With that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Anzalone, President and CEO of the company. Chris?
Christopher Anzalone
Thanks, Vince. Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining us today. This is our final earnings call in 2020. So in addition to discussing our progress for the quarter and plans for 2021, I would also like to speak a bit more broadly about our philosophy and model.
We are building a different type of biotech company. We are not focused on a single therapeutic area or rather on any disease with unmet medical need that is addressable with our technology. We are not focused solely on rare diseases or rather address large and small populations.
We do not rely solely on partners for late-stage clinical development and commercialization or rather we use partnering strategically and judiciously to enable us to build substantial value by commercializing our own drugs.
We are fast, probably the fastest in the business from idea to the clinic and we intend to remain fast as we grow. That devotion to speed also applies to pipeline expansion. I believe we have a fastest growing pipeline in our field and we do not intend to slow that input just because we are entering later-stage clinical studies.
We are not in the me-too product business where we only provide incremental benefit to patients rather we seek to be pioneers. We believe that everything in our clinical pipeline represents the first RNAi to each target in humans. We don’t operate like a normal pharmaceutical company. We are not burdened by analyst gating committees or rather empower our people to make decisions.
Operationally, think of us as a start-up in $7 billion market cap clothing and we intend to continue in this nimble and creative fashion even as we become a substantially larger and more valuable company. We see this as the most effective way to build a business and most importantly to serve our patients. Every day that we can shave off the development process puts our patients one day closer to a new treatment they need. This is a powerful motivator indeed for us, because of the value of our work depends on the number of lives we touch.
I mention all of this now because we are at a moment of transition for our company. We have created a lot of value to this point by building what we believe will soon be the largest RNAi-based clinical pipeline in biopharma. As we move into later-stage clinical studies, our focus needs to expand to include commercial planning. Ultimately, this is the reason we are in this business and we need to do that well.
However, we also need to continue to do the things in discovery and early development that have made us successful while we build our commercial presence. On average, we expect to continue to introduce three new drug candidates into the clinical studies every year and we expect to be able to address a new cell type every 18 to 24 months.
Think of the potential value embedded in those statements. I expect that we will have ten clinical programs by summer spanning four different cell types that could grow to 20 clinical programs spanning five or six cell types just four years from now. We expect this to drive substantial value, because we expect some of those to become products that we will commercialize ourselves and some can be partnered to fund developments and commercial endeavors.
Our ability to rapidly grow our pipeline enables this hybrid model of establishing a limited number of partnerships in order to fund wholly-owned programs. We see this as a powerful model because it allows the rapid value creation associated with commercializing wholly-owned drugs while financing this expensive endeavor largely through non-dilutive capital from partnering programs.
So, even as we approach and ultimately expand our commercial presence, our pipeline strategy should continue to be an important part of our value proposition. This is not only due to the group force of the large numbers of potential drugs in our clinical studies, but should also reflect our expectations of success. There are two components to this.
First we seek to choose only well-validated targets. These are gene targets where consensus of experts agree the reducing expression will likely have positive therapeutic benefits. By focusing on this, we believe we enter clinical studies with reduced biology and target risk relative to other candidates.
Second, the RNAi mechanism and experience with the TRiM Platform can provide this additional wind at our back as we continue to treat more patients with drug candidates built on the TRiM Platform and see consistent activity and up to the safety profile, our confidence increases that other candidates targeting different genes will also be successful.
RNAi doesn’t care what gene is being silenced once we validate our ability to reduce expression of a given gene in a given cell type, we have confidence that we can replicate that in other gene targets. We believe this is a powerful and scalable concept that gives us confidence that a larger percentage of our candidates entering the clinic will ultimately become drugs compared to traditional small molecules.
We hope that as we approach and become a commercial company, the market will properly value our growing pipeline. As I mentioned, it will continue to be an important part of our value proposition and we expect it to remain a substantial differentiator versus our competitors.
With that, let’s move into an overview of the last quarter. During the last few months, our accomplishments included the following: one, we hosted a KOL seminar on ARO-ENaC, our first lung targeted candidate to treat cystic fibrosis and we initiated dosing in a Phase 1/2 clinical study.
Two, we are into a $20 million milestone payment from Amgen following the start of a Phase 2 study of AMG 890, now called Olpasiran, which is a partnered program targeting Lp(a) to tread cardiovascular disease.
Three, we initiated a Phase 1b study for ARO-HIF2, our first tumor targeted candidate to treat renal cell carcinoma. Four, we presented new data on Phase 1/2 studies of both of our own wholly-owned cardio metabolic candidates ARO-APOC3 and ARO-ANG3, and multiple medical needs including the European Society of Cardiology and the American Heart Association meetings and subsequently hosted KOL webinars to discuss the data and our plans for their future developments.
Five, we presented Phase 2 data at AASLD on ARO-AAT, our candidate against liver disease associated with alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency showing that ARO-AAT strongly reduces the production of mutant Z-AAT protein and led to improvements in multiple biomarkers of alpha-1 liver disease.
And six, we signed an agreement with Takeda to co-develop and co-commercialize ARO-AAT, which includes $300 million upfront, $740 million in milestone payments, a 50{50 profit sharing agreement in U.S. and 20% to 25% royalties on sales outside the U.S. This is lot of progress in a short period of time and even more impressive with a backdrop of disruptions caused by COVID-19.
Let’s take a look at the Takeda deal. It’s a good example of our selective partnering strategy. We expect ARO-AAT to benefit from Takeda’s global footprint, existing infrastructure, expertise and 18 year history in the AAT market to enable a rapid launch. If approved, ARO-AAT will join Takeda’s global commercially available products including Glassia, Aralast, Entyvio and their growing GI pipeline.