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

Dave Santos: Yeah, I mean, we are starting a number of new patients on TAVALISSE, Allison, as you’ve heard. And I would just say there’s a plenty of opportunity to continue growing those new patients on TAVALISSE because every day patients fail other therapies or need a new therapy. And I think that’s really the importance of it. As I said before, we’ve got 6,000 some targets for TAVALISSE. And so, we still have a lot of long way to go and making sure all of those clinicians give TAVALISSE a try is especially in a second line or earlier line patient. So that’s going to continue our growth. I mean, that’s why we really – it’s another reason that this institutional really made a lot of sense to us. We don’t want to disrupt that getting that awareness message out to our targets for TAVALISSE.

Raul Rodriguez : One of the things that we have seen post pandemic is just more opening of various centers and being receptive I think patients for a couple of years there were less constant their houses and now are much more open to considering, and there is a better therapy out there that I’d like to avail myself there. And we want to make sure that TAVALISSE is a part of that consideration. Because if doctors are aware of our data, they tend to write substantially more and obviously if they’re not aware of our data, they don’t write very much at all. So, our goal is simple to tell a concise coherent story to those doctors. So they consider our product. I mean, generally we do pretty well when we do that. So I think that’s what we’re looking forward to continuing to raise awareness of this product and our data supporting it.

Allison Bratzel: Got it. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Kristen Kluska with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please proceed with your question.

Unidentified Analyst: Hi, everyone. This is Rick on for Kristen. Thank you for taking our questions. Maybe first, can you talk a little bit about the potential opportunity for olutasidenib in the maintenance setting, as you mentioned on the pipeline expansion slide knowing that physicians often try to get AML patients to bone marrow transplant. Do you have a sense of what percentage of IDH1 positive patients undergo transplant followed by some form of maintenance therapy?

Raul Rodriguez : Dave do you want to take a stab of and then I’ll add some commentary.

Dave Santos : Yeah. Great question, Rick. And when we’re speaking about maintenance therapy here, we’re talking about maintaining a response in a patient who would have gone through let’s say venetoclax aside of a regimen, or some other regimen. We’re not particularly talking about patients who have been to transplant. Because obviously that, when you do intensive therapy with the aim of getting patients to transplant, we think, it’s about 40% of the market, but of that, probably another 30% end up – 30% percent of that end up getting a treatment like Vanessa, just because it’s an easier kind of outpatient treatment. So the actual number of patients getting intensive therapy is I think continuing to actually go down and it’s probably now less than 30% of the market and then when you consider the challenges of getting a match being, getting a complete response in induction therapy, all of those things and it ends up being a relatively small number of patients going to transplant.

So, to us, that’s not where the market is, in terms of maintaining response after transplant. And we’ve looked at that. We think there’s a greater opportunity in those patients who are receiving outpatient therapies like Vanessa who might need to be maintained in their response. I hope that makes sense.