It’s not uncommon to see that. Medical device procedures, you have patients that are taking medications either before and after their procedure. And you see it in diabetes, like I said, I’ve seen this in my 20 years where it’s very common to use multiple tools in combination, whether it’s insulin and oral meds, whether it was fast-acting insulin and long-acting insulin. And so, I think more treatment options here is a good thing for patients. And I think these drugs are a real nice addition to the mix. I think as you go forward though, I think there are some — there are definitely some other areas of interest related to this topic that we’re exploring. I think one thing that is clear to us as we’ve gone through this process is to really use the data a little bit more to our advantage.
Since the launch of Libre, we’ve collected de-identified data from the user base. I’d probably go as far as to say that we probably have the most robust glucose data set in the world. I think the last time I looked at it, we’ve got close to 50 billion hours of glucose monitoring data. So I think Libre is a perfect platform here to actually evaluate the effectiveness outside of a more controlled trial, look at it more in a real world setting. And there’s just so many different ways we can look at the data, look at how the drugs work over time, does one drug work better than the other? What kind of job do they do in terms of a profile, in terms of time and range? So again, I think we can do this on a population level. We can do this on an individual level.
So I think that’s going to be, I’d say, an important thing going forward for us here is to use that data set to be able to kind of explore that. And I’ll just finally say with a portfolio, with a diverse portfolio that Abbott has where we look at healthcare across the full spectrum from nutrition to diagnostics to then treatment. I think that this then provides the company with an opportunity to further explore where we can bring value to patients that are using these drugs. I think it’s common knowledge here that there are side effects, that there are side effects with most drugs. And one of those being increased loss of muscle mass. I’d say, we have experience here in the area of nutrition. And losing that amount of muscle mass as a ratio, it can be problematic.
So we’ve got an opportunity here to be able to develop whether it’s a nutritional product or other products that can help address one of these side effects, which is muscle mass loss. So there’s good opportunities for there for us also in the portfolio. So, bottom line, I think it’s fantastic science, it’s fantastic biology. This is great for public health in the short term. I think the concerns are overblown and I think in the long term if we want to look out 15 years, 20 years, I mean, I think it’s — I think there’s still a lot of question marks there given some of the facts that I’ve raised.
Robbie Marcus: I really appreciate that, Robert. Maybe if I could sneak one more in on CGM, something that I think has really flown under the radar with the GLP-1 noise is, you’ve recently gotten Type II Basel coverage in France. You have it in the U.S. and Japan as well. Just thinking about future opportunities in countries to approve Type II Basel, which could materially expand your reimbursed coverage opportunity around the world. How should we think about that, and how do you size that opportunity over the next few years for Abbott? Thanks a lot.
