Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RIGL) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Allison Bratzel: Hi. Good afternoon guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First, just on the REZLIDHIA prescriber base, I think I heard you mention about 29 prescribers to-date for REZLIDHIA. So I guess, did I hear that, right? And what should we be thinking about as a reasonable target for prescriber breadth during the first year of launch? And then, I think you also had mentioned that two-thirds of users has been in the academic setting one-third, community. Is that it In line with your expectations? Or could you just frame how you expect that to evolve over the course of the year?

Raul Rodriguez : Sure. Dave?

Dave Santos: Sure. Great question, Allison. I’ll start with your last question or last piece first in terms of what we expected. And I would say that we are very pleased with just three months and about a week of having REZLIDHIA available. We’re getting what we think is very good traction mutant IDH1 relapsed/refractory space. And as I said in my prepared comments, we estimate that the bottles shipped to patients in clinics, along with the incidents of newly diagnosed mutant IDH1 patients in the relapsed setting, we’re capturing we believe more than 10% of eligible patients. So, we do expect that as awareness continues to grow, we will continue to increase our patient numbers. And of course, then the carryover of refills should really begin to kick in and impact the demand growth.

All that said, I am really proud of the team for the way they’ve constantly looked at our business and any opportunities to accelerate growth and they did exactly that in Q1 and came up with a solution to accelerate our REZLIDHIA growth in key leukemia treatment centers. And I think this is critical to your question about academic centers. We want to do that while maintaining our current growth trajectory with TAVALISSE. So we made the decision to create a specialized institutional team that will focus on key leukemia treaters and primarily academic accounts. And the great thing about this is, we were able to redeploy the open territories we had to support it and it resulted in us having about 49, we’re not about of having 49 representatives who will continue to have both TAVALISSE and REZLIDHIA in their territories and eight new institutional representatives who will focus on REZLIDHIA in key leukemia centers across the country.

And so that’s a total of 57 sales representatives. So with a net add of two positions and gives us a much more focused presence in these important leukemia centers critical for growth. And as you did hear correctly, we’re seeing about two-thirds of our sales coming from the academic setting and we think this focus with this institutional team will clearly create accelerated growth there, which will also have a downstream effect in the community. I hope that answers all your questions, Allison. And if you have follow-up study just let me know.

Allison Bratzel: Yeah, no, that’s helpful. And then, maybe just one more for you guys on ITP and on TAVALISSE as kind of a follow-up on a prior question. I’m just curious kind of what you see as the key factors in sustaining the nice momentum in new patient starts longer-term? Just I am curious if you could talk to your sense that the biggest remaining growth levers you have to pull in ITP just in the out-years. Any color there would be helpful. Thanks.