David Windley: Okay. Then on thinking about cadence of studies in the comment that Steve, you made about approaching the end of the year and preparing guidance and things of that sort, and looking at the mix of business this year’s target for burn rate has been nine and a half. You seem to be trending, holding right in around that level, kind of starting higher, ending a little bit lower. As you had said, you probably would early in the year. Do you think that a similar progression of burn rate is likely? Is it too early to be able to really make a call on that? I’m just wondering if, if we start at 9.6, end at 9.4 is next year starting at 9.4 and ending at 9.2. And how should we think about that moving through the year? Thanks.
Steven Cutler: Yes, I think it’s a little early to be, prophesizing on that one. David, to be honest with you, obviously, our aim is to improve our burn rate, and we do have several initiatives ongoing within the organization to, to do things faster and to improve our burn, like, so we push it up from 9.5, not down. So we, we believe we’ll end the year at around 9.5 in quarter four. That’s what we expect. And our aim would be to, to do things operationally and in an efficient manner, I suppose, so that we can move that, at least hold it and possibly even increase it. That’s certainly what we’re trying to do for them, so I don’t like your scenario of 9.4 or 5 down to 9.2. That’s not where we’re trying to go at all. And I do expect that we’re going to be able to hold it, at a minimum, hold it next year and possibly increase it.
David Windley: Excellent. I’m glad you don’t like that. The last question for me is around, Steve, you mentioned in your prepared remarks in talking about some of the environmental things. You did mention geopolitical. And I wondered if you could elaborate on that a little bit in terms of how, the ways in which you see that affecting, I’m assuming, a big one is site access and, but how you see geopolitical affecting the business or affecting your clients and their clinical operations. And if you could, comment about how much of the kind of global site landscape is not available to you at the moment. And how does that then read through to Accellacare for ICON? Thanks.
Steven Cutler: Right, right, right. Yes, Dave, I mean, I think you’re obviously referring to Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel now. So to take Israel specifically, we have a pretty, well, a very important operation in Israel. And we’re certainly reaching out to our employees and particularly the ones that have been directly impacted by the horrible events that have been going on there and supporting them. And obviously, our concern is with them and with our business operations to continue out there. However, we have around about 250 people in Israel. So it’s not a huge part of our operation. It’s well under 0.5% of our revenue. It’s an important 0.5%. Of course, because we have customers out there as well. But it’s not going to be a material impact in terms of site access, at least in the short term.
In fact, our employees are doing a fantastic job in continuing to monitor sites out there and to keep our customers’ projects going. So I’m just incredibly grateful to them for what they’re doing and how they’re manfully and so resilient in continuing to do that work out there. So the bottom line from a financial point of view is a minimal impact. China, we had some impact on earlier in the year, but that’s really sort of coming back to sort of normal now. We’re seeing some significant growth rates in China over last year. You’d expect that because last year was quite low. But we’re really bouncing back in China now, which I’m really pleased about. And Russia, Ukraine, it’s kind of more of the same. We’re certainly diminished in terms of capability of site access there.
And we’re not putting any new site studies in Russia, of course. Ukraine, again, thanks to the resiliency of our employees, we’re able to monitor the studies that we have in that country. And we’ve been able to close some databases again, thanks to the incredible dedication of our employees. But we’re not really adding more work there. So there is some impact across Russia, Ukraine and Israel in terms of access to sites. But overall, I don’t think it’s a really significant or it won’t be any further, it won’t be any more significant going forward than what we have now. Certainly Russia, Ukraine is the sort of greatest area of where we’ve been doing studies. And that has already been impacted. It won’t be going back up anytime soon. But I don’t think it’s going to go down any further either.
So unless we close our studies. But overall, I think a fairly modest impact in terms of site access across our global network, which means from a seller care, we’ve seen some uptick in their recruitment. They recruit now at something like twice as fast as our sort of normal sites, if I can use that term ad hoc type sites, non-Accellacare sites. And they’ve been very successful in doing that. They get things started quickly. The quality there is very good. So I’m pleased with the increasing contribution they’re making. We recruit about 10% or 12% of our patients now at the seller care site network. So they’re making an increasing contribution to our overall patient recruitment numbers. I’d like that, of course, going forward to be bigger. And that’s probably an area on the M&A front that we’re going to be looking at in terms of site networks to expand that network and get a greater contribution from seller care, particularly as we move more into the decentralized clinical trials.
David Windley: Sorry for the extra question. Thank you.
Steven Cutler: Okay.
Operator: Thank you. We will take our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Tim Dale from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Tim Dale: Thank you. So, Steve, one of the biggest comments you made on Casey’s RFD question, you talked about how the broad customer said, RFDs are looking good. But you also mentioned, I think, budget season when that comes around. So could you just kind of walk us through a typical timeline of the budget season? Like, when do you get firm communication from customers? They’ve got their ’24 budgets in hand. This is what we’re willing to spend or this is, how we’re looking to adjust our initial outlooks. Just kind of just January, February, December to help us kind of map that out in our heads.
Steven Cutler: Yes, I mean, I don’t know that we’re specifically directly involved. I mean, I hear a little bit from customers around budget season, whether their budget’s going up or whether it’s, staying flat. It doesn’t, it usually doesn’t go down. There may be one or two exceptions, if they have certain circumstances, but usually we’re talking about a reasonable increase. If we find actually in the fourth quarter, they have budget to spend and they’ll sometimes allocate that budget a little more aggressively or assertively or faster than they would because they need to spend it or lose it. So as I say, we get sort of, I’d say indirect feedback, Tim, on the budgets and what they’re likely to be. We see the surveys as well and we’re optimistic that the budget rate or the R&D growth rate will be, probably more mid-single digits.
