Martine Rothblatt
Analyst · Hartaj Singh from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead
Thank you, James, for that great answer. Hartaj, I might provide, if I could - like tag along on James Edgemond's answer a little bit and highlight the interesting interface between capital allocation and R&D, which has to do with our organ manufacturing activities. So we have been making quite good progress with our xenokidney effort, which are aimed to address the unmet medical needs of over 100,000 Americans on dialysis today.Unfortunately, many of them die daily, waiting for a kidney transplant that they won't be able to receive. We reached the point of, in our xenokidney effort, that we've now optimized on a 10-gene pig, which we believe will provide a repeatable, a reliable survival that would be as good as what patients on dialysis could expect, but with a much better quality of life, not having to be tethered to dialysis centers.So to give you a little bit more color on this, the FDA have guided us that a key threshold that they want to see before taking the xenokidneys into man is that they want to see what - they have like kind of a six-by-six matrix, plus a GMP-like facility to produce the xenokidneys. So the six-by-six stands for six baboons, which is the standard model to use for this as a preclinical model, six xenografts put into six baboons with the six baboons' survival to at least six months without evidence of infection or other untoward safety consequences at the point of six months.The reason for six months is actually just practical. Baboons are quite small on the order of like 10 kilograms and the kidneys, which are designed to be human-size, after six months, simply become too large for the baboon abdomen. So we have repeatedly demonstrated over six-month survival with various versions of our xenokidneys, ones that are like three-gene kidneys, five-gene kidneys, eight, nine, and then we finally have like optimized on this 10-gene kidney.And we also - so now, what we're doing is, six of the 10-gene kidney in the baboons during calendar year 2020. In parallel with this, starting last year, we built up our first, what's called in the xeno world parlance, designated pathogen-free facility or DPF. It means like a clean space, analogous to how we would manufacture drugs, but for the situation of an organ coming out of a pig. So it meets GMP type of criteria so that the - everybody is confident that the xenokidney coming out of this pig does not contain any viruses that would give harm to a person.So we completed building the DPF facility. We've actually C-sectioned into that facility the first genetically modified pig, so that should we be able to achieve our six-by-six goal in 2020. We have our DPF up and running, and we should be able to actually go into the first clinical trials with the xenokidneys in 2021. So that's tremendously exciting to us to see that it's sort of near-term.Now there's - like they say, the consequence of a good deed is, people expect a whole lot more of you. So if we are in fact able successfully in 2021, 2022 to complete a clinical study with the xenokidney, showing that we can successfully rescue people who are predicted to only have a half-year of life or so left on dialysis with these xenokidneys, you can imagine that the demand is just going to explode with 100,000 people waiting for a kidney in the United States.So we have to start thinking about building our facility, the scale of which could handle some appreciable proportion of 100,000 kidneys a year. And it's not like 100,000 you whittle down because unfortunately, every year, more people end up with end-stage renal disease.So as many as are rescued, more people are constantly being added. So a facility to support even say like 10% of that demand is certainly a multi-hundred million dollar facility. It's an expensive facility. So I just wanted to like tag on to James' perfect explanation that one additional kind of R&D-ish like capital allocation destination will now be the manufacturing of - the completion of our organ manufacturing facilities.Operator, if you could queue up the next question please?