Jack Khattar
Chief Executive Officer
Yes, sure. The label for ONAPGO says advance of Parkinson's disease. And as you would probably expect, I mean, the definition of advanced by a lot of KOLs might vary between, you know, what they consider advanced. For some KOLs, advanced maybe could mean that I have a patient been diagnosed now 10 years ago. They've tried a lot of agents out there, a lot of the oral adjunctive therapy with levodopa/carbidopa and they're getting to a point where maybe they need deep brain stimulation or some other invasive surgery product and so forth. And that could be a candidate, and would be a candidate for ONAPGO. Another KOL might say, you know what, I've had a patient who's only been diagnosed three or four years ago, but really struggling with all the oral agents out there and therefore I might want to try the pump. So all this remains to be seen clearly. Everything we do promotional and everything, will be centered around the advanced patients. And, as far as the interaction or the overlap, if you want to say, between ONAPGO and potentially Apokyn, just to clarify, ONAPGO is really providing you with all day continuous infusion of apomorphine and it is for all day control. However, Apokyn is more for acute episodes -- single injection for acute episodes. So there is a very distinct positioning clearly and uses for these two products. Now we have said in the past that potentially there might be some overlap or some cannibalization of Apokyn. In case you have patients, for example, who might be taking multiple injections of Apokyn during a certain day, they may choose to try the pump. I mean, there is a possibility, but clearly from our perspective, the two products are separate. Apokyn indication as for acute treatment, single injection. Obviously, the pump is more for an all-day control with a continuous infusion of apomorphine. And generally speaking, apomorphine is really a great drug, and it really differentiates significantly from, first of all, the oral dopamine agonist. It is very much like dopamine. It acts like dopamine. It actually has one of the best receptor binding profile and affinity to all, the D1 through D5 receptors. Unlike some of the oral dopamine agonists, they don't have affinity to the D1 family. So apomorphine actually is very much like dopamine. And also when it gets through the system, it doesn't need to be converted to dopamine. So it acts directly on the, D1, D2 family receptors. So that's a great drug and it really differentiates versus even levodopa itself, because levodopa, even after it gets absorbed, it has to be converted to dopamine, where apomorphine actually doesn't need to be to have that conversion. And therefore, you don't need the neurons to convert apomorphine to dopamine, so that it can get to the postsynaptic neuron. So all in all, we think the drug will differentiate very well and there will be great need for ONAPGO. It as a great clinical profile as well as tolerability. People ask me the question, how does it compare to the other pump that got approved? Clearly, I will let people read the labels and make their own decision as to how they compare.