Christopher Benecchi: Barry, what I would add is that I see enthusiasm continuing to build amongst all of our stakeholders, whether it’s the interactions that we’re having with payers or the dialogues that we’re having with clinicians and key opinion leaders at various medical meetings and in one-on-one conversations or with patient advocacy organizations that as we continue to have all of those conversations, we would expect that enthusiasm to continue to build up and through an announcement around commercial availability. So we’re going to capitalize on those dialogues over the course of the coming weeks to make sure that when we ultimately are commercially available, everybody is aligned in from a stakeholder perspective, ready to prescribe this medication for women with PPD.
Operator: We go next to Paul Matteis with Stifel.
Paul Matteis: I was curious now that you’re getting ready to launch, how many PPD patients specifically are actively treated in the care of a psychiatrist right now? And do you have any kind of data or any grounded data you can give us on just patient flow for PPD in OB/GYN practices, how many patients get either a Benzodiazepine or an SSRI, just any context there would be helpful?
Barry Greene: Yes. Paul, thanks. I appreciate this is important for your model. And we certainly understand the high-prescribing physicians, but don’t have perfect information about that flow and legal change. So let me go through again a high level of announcement. Chris and Laura, if you comment about how we see it today and changing over time. So the numbers are already pretty significant. There’s a couple of hundred thousand women diagnosed a year and about half of those are treated. So 100-plus women treated with various antidepressants today. So if we can simply get to those women with a better oral rapidly acting 14-day treatment course of ZURZUVAE, we’re in pretty good shape. Of course, our drive is to see the diagnosis rates improve and obviously, the treatment rates improve now that we have a different solution for them. But Chris, do you want to add more? And Laura, maybe you want to round it out?
Christopher Benecchi: Barry, what I would add is, roughly speaking, as we look at the prescriber universe, roughly 1/3 of patients are coming through right now OB/GYN practices. In effect, what I would anticipate over the course of time with things like the ACOG guidelines and now the availability of a medication like ZURZUVAE, which has the opportunity to be the first oral therapy for the treatment of PPD, that prescribing to only increase within OB/GYN practices as we go forward. We know that historically through our interactions with OB/GYNs from a ZULRESSO perspective that having something like this that is an oral therapy is going to profoundly change the way that OB/GYNs think about utilizing a medication like ZURZUVAE to help their patients.
So we’ll continue to focus on OB/GYNs. We’ll also capitalize on the opportunity within the psychiatry practices to make sure that they are well aware of this therapy and the impact that it could have on their patients. Laura, anything that you would like to add?
Laura Gault: Yes. And to add, I’d like to emphasize that ZURZUVAE with a 14-day treatment course really fits well into the practice pattern of the OB/GYN and it’s very different from what they’ve been able to access previously using treatments off-label to treat PPD. So I do think that when there’s a solution to a problem, you see people much more ready to identify the problem and then use the solutions they have at hand. I think with regard to psychiatrists, what you’ll see is that they will engage their patients who are already in their practices with depression and talk with them about the risk for postpartum depression during the pregnancy and also have a plan in place to treat them rapidly should those symptoms emerge in the postpartum period.
Barry Greene: Great. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Laura. Appreciate the question, Paul.
Operator: We go next to the line of Ami Fadia with Needham.
Ami Fadia: And congrats on the progress. I have a question on the payer coverage. You mentioned you don’t expect any complex prior authorization. Would there be any prior authorization? And if so what type of prior auths are you anticipating? And as we think about the initial launch, how should we think about access for patients while payers are making the coverage decisions?
Barry Greene: Yes. Very important question. It’s important, as we said, that we’re leaning in to make sure that access for patients with or without coverage is there. Chris, do you want to take it?
Christopher Benecchi: Yes, Barry. So with respect to the first part of the question, types of prior authorizations, when payers look at utilization of medications like ZURZUVAE, they want to make sure that the right patient gets the right medication at the right time. So any prior authorization would be around something like the patient being a woman diagnosed with postpartum depression. So that’s the kind of prior authorization that I would expect, which is not a complex prior authorization. That’s a checkbox PA that clinicians are very familiar in dealing with. In terms of managing patients who don’t have insurance coverage, I said earlier that as an organization, we’re going to lean in with support services, with education and financial assistance resources at the time of launch.
So if a patient in effect is functionally uninsured, Sage as an organization along with Biogen is going to lean in to make sure that that patient doesn’t have to wait an extensive period of time to get access to ZURZUVAE. We’re going to do everything that we can to get that patient on medication because as I said earlier, women with PPD can’t afford to wait.
Operator: We go next to George Farmer with Scotiabank.
