I commented on some of them. Clearly, we expect some potential short-term ordering pattern volatility and headwinds in December within our U.S. glaucoma franchise. That’s both because of the potential final LCD effective date, but also associated, as Tom mentioned in the prepared remarks with the 2024 final CMS rule and the increased facility repayments as you enter into 2024, we expect there could be a little bit of disruption as folks hold off on procedures at the end of the year to do them in the first quarter where they’ll be more — pay the more fulsome payment. We also expect some sequential FX headwinds based upon where that’s been trending in our International Glaucoma Business. There could be a little bit of incremental headwind in the fourth quarter.
And we may also experience some potential ordering disruptions at the end of the year in our U.S. corneal health business, as we’re going to make a variety of moves there operationally this quarter in anticipation of a potential iDose launch in early 2024. Several of those operational things that we’re going to be putting in place in this quarter can impact areas like customer service and our payer relations team priorities that could create a little bit of disruption on the cornea side as well.
Unidentified Analyst: That’s helpful. And then just to give you one that doesn’t focus on iDose. Can you speak further about that agreement with Stuart Therapeutics and maybe the timeline for that ST-113 drug candidate?
Tom Burns: Yeah. I’ll be happy to address that. So Stuart has a very novel compound that very — it’s in a very nascent preparation, but we like the data that we saw in some of the preclinical analysis. And what Stuart has and what we hope to contemplate is a bolus injection that could aid substantially in Neuroprotection in Glaucoma, which as many of you know, is kind of a holy grail. Can you actually preserve the ganglion cells in the back of the eye, given the fact that it’s repeatedly being consulted by the pressures associated with glaucoma? So it is a novel compound proprietary. It’s very early, like I like to say, terribly exciting, terribly early, towards pharmaceutical systems both. But again, it’s — and again, it further validates the fact that we go first. We’re making an effort here to break ground in a whole new area of glaucoma treatment and we’re hopeful that this advances into a formidable clinical trial
Unidentified Analyst: Thanks so much.
Operator: All right. Our next question comes from the line of Joanne Wuensch. Joanne, please go ahead.
Joanne Wuensch: Thank you very much for taking question and congrats on the quarter. I’d like to talk about something a little bit less exciting, which is expenses. I did not hear an update maybe on what you think your operating expenses could be. And then as you think about a product launch versus the time of the year that we start thinking about 2024, how do you sort of dovetail preparing and then launching everything that you’ve got in your pipeline, including iDose, not just this year but next. Thank you.
Alex Thurman: Hey, Joanne, this is Alex. I’ll start with the operating expense question. So I mean, first of all, we were pleased to see the operating expenses for the quarter come in as they did, just shy of $87 million, which was only up modestly 1% sequentially. So we were happy with that. And again, as we’ve talked about in the past, we’ve been very focused on making initial adjustments to our pipeline in anticipation of iDose and basically trying to allocate our resources towards that as we prioritize our balance sheet and capital allocation. You asked about the fourth quarter OpEx. And so basically, what I would guide you to do at this point is we would expect a modest sequential increase in the fourth quarter to what we saw in this quarter, which is actually in line with what we’ve seen in the past, typically from a — if you want to call it a seasonality standpoint, the fourth quarter tends to rise up a little higher than the third quarter.
That should put us for total for the year, somewhere around what we have guided to, which was a 10% or a little over 10% increase from last year, again, excluding all of the IP R&D charges.
