Emil Kakkis
Chief Executive Officer
Okay. So, on the commercial side, there's obviously other ways to talk about ANGPTL3, but the antibodies in hand is very safe, works well. And gene editing knockout strategies have just submitted the very first few patients, which is very exciting, but, to me, is going to take years to get through. The goal of people having trying to do this is certainly not treating at this stage in gene editing. But right now we're watching the gene editing field. We’re a company that likes to take advantage of platforms, but not have to develop them ourselves. So in our view, what we needed was not another early-stage program to experiment with, but a product that we could sell that worked. And down the road, if your point is, well, could something replace this Evkeeza for ANGPTL3, maybe. But is it really in the next few years, or is it 10 years, how long. Could be a while. And honestly, very few people are going to spend all the money on gene editing to treat that few number. So if they're trying to do the bigger market, at some point maybe that will happen. But right now we feel comfortable, it is a program we can sell now that works. Works well. It's pretty convenient. It doesn't have any unknown genetic issues that are yet to be figured out. And so, we're comfortable there is a good place for it in our portfolio at this point in time. But we're watching gene editing, just like all of you and they'll have ups and then down. For UX143, bone moral density by the FDA is generally not considered sufficiently clinical in their mind. There have been situations where it didn't correlate well. Although, I think with anabolic agents it correlates better with outcomes. So their requirement was to have clinically observed fractures to be the primary endpoint. What we know from the data in ASTEROID is that there were trends of fracture improvement in the study, was not very big and didn't have enough time. But our view of it was that the bone moral density improvements and the trend on fractures that we're seeing in the higher dose patients would be readily -- it would be clinically important and we feel comfortable that will work. Second thing, remember that ASTEROID study was adult. Adult bones don't respond like kid bones. And that's why, I remember, with XLH we got out of adult -onset peds and peds would drive the powerful efficacy story. Same thing is going to be true for UX143. Kids bones respond much greater, much faster and will remodel faster and build bone faster. And I'm very confident that in that group that we can improve fractures even more readily than you would in adults. So that's why we're pretty comfortable. That was true by the way are everything we did in kids work faster and more powerful. In fact, people said it should take two years to see bone change remember in XLH, but in kids we actually got 80% of the benefit in nine months only, right? That was unexpected to some. But as a pediatrician, I like kids because they get better. That's why I went into pediatric medicine originally as opposed to