Robert Finizio
Analyst · Stifel. Your line is now open
Thanks, Dave. Good afternoon, everyone. First, I’d like to thank the entire team here at our Company for all their hard work and relentless dedication over the past 12 months. Although 2017 was a challenging year for TXMD, after discussions and agreement with the FDA in November, we resubmitted our new drug application for our first product candidate TX-004HR. Our PDUFA target action date is May 29, 2018. Assuming approval, our plan is to launch TX-004HR in the third quarter of this year as early as July. In December, we submitted the new drug application for our second product candidate, TX-001HR. Based upon the results of our complete clinical program, including positive data from the pivotal Phase III REPLENISH trial, we expect our day 74 filing letter to arrive in March, and it will contain our PDUFA target action date which is currently expected to be in October, assuming acceptance of the NDA. We continue to appropriately expand our sales and commercial infrastructure to prepare for the potential launch of TX-004HR in the third quarter of this year. We have made important progress towards this goal, with our Chief Commercial Officer, Dawn Halkuff, leading the charge. In 2017, our sales team focused on our non-branded disease awareness campaign for VVA. We believe that our sales infrastructure as well as our established relationships in the OB/GYN channel will drive a successful launch of TX-004 if approved. We’ve been laser focused on launch strategy and staffing over the past few quarters and have made significant progress that I’d like to talk about. Beginning with sales, our sales management team is fully staffed and in place for the launch of TX-004HR. We now have 15 regional managers hired across the U.S. This team has either direct, women’s health experience or specific experience of launching new drugs, which we believe represents the right mix of top talent for our therapeutic category. This sales management team is in the process of hiring 150 total reps when complete. We've also been very focused on our retail strength and partnerships given the headwinds facing the pharmaceutical industry today as of late. TXMD has established relationships with the national mail order as well as with a large – one of the largest retail pharmacy chains in America. We have taken the necessary steps to try to avoid stocking and co-pay assistance issues that typically plague launches. We believe these relationships will help us ensure that the TX-004 is both available and affordable for all postmenopausal women in the U.S. whether through the mail or on the shelves of retail pharmacies nationwide. In addition, a dedicated compounding pharmacy relationship team is now in place with the goal of establishing effective relationships in growing our current BioIgnite program. We believe this is a critical and unrecognized vertical that contains significant opportunity for both TX-004 and TX-001HR. This channel is unique to TXMD and we believe our differentiated approach represents a significant opportunity for our Company. By utilizing a multi-threaded retail approach, we believe that we can further ensure the successful launches of our products if approved. This under utilized network of compounding retail pharmacies has been under appreciated by the pharmaceutical industry and we are excited to further build our relationships with them. Lastly, we've had a significant progress on the payer side these past few quarters. We continue to have a strong dialogue with multiple major payers in preparation for the launch of TX-004HR. The feedback that we are getting is that they are – that there are no major barriers to covering a new lower dose branded estrogen product assuming competitive or parity pricing. These discussions were held after the recent introduction of Estrace and Vagifem generics to the market. As a reminder, if approved TX-004 would have a 25x lower estrogen dose than Estrace and its generics and a 2.5x lower estrogen dose than Vagifem and its generics. On the call today, we will review these developments in our prepared remarks and then open it up for Q&A. Dan will start with the review of our financial results then Dr. Sebastian Mirkin will provide a regulatory update for both clinical programs. Dan?