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impacts to clinical results, including an increased number of observed adverse events, as a result of participants enrolled in our clinical trials contracting COVID-19;
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prioritization by healthcare providers, facilities, lawmakers, and regulators of COVID-19-related healthcare needs or, when the pandemic subsides, to address the potential backlog of patients who have deferred medical procedures during the pendency of the pandemic, which may reduce availability of professionals and resources for clinical trials in other disease areas;
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limitations on travel, including limitations on domestic and international travel, and government-imposed quarantines or restrictions imposed by key third parties that could interrupt key trial activities, such as clinical trial site initiations and monitoring, which could impact the reliability or integrity of subject data and clinical study endpoints;
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interruption of, or delays in receiving, supplies of our product candidates from our contract manufacturing organizations due to staffing shortages, production slowdowns or stoppages or interruption in global shipping that may affect the transport of clinical trial materials;
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disruptions and delays caused by potential workplace, laboratory and office closures and an increased reliance on employees working from home across the healthcare system;
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disruptions in or delays to regulatory reviews, responses, inspections, or other regulatory activities, including review of marketing applications and approvals of protocol changes or amendments to Special Protocol Assessments (SPA), as a result of the spread of COVID-19 affecting the operations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or other regulatory authorities;
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changes in local regulations as part of a response to the COVID-19 pandemic which may require us to change the ways in which clinical trials are conducted, which may result in unexpected costs, or to discontinue the clinical trials altogether;
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refusal of the FDA to accept data from clinical trials in affected geographies outside the United States; and
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negative effects on the quality, completeness, integrity, interpretability and cost of our clinical study data.
The potential disruptions discussed above and other consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic could result in missed study visits or study procedures in our clinical trials, which could lead to an abundance of protocol deviations that impact the interpretability of the trial results. A significant number of deviations may call into question whether the execution of a clinical trial was consistent with the protocol, which is of particular importance where study designs were agreed to as part of a SPA as in the case of our Phase 3 clinical trial for the combination of ublituximab plus umbralisib for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (UNITY-CLL) and our registration program for ublituximab in relapsing multiple sclerosis (ULTIMATE I and II). In extreme cases, significant deviations from the protocol may be considered a violation of the SPA and result in potential rescindment of the SPA agreement, which could adversely affect our ability to use the results of the impacted study to support a future regulatory application.
We will continue to monitor the potential impact of COVID-19 on our clinical trial program, however, the full extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic may directly or indirectly impact the progress of our current and planned trials will depend on future developments that are highly uncertain and cannot be accurately predicted.
The third parties upon whom we rely for the supply of starting materials, intermediates, active pharmaceutical ingredient (API)/drug substance, drug product, and other materials used in our drug candidates are our sole source of supply, and the loss or disruption of any of these suppliers, including as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, could significantly harm our business.
The starting materials, intermediates, API/drug substance, and drug product used in many of our drug candidates are currently supplied to us from single-source suppliers. Our ability to successfully develop our drug candidates, supply our drug candidates for clinical trials and to ultimately supply our commercial drugs in quantities sufficient to meet the market demand, depends in part on our ability to obtain starting materials, intermediates, API/drug substance, and drug product for these drugs in accordance with regulatory requirements and in