Lastly, your question on patient start forms and how we should be thinking of that first quarter versus rest of the quarters of the year. As I said to previous questions, I think it’s safe to say, while we’re not giving quarterly guidance, that we see a softness in the first quarter in patient start forms, and we would estimate that we’re going to need to see a pickup in patient start forms as we move into Q2 and Q3 and Q4, obviously, for the rest of the year. And we feel confident that those trends are starting to move in the right direction.
Stacy Ku: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ed Arce with H.C. Wainwright. Please proceed with your question.
Ed Arce: Hi, thanks for taking my questions and congrats on a strong end of the year. A couple of questions for me. First, could you discuss your — what you believe to be the key headwinds to further sales growth in 2022, perhaps even beyond your strong guidance? Obviously, given, as you said, the COVID and Omicron variant issue as well as the 90% payer coverage at this point, some of the key headwinds going through the year as well as perhaps key drivers that may factor in as a key swing for the upside? And then I have a follow-up.
Peter Greenleaf: Yeah. I think, it’s twofold, one is, obviously, this COVID environment, and listen, I’m sure investors have heard plenty of other companies characterize this, but from our perspective, it impacts the entire ecosphere, right? Like our direct representatives, it’s their ability to get access to institutions, into offices. Inclusive of that, it’s the way patients €“ or excuse me, physicians and physicians’ office staff are operating today. And then lastly, and I think most importantly, which will bleed into my second comment, is the fact that patients and how they relate to the health care system, how aggressively they are at keeping their visits on the books, to picking up their medications, et cetera, have all been impacted.
And we previously quoted growth or lack of growth in 2020 to 2021 in new diagnosis for lupus nephritis, at least from our ICD-9 code poll data it showed almost a 30% drop in new patient diagnosis. So that just as one example, so COVID is the only thing we can point to, to say why these numbers have declined. And obviously, thee have been other companies who can’t come out and even said that, cancer therapies, cancer diagnosis, adherence to chemotherapeutic regimens have seen direct input as well. So I won’t belabor that one anymore, because I think that, by and large, is the largest swing factor. And then €“ and as I said, I think we’re seeing some really good signs of life that we’re moving out of that. The second part for me is, if we can continue to, which we fully expect we will, identify new patients and patient start forms is how long we’re keeping patients on therapy.
And of those patients who actually do get the drug approved, how many are actually picking up the prescription and adhering to the profile. And as we’ve said right now, at least adherence and discontinuations as it pertains to cancellations and discontinuations were about 25% to 30% of our overall patient start forms. It will be interesting and a big swing factor in our forecast this year or a meaningful one to know how long those patients are actually staying on therapy over time, because it just compounds the effect of getting new patients on drug, if patients are staying on drug. So one that, we look forward to talking more about as we get more data.
