Martine Rothblatt
Chairman
Thanks, Dr. Peterson. Thank you very much. So with regard to the inventory, Marty, I think, we're going to be in good shape. In fact, just this week, at the request of our Head of Manufacturing, Pat Poisson, we allocated $5 million for inventory buildup for the TreT launch during 2021. So, he regularly visits the MannKind plant in Connecticut, where we do the manufacturing of everything. And I feel confident that we'll have adequate supply to meet our needs. As you probably recall from reviewing our proxy, how one of our companies for companywide objective is upon which everybody's bonus is based in the entire company is that we have to have a two-year inventory of all commercially launched products at the rate of the product take-up. So Mike Benkowitz and his commercial team, they would provide a forecast to manufacturing in terms of how many Dreamboat TreT patients we expect to garner in the first 12 months after launch, which would be mostly a 2022 thing. And then, so already in 2021, Pat Poisson and our manufacturing team are making sure that we have 2 times that amount of inventory built up for at the time of launch, so that we can crush that manufacturing and inventory milestone as we actually always have every year for as far back as I can remember. With regard to the xeno question, I think, your numbers are quite accurate, Marty. There are 20,000-plus kidney transplants done. If you get into what are called living related kidney transplants, where people designate a kidney to a relative or something like that, you get up into the 35,000 type of category. And the next number that comes up a lot is 100,000 people are waiting for kidney transplants and are currently on dialysis. And then the next number that comes up is that there is something like 300,000 people in need of a kidney transplant, but for various and sundry reasons, they are not even able to access dialysis. So, it is probably one of the largest unmet medical needs in the United States. It's not unrelated to the very high levels of diabetes in the United States, but that's not the only reason for end-stage renal disease. So kidney transplantation is a cure for end-stage renal disease. And people such as ourselves have been working many years in order to have an unlimited supply of transplantable kidneys that would be well-tolerated by the recipients. And I think that's what we are on the cusp of here. We've spent several years not knocking out or knocking in gene after gene and then testing the results to make sure that we had really the ideal level and the ideal combination of genes that have been knocked in or knocked out. And then we've also constructed a pathogen-free facility, which is the xeno equivalent of a good manufacturing product in Alabama. And it is those kidneys coming out of that DPF facility, which would be the first ones going into the clinic, which is why I mentioned that we expect to file an IND in 2021 based on kidneys coming out of that DPF. In terms of when we would pull the trigger on building a commercial scale DPF, the one I just referred to in Alabama is a clinical trial scale DPF. The commercial scale DPF will take a couple of years to build and bring into operation. So I think the right time to pull the trigger on that would be once we have a successful result in the first clinical xenokidney transplant and with the - as mentioned in the beginning of the call, with the IND going in '21, so we will know in '22 whether we have a successful xenokidney product. And so that would be the time to pull the trigger. We have already completely designed the facility, using our design architects at EwingCole company in Philadelphia. They specialize in bio agro type of manufacturing designs. So, we have a well vetted design that's been reviewed by all of the experts in controlling viruses and microbes and whatnot in animal populations. So, I think we're ready to like sign a contract pretty rapidly and proceed with the construction and then that whole facility could be brought into operation sometime during 2024. Thanks for the question, Marty. And operator, we have time for one last question.