Ascendis Pharma A/S (NASDAQ:ASND) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Leland Gershell: Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Just one question from us as it pertains to SKYTROFA. In discussions with endocrinologists, they’ve said that, that at the same time that you’ve grown the product, they’ve also seen shortages in the daily injectables market, kind of providing more opportunity for SKYTROFA, which may maybe due to some manufacturers shifting over to pins that that may be for GLP-1s versus growth hormones. Just wondering if you could comment on that dynamic and how you may see those shortages persisting or changing in the near term? Thank you.

Jan Mikkelsen: First of all, the daily growth hormone market in the U.S. consisting of five to six player. And I actually, to my knowledge, I only believe there’s one or two of them or two of them have a GLP-one players. So I don’t believe that you can generally take the comments on shifting to the GLP-1 segment is the reason for shortest in our daily growth hormone. I think the key element is basic the long-term perspective of what happened in the data growth node that started already for two, three years ago when the — our Phase 2 data came out, where we saw that there was, what I call, a classical way to leave a market. We saw most of them basically got rid of the sales force, they got rid of every promotion that got rid of the hope.

Today, many of them basically had stopped manufacturing for a year back, stopped subcontracting to European countries. And this is a part what you see is driving the basic, the daily growth hormone shortage. Because the consolidation got everyone got stopped, if [indiscernible] been in the old days for four to five years, everyone else can just take in, it’s not happening because they are leaving the growth hormone market. So I think we need to go back to fundamentals where fundamentals is that the daily growth hormone consolidation already started for three to four years because this is how your basically get optimal financial return to ensure. And what you see now is the end of the consolidation where you see some shortness in the daily, because there is not so many that really wants to supply it because it’s not really an interesting business.

If you have a big farm, a large entity, selling for less than $100 million, you cannot have a positive P&L of such product. You want to leave and they are leaving, and I will leave, too, I will get out as fast as possible. And this is what you see.

Leland Gershell: Thank you. And then also a question with respect to the new GLP-1 work that you’ve been doing. I wanted to ask about what your freedom to operate there is? Presumably, if you were to move forward with the candidate using one of the APIs, you’d have — would we be able see an agreement with one of the respective farmers [indiscernible]? Is that something we should look out for? Thank you.

Jan Mikkelsen: Yeah, the GPL-1 is really interesting from a IP perspective, because there’s actually a lot of freedom to operate in the GPL space. This is really surprising, but it’s not surprising when you think about it, many of them are old product that they think of us develop diabetes and then got repositioned into the era of obesity. So, from that perspective, there’s a lot of freedom to operate of really interesting. What we’re doing with all of them is basically making the best-in-class product opportunities because we can really address some of the tolerability there is by providing, for example, if you’d use it once weekly, you have flat curve, meaning is that a flat PK curve, not really the excursion that gives you a side effect.

You can also take it if you have problem with adherence. We know that only one-third of the patient are on treatment after one year after GLP treatment. So we need to do something to improve the adherence, improve the way that the gated product both related to tolerability and adherence, which one is the most important for the patient.

Leland Gershell: Great. Thanks very much for taking the question.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] I’m showing no further questions. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our Q&A portion. We will now — we would like to thank you for your participation in today’s call. This concludes the call. You may now disconnect.

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