Anhedonia is a really important symptom in depressed patients that is not addressed by currently available antidepressant therapies. And so there’s a huge opportunity there for patients to get treatment for their anhedonia element. It’s a bit early to tell whether this would be an adjunctive treatment or could have the possibility to be used as a treatment as a monotherapy. In the Phase 2 study, we are looking at the anhedonia scales in patients on current antidepressant treatment. But in addition, we will be looking as to whether there’s any direct antidepressant effect on normal depression scales, the MADRS as well. And so I think once we read out the data from this study, we’ll have a better understanding of the potential path forward.
Charles Duncan: Thank you.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Laura Chico with Wedbush Securities. Please go ahead.
Laura Chico: Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Just a quick one with respect to the diagnosed TD population that you’re estimating. Approximately 30% of TD patients are now diagnosed. I’m wondering if you could speak to the typical duration of treatment that you’re seeing among the diagnosed patients, how long are TD patients remaining on a VMAT2 inhibitor once they start? And just out of curiosity, how frequently are patients coming back to treatment? And just wondering what drivers might be contributing there? Thank you.
Eric Benevich: Going into this launch, certainly, we expected that compliance with INGREZZA would be similar to other medicines that these patients are taking for their underlying psychiatric illnesses, consistent with what you see, for example, with antidepressants or with antipsychotics. We’ve actually been very pleased with the persistency that we’ve seen subsequent to the launch better than what we expected. So certainly, that’s an important driver of growth and has been really since the early days of the launch and has continued all the way through Q4 of 2022. And so we don’t see any reason why that would change. It’s better than what we expected to see and certainly better than what we see with the psychiatric meds, but we haven’t given specific numbers in terms of what the actual persistency is with INGREZZA.
And then with regards to the overall patient population, we estimate it to be around 600,000 in the U.S. There are other estimates that are out there that are larger. However, if you look at the progress that we’ve made over the last five plus years since the launch, we started with an extremely under-diagnosed, under-coded patient population, only low single digit percent of people living with TD had actually been given the diagnosis that was in their medical record. Now we estimate that’s around 30%. So we feel good about the progress that we’ve made. However, there’s still a lot of work to do. Still seven out of 10 roughly patients living with TD have yet to be given the diagnosis or really any explanation for their abnormal movements. And about half the time when patients are diagnosed, they’re not offered treatment with a VMAT2 inhibitor, which is the new standard of care.
So we see a lot of opportunity for improvement and frankly, a lot of opportunity for organic growth with INGREZZA in the TD patient population. We feel good about the progress we’ve made, but we recognize that there’s a lot of work ahead of us. Thanks.
Laura Chico: Thank you.
Operator: We will take our next question from Anupam Rama with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst: Hi. Thanks for the question. This is actually on for Anupam. You had previously mentioned sales force pull-through expected around 3Q. What metrics are you seeing or tracking to best understand that? Thank you.
