81 If we engage in acquisitions, in-licensing or strategic partnerships, this may increase our capital requirements, dilute our stockholders, cause us to incur debt or assume contingent liabilities and subject us to other risks. We may engage in various acquisitions and strategic partnerships in the future, including licensing or acquiring complementary products, intellectual property rights, technologies or businesses. Any acquisition or strategic partnership may entail numerous risks, including: • increased operating expenses and cash requirements; • the assumption of indebtedness or contingent liabilities; • the issuance of our equity securities which would result in dilution to our stockholders; • assimilation of operations, intellectual property, products and product candidates of an acquired company, including difficulties associated with integrating new personnel; • the diversion of our management’s attention from our existing product candidates and initiatives in pursuing such an acquisition or strategic partnership; • retention of key employees, the loss of key personnel, and uncertainties in our ability to maintain key business relationships; • risks and uncertainties associated with the other party to such a transaction, including the prospects of that party and their existing products or product candidates and regulatory approvals; and • our inability to generate revenue from acquired intellectual property, technology and/or products sufficient to meet our objectives or even to offset the associated transaction and maintenance costs. In addition, if we undertake such a transaction, we may incur large one-time expenses and acquire intangible assets that could result in significant future amortization expense. Our internal computer systems, or those used by our third-party research institution collaborators, CROs or other contractors or consultants, may fail or suffer security breaches. Despite the implementation of security measures, our internal computer systems may be vulnerable to damage from computer viruses and unauthorized access. Although to our knowledge, we have not experienced any such material system failure or security breach to date, if such an event were to occur, it could result in a material disruption of our development programs and our business operations, whether due to a loss of trade secrets or other proprietary information or other similar disruptions. For example, the loss of clinical trial data from completed, ongoing or future clinical trials could result in delays in our regulatory approval efforts and significantly increase our costs to recover or reproduce the data. Likewise, we rely on third-party research institution collaborators, CROs, other contractors and consultants for many aspects of our business, including research and development activities and manufacturing of our product candidates, and similar events relating to their computer systems could also have a material adverse effect on our business. The secure maintenance of information is critical to our business and reputation. We believe that companies have been increasingly subject to a wide variety of security incidents, cyber-attacks and other attempts to gain unauthorized access. These threats can come from a variety of sources, ranging in sophistication from an individual hacker to a state-sponsored attack. Cyber threats may be generic, or they may be custom-crafted against our information systems. Over the past few years, cyber-attacks have become more prevalent and much harder to detect and defend against. Our network and storage applications and those of our collaborators, CROs and vendors may be subject to unauthorized access by hackers or breached due to operator error, malfeasance or other system disruptions. It is often difficult to anticipate or immediately detect such incidents and the damage caused by them. These data breaches and any unauthorized access or disclosure of our information or intellectual property could compromise our intellectual property and expose sensitive business information. A data security breach could also lead to public exposure of personal information of our employees. Cyber-attacks could cause us to incur significant remediation costs, disrupt key business operations and divert attention of management and key information technology resources. Our network security and data recovery measures and those of our collaborators, CROs and vendors may not be adequate to protect against such security breaches and disruptions. To the extent that any disruption or security breach were to result in a loss of, or damage to, our data or systems, or inappropriate disclosure of confidential or proprietary information, we could incur liability, our competitive position could be harmed, and the further development and commercialization of our product candidates could be delayed.