Roivant Sciences Ltd. (NASDAQ:ROIV) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And then in terms of therapeutic areas where we see the most unmet needs we’ve always been therapeutic area agnostic. We continue to be therapeutic area agnostic. There is unmet need for patients in every therapeutic area. That’s clear. Some areas are more competitive than others as this has been a year with a lot of activity in I&I although it’s also proven to be as you aware some mechanisms have had an easier goal with than others in I&I. So we are looking across therapeutic area landscape and are really open to anything.

Louise Chen: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And one moment please for our next question. Our next question will come from Douglas Tsao of H.C. Wainwright. Your line is open.

Douglas Tsao: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Just maybe as a starting point, Matt, if you could provide some color on the time, I know you sort of indicated physicians are having some questions or sort of misperceptions around the coverage. I’m just curious what feedback you’ve gotten from a clinical standpoint both deposit as a negative and what sort of things you might need to correct within the physician community to perhaps sort of jumpstart growth within psoriasis? Thank you.

Matt Gline: Yes, perfect. So on the payer side, you covered it well. On the clinical side, we really have a little bit of a tale of two cities where we have talked to use it quite a lot in the practice and love the report constantly positive both patient feedback and their own feedback in terms of how that helps them to have a real steroid alternative at this level of safety and efficacy. And then, we have adapt to a writing you know I’d say like six or fewer scripts a months. We bucket them in a couple different ways. And you know I think those doctors still sort of experimenting. And so, we get different feedback. I’d say like we are not getting a lot of like specific negative perception is that we need to counteract. I’d say the main thing is these are docs who because they have only used the product a little bit have not sort of figured out how they want to think about it, vis-a-vis steroids.

And so if anything, the feedback is yes this is a great product but steroids are pretty good too. And so I think that’s what we are sort of most actively working on is how to help those docs to see the benefits we are starting to see the remitted benefit, see the tolerability benefit, you know the intertriginous data that we just put out here is potentially helpful to support our position we’ve always had day to day are. So you know I think those are the kinds of messages that matter. And it’s really about working on continuing strategies to convert those docs to the kinds, who write it more. So you know as I said we are hopeful about work that we are doing there, but I want to be measured, given what we’ve seen over the past call it five to six months.

Douglas Tsao: And that may be as a follow-up, and I know you touched on it a little bit on the Telavant call, but just given you know your sort of what your capital position will be does that change the sort of opportunities that you look at and sort of the commitment that those would take, be it either from a development standpoint as well as ultimately a commercial standpoint in terms of the infrastructure needed to support them. Thank you.

Matt Gline: Yes. I think the short answer is, it just puts us in an incredibly strong position to do anything. And so I mean in commercialized drugs to develop drugs we feel like we have the capital to pursue the biggest opportunities aggressively. You know I think we are still approval by nature and so I think it’s still hard for us to stomach large upfront capital commitments, generally. And so I think that’s probably the one thing where if we do it, it will be some really special. But other than that I’d say the main way I think about the capital, is it just let’s just do more and I think I’ve said this a couple of places, now going, in hindsight, it doesn’t seem like it should have been, but the decision to pursue the TL1A program a year ago was not totally easy decision, at least not for our entire team, because those would have been extensive Phase 3 studies and we are doing at a time where everyone’s access to capital and our own access to capital were somewhat limited and I think I don’t want to be in a position next time of tiptoeing around an opportunity that is that good.

So, you know I think having this capital base and being able to put it to work really gives us strength in those kinds of discussions.

Douglas Tsao: And then maybe just one follow-up. Final follow-up for me. Over the last couple years, we’ve seen sort of a progressive de-emphasis on some of the internal drug discovery efforts by the company. Does that — do some of those come back into focus a little bit more just given your cash needs or cash position is so much stronger? Thank you.

Matt Gline: Yes. I think the evolution of that exercise in general for us has been a positive one. You know it’s been challenging at times, but I think we’ve got some best on right now at the VantAI, Covant, Psivant that we are excited about and one of the things we like about it is I think we found very capital-efficient ways for that work to be funded through partnership or by outside capital. It’s just that we have a lot of optionality on success, but it’s always been pretty small piece of our burn and I’d say it’s gotten significantly smaller over the best of all years as our late stage pipeline has come into sharper relief. I don’t candidly, expect that to change significantly, in the near term just because, I think we are pretty well set on how those businesses are running and we like to…

Douglas Tsao: Okay. Great. Thank you.

Matt Gline: Thanks, Doug.

Operator: And one moment please for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Yatin Suneja of Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.

Unidentified Analyst: Hey team good morning. This is Evin [Indiscernible] on for Yatin, and thanks for taking the questions. Two for us. The first is on brepo and then I have another one kind of on broader strategy. On brepo how would your POS changed for Dermatomyositis, if you didn’t need the bar, the [Ducros] (ph) bar in SLE? And then from a strategic standpoint, when you’re thinking about the potential progression of Roivant to $20 billion to $30 billion company what proportion of the growth comes from the existing pipeline that you already have versus an external you know BD opportunity? So in other words, do you have to bring in an asset or two to reach that future valuation?