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Saul's avatar

I haven’t checked the SEC documentation but, occasionally, companies disclose their actual R&D spend per asset (as opposed to aggregate expenditure). This makes for real granularity.

BioBoyScout's avatar

Good instinct, and I checked the filings for all three. None of Arrowhead, Alnylam, or Ionis breaks out R&D per program in a way that supports a clean cross-company per-asset comparison. That inconsistency is exactly why I used a labeled proxy rather than each company's self-defined disclosures. Even where a company discloses spend on one or two late-stage assets, "program" is defined differently across filers, so stacking those numbers would be apples-to-oranges. The R&D-per-clinical-program figures in the note are explicitly indicative, not precise, and I flagged them as such.