Richard King
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Your line is open
Thank you, Alf. With the approval and launch of GOCOVRI, Parkinson's disease patients now have an FDA approved medicine clinically proven specifically to treat dyskinesia. In two Phase 3 trials, GOCOVRI not only significantly reduces dyskinesia but it also reduced off. Together this produced an increase in functional time from baseline of about four hours a day as measured by on time without troublesome dyskinesia. This means that for the first time, physicians treating Parkinson's patients with levodopa don't have to choose between managing dyskinesia and treating off symptoms. With a strong data in hand, let me turn to the progress we've made in launching GOCOVRI since our last call. In these early days, the best assessments of progress of a launch in my book is measured by what we call evaluation of awareness, trial and usage. That is the awareness of the availability of the newly approved product, the trial of that new product by the prescribing population, and ongoing usage by and feedback from physicians and patients. In terms of awareness, we measure this by surveying physicians to ask them about their unaided or unprompted awareness of products that have recently been approved or are available and also their aided awareness of products based on selection from a list that is presented to them. We did such an exercise in December 2017 prior to the launch of GOCOVRI and again in March of 2018. In each survey we asked approximately 130 neurologists about their awareness of GOCOVRI. In December 2017, unaided awareness of GOCOVRI was 13% and aided awareness was at 53%. By March following the introduction of GOCOVRI, physician awareness had risen to 56% for unaided awareness and was at 95% for aided awareness. In a very short period of time therefore, GOCOVRI has reached very high levels of awareness reflective of its value proposition, and our investments in direct promotion to our experienced sales team, as well as investments in advertising across print, web and social media channels. We are obviously very pleased with this progress. In addition, we've aided awareness with a strong presence at our first American Academy of Neurology meeting recently. We had a well attended commercial booth and a successful products symposium where Maryum Ali, the oldest daughter of Muhammad Ali was our keynote speaker. After awareness of the product the key question is whether the prescribing population has tried the product. As Alf mentioned earlier, approximately 550 physicians have prescribed GOCOVRI by the end of the first quarter. You'll recall that our target population is approximately 6,500 physicians who are high prescribers of carbidopa levodopa. This implies that we have generated prescriptions from almost 1 in 12 of the target population by the end of the first quarter 2018, and that's extremely encouraging and again demonstrates the strength of the GOCOVRI value proposition for patients, as well as the effectiveness of our sales team to sharing GOCOVRI story and the investments we have made and ensuring the physician population is aware of the GOCOVRI data set through promotion, peer presentations, media and medical publications. Now that said, we are seeing a full flow post to GOCOVRI by prescribers with a number of physicians who are trying the product in a patient and waiting for the feedback from that patient to evaluate the effect of GOCOVRI in their own hands. This is unsurprising in these early days and reflects what we've seen with other launches in this neurology market. The final stage of assessment in this early stage of launches whether there is repeated and continuous usage of the product. To that end, we're already seeing some individual physicians that have moved a large proportion of the Parkinson's dyskinesia population to GOCOVRI and while that all physicians are doing this yet, we are encouraged by the positive feedback from new patients on GOCOVRI. We are hearing loudly and clearly from these patients by the successes they are seeing with GOCOVRI treatment. Every day we hit stores from our field team falling meetings that they've had with physicians. For instance we recently heard from a physician in the Midwest but after putting patients on GOCOVRI, she was pleasantly surprised to see them doing so well since they had failed amantadine IR. She commented that her patients and their caregivers were thrilled with the results on GOCOVRI. And another physician in the Southeast who described the young Parkinson's disease patient who was struggling extensively with dyskinesia. After trying a myriad of treatment options, she had almost lost hope as to what to do for this patient until she learned about the approval of GOCOVRI specifically for dyskinesia. She started this patient on GOCOVRI and today her patient's life has changed for the better and the patient is doing incredibly well. We've heard similar stories from physicians across the country and this positive reinforcement to the prescriber of the effects of a new part such as GOCOVRI is key to seeing continued and expanded usage. Today we've seen support from payers regarding GOCOVRI prescription reimbursement, a process which is handled by our GOCOVRI onboard program. The significant majority of prescriptions submitted are being reimbursed with less than 2% of prescriptions received to-date ultimately rejected as not covered. While specific criteria for coverage may not yet be available and/or may differ slightly from plan to plan in the majority of cases and across all peer segments, coverage is supported if the patient has a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease dyskinesia is consistent with labeling. Some plans also ask the physician to confirm that the patient has a medical history with amantadine IR. We believe our GOCOVRI onboard program is effectively working to enhance physicians, patients and caregiver access to have the treatment when needed and we continue to improve and make this program even more effective. With that, I’m going to pass the call over to Rajiv.