at a reasonable cost or in a timely manner. It is also possible that we will fail to identify patentable aspects of our research and development results before it is too late to obtain patent protection. We enter into non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements with parties who have access to patentable aspects of our research and development output, such as our employees, corporate collaborators, outside scientific collaborators, CROs, CMOs, consultants, advisors and other third parties, but any of these parties may breach these agreements and disclose such results before a patent application is filed, thereby jeopardizing our ability to seek patent protection.

Composition of matter patents for biological and pharmaceutical product candidates often provide a strong form of intellectual property protection for those types of products, as such patents provide protection without regard to any method of use. However, we cannot be certain that the claims in our pending patent applications directed to composition of matter of our product candidates will be considered patentable by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) or by patent offices in foreign countries, or that the claims in any of our issued patents will be considered valid and enforceable by courts in the United States or foreign countries