Catalyst Pharmaceuticals at Bank of America 2025: Strategic Expansion and Growth

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:CPRX) presented at the Bank of America 2025 Healthcare Conference, showcasing its robust Q1 2024 performance and future strategies. The company reported record sales and earnings, driven by strong performances from its key products, Firdapse and GammaRay. While Catalyst highlighted its financial strength and market expansion plans, it also addressed challenges such as potential generic competition and regulatory impacts.

Key Takeaways

• Catalyst achieved record Q1 2024 sales and earnings, with Firdapse growing 25% year-over-year.
• The company holds approximately $600 million in cash with no debt, positioning it for strategic acquisitions.
• GammaRay’s launch for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy reached $22 million in sales in its first full quarter.
• Catalyst is streamlining diagnostics for cancer-associated LEMS to enhance market penetration.
• The company is actively monitoring potential impacts of executive orders on pricing.

Financial Results

• Q1 2024 Performance:

- Record sales and earnings, with Firdapse exceeding growth forecasts at 25%.

- GammaRay generated $22 million in sales during its first full quarter.

- Fycompa outperformed expectations by $5 million due to favorable wholesaler fee changes.

• Future Royalties:

- Firdapse royalty rates are set to decrease over the next three years: 17% in 2025, 7% in 2026, and 6% in 2027.

• Cash Position:

- Catalyst maintains a strong financial position with nearly $600 million in cash and no debt.

Operational Updates

• Firdapse Market Strategy:

- Focus on differentiating between idiopathic and cancer-related LEMS markets.

- Streamlined VGCC testing for faster diagnosis in oncology settings.

• GammaRay Launch:

- Targeting patients from Emflaza and prednisone markets, with a retention rate of 85%.

• SUMMIT Trial:

- An open-label trial aimed at assessing GammaRay’s long-term benefits, with initial data expected in 2026.

Future Outlook

• Firdapse Growth:

- Catalyst aims for a billion-dollar market opportunity, focusing on both idiopathic and cancer-related LEMS.

• GammaRay Strategy:

- Emphasis on demonstrating long-term benefits in the SUMMIT study to drive earlier adoption.

• Business Development & Acquisitions:

- Actively seeking acquisitions in the rare orphan diseases sector, leveraging its strong financial position.

• Regulatory & Pricing:

- Monitoring potential impacts of executive orders on most favored nations pricing.

Q&A Highlights

• Firdapse Patient Identification:

- Approximately 500 potential LEMS patients identified, with 75% being idiopathic.

• GammaRay Step Edits:

- Most plans require a step through one generic.

• Impact of Gene Therapy:

- Limited data on gene therapy’s impact on the steroid market.

• Government Exposure:

- Firdapse has 40% Medicare exposure, while GammaRay has 55-56% Medicaid exposure.

In conclusion, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals remains optimistic about its growth trajectory and strategic initiatives. For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - Bank of America 2025 Healthcare Conference:

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Here with our next company presenter at the BofA Annual Healthcare Conference. I’m pleased to be introducing our next company presenter Catalyst Pharmaceuticals and Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer and Steve Miller, COO and CSO. My name is Jason Gerberry. I cover SpitCat Biotech and Specialty Pharma at BofA. And so Catalyst, a commercial stage rare orphan focused company in growth mode and has a sort of a license and acquisition model.

So we can kind of jump into the discussion of the existing assets and, you know, where you’re headed in terms of ramping and where those products can take you and what the future looks like in terms of strategy and capital deployment as well. So maybe Richard coming out of 1Q, I don’t know if there’s any kind of high points you’d want to flag as it pertains to where the company’s come. You’ve been with the company a little over a year now, right? And kind of where you see the company having come in that timeframe and where you see it evolving to?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Well, yeah, thank you Jason for having us here. We really appreciate it. So we had a really successful quarter building on a very successful year in 2024, record sales, record earnings. Firdapse did a phenomenal job in the quarter. We had our that’s for Lambert Eaton myasthenic syndrome.

And then we had GammaRefer Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which is first full first quarter on the market with 22,000,000 in sales. So it continues to source patients from the entire market, the generic market and the branded market. And then Fycompa, which actually is an epilepsy product will go generic actually could see generic incursion as early as next week, the end of next week, actually had a very, very strong quarter. So the things that I think were most interesting about the quarter was Firdapse grew 25% over first quarter last year. We forecasted about a 15% to 20% growth, but the 25% growth was not actually that surprising.

What we saw in the first quarter of last year was the change health issue, and that actually depressed sales a little bit. But when you back out the issue of change health, we saw about a 15 to 20% growth quarter over quarter, which is what we expected. We had about $1,200,000 in sales last year for Agamry. We launched March 13 and we see $22,000,000 this year, which there’s a little bit of seasonality around the first quarter. So we had a little bit of an increase over fourth quarter.

So good performance on the product. And we do see a little bit of what we call a 11 is queuing. So as patients get ready for eleven is they don’t want to switch their steroid, but we are seeing good switching of steroids, as I said. So we are seeing some delay in the switching. But we did, we are seeing, as Jeff mentioned, Jeff Del Carmen, our Chief Commercial Officer mentioned on our call, we are seeing some pretty good performance in April.

So we’re seeing some really solid performance. And then the most surprising thing actually was the performance of Fycompa. The prescriptions for Fycompa are right on trend, it’s growing about one or 2%. So it’s not a prescription issue. The product overperformed by about $5,000,000 but that’s actually because the wholesalers changed their fees and we got a favorable fee structure from the wholesalers.

So not an enduring thing. So we just see the product continues to perform very, very well.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay. So, you know, Firdapse and GammaRear are sort of your growth anchors. Looking forward for Fycompa, we’ll have some natural erosion as you mentioned with the generics. So we’ll focus on Fird apps and Agamry. Guess interestingly with Fird apps, as you said, kind of this mid teens growth that you’re achieving.

Product’s been on the market for a decent amount of time, of $300,000,000 in sales. You’ve talked about this being a billion dollar market opportunity. I’m wondering if you could sort of frame where we’re at in terms of the life cycle of this product? A lot of rare orphan drugs do take time to patient find to build these markets. Oftentimes we see a lot of rare orphan drugs eventually get to 50% to sixty percent penetration rates.

So do you feel like the patients are out there, they’re diagnosed or there needs to be more effort to get more patients into the treatment pool? What are some of the battles and some of the key levers that’ll make this truly a billion dollar market opportunity to keep that mid teens growth sustainable?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Great question. So think of it as two separate markets. Think of it as one molecule but two different brands. So there’s an idiopathic or non cancer side, and then there’s the cancer side. A lot of our focus in the first six years was on the idiopathic side.

You have to find these patients as a prospecting market. You look for the patient, you build that patient. The average physician sees one patient in their entire career. So there’s a lot of education that has to happen. The treatment journey is six years from first symptom to the actual getting on Firdapse.

The cancer side of the business is quite different. It’s highly concentrated. And we went back and restructured our thinking about how to approach this market over the last eighteen months and looked at it and said, hey, if we focus as two different brands, same molecule, two different brands and approach the market in unique ways, these two markets unique ways, and what we saw was testing. So VGCC testing is available, but it was very difficult. And so now we have frictionless testing.

We went out and contracted with the national lab. Prior to that, that contracting, a patient would have to leave the office, get the test, and maybe a month or six weeks later, the test would come back. Now the patient gets the test in the office and the test comes back in the oncology office before they come back for the next oncology treatment. So we’re looking at this as a way to actually accelerate growth in the oncology space because instead of just one patient in their entire career, the oncologist sees multiple patients because it’s associated with small cell lung cancer. About three percent of small cell lung cancer patients are diagnosed with LEMS.

That’s nine hundred patients per year. So we see this as a great opportunity if we can make it frictionless testing and we can supply the drug through the office, through the pharmacy in the office. So that’s really what our accelerator is for that. And so we see this fifteen to twenty percent growth. So getting to the billion dollars, we think we could do it on both sides of the business for LEMS.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: So what does that look like on the idiopathic side? Does that look like those doctors who see one patient in their life now start to see two and that more patients maybe kind of funnel in, maybe patients incorrectly diagnosed with that myasthenia gravis, for example. And that might constitute, you know, half of your incremental growth to that billion dollar target and the other half may come from the cancer LEMS side.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: So we think we can accelerate the growth on the cancer side. We also think we can use the myasthenia gravis opportunity. There’s a lot of attention on myasthenia gravis. As more patients get diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, more patients will be misdiagnosed with myasthenia gravis. They will fail myasthenia gravis therapy and then move on to the next therapy, which eventually they’ll get to, we think Firdapse.

But we can always also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to seek those patients out and get them on. So we’re really looking at those opportunities as well to shorten the patient journey and bring that. So we’re really focused on both sides of the business to do that, to accelerate it.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay, share of growth is maybe split between the two opportunities. Is that a fair way to summarize it?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Okay.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: So let’s see. So is there a meaningful difference in say the cancer LEMS versus the idiopathic? Would imagine there is in terms of the duration of treatment with IDIO. Imagine you may get a patient for life whereas with cancer LEMS you get a patient that is more of an incidence based market.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: It is. You do get a patient for life. This is a highly symptomatic, if I can say that highly symptomatic condition. The persistence of a patient to stay on therapy, we have about ninety percent of the patients get on the drug, they stay on the drug if you’re idiopathic. So you’re going to have that patient on for a long time.

On the cancer side of the business, a patient with small cell lung cancer on average lives between seven and nine months. A patient with small cell lung cancer associated with LEMS lives seventeen months. Nobody knows why. It’s not understood. But they live twice as long.

And the physicians that we’ve encountered as we’ve restructured this market and our understanding of the they just assume that the patient’s not gonna live that long. But when we say to them, when we talk to them about how long they’re gonna live, they say, well, I have to think about that patient differently. I have to think about, well, I need to think about their quality of life. So yes, so we can see this opportunity and then, you know, you have these nine hundred patients entering the market every year, these two segments of the market are the same size, higher turnover, if you will, because the patients don’t live as long on the cancer side, but you can expect that they’ll, it’s just a more of a churn in the marketplace.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: You said roughly eighteen months for the cancer labs?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Seventeen to eighteen months, yeah. If you have cancer associated labs, yeah. Okay,

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: and then thinking about the time to getting maybe to grow this to a billion dollar marketing, if you continue this kind of mid teens growth over eight or nine year period, you could get there. But do you see kind of eventually as you get to bigger numbers, maybe a growth slowdown and with the IP settlements to 2,035, that may play a key role in just giving you a longer runway to get to that number?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: So getting, so being alone in the marketplace, so we still have two other litigants in play and we’re working, obviously we want to settle those cases as well. But when you take TEFA out of the mix, which is what we did in January, that’s a really, I think a good signal here. But it is, Jason, what you’re, I think you’re referring to is the law of decreasing increases over time. We have a bigger base and you would expect as growth, as you have a bigger base, your growth is going to slow, but you have a bigger base. And so right now to continue to experience 15%, twenty % growth every quarter over the years previous quarter on a bigger base, that’s pretty impressive.

And so we can see that continuing, but yes, I would expect it to slow, but on a much bigger base.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Yeah. Okay. And so you have this current like queue of patients that you guys have characterized as 500 or so patients that you’ve identified, they’re not on treatment. Can you just remind us where are those patients at in terms of their diagnostic workup and identification and probability of getting treated? And my understanding is I think they’re more heavily skewed to IDEO, right?

And so the cancer LEMS rollout story sounds like more of a 2026 plus opportunity. Great point.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: So we have, you mentioned, about 500 patients, at least five hundred patients in the pool of patients we have identified that may have LEMS. About seventy five percent of those patients we think are idiopathic. So fifty percent of our patients in any given quarter, in any given year come from this pool of patients. So we’ve done a really good job of identifying who these patients are and helping the physician better identify the patient and get the patient on therapy. We then even further delineate those patients into higher likelihood patients by working with the physician.

Again, we don’t know the name of the patient. We just can see some market data and some prescription data based on myasthenia gravis and other therapies that that patient might be on or other treatment modalities and so we work with the physician to say, have you considered or you know, some educational materials again because a physician only sees one patient in their career. It’s a lot of education that has to happen. So we further delineate those patients into higher likelihood patients usually 50 to 70 five patients and we work with those physicians more closely to bring in those patients and get them on therapy.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay. Maybe for Steve, just the litigation, I think you guys have an estimate 4Q or 1Q twenty twenty six for when the Firdapse litigation with the other two challengers could make it to litigation, just a status update there.

Steve Miller, COO and CSO, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Yeah. So far, the judge has not actually scheduled the trial for this case. The dates you gave are actually the latest that we would expect it to happen because the stay ends in May of twenty twenty six, and the judge is going to try to make sure that this case is is is resolved one way or the other by May of twenty twenty six, which means trial has to be toward the end of the year or beginning of next year.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay.

Steve Miller, COO and CSO, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: And I’ll point out also that we have settled with two of the litigants. We do have conversations with the others from time to time. And certainly if they have something that’s of value to the shareholders, we’re going to act on it.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay. Maybe shifting to a GammaRay and know off to a good launch. Maybe just talk about, I mean the closest launch comp that we can look to is PTCs and FLASSA.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Yes.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: And so how you think you know early trajectory compares there, you’re sourcing, where you’re sourcing your patients from, how maybe that compares. Imagine when Flaza launched the only source of patients could have been prednisone.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Correct.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Right. So it’s probably a higher percentage wise, but has anything surprised you so far in terms of the early launch and how maybe you’re looking at yourself relative to sort of the early Emflaza performance in the market? Sure.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: So I guess the most surprising thing in the launch is that when we launched, we expected we would source from Emflaza almost exclusively. And then we actually had an early enrollment program. We got approved in October. We started enrolling patients early before the launch in December. And so we watched them through the launch in March and we were sourcing patients 50%, roughly 45% from Emflaza in this early enrollment program.

Patients were signing up before they could actually get the drug, forty five percent from Emflaza, forty five percent from prednisone. So now you’re saying to yourself, we’re participating in a % of the market, which is tremendous. So the first big surprise is that this continues to today, which we think is amazing. And realize that there’s a generic Emflaza on the market. There’s more than one generic Emflaza on the market and we’re still sourcing from both parts of the market.

And we don’t see a significant incursion of generic and flaza in the market, which is the second big surprise. But when you think about the support services that a company like ours provides the patients, probably not that big a surprise. The patients get a lot of support and the average patient pays less than $2 for it. And when you think about the first tier copay for a generic without support, it’s gonna be higher than that. So we’re really pleased with the performance of the product and the patients obviously, and their retention rate is in the eighty five percent rate as So we’re really pleased with all of that performance.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: And so when you launched, there was obviously at the time or when you got the asset, the Flossa generics hadn’t been commercially available. Now they are commercially available. And so one of the questions around payer access and step edits, would you have to step through one or two generics? And I believe you’re at one generic step through, right, for most plans?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: So we, right now, every patient, you can think about it, that they’ve either been on a generic prednisone or a branded Emflaza. So logically, if a patient has been on those, a plan’s not going to make them go back and step through a generic if they want to try a gamma ray because they’ve already been

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: on Inflavon. So is the criteria then typically a lifetime, have you ever been on a generic thus if you have and you check that box, then you can get a gamma ray.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Great, great point. I think over time as newer patients enter the market, it’s about eleven thousand to thirteen thousand patients in the market. You can expect about seven hundred to eight hundred patients enter the market each year. Those patients have never been on a generic Imflaza or generic prednisone. You can expect those patients to do a step through.

That’s a reasonable assumption. I think.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Yeah, but do know at the moment? Are the new starts stepping through or are they forced to step through or not?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: I think the, not forced to step through, I think the physicians are with the younger patients. Our average patient’s 12 years old. So I think the younger patients typically are getting a generic prednisone. We’re not moving in, we haven’t moved into that part of the market. We want to move into that part of the market.

So that’s for us a longer term play.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Yeah. And what drives that? Is it things like the Ascent or the, I’m sorry, the Summit trial?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: I think what drives our movement to the other part?

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Yeah, because it would seem like, you know, for long term growth and, you know, getting patients who are on therapy for a long period of time, getting earlier is better.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Yeah. And I think it’s mostly habit where the physicians are there to speak to one issue. I think proving that the patients will have better behavior, will have better stature, better bone health, and less cataracts and maybe better cardiovascular health, which is the purpose, the fivefold purpose of SUMMIT study, that I think will bear itself out over time. So I think physicians are gonna wait for that. But the reason why the twelve year olds really, a 12 year old is average is because those patients I think are really frustrated.

Everybody should be on a steroid. Ninety five percent of patients in the DMD market have been on a steroid, but only seventy percent are currently on a steroid. That gap speaks to the frustration. So they’re saying, I want something. And those people who’ve been on a steroid for a long time are the ones we’re It’s a frustration issue.

So we’re addressing that right now. We’ll work our way back into the earlier patients over time.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay. You mentioned a potential queuing effect dynamic coming into the start of the year and you had the unfortunate patient death on gene How has that affected gene therapy adoption and the dynamic with, you know, steroid switching?

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: So we really, there’s not a lot of data available in the steroid market because we all have our own specialty pharmacies. There’s not a lot of data available on the gene therapy side of it. So we really can’t see that. But what we can see is there are 100 centers of excellence in the marketplace for DMD, and there’s a lot of unique protocols that are out there. And so we’re seeing the response to the unfortunate incident in the marketplace and the death of the patient.

We’re seeing unique responses throughout these hundred centers. So it’s hard to categorize universally what’s happening. Each of the centers has their own, not each of them, but there are several protocols that are out there, each of the centers is responding in their own way. So we’re responding to the centers as it goes forward. And we’re seeing, Jeff said on the call last Thursday, we’re seeing solid uptake into April.

So we’re excited about that.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay. And maybe for Steve, just thinking about Summit and how important that ultimately will be to the use case for GammaRay and talk about the cadence of data generation that’ll come out of this and when investors will get a lot of sight on new data sets that are generated and what are the important objectives here to inform clinicians?

Steve Miller, COO and CSO, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Well, I’ll start with the important objectives. The important objectives are to get additional safety information out to the treating physicians so that they know what the advantages of a gamma ray are relative to other potential therapies for patients. And we’re looking at cardiovascular safety, bone health, stature, aggression, and other psychological changes, as well as just a number of other clinical characteristics of these patients. Now, regard to the cadence of the data, it is an open label study. We have visibility to the data.

It is a trial that’s what’s called a natural history controlled trial as well. And so we will as because we have access to the data, we will periodically put data in the public domain approximately about once a year. But remember, it’s still recruiting now. So I would anticipate that the first data probably would be sometime in 2026. That would be data with descriptive statistics that would be released to conferences and things like that and perhaps published as well.

The comparisons against natural history will be done only when we think that there’s a significant increase in a particular endpoint that we’re watching, because every time you do that comparison, you spend a little bit of alpha and decrease your chance of achieving statistical significance. But the important takeaway from doing that analysis is when you do that natural history comparison, is of sufficient control to submit to the FDA to request changes to our insert sheet and get important safety information put onto the insert sheet for the product.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay. Maybe just a P and L question. When you look at consensus gross margins, I think they may be going down, but you lose the royalty to BioMarin, I believe soon. And that’s pretty material on your biggest product. So I was wondering if you have any commentary on I do, yeah.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: So this is actually public knowledge and I’m not sure it’s well understood. The puts and takes on the royalties are quite complex, but I just want to really simplify it. So our royalties on, and this is in our queue, and I think Steve, I think it’s footnote thirteen, twelve and thirteen, I think it’s a combination. So I just wanna be really clear. So to simplify it, in 2025, our royalty on Firdapse is 17%, In ’twenty six, it goes to 7% and in ’7, it goes to 6%.

It’s very complicated. You can look at it, but when you do the math, that’s the math. And I don’t think that’s well understood. And that’s significant. I mean, that’s, you know, this is our biggest product.

It’s, you know, we’re forecasting a $3.53 $60,000,000 this year. And we look at that kind of a change in our royalty rate, you know, we want to just be really clear about what we’re seeing in the coming years. And we’re really excited about that part of it. So that’s meaningful for us, obviously for any company.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Yeah, okay. Maybe just, I realize it’s difficult to answer questions around the recent executive order pertaining to most favored nations. And I guess like one way that investors are just looking at companies with high sales in US and high government exposure in the absence of certainty as to exactly where it may pertain. So I guess how would you kind of educate investors in terms of your I believe you got more higher Medicaid exposure on a Gamma Ray versus high Medicare exposure on Firdapse. Just dimensionalizing that and you know, I guess the dynamics with OUS reference pricing points in OECD countries.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Sure. So in the absence of information, reading the EO, it’s hard to say what’s actually gonna happen, but just to look at it, our exposure on Medicare Firdapse is about 40%. Our exposure on Medicaid for a GammaRay is about 55, 50 six percent. And then you look at the external pricing, and again, this is a weight based pricing, you have to take this all into account. The price in Germany is about €53,000 and then the pricing in The UK is about a little over £100,000.

But again, it’s all weight based, you have to be thinking about that. So the question is, how can the government, how will the government, what are the rules around this? And we don’t know. So we’re not sure how it’s to be rolled out. So is it going to be based on IRA?

We wouldn’t be subject to IRA. Is it going be based on Part B? We don’t have any Part B medications. And if you go deeper than that, then you’re really talking about things that would probably require legislation and is there a significant enough momentum in Congress to actually pass legislation. So, I think there are so many questions at this point in time.

And I think the markets responded to that, to that uncertainty on Monday, you know, in a positive way, you know. Are

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: there you outlined, I think the delta, is it a delta U. S. Versus that 50 to 100? It is.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: The price for Emflaza as an example is about $200,000 Our price is about $200,000 in The U. S. On an annual basis for a GammaRay.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: And the German price point of 50 is subject to renegotiation, right? It’s not

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: like a That’s the first year price,

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: correct.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: So that would be subject

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: to renegotiation. So you control pricing of that? We do not. Okay. All right.

And then maybe just thinking about BD in the last two minutes here. I know it’s been historically something that the company has done a deal maybe once every couple of years, right? Again, maybe in the last one, do you feel like the company is at a position to take on another asset bringing in? Absolutely.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Yes, absolutely. The nature of orphan and rare conditions is the, there’s two elements to it. What faces the customer? And those are typically very focused organizations. You can see our GammaRay team is 12 that faces the customer with a very small MSL team and our Firdapse team is 16.

And then we have an oncology team that’s even smaller than that, that faces the GPOs. And then what’s behind that and supports the patient getting on the drug, staying on the drug and getting on the appropriate dose can be applied to any condition or any therapy that’s in the specialty pharmacy and all that. And that’s applicable across the board and scale is easily scalable as is the sales organization. So can we take it on? Absolutely, we are ready to go.

Do you feel like a

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: lot of what’s going on in the macro will be presaged like a consolidating environment? There’s a lot of biotech companies out there, right? That it’s the challenge to subsist on a standalone basis in capital intensive spaces and rates aren’t dropping

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: like a rock either. If you were a company that is a commercial excellence organization, you had no debt and almost $600,000,000 in cash, this is a great buying environment and that is Catalyst. So I think this is a great buying environment. So we’re really excited. I mean, it’s unfortunate for companies that are not like Catalyst, but I think we’re in a great position to be purchasing assets and executing on those purchases.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: In terms of like confidence in getting something done this year, I mean, do you feel like all of the assets that maybe you’re looking at, there’s always a question of are sellers willing to sell, especially in these periods of macro uncertainty or is there a weighted out mentality and we feel like we’re being unfairly valued maybe because of what’s going on in the market, which will pass. And so that maybe becomes a difficult environment for the bid ask dynamic.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: I think when we talk to companies, they want, it’s almost like it’s their child. They want what’s best for the asset and they look at what opportunities they have to bring it to market and they look at the opportunities that we have to bring it to market and they look at the success we’ve had and the conversations we have is they think we can do a great job for their product. It’s not a question of, hey, you know, we want to give this product away. So they look at that opportunity as we do what’s best for the product.

Jason Gerberry, Analyst, BofA: Okay, well we’re out of time. So gentlemen, thank you much for joining. Thank you.

Richard Ailey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst Pharmaceuticals: Thanks, great

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