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spk08: Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Acadia Pharmaceuticals' fourth quarter and full year 2023 Financial Results Conference call. My name is Abigail, and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a -and-answer session towards the end of today's call. To ask a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. I would now like to turn the presentation over to Al Khaldani, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications at Acadia. Please proceed.
spk31: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Acadia's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings results. Joining me on the call today from Acadia are Steve Davis, our Chief Executive Officer, who will provide some opening remarks, followed by Brendan Tien, our Chief Operating Officer and Head of Commercial, who will discuss our strong commercial franchises, Debut and New Plazaid. Doug Williamson, our Head of Research and Development, will provide an update on our pipeline programs, and Mark Schneier, our Chief Financial Officer, will review the financial highlights. Steve will then provide some closing thoughts before we open up the call to your questions. In addition, Parag Maswani, Senior Vice President for Finitide, Rare Disease Franchise, will be available for the Q&A session. We are using supplemental slides, which are available on our website's events and presentations section. Before proceeding, I would like to remind you that during our call today, we will be making several forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements, including goals, expectations, plans, prospects, growth potential, timing of events, or future results, are based on current information, assumptions, and expectations that are inherently subject to change and involve several risks and uncertainties that may cause results to differ materially. These factors and other risks associated with our business can be found in our filings made with the SEC. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are made only as of today's date. I'll now turn the call over to Steve for opening remarks. Thank you, Al. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Please turn to slide five. We transformed our business in 2023. Today we are a cash-flow positive company with two -in-class commercial assets. We have three late-stage assets and a robust early-stage pipeline, and we continue to invest in future growth through business development. Let's begin with our commercial franchises, which delivered record revenues of $231 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 and $726.4 million for the full year. Debut, the first and only drug approved to treat Rett syndrome, generated fourth-quarter sales of $87.1 million in its second full quarter of sales since it was launched in April of last year. We're proud of our early success with the launch and excited about the future of Debut. New Plazit continues to deliver and be strongly cash-flow positive. Sales in the fourth quarter were $143.9 million and reflect our ability to gain market share and grow the revenue base while continuing to manage the expense base. In addition to our two successful commercial franchises, we have a deep and growing pipeline, which is making significant advances, including programs in the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, product willy syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease psychosis. Acadia has never been in a stronger financial position. We delivered 40% revenue growth in 2023 on the strength of our successful Debut launch. We are now in a position to generate substantial, sustainable cash flow to fund further growth in our business. We ended the year with $438.9 million in cash, even after deploying a little over $100 million for business development, and expect our cash balance to grow to between $585 and $655 million by the end of 2024. Acadia is relatively unique amongst our biotech peers, combining successful commercial franchises, exciting late and early stage assets, and the financial strength to capitalize on these opportunities. This includes further expanding our portfolio and building on our success with Debut and Placid in central nervous system and rare diseases. Let's next turn to a snapshot of our current products and pipeline on slide 6. Deutplacid is our treatment for Parkinson's disease psychosis, which today remains the only drug approved for the treatment of this condition. In 2023, we added significant growth potential to our business with the introduction of Debut for the treatment of Rett syndrome. Here, too, Debut is the first and only drug approved for the treatment of Rett. Behind these two successful commercial franchises, we have numerous late and early stage pipeline assets, including our negative symptoms of schizophrenia program with Femivanserin. There are no FDA approved treatments for this disorder, so the unmet need is high. And we look forward to having top-line results of our Advanced II study by the end of this quarter. As a side note, obviously, we do not have results as of today. ACP101 and Prader-Willi syndrome, where we are currently enrolling subjects, Prader-Willi is a rare and highly debilitating genetic disease where patients have an unrelenting drive to eat called hyperphagia. The severity of this disorder translates into an average lifespan of 30 years. Here, too, there are no FDA approved treatments. We're also currently enrolling our seamless Phase II, Phase III program with ACP204 in Alzheimer's disease psychosis patients, another disorder where there are no approved treatments. ACP204 is our second generation 5-H T2A blocker where we are leveraging our learnings from Femivanserin. And beyond that, we have a rich pipeline of early stage disclosed and undisclosed programs that position us for future growth. I'll now turn the call over to Brendan to discuss our commercial performance on slide 7.
spk35: Thank you, Steve. I'm pleased to provide additional commentary on our two commercial franchises, Debut and New Pleasant, and the terrific performance both delivered in the quarter. Please turn to slide 8 beginning with Debut. We're now roughly 10 months into launch and I'd like to begin by summarizing our accomplishments to date. The launch of Debut has been one of the most successful recent launches in rare disease. We've had the privilege of bringing this therapy to RET patients and their caregivers who previously had no approved therapeutic options to help them deal with the debilitating condition. With an estimated 5,000 diagnosed RET patients in the United States and a prevalent population of 6,000 to 9,000, there is a substantial opportunity in front of us to bring the benefits of this therapy to many more patients. We anticipate this will drive meaningful revenue growth well beyond this year. As the first drug approved for the treatment of RET syndrome, we've experienced strong interest and demand from RET families. As we've previously reported, this strong interest produced a surge of new patient starts in the first four months of the launch, followed by a demand curve that is much closer to our prelaunch expectations and the linear shape curve we typically see in rare disease drugs. From a prescriber perspective, this initial surge was concentrated in RET centers of excellence or COEs and we have since significantly expanded the breadth and depth of prescribers. This surge has produced multiple benefits. It's enabled us to reach a critical mass of experience in the medical and caregiver communities dramatically faster than we otherwise would have. This has also enabled us to rapidly gain real world insights that we've been able to use to further educate the medical and caregiver communities. Ten months into the launch, COEs continue to represent a rich source of new patient starts. In fact, today, approximately 40% of our new patient prescriptions come from COEs and we are continuing to add depth in this sector. Non-COE high volume institutions account for approximately 30% of our new patient prescriptions. This sector represents an additional important growth opportunity as we continue to increase our breadth and depth in these institutions. I'd like to focus now on seasonal dynamics we observed in the latter part of the fourth quarter and early part of the first quarter. In December, in particular, we experienced higher than average refill rates as families prepared for the holidays and health plan changes or reauthorizations in the new year. In January, we saw a decline in new prescriptions written driven by seasonal and significant decline in Rett Clinic visits following the holiday period where approximately 50% of COEs had either no clinic days or reduced clinic days available. We have since seen a return of Rett Clinic days in February tracking back to historical levels and new patient prescription rates returning to the trends we observed prior to January. In January, we also saw a reduction in refills and conversion rates due to typical beginning of the year reauthorization and reenrollment processes. This resulted in delays in patients receiving their first paid shipments in the new year. We're working through those authorizations and do not see any long-term issues associated with processing these. Let's turn to persistency on slide nine. What you see on this slide is updated persistency information. There are two key points I'd like to highlight. First, we continue to track at least 10 percentage points above our clinical trial experience, specifically the Lilac One Open Label Extension where patients rolled over to triphenotide from placebo and this differential has continued to be very consistent for several months now. Second, when we look at these monthly milestones, they're improving. For example, our month four persistency number was 75% when we reported on our earnings call in November and now at month four, you see that with many more patients, we're at 80% persistency. And our month six persistency, which we reported at JP Morgan last month, was 68% and now has risen to 70%. And we continue to see this data improve at all time points thus far. We are seeing improvements in persistency as patients and HCPs gain more experience with the safety and tolerability profile at debut. For clarity, the persistency rates we're including here are calculated based on the confirmed discontinuations plus those that are 60 days beyond their scheduled refill date counted as a discontinuation. Please turn to slide 10. As I mentioned earlier, we continue to generate and share data supporting the long-term benefits observed in patients treated with debut. Here we describe two important posters that we presented recently at the American Epilepsy Society or AES meeting in December that underscore the benefits of debut. The first poster details the long-term outcomes in patients who completed our lavender study and then continued into our open label Lilac 1 and then Lilac 2 studies. Data presented in the poster demonstrated that patients treated with profanityde and Lilac 2 continued to experience improvement in symptoms for up to 32 months. In addition, safety and tolerability were consistent with prior studies. Let's now turn to slide 11 for the second poster presented at AES. This poster presented the results of the caregiver exit interviews for RET patients treated with profanityde in the lavender and Lilac studies. You can see in the table on the left some of those specific real-world improvements caregivers cited in their interviews. Consistent with the unmet need often highlighted by caregivers, the top three areas of improvement noted by these respondents and their children were improvement in engagement, improvement in hand use, and improvement in eye gaze. We're pleased to have the feedback regarding the impact of profanityde on the very symptoms that matter most to RET families and we're using this information to educate HCPs and RET families about the potential benefits of debut. Let's turn to slide 12. These quotes from caregivers reinforce some of the observations described above, which are consistent with the types of things we've been hearing for many months such as caregivers noting higher levels of engagement, improvement in speech with a broadening vocabulary and improved engagement in conversations, more purposeful use of hands and decreased hand bringing and stereotypies. We also regularly hear feedback about a loved one's increased cognitive ability or increased alertness with patients now being able to better follow conversations. These testimonials all speak to the promise of treatment with debut and underscore exactly why we at Acadia do what we do to support and benefit those with greatest needs. Let's next turn to our plans to make debut available to patients outside the United States on slide 13. We see a clear opportunity to launch debut outside the United States and leverage the insights and learnings from the very successful U.S. launch to help many more patients suffering from RET syndrome. Starting in Europe, it's estimated there are 9,000 to 14,000 RET patients between Europe and the U.K. We've engaged with EMA this quarter and we anticipate filing a marketing authorization application with the European Medicines Agency in the first half of next year. In Canada, it's estimated there are 600 to 900 RET patients. We expect to file our new drug submission later this quarter with the potential approval around year end 2024. And in Japan, there are an estimated 1 to 2,000 RET patients and this year we're engaging the Japanese regulatory agency to kick off our efforts to pursue approval. Let's turn to slide 14 for a discussion of our new Placid franchise. Product sales of new Placid in 2023 were $549.2 million, an increase of 6% over 2022 as we continue to grow new patient starts and increase market share. Our primary financial objective for new Placid is to optimize cash flow in that franchise and we do that in two ways. First, we're continuing to grow bottle shipments and market share. The most effective lever to drive growth recently has been the broad educational campaign we launched last year to bring attention to our real world evidence studies. These efforts have allowed us to grow new patient starts faster than the market. In fact, in 2023, new patient starts were up 12% year over year. The second way we optimize new Placid franchise cash flow is by carefully managing expenses and we'll continue to do that throughout 2024. These combined efforts have enabled us to generate over $300 million on a stand alone, fully burdened basis in annual cash flow. We look forward to continuing to grow this franchise. I'll now turn it over to Doug Williamson, our head of research and development, to provide an update on our pipeline programs starting on slide 15.
spk39: Thank you, Brendan. In addition to our commercial products, we have a strong pipeline of clinical programs providing us with several opportunities to further expand our growth. Let's start with Pimavansren as a potential treatment for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia on slide 16. Predominant negative symptoms remain one of the largest unmet needs in schizophrenia. And as of today, there are still no approved treatments for these symptoms. It's important to understand the distinction between treating the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Positive or psychotic symptoms are hallucinations, delusions, and thought disorders that typically resolve with antipsychotic treatment. Negative symptoms are social withdrawal, restricted speech, lack of emotion, loss of motivation, and blunted affect. Our Pimavansren program is designed to treat the approximately 700,000 patients in the U.S. whose positive psychotic symptoms are adequately controlled with antipsychotic treatment, but who still suffer from persistent and uncontrolled negative symptoms, inhibiting their ability to lead a normal, productive life. Please turn to the next slide to discuss our Pimavansren clinical program for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Let's discuss the details of our program. The Advanced 2 study is designed to treat patients whose positive symptoms are adequately controlled, but still suffer from persistent, uncontrolled negative symptoms. Negative symptoms of schizophrenia have proven to be an exceedingly difficult drug development challenge with multiple industry failures over several decades. Therefore, with our previous positive and advanced 1 study of Pimavansren, we achieved something very rare in this population. Advanced 2, our second six-month study, is designed to evaluate the impact on persistent negative symptoms in patients whose acute psychosis has been controlled with antipsychotic treatment. As Steve said, we don't know the results yet, but remain on track to share them by the end of the quarter. Please turn to slide 18 to discuss our late-stage ACP 101 program for the treatment of hyperphagia in Prader-Willi syndrome. Let me start with just a brief reminder of the disease. Prader-Willi syndrome is a rare genetic neurobehavioral syndrome that affects approximately 8,000 to 10,000 patients in the United States and represents a significant unmet need. There are currently no therapies approved to treat the hyperphagia in patients with PWS. Hyperphagia is the defining characteristic of PWS and commonly begins between the ages of 3 and 8. It's characterized by unrelenting hunger that often leads to obesity and behavioral challenges such as anxiety and aggression and is extremely distressing for patients, parents, and caregivers. To illustrate just how devastating this disorder is, the average life expectancy is approximately 30 years, largely due to obesity and cardiovascular-related disease. Please turn to slide 19 where I'll speak to our clinical program in Prader-Willi syndrome. Late last year, we initiated a phase 3 study of ACP 101 for the treatment of hyperphagia in PWS. Before getting into the details of the study, I'd like to note that the PWS community has shown an incredibly high level of enthusiasm for this opportunity and interest in our study. On this slide, we've laid out the design of the COMPASS phase 3 global multi-center randomized double-blind 12-week placebo control study evaluating the efficacy and safety of ACP 101 in approximately 170 Prader-Willi patients. The primary efficacy endpoint is improvement of hyperphagia as measured by the Hyperphagia Questionnaire for Clinical Trials, or HQCT, scale. Those patients who complete the study will be eligible to enroll in an open-label long-term extension study. If data from this phase 3 study is positive, we plan to submit a new drug application for the treatment of hyperphagia in PWS to the FDA. We look forward to working with the Prader-Willi community and clinical experts as we continue to advance development of this program. Please turn to slide 20. We're advancing ACP 204, our next-generation 5-HT2A compound, which we're developing as a potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease psychosis. As we previously described, ACP 204, like Pimavansrin, works primarily as an inverse agonist of the 5-HT2A receptor. With ACP 204, we're seeking to build on our extensive learnings from Pimavansrin and believe it has an exciting future. Our work completed to date includes a comprehensive phase 1 program and supports our target product profile for ACP 204, including no sign of QT prolongation at planned doses in our studies, a wide dose range supporting the potential for a dose approximately equivalent to two times that of 34 milligrams of Pimavansrin, and a steady state concentration achieved in less than half the time of Pimavansrin. As you can see on the slide, ACP 204's profile could represent a significant improvement over an already strong product profile for Pimavansrin. Please turn to slide 21. Our seamless phase 2, phase 3 program for ACP 204 is now underway. This plan includes a phase 2 study with over 300 patients, which we've aligned on with the FDA, and which is designed to roll seamlessly into two phase 3 studies. The phase 2 study has been designed and sized in such a way that if successful, it could be considered a pivotal registration study. Once the full study allocation of patients for phase 2 is complete, we will analyze and report phase 2 results, by which time the two phase 3 studies will already be underway. This plan will ultimately provide three potential pivotal studies for a submission. We look forward to continuing to advance this program and providing future updates. And now I'll turn it over to Mark for a financial update beginning on slide 22.
spk32: Thank you, Doug. Let's start by reviewing our fourth quarter and full year performance on slide 23. In the fourth quarter, we recorded $231 million in total revenue, up 69% from the fourth quarter of last year. For the full year 2023, we recorded $726.4 million of total revenue, up 40% from the prior year. Fourth quarter debut net product sales were $87.1 million. Full year debut sales were $177.2 million in the first 8.5 months of commercialization. Fourth quarter new Plaza net product sales were $143.9 million, up 5% versus the prior year. And our gross to net adjustment was .5% in the quarter for New Plasit. For the year, New Plasit net product sales were $549.2 million, up 6% compared to $517.2 million in the prior year. Our New Plasit franchise achieved 3% demand bottle growth year over year driven by increases in new patient starts in both market segments. Sell-in growth increased by 2% as we experienced a modest reduction in in-channel inventory over the course of the year. The New Plasit gross to net adjustment for the full year was .3% as compared to .8% last year. This increase was primarily due to increased accruals related to the Inflation Reduction Act. For 2023, our New Plasit franchise generated over $300 million of cash flow on a fully allocated cost basis. R&D expenses decreased to $351.6 million in 2023 from $361.6 million in 2022. The decrease was mainly due to the Trifinitide Commercial Supply Build in 2022 that was accounted for as R&D expense as those expenditures took place prior to the FDA approval of debut. We had a similar level of clinical spend and business development investments year over year. SG&A expenses increased to $406.6 million in 2023 from $369.1 million in 2022. The increase was primarily driven by debut commercialization expenses, partially offset by reductions in New Plasit spent. Our cash balance increased year over year as we ended the year with $438.9 million of cash compared to $416.8 million at the end of 2022. Let's turn to slide 24 for discussion of our 2024 guidance. Beginning with debut, we expect net sales for debut in 2024 to be in the range of $370 to $420 million. In our 2024 full-year guidance, we project new patient prescriptions from the beginning of February forward that are consistent with the linear growth trend we observed in the fourth quarter. Persistency rates that continue to be 10 percentage points above our clinical trial experience, compliance to dose continuing in the range of 75 to 80%. I'd also like to offer some financial perspective on the seasonal dynamics impacting the first quarter of 2024. Let's start with December. As Brendan discussed, Q4 net sales were positively impacted by a seasonal increase in refill rates as families prepared for the holidays, health flare changes, and copay resets. In January, we saw a reduction in new patient prescriptions due to fewer office visits and red clinic days, together with reductions in conversion and refill rates as patients went through the payer re-enrollment process. And in February, we have seen strong recovery across these metrics. Factoring in the seasonal dynamics and expected higher growth to net in the first quarter, we anticipate first quarter net sales to be in the range of $76 to $82 million. This is reflected in our annual guidance range of $370 to $420 million. Moving to New Placid, we are providing net sales guidance between $560 and $590 million for 2024. The midpoint of the range assumes approximately .5% volume growth and 3% net price growth. We are protecting growth to net for New Placid to be between 25 and 29% for the full year and between 33 and 35% for Q1. We expect growth to net to be of similar levels for the remaining quarters of the year, as we don't anticipate an increase in growth to net for the fourth quarter of 2024 because of the Medicare Part D redesign that is expected to take place in 2025. We expect R&D expense to be between $305 and $325 million, including approximately $20 million in stock-based compensation. We will be increasing our clinical spend year over year as we progress ACP204, ACP201, and our early stage programs and reduce our spend on triphenotide. As a reminder, our R&D range does not guide for incremental spend for business development transactions. We expect SG&A expense to be between $455 and $480 million for the full year, including approximately $50 million in stock-based compensation. The growth in SG&A year over year is primarily due to increased investment in our U.S. debut franchise, as well as the annualization of expenses from being on the market for a full year in 2024, and foundational investments preparing for triphenotide -U.S. launches. Our SG&A guidance does not include pre-launch investment for negative symptoms of schizophrenia, which is contingent on positive results of advance two. Finally, we expect our 2024 year-end cash balance to be approximately $585 to $655 million based on our expected range of operational cash flows, excluding any expenditures for future business development transactions. With that, I'll turn it over to Steve for closing remarks.
spk31: Thanks much, Mark. Please turn to slide 25. I'll close by briefly recapping 2023 and highlighting our opportunities in 2024 and beyond. 2023 was a transformational year for us. We launched our second commercial drug debut, we achieved 40% revenue growth from two commercial franchises, Debut and New Closet, and we completed enrollment in our Advanced Two-Study in Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia. We also acquired worldwide rise to triphenotide, we initiated our Phase III program of ACP101 and Porter-Willi Syndrome, and we initiated our seamless Phase II, Phase III study of ACP204 and Alzheimer's disease psychosis. Looking to this year and beyond, we continue to capitalize on the successful launch of Debut and project strong revenue streams from Debut and New Closet. We will have the top-line results from our Advanced Two-Study by the end of this quarter. We're pursuing expansion of Debut in Europe, Canada, and Japan. We're now well on our way to determining the potential of ACP101 and Porter-Willi Syndrome, with the potential new therapy there. Likewise, with ACP204 for Alzheimer's disease psychosis, and we're now at a point where we have sustainable and growing cash flow from operations to fund future growth. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for our Q&A. Operator?
spk08: Thank you. At this time, we'll conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If your question has been answered or you wish to withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. We ask that you limit yourself to one question. One moment
spk10: for our first question. Our first question comes from Tess Romero with JP Morgan. Your line is
spk08: open.
spk23: Good afternoon, guys. Thanks so much for taking our question. So, first one from me is, what drove your decision to provide full-year Debut guidance at this time, rather than just a quarterly guide, which I think was your base case at the time of our conference in January? And second question is, just around your guide, are you able to clarify the assumption around where you are estimating real-world persistency is at 12 months? And are you able to give us an update on the number of patients that are currently on Debut? Thanks so much.
spk32: Sure. Mark, do you want to take that? Yeah, I think as we approach every conversation with Wall Street, we just want to give the most relevant information in context of the business as a whole. As we went through our year-end process and saw the seasonality that we experienced at the beginning of the year, we thought it was important to provide context not only on that, kind of one-forward quarter guidance, but provide perspective on where we see Debut for the entire year and our confidence in growing the brand over the course of the year and beyond. So that led to our discussion on the two periods of guidance range. On the persistency level, when we continue within our guidance to expect kind of 10 percentage points above the clinical trial experience from the levels that Brendan suggested. And I think for long-term, I think if you think more like 50% plus over a 12-month and beyond period, that's a good early sign. Obviously, I'll point out we don't have patients out that far in the commercial setting, so that's some data that we'll evaluate. But I think that's a good reasonable bulk park assumption to take at this time.
spk31: And actually, I'm going to ask Mark to come back to the number of patients in therapy in a second. But since he paused there, let me just add a little bit more color to that. So of all the patients who initiated therapy on triphenidate or debut in clinical trials in lavender together with those that rolled over to drug in lilac, 40% of them remain on therapy today, and that's two plus years that they've been on therapy. And as Mark mentioned, and as we've described before, we continue to track 10 plus percentage points above our clinical trial experience. So that's the gist of Mark's comment that we expect longer term. And again, when we look at our clinical trial experience, we're looking at two plus years on therapy, 40% of them on. We're tracking 10% above that, so that's the basis of our projection that we expect half or more patients to stay on therapy over the long term. I would also note that of all those patients, that 40% of patients that were on triphenidate or debut in clinical trials that have now rolled over, we've had zero dropouts from those patients since launch. So it's created a very persistent and consistent enduring population. Mark, do you want to address the number of patients on therapy? I think
spk32: as you recall, we had just over 800 patients at the end of the third quarter. When we closed 2023, we had close to 900 patients on therapy. And just to give a little further context, as we described, we had a seasonal decline in January, and as a consequence, fewer patients initiated therapy. And then in February, we saw a significant rebound in new patient starts, and together with improvements in conversion and refill rates. And today, we have taken that all together, we have approximately 860 patients on therapy.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Ash Burma with EBS. Your line is open.
spk05: Thanks for taking your questions. Congrats on all the progress. So on debut, can you quantify what was the seasonality benefit in December? And I'm just trying to wrap my head around, so where are you run grading at based off 4Q and is this a 370 to 420 million guide? It seems pretty conservative, given that we are so early in the launch. It would be helpful to understand, like in terms of new patient growth, what are your expectations for the remainder of the year?
spk31: Yeah, thanks a lot. I'm going to ask Mark to answer the first question, and Brendan
spk32: the second. So for the seasonality, and maybe one-time benefits in revenue that we experienced in the fourth quarter, it's a total of about 5 million positive to revenue in the fourth quarter, and we'd quantify that as 3 million due to seasonality and 2 million due to a favorable growth to net in the quarter.
spk35: Thanks. I'll go from there. So in our prepared remarks, we talked about the seasonality in terms of new patient starts. Following a surge that characterized the first four months of the launch of debut, very interested families that queued up to get started, we then hit a growth trajectory or a launch trajectory that was very much like what we expected, linear growth, third quarter and fourth quarter through December. The one place where there was a slowdown in new patient starts was January. Significant slowdown driven by lack of COE, red patient days and red patient visits, we saw a snapback or however you want to describe it in February to a similar trajectory for new patient starts moving forward. So thinking about 2024 in the midpoint of our guidance, we would anticipate the linear curve replicating what we saw in the third and fourth quarter of last year. For new patient starts.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from David Huang with Citigroup. Your line is open.
spk27: Hi, congrats on the progress in picking my question. I'm just trying to get a better handle on the higher end of your guidance range for debut in 2024. What type of elements would you need to see to drive towards the higher end of guidance? Thanks a lot.
spk31: Sure, Mark, you want to take that?
spk32: Yeah, I think the three main assumptions driving our forecast are new patient starts, persistency rates and overall compliance. And obviously we run many scenarios to get to the informed guidance range that we've shared to you. And it's not necessarily one in particular assumption that you would change that would get you from the middle to the high or to the low. So I think as you know, the midpoint of the range is more towards what Brendan just mentioned on new patient starts, having our persistency continue to be 10 percentage points above our clinical trial experience and compliance to those to be within the range of 75 to 80 percent. And as you branch out from the middle, you just collect any or any or all those assumptions up will get you towards the high end of the range.
spk10: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Charles Duncan with Cantor. Your line
spk08: is open.
spk06: Hey, good afternoon, Stephen team. Congrats on a good year progress and all the information on debut. That's very helpful. I wanted to ask a question on the pipeline specific to advance to a negative symptoms of schizophrenia. I know that you don't have the data in house yet, but I guess I'm wondering, are you tracking concurrent medications? And if you could provide us a little bit of color on clinically meaningful results versus statistically meaningful results. And then finally, do you anticipate needing a 12 month exposure beyond the six month study? Or do you think that the current safety, you know, profile of new plans that will handle it? Thanks.
spk30: Thanks for
spk06: the question.
spk30: Doug, three parts to that question, I think.
spk39: Yeah, and I've already forgotten the first two. But the in terms of safety, we have an extensive safety database of answering in schizophrenia as well as other conditions. So we have comfortably more patient exposures than we would need to get an approval. First question was again.
spk31: Charles, good Charles. The first two questions.
spk06: Yeah, concurrent medications. Are you tracking that? Do you have good coverage and then clinically meaningful versus statistically significant results? What are you looking
spk39: for? Yeah, we're tracking. Obviously, we're carefully tracking concurrent medications. And, you know, any antipsychotic is allowed and, you know, we haven't analyzed the data yet, obviously, but we expect the results to be similar to advance one where it was the three most commonly used antipsychotics, Alanzapine, Risperidone, and Aripiprazole that were the main concurrent medications. Clinically and statistically significant. Well, obviously, statistically significant will be defined by the primary. For clinically significant, you know, nothing's been approved yet, so there's no kind of benchmark. But in the, you know, in psychiatric studies in general, an effect size of sort of 20 to 0.2 to 0.3 is generally regarded as clinically significant. In advance one at the 34 milligram dose, we saw an effect size of 0.34. So, you know, something around the 0.2 to 0.3 level of effect size we would regard as and the field would regard as highly clinically significant.
spk08: One moment. Our next question. Our next question comes from me to Beryl with TD Cowan. Your line is open.
spk16: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I want to ask about Europe. You mentioned that you're going to be filing next year. I wanted to ask in the first half of 2025, I wanted to ask what the gating items were for the MAA filing. Do you have to generate any more clinical data? Do you have to generate any sort of data to help with health technology assessments over there? And any potential direction you can give us on what sort of European price that you may, that you think that you can get?
spk31: Yeah, thanks so much for the question, Richard. We don't need to do any, we don't believe we'll need to do any more clinical work. We, the principal gating item is no PIP was done before we acquired ROTS to the program. So, we've got to get alignment on that with the European agencies. And there's some additional work running in parallel. Sometimes, oftentimes, the excipient requirements on formulations differ between the US and the EU. And there's a little bit of work we're doing there just to button that up. We don't anticipate that being a rate limiting issue, but it's just running in parallel with the other work we're doing. And then I'll ask Brynjan to address the pricing question. Yeah,
spk35: two points for you, too. Thanks for the question. One is there will obviously be work already ongoing with our global value dossier and reinforcing the value proposition for triphenatide in Rett syndrome. And then we're still a ways off in terms of determining price for debut in Europe. I'll simply suggest that obviously we would be pricing it for the value it imparts on patients, caregivers, and the health system. And I know you all would look at other rare disease launches first in the United States and then in the EU, where I think you see an opportunity, there tends to be less of a different scene with rare disease products than are seen in broader market assets.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Jeff Hung with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
spk29: Thanks for taking my question. For negative symptoms of schizophrenia, can you just talk about your commercial launch strategy and the timing of key initiatives and about how many additional reps might be needed?
spk30: Yeah, sure, Jeff. Brynjan, you want to take that?
spk35: Sure. Thanks for the question. Obviously, we're excited and looking forward to turning the card over and hopefully having an opportunity to be the first therapy ever approved to support that patient population. We have a footprint in CNS and we do call on a subset of physicians that would help treat the disease. I think you would expect us to expand from that footprint incrementally and address an opportunity that is more in the psychiatry space than in the neurology space, but we will leverage existing field footprint resources to support that. We also have lots of people that have worked in the broader CNS space that work at Acadia, that have worked on similar assets, and we have lots of internal capabilities that we'll leverage as well. I would look at us continuing to ramp up, post a positive result towards the latter half of this year and into 2025.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Gregory Renza with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
spk22: Hey, good afternoon, Steve and team. Congrats on the progress in the quarter. Thanks for taking my question. Steve, maybe a question for Brendan as well, just revisiting the seasonal patterns. Just curious for Brendan and the team, what learning are you taking away from this to perhaps address maybe this situation or the seasonality that you look forward with 2024 to 2025, especially when you could be encountering certainly greater patient numbers on debut. Just curious how surprising some of those dynamics from December, January, and February were just in the context of how it comps to the usual patterns with re-ops and visits versus that which could be unique to APU. Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks, Greg.
spk31: Let me answer that at a high level and I'll turn it over to Brendan. So the seasonality that we saw is something that's just very common in our industry. We see that a lot. It happens to a greater or lesser extent with most drugs. Some of it has more of an impact than others. In a rare disease space, things do bounce around more than others and we saw a more pronounced effect of the seasonality than we anticipated. We saw a much more significant impact, particularly in January, than we would have anticipated. But the dynamics are very similar across the industry and one of the learnings we have from this is that a lot of the RET centers, and this applies to a certain extent also even outside of the COEs, but a lot of the COEs dramatically reduce the RET clinic days and that just had a significant impact on our prescriptions in that time frame. Brendan, any additional color you'd like to add?
spk35: Yeah, I agree and Greg, thanks for the question. I think one of the key learnings is just the level of preparation that these families have around the holiday season. Whether you are seeking treatment for the first time, I think we saw a nice trajectory for new patients starts in December. And obviously not a similar trajectory in January, which I think makes sense. There are fewer RET clinic days and there's less interest in RET clinic visits at the time. But I think more notably is the continuing patient that wants to make sure they have appropriate supply throughout the holiday season, which probably bolsters refill rates in December and may have some impact on January. But I don't think it changes the way we would approach our promotional efforts to this audience and the return in February to what we're seeing for both patient visits and new patient prescriptions have us on the trajectory we would have expected.
spk08: Our next question comes from Amy Fadia with Needham. Your line is open.
spk11: Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my question. I've got to firstly just with regards to debut, a few more months under the belt. Can you give us a sense of where you see the peak market share evolving? And if you can give us some color on penetration in center of excellence versus non and then penetration within different age groups under and over 20. And with regards to the trials that you've initiated in Alzheimer's disease psychosis and Pryver Lee syndrome, when can we anticipate to see any data? Could we see some data next year? Thank you.
spk31: Thanks, Amy. Let me take the last question and then I'll ask Brendan and Mark to respond to the first two. With respect to data on ADP and PWS, we'd like to get a little bit deeper into these studies before we narrow the aperture on when we expect to complete enrollment and when we'd have results. So it's a little bit premature for us to comment on that yet. What I will say in ADP is these studies usually take a couple of years and in Pryver Willie it's probably a fairly similar timeframe. So obviously a much smaller study, but in a rare disease population you just have a smaller patient pool that you're pulling from. So Brendan, do you want to take the first, I'm sorry, Mark, I meant to say Mark. Mark, do you want to take the first question on
spk32: peak? Yeah, I think just as a matter of kind of our corporate policy, we don't talk about peak market share and peak sales, but qualitatively what I would say is we have a significant potential in both from where we stand today as far as penetration. There are a significant number of patients that we believe can benefit from debut across all market segments. And then as far as peak sales is concerned, we obviously see meaningful improvement in sales this year as per our guidance and we expect that sales can increase significantly above those levels in
spk35: the years to come. And maybe I'll address the sort of the market characteristics you were asking about as well. And yes, I think we have ample opportunity to continue to grow our penetration. The question was around COEs and non-COEs. In COEs, we're getting about 40% of our prescriptions today from them, 30% from high volume institutions and COE-like, and then 30% in the community. Our penetration, while we don't speak to absolutes, is the highest in COEs, but we still have ample opportunity to grow new patient share in COEs, then followed by the high volume institutions and then the community thereafter. I think you also asked about age groups. What I can say is quarter over quarter after the kind of the initial surge, what we see is a very consistent distribution of patients getting started on debut that is reflective of the rec community. I think that can give you a good sense of where we're sourcing business.
spk31: Ami, your line was breaking up a little bit. Did you also have a component of your question related to negative symptoms, or did I mishear that?
spk13: No, I think you covered all my questions. Thank you so
spk15: much. Thank you.
spk08: One moment, our next question. Our next question comes from Oyeer with Manzula. Your line is open.
spk44: Hey guys, thanks for taking our question. Just first a clarification question. Did you say that you engage with the EMA, and if you did, did they specifically say that you didn't have to do another study? And our second question is based on what Manova put out, is there any learnings from their CRLs that you can apply to your own SNDA for negative symptoms? Thank you.
spk31: Yeah, I have two questions. One on debut or to finish that in Europe and the other on negative symptoms.
spk39: Yeah, so on Cropinotide, we've had preliminary communications with EMA, but obviously they don't confirm that we don't need to do an extra study until we've formally sought scientific advice. But we don't anticipate having to do any further clinical work. On negative symptoms, we don't normally comment on other companies' submissions, but I think since in the press release they spelt out the reasons for the CRL, it's worth noting that the concerns were that there was only one study and they need two. So obviously we were doing a second study, that they didn't have a sufficient size safety database. We have an extensive database with Pimavansrin that they'd failed to show the clinical significance. We're engaged with the agency, answering their questions about the clinical significance of the NSA 16 data that we're providing. And I always forget the fourth thing. But whatever it was is not an issue for us either. So I think that
spk18: they
spk31: were also looking at this drug as monotherapy and of course we're looking at it as adjunctive therapy. That's right.
spk39: Yeah, the FDA wanted to see concomitant data for their air asset because they know that's how it's going to be used in the real world. And obviously ours is an adjunctive treatment anyway, so that's not an issue.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Joel Beattie with Baird. Your line is open.
spk28: Thanks. What's the exclusivity period look like for nucleoside now that the favorable legal rulings have come in December? And then also, is that a long enough period for launch in negative symptoms of schizophrenia to add much?
spk31: Yeah, thanks much for the question. Let me kind of sum up where we stand. As you recall, we have two patents or two families of patents that protect Pimavansrin. One is our composition of matter patent. We won at the trial court level on that in the fall. We submitted two arguments. We only needed one to win on one. We won on both arguments. That is being appealed as we fully expected it would be. The schedule I anticipate there is we'll probably go through a series of briefings in the second quarter of this year. And then we expect oral arguments to be probably in the third quarter of this year. And the decision would likely come probably in the first half of next year. That's where we stand on that front. Again, I'll just repeat what we said before. We feel like we're in very good position there. We won at the trial court level. This is being appealed. And so we will be continuing to aggressively protect our rights there. On the other family patents dealing with four formulation patents around the 34-milligram capsule formulation of Pimavansrin. And we also, as an aside, have a method of use patent on the 10-milligram tablet. Those are the only two marketed forms of the drug. On the formulation patents, we in the fall, we also won a Markman ruling in that case, which puts us in a favorable position, advancing into the trial court that is scheduled for December this year. Or excuse me, trial is scheduled for December this year. And we would anticipate a decision from that trial on these formulation patents in the first half of next year also. So that's kind of where things stand. And so when you work through all of that, today we have composition of matter protection that takes us to April of 2030 with a six-month pediatric extension, which we anticipate that would get us to October of 2030. That's all on the composition of matter patent, which we've won at the trial court level, now under appeal. On the formulation patents, those run to 2038. We have already settled and yielded a little bit of ground there, which you typically do when you start settling on that. And that, we've settled with all but two companies, I should say, on the formulation patents. And so that would pull us back to late 2037 on those patents. That family patents, again, will come to trial in December, and we expect a decision on that in the first half of next year.
spk07: One moment for our next question.
spk08: Our next question comes from Mark Goodman with Lee Rank. Your line is open.
spk25: Yes, for debut, just a little bit more color. Can you help us with dosing? What's the dosing for most of these patients relative to the target dose? And then also like average age and weight of the patients, if you can help us with that. Thanks.
spk30: Sure. Before we answer that question,
spk32: there was a question on profitability that I realized we didn't answer. So Mark, you want to take that? Yeah, happy to. I think just on the previous question, the simple answer is, can we make a launch and investment in negative symptoms of schizophrenia profitable? The simple answer is yes. Obviously, we will be mindful of the potential ranges for exclusivity for remaining for permanent answer in. So our launch will be a little different than if we knew that we would have a much longer dated life. But as we get into 2030 and beyond, we can adjust investment. And also keep in mind, there's a significant number of synergies between negative symptoms of schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease psychosis. So we're not starting from scratch and altogether can make we can make this franchise profitable to Acadia
spk03: on a variety
spk32: of ranges for ultimate exclusivity for the molecule. Thanks, Mark. OK, bring
spk30: in two
spk32: questions.
spk35: Yeah, sure. Mark, thanks for the question. In terms of dosing, we think in terms of compliance to the label dose, you know, it's a weight based product. The the average compliance to doses in the seventy five to eighty percent range at this point, you also ask questions about weight and age. The weight has remained in the low 30 kilogram range between thirty two, thirty four and the the ages in the mid teens, about 16 for an average age.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Last question comes from Yatton Sinesha with Guggenheim. Your line is open.
spk02: It's too quick one for me. Could you comment on gross to net where you are on debut? If you can also characterize the opportunity in dollar perspective. And then are you willing to say anything on your planet from Cuba's perspective? How should we think about seasonality there? Similar to what you have experienced in the past few years or a little bit different?
spk26: OK, I think it's going to be Mark, Brendan, Mark.
spk32: Yeah, I'm gross to net. Maybe I'll do a go forward and a look back on debut. I think going forward, we expect gross to net to be in the 20 percent range for debut. And it shouldn't really fluctuate quarter to quarter. When we look backwards, it was a little lower over the course of the entire year. So it's 17.7 percent through fiscal year 2023. And we did have favorability to that in the fourth quarter. And the gross to net for debut was 15.4 percent in the fourth quarter
spk35: of last year. From just thinking about debut outside the United States, obviously we see a tremendous opportunity. I would speak to it in terms of the prevalent population, which is slightly larger than the United States and EU. Canada, where we'll be first, is on the order of 600 to 900 patients. And then Japan is likely between a thousand and two thousand patients. So in terms of value, I think I spoke a little bit to what we see, which is you can take a look at our U.S. pricing and you can look at other rare disease products that launched in the U.S. to see their proximity to a U.S. price for their EU approach. And I think there's a narrower band than existed for broad range or broad indication products. It's too early for us to really talk about what a price for EU nation will be at this point, but that should give some sense of direction. And then on
spk32: New Placid, I think dynamics should be consistent this year, except for the gross to net dynamic that I mentioned for the fourth quarter. So we gave kind of seasonal dynamics and across the quarter should be the same in terms of volumes. And then I gave the gross to net guidance for the first quarter just to make sure people can think in the right range as we go through the Medicare Part D dynamics for the first quarter. And there'll just be less of that in the fourth quarter of this year, just due to the anticipated Medicare Part D redesign in 2025.
spk08: That concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the call back to Steve Davis for closing remarks.
spk31: Great. Thank you, Operator. Thanks again, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter.
spk08: Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.
spk00: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
spk08: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Acadia Pharmaceutical's fourth quarter and full year 2023 Financial Results Conference call. My name is Abigail, and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a question and answer session towards the end of today's call. To ask a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. I would now like to turn the presentation over to Al Kadani, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications at Acadia. Please proceed.
spk31: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Acadia's fourth quarter and full year, 2023 earnings results. Joining me on the call today for Acadia are Steve Davis, our Chief Executive Officer, who will provide some opening remarks, followed by Brendan Tien, our Chief Operating Officer and Head of Commercial, who will discuss our strong commercial franchises, debut, and new plaza. Doug Williamson, our Head of Research and Development, will provide an update on our pipeline programs, and Mark Schneier, our Chief Financial Officer, will review the financial highlights. Steve will then provide some closing thoughts before we open up the call to your questions. In addition, Parag Maswani, Senior Vice President for Finitide, Rare Disease Franchise, will be available for the Q&A session. We are using supplemental slides, which are available on our website's events and presentations section. Before proceeding, I would like to remind you that during our call today, we will be making several forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements, including goals, expectations, plans, prospects, growth potential, timing of events, or future results, are based on current information, assumptions, and expectations that are inherently subject to change and involve several risks and uncertainties that may cause results to differ materially. These factors and other risks associated with our business can be found in our filings made with the SEC. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are made only as of today's date. I'll now turn the call over to Steve for opening remarks. Thank you, Al. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Please turn to slide five. We transformed our business in 2023. Today, we are a cash-flow positive company with two -in-class commercial assets. We have three late-stage assets and a robust early-stage pipeline, and we continue to invest in future growth through business development. Let's begin with our commercial franchises, which delivered record revenues of $231 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 and $726.4 million for the full year. Debut, the first and only drug approved to treat Rett syndrome, generated fourth quarter sales of $87.1 million in its second full quarter of sales since it was launched in April of last year. We're proud of our early success with the launch and excited about the future of Debut. NewPlasic continues to deliver and be strongly cash-flow positive. Sales in the fourth quarter were $143.9 million and reflect our ability to gain market share and grow the revenue base while continuing to manage the expense base. In addition to our two successful commercial franchises, we have a deep and growing pipeline, which is making significant advances, including programs in the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, product willy syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease psychosis. Acadia has never been in a stronger financial position. We delivered 40% revenue growth in 2023 on the strength of our successful Debut launch. We are now in a position to generate substantial, sustainable cash flow to fund further growth in our business. We ended the year with $438.9 million in cash, even after deploying a little over $100 million for business development and expect our cash balance to grow to between $585 and $655 million by the end of 2024. Acadia is relatively unique amongst our biotech peers, combining successful commercial franchises, exciting late and early stage assets, and the financial strength to capitalize on these opportunities. This includes further expanding our portfolio and building on our success with Debut and NewPlasic in central nervous system and rare diseases. Let's next turn to a snapshot of our current products and pipeline on slide 6. NewPlasic is our treatment for Parkinson's disease psychosis, which today remains the only drug approved for the treatment of this condition. In 2023, we added significant growth potential to our business with the introduction of Debut for the treatment of Rett syndrome. Here, too, Debut is the first and only drug approved for the treatment of Rett. Behind these two successful commercial franchises, we have numerous late and early stage pipeline assets, including our negative symptoms of schizophrenia program with Femur Vanserim. There are no FDA approved treatments for this disorder, so the unmet need is high. And we look forward to having top-line results of our Advanced II study by the end of this quarter. As a side note, obviously, we do not have results as of today. ACP 101 and Prader-Willi syndrome, where we are currently enrolling subjects, Prader-Willi is a rare and highly debilitating genetic disease where patients have an unrelenting drive to eat called hyperphagia. The severity of this disorder translates into an average lifespan of 30 years. Here, too, there are no FDA approved treatments. We're also currently enrolling our seamless Phase II-Phase III program with ACP 204 in Alzheimer's disease psychosis patients, another disorder where there are no approved treatments. ACP 204 is our second generation 5-H T2A blocker where we are leveraging our learnings from Femur Vanserim. And beyond that, we have a rich pipeline of early stage disclosed and undisclosed programs that position us for future growth. I'll now turn the call over to Brendan to discuss our commercial performance on slide 7.
spk35: Thank you, Steve. I'm pleased to provide additional commentary on our two commercial franchises, Debut and New Pleasant, and the terrific performance both delivered in the quarter. Please turn to slide 8 beginning with Debut. We're now roughly 10 months into launch and I'd like to begin by summarizing our accomplishments to date. The launch of Debut has been one of the most successful recent launches in rare disease. We've had the privilege of bringing this therapy to RET patients and their caregivers who previously had no approved therapeutic op gems to help them deal with the debilitating condition. With an estimated 5,000 diagnosed RET patients in the United States and a prevalent population of 6 to 9,000, there is a substantial opportunity in front of us to bring the benefits of this therapy to many more patients. We anticipate this will drive meaningful revenue growth well beyond this year. As the first drug approved for the treatment of RET syndrome, we've experienced strong interest and demand from RET families. As we've previously reported, this strong interest produced a surge of new patient starts in the first four months of the launch, followed by a demand curve that is much closer to our pre-launch expectations and the linear-shaped curve we typically see in rare disease drugs. From a prescriber perspective, this initial surge was concentrated in RET Centers of Excellence, or COEs, and we have since significantly expanded the breadth and depth of prescribers. This surge has produced multiple benefits. It's enabled us to reach a critical mass of experience in the medical and caregiver communities dramatically faster than we otherwise would have. This has also enabled us to rapidly gain real-world insights that we've been able to use to further educate the medical and caregiver communities. Ten months into the launch, COEs continue to represent a rich source of new patient starts. In fact, today, approximately 40% of our new patient prescriptions come from COEs, and we are continuing to add depth in this sector. Non-COE, high-volume institutions account for approximately 30% of our new patient prescriptions. This sector represents an additional important growth opportunity as we continue to increase our breadth and depth in these institutions. I'd like to focus now on seasonal dynamics we observed in the latter part of the fourth quarter and early part of the first quarter. In December, in particular, we experienced higher than average refill rates as families prepared for the holidays and health plan changes or reauthorizations in the new year. In January, we saw a decline in new prescriptions written, driven by seasonal and significant decline in Rett Clinic visits following the holiday period where approximately 50% of COEs had either no clinic days or reduced clinic days available. We have since seen a return of Rett Clinic days in February, tracking back to historical levels and new patient prescription rates returning to the trends we observed prior to January. In January, we also saw a reduction in refills and conversion rates due to typical beginning of the year reauthorization and reenrollment processes. This resulted in delays in patients receiving their first paid shipments in the new year. We're working through those authorizations and do not see any long-term issues associated with processing these. Let's turn to persistency on slide nine. What you see on this slide is updated persistency information. There are two key points I'd like to highlight. First, we continue to track at least 10 percentage points above our clinical trial experience, specifically the Lilac 1 open label extension where patients rolled over to triphenetide from placebo and this differential has continued to be very consistent for several months now. Second, when we look at these monthly milestones, they're improving. For example, our month four persistency number was 75% when we reported on our earnings call in November and now at month four, you see that with many more patients, we're at 80% persistency. And our month six persistency, which we reported at JP Morgan last month, was 68% and now has risen to 70% and we continue to see this data improve at all time points thus far. We are seeing improvements in persistency as patients and HCPs gain more experience with the safety and tolerability profile at debut. For clarity, the persistency rates we're including here are calculated based on the confirmed discontinuations plus those that are 60 days beyond their scheduled refill date counted as a discontinuation. Please turn to slide 10. As I mentioned earlier, we continue to generate and share data supporting the long-term benefits observed in patients treated with debut. Here we describe two important posters that we presented recently at the American Epilepsy Society or AES meeting in December that underscore the benefits of debut. The first poster details the long-term outcomes in patients who completed our lavender study and then continued into our open label Lilac 1 and then Lilac 2 studies. Data presented in the poster demonstrated that patients treated with profanityde and Lilac 2 continued to experience improvement in symptoms for up to 32 months. In addition, safety and tolerability were consistent with prior studies. Let's now turn to slide 11 for the second poster presented at AES. This poster presented the results of the caregiver exit interviews for RET patients treated with profanityde in the lavender and Lilac studies. You can see in the table on the left some of those specific real-world improvements caregivers cited in their interviews. Consistent with the unmet need often highlighted by caregivers, the top three areas of improvement noted by these respondents and their children were improvement in engagement, improvement in hand use, and improvement in eye gaze. We're pleased to have the feedback regarding the impact of profanityde on the very symptoms that matter most to RET families. And we're using this information to educate HCPs and RET families about the potential benefits of debut. Let's turn to slide 12. These quotes from caregivers reinforce some of the observations described above, which are consistent with the types of things we've been hearing for many months, such as caregivers noting higher levels of engagement, improvement in speech with a broadening vocabulary and improved engagement in conversations, more purposeful use of hands and decreased hand wringing and stereotypies. We also regularly hear feedback about a loved one's increased cognitive ability or increased alertness with patients now being able to better follow conversations. These testimonials all speak to the promise of treatment with debut and underscore exactly why we at Acadia do what we do to support and benefit those with greatest needs. Let's next turn to our plans to make debut available to patients outside the United States on slide 13. We see a clear opportunity to launch debut outside the United States and leverage the insights and learnings from the very successful US launch to help many more patients suffering from RET syndrome. Starting in Europe, it's estimated there are 9,000 to 14,000 RET patients between Europe and the UK. We've engaged with EMA this quarter and we anticipate filing a marketing authorization application with the European Medicines Agency in the first half of next year. In Canada, it's estimated there are 600 to 900 RET patients. We expect to file our new drug submission later this quarter with the potential approval around year end 2024. And in Japan, there are an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 RET patients. And this year, we're engaging the Japanese regulatory agency to kick off our efforts to pursue approval. Let's turn to slide 14 for a discussion of our new Placid franchise. Product sales of new Placid in 2023 were $549.2 million, an increase of 6% over 2022 as we continue to grow new patient starts and increase market share. Our primary financial objective for new Placid is to optimize cash flow in that franchise. And we do that in two ways. First, we're continuing to grow bottle shipments and market share. The most effective lever to drive growth recently has been the broad educational campaign we launched last year to bring attention to our real world evidence studies. These efforts have allowed us to grow new patient starts faster than the market. In fact, in 2023, new patient starts were up 12% year over year. The second way we optimize new Placid franchise cash flow is by carefully managing expenses and we'll continue to do that throughout 2024. These combined efforts have enabled us to generate over $300 million on a standalone, fully burdened basis in annual cash flow. We look forward to continuing to grow this franchise. I'll now turn it over to Doug Williamson, our head of research and development, to provide an update on our pipeline programs starting on slide 15.
spk39: Thank you, Brendan. In addition to our commercial products, we have a strong pipeline of clinical programs providing us with several opportunities to further expand our growth. Let's start with Pimavansren as a potential treatment for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia on slide 16. Predominant negative symptoms remain one of the largest unmet needs in schizophrenia and as of today, there are still no approved treatments for these symptoms. It's important to understand the distinction between treating the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Positive or psychotic symptoms are hallucinations, delusions, and thought disorders that typically resolve with antipsychotic treatment. Negative symptoms are social withdrawal, restricted speech, lack of emotion, loss of motivation, and blunted affect. Our adjunctive Pimavansren program is designed to treat the approximately 700,000 patients in the US whose positive psychotic symptoms are adequately controlled with antipsychotic treatment, but who still suffer from persistent and uncontrolled negative symptoms inhibiting their ability to lead a normal, productive life. Please turn to the next slide to discuss our Pimavansren clinical program for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Let's discuss the details of our program. The Advanced 2 study is designed to treat patients whose positive symptoms are adequately controlled, but still suffer from persistent, uncontrolled negative symptoms. Negative symptoms of schizophrenia have proven to be an exceedingly difficult drug development challenge with multiple industry failures over several decades. Therefore, with our previous positive and Advanced 1 study of Pimavansren, we achieved something very rare in this population. Advanced 2, our second six-month study, is designed to evaluate the impact on persistent negative symptoms in patients whose acute psychosis has been controlled with antipsychotic treatment. As Steve said, we don't know the results yet, but remain on track to share them by the end of the quarter. Please turn to slide 18 to discuss our late-stage ACP-101 program for the treatment of hyperphagia in Prader-Willi syndrome. Let me start with just a brief reminder of the disease. Prader-Willi syndrome is a rare genetic neurobehavioral syndrome that affects approximately 8,000 to 10,000 patients in the United States and represents a significant unmet need. There are currently no therapies approved to treat the hyperphagia in patients with PWS. Hyperphagia is the defining characteristic of PWS and commonly begins between the ages of 3 and 8. It's characterized by unrelenting hunger that often leads to obesity and behavioral challenges such as anxiety and aggression, and is extremely distressing for patients, parents, and caregivers. To illustrate just how devastating this disorder is, the average life expectancy is approximately 30 years, largely due to obesity and cardiovascular-related disease. Please turn to slide 19, where I'll speak to our clinical program in Prader-Willi syndrome. Late last year, we initiated a phase 3 study of ACP-101 for the treatment of hyperphagia in PWS. Before getting into the details of the study, I'd like to note that the PWS community has shown an incredibly high level of enthusiasm for this opportunity and interest in our study. On this slide, we've laid out the design of the COMPASS Phase 3 global multi-center, randomized, double-blind, 12-week placebo control study evaluating the efficacy and safety of ACP-101 in approximately 170 Prader-Willi patients. The primary efficacy endpoint is improvement of hyperphagia as measured by the Hyperphagia Questionnaire for Clinical Trials, or HQCT, scale. Those patients who complete the study will be eligible to enroll in an open-label long-term extension study. If data from this Phase 3 study is positive, we plan to submit a new drug application for the treatment of hyperphagia in PWS to the FDA. We look forward to working with the Prader-Willi community and clinical experts as we continue to advance the development of this program. Please turn to slide 20. We're advancing ACP-204, our next-generation 5-HT2A compound, which we're developing as a potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease psychosis. As we previously described, ACP-204, like pimavansrin, works primarily as an inverse agonist of the 5-HT2A receptor. With ACP-204, we're seeking to build on our extensive learnings from pimavansrin and believe it has an exciting future. Our work completed to date includes a comprehensive Phase 1 program and supports our target product profile for ACP-204, including no sign of QT prolongation at planned doses in our studies, a wide dose range supporting the potential for a dose approximately equivalent to two times that of 34 mg of pimavansrin, and a steady state concentration achieved in less than half the time of pimavansrin. As you can see on the slide, ACP-204's profile could represent a significant improvement over an already strong product profile for pimavansrin. Please turn to slide 21. Our seamless Phase 2-Phase 3 program for ACP-204 is now underway. This plan includes a Phase 2 study with over 300 patients which we've aligned on with the FDA and which is designed to roll seamlessly into two Phase 3 studies. The Phase 2 study has been designed and sized in such a way that if successful, it could be considered a pivotal registration study. Once the full study allocation of patients for Phase 2 is complete, we will analyze and report Phase 2 results, by which time the two Phase 3 studies will already be underway. This plan will ultimately provide three potential pivotal studies for a submission. We look forward to continuing to advance this program and providing future updates. I now turn it over to Mark for a financial update beginning on slide 22.
spk32: Thank you, Doug. Let's start by reviewing our fourth quarter and full year performance on slide 23. In the fourth quarter, we recorded $231 million in total revenue, up 69% from the fourth quarter of last year. For the full year 2023, we recorded $726.4 million of total revenue, up 40% from the prior year. Fourth quarter debut net product sales were $87.1 million. Full year debut sales were $177.2 million in the first eight and a half months of commercialization. Fourth quarter New Plasid net product sales were $143.9 million, up 5% versus the prior year, and our gross to net adjustment was .5% in the quarter for New Plasid. For the year, New Plasid net product sales were $549.2 million, up 6% from the previous year. Compared to $517.2 million in the prior year. Our New Plasid franchise achieved 3% demand bottle growth year over year, driven by increases in new patient starts in both market segments. Selling growth increased by 2% as we experienced a modest reduction in in-channel inventory over the course of the year. The New Plasid gross to net adjustment for the full year was .3% as compared to .8% last year. This increase is primarily due to increased accruals related to the Inflation Reduction Act. For 2023, our New Plasid franchise generated over $300 million of cash flow on a fully allocated cost basis. R&D expenses decreased to $351.6 million in 2023 from $361.6 million in 2022. The decrease was mainly due to the Trifinitide Commercial Supply Bill in 2022 that was accounted for as R&D expense as those expenditures took place prior to the FDA approval of debut. We had a similar level of clinical spend and business development investments year over year. SG&A expenses increased to $406.6 million in 2023 from $369.1 million in 2022. The increase was primarily driven by debut commercialization expenses partially offset by reductions in New Plasid spent. Our cash balance increased year over year as we ended the year with $438.9 million of cash compared to $416.8 million at the end of 2022. Let's turn to slide 24 for discussion of our 2024 guidance. Beginning with debut, we expect net sales for debut in 2024 to be in the range of $370 to $420 million. In our 2024 full year guidance, we project new patient prescriptions from the beginning of February forward that are consistent with the linear growth trend we observed in the fourth quarter. Persistency rates that continue to be 10 percentage points above our clinical trial experience, compliance to dose continuing in the range of 75 to 80%. I'd also like to offer some financial perspective on the seasonal dynamics impacting the first quarter of 2024. Let's start with December. As Brendan discussed, Q4 net sales were positively impacted by a seasonal increase in refill rates as families prepared for the holidays, health flare changes, and copay resets. In January, we saw a reduction in new patient prescriptions due to fewer office visits and red clinic days together with reductions in conversion and refill rates as patients went through the payer re-enrollment process. And in February, we have seen strong recovery across these metrics. Factoring the seasonal dynamics and expected higher growth to net in the first quarter, we anticipate first quarter net sales to be in the range of $76 to $82 million. This is reflected in our annual guidance range of $370 to $420 million. Moving to New Placid, we are providing net sales guidance between $560 and $590 million for 2024. The midpoint of the range assumes approximately .5% volume growth and 3% net price growth. We are protecting growth to net for New Placid to be between 25 and 29% for the full year and between 33 and 35% for Q1. We expect growth to net to be of similar levels for the remaining quarters of the year as we don't anticipate an increase in growth to net for the fourth quarter of 2024 because of the Medicare Part D redesign that is expected to take place in 2025. We expect R&D expense to be between $305 and $325 million, including approximately $20 million in stock-based compensation. We will be increasing our clinical spend year over year as we progress on our ACP204, ACP201, and our early-stage programs and reduce our spend on triphenotype. As a reminder, our R&D range does not guide for incremental spend for business development transactions. We expect SG&A expense to be between $455 and $480 million for the full year, including approximately $50 million in stock-based compensation. The growth in SG&A year over year is primarily due to increased investment in our U.S. debut franchise as well as the annualization of expenses from being on the market for a full year in 2024 and foundational investments preparing for triphenotype -U.S. launches. Our SG&A guidance does not include pre-launch investment for negative symptoms of schizophrenia, which is contingent on positive results of advance two. Finally, we expect our 2024 year-end cash balance to be approximately $585 to $655 million based on our expected range of operational cash flows, excluding any expenditures for future business development transactions. With that, I'll turn it over to Steve for closing remarks.
spk31: Thanks much, Mark. Please turn to slide 25. I'll close by briefly recapping 2023 and highlighting our opportunities in 2024 and beyond. 2023 was a transformational year for us. We launched our second commercial drug debut. We achieved 40% revenue growth from two commercial franchises, Debut and New Closet. And we completed enrollment in our advance two study in negative symptoms of schizophrenia. We also acquired worldwide rise to triphenotype. We initiated our Phase 3 program of ACP 101 in Porter-Willi Syndrome. And we initiated our seamless Phase 2 Phase 3 study of ACP 104 in Alzheimer's disease psychosis. Looking to this year and beyond, we continue to capitalize on the successful launch of Debut and project strong revenue streams from Debut and New Closet. We will have the top-line results from our advance two study by the end of this quarter. We're pursuing expansion of Debut in Europe, Canada, and Japan. We're now well on our way to determining the potential of ACP 101 in Porter-Willi Syndrome and we're now at a point where we have sustainable and growing cash flow for operations to fund future growth. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for our Q&A. Operator?
spk08: Thank you. At this time, we'll conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder to ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If your question has been answered or you wish to return it, please do so. If you would like to draw your question, please press star 11 again. We ask that you limit yourself to one question. One moment for our first question.
spk10: Our first question comes
spk08: from Tess Romero with JP Morgan. Your line is open.
spk23: Good afternoon, guys. Thanks so much for taking our question. So first one for me is what drove your decision to provide full-year debut guidance at this time rather than just a quarterly guide, which I think was your base case at the time of our conference in January? And second question is just around your guide, are you able to clarify the assumption around where you are estimating real-world persistency is at 12 months? And are you able to give us an update on the number of patients that are currently on debut? Thanks so much.
spk31: Sure. Mark, do you want to take that?
spk32: Yeah, I think as we approach every conversation with Wall Street, we just want to give the most relevant information in context of the business as a whole. As we went through our year-end process and saw the seasonality that we experienced at the beginning of the year, we thought it was important to provide context not only on that, kind of one-forward quarter guidance, but provide perspective on where we see debut for the entire year and our confidence in growing the brand over the course of the year and beyond. So that led to our discussion on the two periods of guidance range. On the persistency level, when we continue within our guidance to expect kind of 10 percentage points above the clinical trial experience from the levels that Brendan experienced, Brendan suggested. And I think for long-term, I think if you think more like 50% plus over a 12-month and beyond period, that's a good early sign. Obviously I'll point out we don't have patients out that far in the commercial setting, so that's a data that we'll evaluate. But I think that's a good reasonable ballpark assumption to take at this time.
spk31: actually I'm going to ask Mark to come back to the number of patients in the therapy in a second. But since he paused there, let me just add a little bit more color to that. So of all the patients who initiated therapy on triphenidate or debut in clinical trials in Lavender, together with those that rolled over to drug in Lilac, 40% of them remain on therapy today. And that's two plus years that they've been on therapy. As Mark mentioned, and as we've described before, we continue to track 10 plus percentage points above our clinical trial experience. So that's the gist of Mark's comment that we expect longer term, and again, when we look at our clinical trial experience, we're looking at two plus years on therapy, 40% of them on. We're tracking 10% above that, so that's the basis of our projection that we expect half or more patients to stay on therapy over the long term. I would also note that of all those patients, that 40% of patients that were on triphenidate, or debut in clinical trials, that have now rolled over, we've had zero dropouts from those patients since launch. So it's created a very persistent and consistent enduring population. Mark, do you want to address the number of patients on therapy? Sure. I think
spk32: as you recall, we had just over 800 patients at the end of the third quarter. When we closed 2023, we had close to 900 patients on therapy. And just to give a little further context, as we described, we had a seasonal decline in January, and as a consequence, fewer patients initiated therapy. And then in February, we saw a significant rebound in new patients and then we had a at the end of the fourth quarter. recovery rate. And then we had a very strong 2,270
spk05: patients. And then we had a very 2,270 patients. So we had a very consistent recovery rate of 3,270 patients. response rate of 2,270 patients. 2,270 patients. So that's growth. What are your expectations for the remainder of the year?
spk31: Thanks. Yeah, thanks much. I'm going to ask Mark to answer the first question, and Brendan
spk32: to second. So for the seasonality, I would, you know, and maybe one-time benefits in revenue that we experienced in the fourth quarter, it's a total of about 5 million positive to revenue in the fourth quarter. And we quantify that as 3 million due to seasonality and 2 million due to a favorable growth to net in the quarter.
spk35: Thanks. I'll go from there. So in our prepared remarks, we talked about the seasonality in terms of new patient starts. You're following a surge that sort of characterized the first four months of the launch of debut very interested families that queued up to get started. We then hit a growth trajectory or a launch trajectory that was very much like what we expected. Linear growth, third quarter and fourth quarter through December. The one place where there was a slowdown in new patient starts was January. Significant slowdown driven by lack of COE patient days and patient visits. We saw a snapback, or however you want to describe it in February, to a similar trajectory for new patient starts moving forward. So thinking about 2024 in the midpoint of our guidance, we would anticipate the linear curve replicating what we saw in the third and fourth quarter of last year for new patient starts.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from David Huang with City Group. Your line is open.
spk27: Hi, congrats on the progress in taking my question. I'm just trying to get a better handle on the higher end of your guidance range for debut in 2024. What types of elements would you need to see to drive towards the higher end of guidance? Thanks a lot.
spk31: Sure, Mark, you want to take that?
spk32: Yeah, I think the whole, I mean, the three main assumptions are driving our forecast are new patient starts, persistency rates, and overall compliance. And obviously we run many scenarios to get to the informed guidance range that we've shared to you. And it's not necessarily one in particular assumption that you would change that would get you from the middle to the high or to the low. So I think as you know, the midpoint of the range is more towards what Brendan just mentioned on new patient starts, having our persistency continue to be 10 percentage points above our clinical trial experience and compliance to those to be within the range of 75 to 80 percent. And as you branch out from the middle, you just flex any or all of those assumptions up will get you towards the high end of the range.
spk10: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Charles Duncan with Cantor. Your
spk08: line is open.
spk06: Hey, good afternoon, Steve and team. Congrats on a good year of progress and all the information on debut. That's very helpful. I wanted to ask a question on the pipeline specific to advance to negative symptoms of schizophrenia. I know that you don't have the data in house yet, but I guess I'm wondering, are you tracking concurrent medications and if you could provide us a little bit of color clinically meaningful results versus statistically meaningful results. And then finally, do you anticipate needing a 12 month exposure beyond a six month study or do you think that the current safety profile of NUPLA will handle it? Thanks.
spk30: Thanks for the question, Charles. Doug, three parts to that question,
spk39: I think. Yeah, and I've already forgotten the first two. in terms of safety, we have an extensive safety database of answering in schizophrenia as well as other conditions. So we have comfortably more patient exposures than we would need to get an approval. First question was, again,
spk31: Charles, the first two questions.
spk06: Yeah, concurrent medications, are you tracking that? Do you have good coverage? And then clinically meaningful versus statistically significant results. What are you looking
spk39: for? Yeah, we're tracking, obviously we're carefully tracking concurrent medications. Any antipsychotic is allowed. We haven't analyzed the data yet, obviously, but we expect the results to be similar to advance one where it was the three most commonly used antipsychotics, Alanzapine, Resperado, and Aripiprazole that were the main concurrent medications. Clinically and statistically significant, well, obviously statistically significant will be defined by the primary. For clinically significant, nothing has been approved yet, so there's no kind of benchmark. But in the, in psychiatric studies in general, an effect size of 20 to .2 to .3 is generally regarded as clinically significant. In advance one at the 34 milligram dose, we saw an effect size of .34. So, you know, something around the .2 to .3 level of effect size we would regard as, and the field would regard as highly clinically significant.
spk08: One moment. Our next question. Our next question comes from Me Too Barrel with TD Cowan. Your line is open.
spk16: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about Europe. You mentioned that you're going to be filing next year. I wanted to ask in the first half of 2025, I wanted to ask what the gating items were for the MAA filing. Do you have to generate any more clinical data? Do you have to generate any sort of data to help with health technology assessments over there? And any potential direction you can give us on what sort of European price that you may that you think that you can get?
spk31: Yeah. Thanks so much for the question, Me Too. We don't need to do any, we don't believe we'll need to do any more clinical work. The principal gating item is no PIP was done before we acquired ROTS to the program. So we've got to get alignment on that with the European agencies. And there's some additional work running in parallel. Sometimes, oftentimes, the requirements on formulations differ between the U.S. and the EU, and there's a little bit of work we're doing there just to button that up. We don't anticipate that being a rate limiting issue, but it's just running in parallel with other work we're doing. And then I'll ask Brendan to address the pricing question.
spk35: Yeah, two points for you, too. Thanks for the question. One is there will obviously be work already ongoing with our global value dossier and reinforcing the value proposition for triphenotide and Rett syndrome. And then we're still a ways off in terms of determining price for debut in Europe. I'll simply suggest that obviously we would be pricing it for the value it imparts on patients, caregivers, and the health system. And I know you all would look at other rare disease launches first in the United States and then in the EU, where I think you see an opportunity there tends to be less of a different scene with rare disease products than are seen in broader market assets.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Jeff Hung with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
spk29: Thanks for taking my question. For negative symptoms of schizophrenia, can you just talk about your commercial launch strategy and the timing of key initiatives and about how many additional reps might be needed?
spk30: Sure, Jeff. Brendan, you want to take that?
spk35: Sure. Thanks for the question. Obviously we're excited and looking forward to turning the card over and hopefully having an opportunity to be the first therapy ever approved to support that patient population. We have a footprint in CNS. And we do call on a subset of physicians that would help treat the disease. I think you would expect us to expand from that footprint incrementally and address an opportunity that is more in the psychiatry space than in the neurology space, but we will leverage existing field footprint resources to support that. We also have lots of people that have worked in the broader CNS space that work at Acadia, that have worked on similar assets, and we have lots of internal capabilities that we'll leverage as well. And I would look at us continuing to ramp up, post a positive result towards the latter half of this year and into 2025.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Gregory Renza with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
spk22: Hey, good afternoon, Steve and team. Congrats on the progress in the quarter. Thanks for taking my question. Steve, maybe a question for Brendan as well and just revisiting the seasonal patterns. Just curious, for Brendan and the team, what learnings are you taking away from this to perhaps address maybe this situation or the seasonality that you look for with 2024 to 2025, especially when you could be encountering certainly greater patient numbers on Day View. Just curious how surprising some of those dynamics from December, January, and February were just in the context of how it comps to the usual patterns with re-ops and visits versus that which could be unique to Day View. Thanks so much.
spk31: Yeah, thanks, Greg. Let me answer that at a high level and I'll turn it over to Brendan. So the seasonality that we saw is something that's just very common in our industry. We see that a lot. It happens to a greater or lesser extent with most drugs. Some of it has more of an impact than others. In a rare disease space, things do bounce around more than others and we saw a more pronounced effect of the seasonality than we anticipated. We saw a much more significant impact, particularly in January, than we would have anticipated but the dynamics are very similar across the industry and one of the learnings we have from this is that a lot of the RET centers, and this applies to a certain extent also even outside of the COEs, but a lot of the COEs dramatically reduce their RET clinic days and that just had a significant impact on our prescriptions in that time frame. Brendan, any additional color you'd like to add?
spk35: Yeah, I agree and Greg, thanks for the question. I think one of the key learnings is just the level of preparation that these families have around the holiday season. Whether you are seeking treatment for the first time, I think we saw a nice trajectory for new patients starts in December and obviously not a similar trajectory in January, which I think makes sense. These are fewer RET clinic days and there are fewer less interest in RET clinic visits at the time. But I think more notably is the continuing patient that wants to make sure they have appropriate supply throughout the holiday season, which probably bolsters refill rates in December and may have some impact on January. But I don't think it changes the way we would approach our promotional efforts to this audience and the return in February to what we're seeing for both patient visits and new patient prescriptions that have us on the trajectory we would have expected.
spk09: One moment. Next question.
spk08: Our next question comes from Amy Fadia with Needham. Your line is open.
spk11: Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my question. I've got to first, just with regards to debut. A few more months under the belt. Can you give us a sense of where you see the peak market share evolving? And if you can give us some color on penetration in center of excellence versus non and then penetration within different age groups under and over 20. And with regards to the trials that you've initiated in Alzheimer's disease psychosis and Pryver Lee syndrome, when can we anticipate to see any data? Could we see some data next year? Thank you.
spk31: Thanks, Amy. Let me take the last question and then I'll ask Brendan and Mark to respond to the first two. With respect to data on ADP and PWS, we'd like to get a little bit deeper into these studies before we narrow the aperture on when we expect a complete enrollment and when we'd have results. So it's a little bit premature for us to comment on that yet. What I will say in ADP is these studies usually take a couple of years. And in Pryver Willie it's probably a fairly similar time frame. It's obviously a much smaller study but in a rare disease population you just have a smaller patient pool that you're pulling from. Brendan, do you want to take the first I'm sorry, Mark. I meant to say Mark. Do you want to take the first question on
spk32: peak? Yeah, on peak I think just as a matter of our corporate policy we don't talk about peak market share and peak sales but qualitatively what I would say is we have significant potential in both. From where we stand today as far as penetration there is a significant number of patients that we believe can benefit from debut across all market segments. And then as far as peak sales is concerned we obviously see meaningful improvement in sales this year as per our guidance and we expect that sales can increase significantly above those levels in
spk35: the years to come. And maybe I'll address the sort of the market characteristics you were asking about as well. And yes, I think we have ample opportunity to continue to grow our penetration. The question was around COEs and non-COEs. In COEs we're getting about 40% of our prescriptions today from them. 30% from high volume institutions and COE like. And then 30% in the community. Our penetration while we don't speak to absolutes is the highest in COEs but we still have ample opportunity to grow new patient share in COEs. Then followed by the high volume institutions and then the community thereafter. I think you also asked about age groups. What I can say is quarter over quarter after the kind of the initial surge what we see is a very consistent distribution of patients getting started on debut that is reflective of the rec community. I think that can give you a good sense of where we are in the resource business.
spk31: Did you also have a component of your question related to negative symptoms? Did I mishear that?
spk13: No, I think you covered all my questions. Thank you so much.
spk15: Thank you.
spk08: One moment. Our next question. Our next question comes from with your lines open.
spk44: Hi guys. Thanks for taking our question. First a clarification question. Did you say that you engage with the EMA? Did they specifically say that you didn't have to do another study? Our second question is based on what MANOVA put out, is there any learnings from their CRLs that you can apply to your own SNDA for negative symptoms? Thank you.
spk31: Yeah, two questions. One on debut and other on negative symptoms.
spk39: On trupenazide, we've had preliminary communications with EMA, but obviously they don't confirm that we don't need to do an extra study until we've formally sought scientific advice. But we don't anticipate having to do any further clinical work. On negative symptoms, we don't normally comment on other companies' submissions, but I think since in the press release they spelt out the reasons for the CRL, it's worth noting that the concerns were that there was only one study and they need two, so obviously we were doing a second study. That they didn't have a sufficient size safety database. We have an extensive database with Pimavansrin. That they failed to show the clinical significance. We're engaged with the agency answering their questions about the clinical significance of the NSA 16 data that we're providing. And I always forget the fourth thing. But whatever it was is not an issue for us either. So I think, you know...
spk18: I think, Doug, I
spk31: think that they were also looking at this drug as monotherapy, and of course we're looking at it as adjunctive therapy. That's right.
spk39: The FDA wanted to see concomitant data for their air asset because they know that's how it's going to be used in the real world. And obviously ours is an adjunctive treatment anyway, so that's not an issue.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Joel Beattie with Baird. Your line is open.
spk28: Thanks. What's the exclusivity period look like for nucleoside now that the favorable legal rulings have come in December? And then also is that a long enough period for launch in negative symptoms schizophrenia to add much?
spk31: Yeah, thanks much for the question. Let me kind of sum up where we stand. As you recall, we have two patents or two families of patents that protect PIVAVANCER. One is our composition of matter patent. We won at the trial court level on that in the fall. We submitted two arguments. We only needed one to win on one. We won on both arguments. That is being appealed as we fully expected it would be. The schedule I anticipate there is we'll probably go through a series of briefings in the second quarter of this year, and then we expect oral arguments to be probably in the third quarter of this year, and the decision would likely come probably in the first half of next year. So that's where we stand on that front. Again, I'll just repeat what we said before. We feel like we're in very good position there. We won at the trial court level. This is being appealed, and so we will be continuing to aggressively protect our rights there. On the other family patents, dealing with four formulation patents around the 34-milligram capsule formulation of PIVAVANCER, and we also, as an aside, have a method of use patent on the 10-milligram tablet. Those are the only two marketed forms of the drug. On the formulation patents, in the fall we also won a Markman ruling in that case, which puts us in a favorable position, advancing into the trial court that is scheduled for December this year, or excuse me, trial scheduled for December this year. And we would anticipate a decision from that trial on these formulation patents in the first half of next year also. So that's kind of where things stand. So when you work through all of that, today we have composition of matter protection that takes us to April of 2030 with a six-month pediatric extension, which we anticipate that would get us to October of 2030. That's all on the composition of matter patent, which we won at trial court level, now under appeal. On the formulation patents, those run to 2038. We have already settled and yielded a little bit of ground there, which you typically do when you start settling on that, and that we've settled with all but two companies, I should say, on the formulation patents. And so that would pull us back to late 2037 on those patents. That family patent, again, will come to trial in December, and we expect a decision on that in the first half of next year.
spk07: One moment for our next question.
spk08: Our next question comes from Mark Goodman with LeeRink. Your line is open.
spk25: Yes, for Debut, just a little bit more color. Can you help us with dosing? What's the dosing for most of these patients relative to the target dose? And then also, like, average age and weight of the patients, if you can help us with that. Thanks.
spk30: Sure. Before we answer that question, there was a question on
spk32: profitability that I realized we didn't answer, so Mark, do you want to take that? Yeah, happy to. I think just on the previous question, the simple answer is, can we make a launch and investment in negative symptoms of schizophrenia profitable? The simple answer is yes. Obviously, we will be mindful of the potential ranges for exclusivity for remaining for primitive answerin, so our launch will be a little different than if we knew that we would have a much, you know, the longer-dated life, but as we get into 2030 and beyond, we can adjust investment, and also keep in mind, you know, there's a significant number of synergies between negative symptoms of schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease psychosis, so we're not starting from scratch, and altogether, we can make this franchise profitable to Acadia
spk03: on
spk32: a variety of ranges for ultimate exclusivity for the molecule. Thanks, Mark. Okay, we're in on two questions.
spk35: Yeah, sure. Mark, thanks for the question. In terms of dosing, we think in terms of compliance to the labeled dose, you know it's a weight-based product. The average compliance to dose is in the 75 to 80% range at this point. You also asked questions about weight and age. The weight has remained in the low 30-kilogram range between 32, 34, and the age is in the mid-teens, about 16 for an average age.
spk08: One moment for our next question. Our last question comes from Yat and Sinesha with Guggenheim. Your line is open.
spk02: That's a too quick one for me. Could you comment on Gross2Net, where you are on debut, if you can also characterize the OUS opportunity in the dollar perspective, and then are you willing to say anything on Neoplasic? I think from Q1 sales perspective, how should we think about seasonality there, similar to what you have experienced in the past few years, or a little bit different?
spk26: Okay, I think it's going to be Mark, Brendan Mark.
spk32: Yeah, on Gross2Net, maybe I'll do a go-forward and a look-back on debut. I think going forward, we expect Gross2Net to be in the 20% range for slump in the gross to net for debut, and it shouldn't really fluctuate quarter to quarter. When we look backwards, it was a little lower over the course of the entire year, so it was .7% through fiscal year 2023, and we did have favorability to that in the fourth quarter, and the gross to net for
spk35: the first quarter. From just thinking about debut outside the United States, obviously we see a tremendous opportunity. I would speak to it in terms of the prevalent population, which is slightly larger than the United States and EU. Canada, where we'll be first, is on the order of 600 to 900 patients, and Japan is likely between 1,000 and 2,000 patients. In terms of value, I think I spoke a little bit to what we see, which is you can take a look at our U.S. pricing and you can look at other rare disease products that launched in the U.S. to see their proximity to a U.S. price for their EU approach. I think there's a narrower band than existed for broad range or broad education products. It's too early for us to really talk about what a price per EU nation will be at this point, but that should give some sense of direction. Then
spk32: on new plazit, I think dynamics should be consistent this year, except for the growth to net dynamic that I mentioned for the fourth quarter. We gave seasonal dynamics and across the quarter should be the same in terms of volumes. Then I gave the growth to net guidance for the first quarter just to make sure people can think in the right range as we go through the Medicare Part D dynamics for the first quarter. There will just be less of that in the fourth quarter of this year just due to the anticipated Medicare Part D redesign in 2025.
spk08: That concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the call back to Steve Davis for closing remarks.
spk31: Great. Thank you, operator. Thanks again, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter.
spk08: Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.
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