Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals, Ltd. (NASDAQ:KNSA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So we work very closely with the patients to make sure both kind of economic circumstances like that that are within appropriate ways as we can and to try to support patients going onto — going back to commercial therapy if they’re provided bridge therapy and so on throughout, ensures plan changes as well. So we have all those programs in place for eligible patients and we look forward to continuing to support those patients to make sure that they can remain on commercial therapy.

Paul Choi: And then I want to maybe just ask with the growing patient base, what your potential relative exposure in the early part of the year to Medicare donut hole might be? And then one pipeline question is, maybe can you provide us just an enrollment update on 404 where you are and when you potentially expect to complete enrollment here in the dose escalation?

Sanj Patel: So maybe I’ll take the first part of the question and pass on to Eben to talk about the next part. But in terms of the donut hole and patients that face that in the start of the year is, we’ve been there before and supported patients in every way that we can through that, through catastrophic coverage, which happens recently quickly with our type of drug as well. So we just remain very close to the patients and we have a wealth of services to support them through each eventuality. So we’re quite confident in having all the programs in place that we can to support patients throughout the year.

Eben Tessari: I’ll take the other part of the question on the enrollment. What we obviously said is that we’ll have results in the first half of next year, and we’re certainly on track to meet that objective and no updates.

Operator: And our next question comes from David Nierengarten from Wedbush.

David Nierengarten: I had a question on the patients who discontinue. And do they, after taking treatment, of course initial treatment, are they — do you know or are they tending to be patients who are earlier line or less severe? I’m just trying to get a handle for the duration of therapy in patients who might be a little bit earlier in line than the initial group of patients that you have treated over the past year and a half?

Ross Moat: It’s a great question, and really we need to wait for a date to build on that, to try to understand some of the deeper dynamics on the types of patients that may be stopping and restarting. And if there’s anything — any particular trends there to be aware of. But at the moment, it’s relatively early days with fairly small in size that we can’t really draw very clear conclusions to at the moment. So really our focus is on educating around the duration of the disease with physicians to make sure that they know that the 60% of patients do have disease for two years. The median is three years in that particular data set that we use and some patients have it for many years beyond that as well, it’s a very long tail. So we know the importance of treating throughout the disease and to try and help physicians to understand that and play that into their thinking.

What we have seen is that the approximate end of the initial treatment duration is around 12 months on average, which is probably driven by the fact that the majority of prescribers are prescribing for 12 months worth of refills. And also the payers also approving for 12 months before, in general before in spite requiring a simple reauthorization for the patients to continue longer. So of course, that does create a bit of a junction and that 12 months-ish time period where physicians and patients will consider whether to stay on therapy or trying to stop or not, and I’ve certainly seen some patients do try to stop. But out of all those patients that do stop, regardless whether it’s at the 12 months time period or much shorter or even longer than that, we see a restarting total of 45%, which I think really eludes and speaks to what we know about the duration of the disease and how persistent this disease can be.