So I think people are maybe learning along the way as well and wanting to make sure that patients do get treated for the adequate amount of time, so they don’t have to suffer future flares.
Operator: And our next question comes from Geoff Meacham from Bank of America.
Geoff Meacham: I just have a couple. So ARCALYST another question on persistence rates. Where do you think it could ultimately go? I guess, is the question. And then when you look at new starts, have you guys shortened the time to onboarding, I guess the question would be like, whether you guys have shortened the diagnostic path to try to get patients on drug at an accelerated rate? And then a second one for Sanj. The question is, how important is profitability as a strategic objective? It is very differentiated among SMID cap peers. I wasn’t sure that where this ranks as a priority for you guys in the near term?
Sanj Patel: Maybe I’ll have Ross answer this first part, and I’ll come back to the second one.
Ross Moat: So maybe if I take your question about persistence rates and duration first. This is the first time we’ve announced that we expect the total average duration to be around 18 months. And we know that that may well have a long tail with it due to what we know about the disease. But yes, that’s a longer time period than we have previously anticipated and mentioned. And is there the ability for that to be even longer made? I mean the answer is quite possibly, yes. But we just need to wait for the data to build on that. We know what the initial treatment duration looks like, we know what the restart percentage looks like so far. But knowing that when you get that far out, the number of patients that we are tracking are reasonably limited.
We’ve only been on the market for 21 months or so now. So we’ve tracked that with a very keen eye and look forward to sharing more information on that as time goes on. But for now, we’ve said that the approximate average duration will be 18 months worth of therapy from what we’ve seen through to the end of 2022. The second part of your question around the diagnostic path or time through to diagnosis and then initiation on ARCALYST. Again, it’s difficult to tell knowing that the patients are very widely spread throughout the US. And we’re making very keen efforts on educating physicians, promoting ARCALYST, creating the awareness and we’re seeing that in the success in the prescriber rates, the number of patients on therapy and how the revenues building.
But remembering what we’re doing here is ultimately building a market where we are the first and only approved therapy. And we’re going in and educating physicians and actually changing the treatment paradigm, which I think takes some time to do if you looked at other analogs in a similar type of market space as well. And this is a rare flaring disease. So it takes some time. But we’ve always said we see this as a good steady sequential launch with 5% into the penetration of the target population so far. And that’s why we are exceedingly excited by the opportunity that we have ahead. And Geoff, to the latter part of your question in terms of profitability and how important that is as well. Obviously, it is important to us and not going to miss.
But I think in addition to that and perhaps even more so growth and increasing opportunities to increase the value are even more important. I think we’ve shown that we can be very disciplined as far as financial discipline is concerned and we’ve shown that quarter-on-quarter. So while obviously profitability is important, we are very much focused on increasing the value, that’s why we’ve made some of the changes we’ve made in our portfolio that will allow that licensee out for significant amount of capital, and we’ll continue to be disciplined and strategic moving forward.
