Scpharmaceuticals at Leerink’s Global Healthcare Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Tuesday, 11 March 2025, Scpharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SCPH) presented at the Leerink’s Global Healthcare Conference 2025, outlining its strategic initiatives and growth prospects. Led by CEO John Tucker, the company highlighted its recent FDA approval for a new indication, the expansion of its sales force, and the anticipated benefits from Medicare redesign. While the outlook was optimistic, challenges related to gross-to-net adjustments and the integration of new distribution channels were acknowledged.

Key Takeaways

• Scpharmaceuticals received FDA approval for Pharosix to treat edema caused by chronic kidney disease (CKD), unlocking a significant market of 700,000 patients.
• The company plans to file an NDA for an auto-injector version of Pharosix, expected to reduce costs by 70-75%.
• Expanded sales force and Medicare redesign are anticipated to drive growth, with a projected $36 million in full-year revenue for Pharosix.
• Scpharmaceuticals is focusing on Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs) to improve distribution efficiency and reduce costs.
• The company plans significant capital allocation towards commercial operations, with R&D spending at $2.5 million to $3 million per quarter.

Financial Results

• Full-year revenue for Pharosix is projected at approximately $36 million.
• Units shipped increased by 24% from Q3 to Q4.
• Q4 gross-to-net adjustments were in the 18% to 19% range, with a projection of 25% to 30% in Q1, and an exit target of 35% for the year.
• Medicare patients account for 70% to 75% of the customer base, with coverage split between advantage and strict PDP patients.

Operational Updates

• Scpharmaceuticals expanded its sales force in Q4 to enhance growth in 2025, aiming for a total of 120 to 125 representatives.
• A specialty nephrology sales force of about 30 people will focus on nephrologists.
• Distribution channels have been broadened with additional specialty pharmacies and a focus on IDNs, including relationships with Kaiser, Geisinger, and Cleveland Clinic.
• The company plans to enter the VA system this year.

Future Outlook

• Scpharmaceuticals plans to file an NDA for an auto-injector version of Pharosix mid-year, with a potential launch in the first half of the following year.
• The auto-injector is expected to significantly reduce costs and provide a more convenient administration option.
• The company is exploring further label expansions into liver disease and subcutaneous beta-lactam antibiotics.

Q&A Highlights

• The FDA required separate indications for heart failure and CKD, but a broad label was achieved.
• Nephrologists, who are more comfortable with aggressive dosing, are expected to contribute 35-40% of business.
• Awareness of Pharosix prior to launch was 10% in cardiology and 31% in nephrology.

For further details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Leerink’s Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Thanks for joining us at the Leerink Partners Global Healthcare Conference. My name is Nick Gassik. I’m one of the VPs here in Equity Research. It’s a pleasure to have SC Pharma here with us today. I’m joined by President and CEO of the company, John Tucker.

John, welcome. It’s great to see you.

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Thanks, Nick. Thanks for having us. Absolutely.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: I guess, like, we can kick it off with some bigger picture questions and then maybe dig a bit deeper into the story from there. So I guess for investors who are newer to the name, could you give us a quick overview of the company and highlight some of the differentiating features of your lead product, Pure six?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Yes, sure. So, SC pharma is really focused on driving care from the highest cost setting, which is the hospital with the worst outcomes really to the lowest cost setting of care with preferred outcomes, which is the home. Our lead drug is a drug called Pharosix. It’s a drug device combination that actually takes IV furosemide and we’ve reformulated it, created a patent estate and deliver it subcutaneously by an on body infuser that allows patients to diurese at home as opposed to in the hospital. So patient on oral furosemide will have an episode where they have worsening heart failure, the bioavailability of their oral will go down, they need 100% bioavailable furosemide.

Really in The United States before furosemide, the only place to get that was really in a hospital either be admitted, maybe in an IV lab, but now we can deliver that same level of safety and efficacy at home, in the patient’s home.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Got it. That’s a very helpful overview. I guess like, we’re in 2025 now. I guess, what are some of the top clinical, maybe regulatory, commercial priorities for the year? And what are some of the big catalysts investors should be watching for this year?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Yes. So one of our big ones was actually last Thursday, we announced that we had approval of edema caused by chronic kidney disease. So expanded our label now, we have heart failure, edema from heart failure and edema from chronic kidney disease. As you know, the heart and the kidney work kind of in tandem. So this opens up a whole another book of business for us.

About seven hundred thousand patients have edema from chronic kidney disease that do not have heart failure. So they really haven’t had an option. We’ve had some nephrologists attempt to write it for kidney and it’s off was off label. So we’re really excited about the launch in nephrology, which we will have our launch meeting next month mid April and then be launching to nephrology. So we’ll have cardiology and nephrology call point.

We also expanded our sales force in Q4. And I think we’re starting to see some of the benefits of the expanded sales force, allow us to have higher frequency on some of the bigger heart failure accounts and now heart failure clinic accounts and now into those big nephrology offices as well as continue to service the cardiology population. We also think the Medicare redesign is a tailwind in our back. I know for some companies it’s more of a headwind. For us, having to pay the mandatory rebate though really gives access to more patients that can be affordable.

And if you remember the Medicare redesign really lowered patients out of pocket caps to $2,000 from really was about $4,000 last year. So that really will allow more patients to have access to Pharosix at an affordable co pay. So the expansion of the sales force, the expansion of the label, the Medicare redesign and then another catalyst for us, not commercial this year, will be filing our NDA for our auto injector. So our current product, which I might add is had tremendous response in the field from patients and physicians on how well it’s working, how fast it’s working, and maybe most importantly, how predictable it works. It works every time.

It’s 100% bioavailable furosemide. So we’ve had amazing feedback. But our auto injector, which again, we’ll be hoping to file mid year this year, takes our COGS down by about seventy percent to seventy five percent, but also, probably more importantly, gives patients and physicians another option in treating their worsening heart failure. Very convenient. It’s a two second push.

And again, we hope to have that filed mid this year and on the market first half of next year.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Got it. That’s a solid overview. Lots to look forward to.

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Great answer.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: I want to zero in on heart failure for a second. Maybe could you remind us of some of the key aspects of HERO6 label? What types of patients is it approved in? Who’s the most likely to get the most benefit for HERO6 right now?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: So when we initially received our approval for was for New York Heart Association, Class II and Class III heart failure. So doctors couldn’t write it for Class IV, which tend to be the sicker patients or what the doctors call them frequent flyers that are in and out of the hospital maybe six, eight, 10 times a year. So we launched in Class II and Class III heart failure. We added the expansion to Class IV heart failure in August of last year of twenty twenty four. So actually what happened is by adding Class IV, we took all of the classifications off of the label.

Now it’s indicated for heart failure and for chronic kidney disease. So these Class IV patients, I know you always think of them as these are the patients waiting for heart transplants. Probably half of them are in a position where they’re not really candidates for phorosix, but the other half are. And again, these are patients that could be palliative care patients that are coming into an IV clinic, you know, two or three times a week, or they could be, patients that are kind of considered frequent flyers where they’re being hospitalized every month or every other month. So we launched in class four really in September.

We’ve already seen an impact, not just in how many scripts are being written, the length of the script. These are longer scripts because they’re sicker patients. Again, there’s some palliative care, so you’ll see a doctor write for a month at a time and maybe write 12 units. But it’s also given us access into more of the heart failure clinics where more of these patients are, where when we were we didn’t have that indication, it was really a struggle sometimes to get in and see some of these physicians.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Got it. No, that’s very helpful. I think you pre announced full year revenues, Raffiro six, about $36,000,000 or so. I guess, like looking ahead in 2025, what are some of the key growth drivers for the trajectory from here? And how do you expect the year to shape up?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Yes. We pre announced back in January, we did do a little over $36,000,000 We saw a really nice growth in the second half of the year. Just unit script I mean, units shipped went up 24% from Q3 to Q4. So we’ve continued to see increasing unit ship quarter over quarter. We anticipate seeing that obviously accelerate into this year.

So the key growth drivers, as I spoke about, really having that expanded sales force, we really didn’t feel the benefit of it until probably early this year. But having the expanded sales force, the kidney indication, the Class four all year, and then again, the Medicare redesign, I understand you’re going to take a little GTN hit here because you’re going to have a mandatory rebate. But having all of those Medicare patients with access to affordable co pays for us, and not everyone’s going to look at it the same way, but for us, that’s a giant growth driver for us this year.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: For sure. I want to dig into that Part D update, just from a volume standpoint. But I guess, could you remind us what the current coverage split is for FURO6?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Yes. So about seventy percent to seventy five percent of our patients are Medicare patients. And now within Medicare, that’s split pretty evenly fifty-fifty between advantaged patients and patients in strict PDP. And then the balance of it is split pretty evenly between Medicaid. And with Medicaid, we have coverage in every state with co pays typically at $8 maybe up to $12 and then the other 15% or so in commercial.

In commercial, we’re preferred formulary at United Optum with a $60 co pay and then we can co pay coupon them down to make sure everyone has an affordable co pay. That’s the key thing. If you ever go to any of the RA Capital seminars about no patient left behind, it’s really about making these products affordable to patients. It’s great to have this therapy that keeps them out of the hospital. But if the PBMs and the plans make the co pay so high that it doesn’t allow a patient to access it, it doesn’t make any sense.

So that’s where we are. With Medicare again, this year things have changed. In Q1, everyone still has their deductible, which is $550 Patients had the option this year in Medicare to sign up for something called smoothing, which was taking that total $2,000 out of pocket and really spreading it evenly over twelve months. So $166 co pay each month. Now CMS had estimated that 70% of the patients would sign up for smoothing.

I think this got off to a little bit of a choppy start listening to what CMS is saying, what we’re seeing there haven’t been as many patients as we thought would be on the smoothing. But that’s one of the three components with the smoothing. The bigger component is the $2,000 out of pocket. And these are heart failure patients. Last year, again, was closer to $4,000 There was a hard cap and a soft cap.

That’s all gone with just a $2,000 hard cap now. These patients will get through that heart failure patients probably in April, May timeframe. And then again, it is $0 co pays. And we’ve seen over the course of the two years, for us when that patient co pay goes down to under $100 a month or $100 a script is where our fill rate goes up dramatically. We actually see the doctors kind of follow almost a halo effect of when their patients can get this at an affordable co pay, they tend to write more and more.

So we really think, yes, we’ll take a little hit on the GTN, especially here in the first quarter. But that once these patients get to that out of pocket cap that we’re going to see a big increase, not just in what’s filled, but also what’s written.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Got it. So I guess you expect an uptick in volume around April or May as

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: I think you’ll see an uptick in volume. You got in the first quarter, you got to offset that with the increase in the GTN. But clearly, when the patients get to these lower co pays, we saw it last year with some of these foundations when I know Coca Cola wrote a giant grant to a heart failure foundation, and we saw immediate impact on our business. So we know what happens when co pays go down. We just decided not to play the game with the PBMs of massive, massive discounts when we launched.

We did it a little bit the hard way, but we really think that this redesign really positively impacts us.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: For sure. Maybe on that note, I guess like where’s gross to net at today and where do you see it going over the next year or so?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: So when we pre announced Q4 that we said is in the 18% to 19% range, it’s going up, it has to. So we think this quarter Q1, what kind of guidance we’ve given is 25% to 30%, probably the same for next quarter as the first stage of the initial phase of Medicare is a ten percent rebate. And then it goes to twenty percent when the patient gets to catastrophic, twenty percent for us. And that probably leaves us with a exit GTN of about thirty five percent. So if you kind of smooth the year, we’re thinking around thirty percent for the year.

And again, I’ve looked at other companies that have reported and have said that the redesign is a bit of a headwind for them on a net sales. And it’s true. I saw one company that said their GTN is going up to 75% to 80%. The important thing to keep in mind, most likely that company was paying 55% to be on preferred. So while they’re getting they’re not getting any more access, they’re not getting any more low co pays, they’re just paying the rebate.

We’re not in that position. We’re really adding significantly to the number of patients that can afford a co pay for Pharosix.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Got it. That’s super helpful. And I guess just what have you been hearing from the field in terms of patient out of pocket costs, have these been more manageable lately? What’s the feedback then?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: So it’s been really interesting to watch. And again, on October fifteen of last year, CMS said they’re going to go out and identify these patients that are going to hit their caps. And based on what had happened last year for these patients and then sign them up in the smoothing program to better manage that out of pocket, that $2,000 out of pocket. We have seen some patients when January 1 came about that had smooth. You could tell they had smooth just by if it’s January 2 and someone has a $0 co pay in Medicare, they elected smoothing.

There’s no way they would have gotten to the cap already. But again, not as many patients as I think CMS anticipated had been in there. So we did see, especially in January, a number of large co pays, dollars 2,000 co pays out of pocket. That’s moderated a bit as patients because every time you fill anything, it comes off of that $2,000 cap. So we’re starting to see the co pays go down and see more and more smoothing.

And I think that will continue really as we get as I said with heart failure patients, we anticipate them being through the cap April timeframe. And then that’s when

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: you see the real acceleration of co pays at $0 across the board. For sure. Maybe a good segue. I think you also mentioned that you expanded some of your specialty pharmacy distribution channels recently. I’m curious like what sort of impact is that having on the trajectory so far this year?

How are you thinking about future expansion on that front?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Yes. So we launched initially with two specialty pharmacies. We added a third one that is really focused on Medicaid and one that has courier service actually to the large MSAs in the country. So now a script can come in adjudicated, go out immediately by courier service. We made a brand promise that we were going to meet the patients where they are.

These are heart failure patients, a lot of them don’t drive. Rideshare, kid gives them a ride, public transportation, we said we’re going to have a distribution model that we can get it right to the patient’s home. We know during COVID and immediately post COVID, patients were doing a lot of telemed with doctors. Now the doctors still want to see the patients. They want to put their hands on a heart failure patient.

But really where the brand proposition is, you call that doctor and say, hey, I’m ten pounds over my dry weight, a little short of breath walking up the stairs, my fingers my feet are swollen, okay, double your oral Mrs. Jones right now and I’m ordering for ROCCS it’ll be there tomorrow, it’ll be there the next day. Still want you to come in, but we’re going to put the Pharosix right there. So that you can only do that by really meeting those patients where they are. So that’s why we chose the distribution network.

Now we’ve expanded and have been really focused on growing our IDN presence. And we put a new team out there just really calling on IDNs. And the IDN business is hard. In a lot of ways, it’s slow. It’s like getting a drug on a hospital formulary in the old days going through P and T.

And you have to really work kind of top down and bottom up. You want to engage with the plan administrator, the pharmacist, head of the clinic. But if you don’t have underlying demand, then there’s no reason to do anything with an IDN. We’ve been really driving the underlying demand within these IDNs. But the advantage of the IDN for us, A, it’s a lower distribution cost for us than going through our SP, our specialty pharmacies.

B, it removes friction from the script, from a doctor writing. If it’s in his own pharmacy, it’s in his own EMR or whatever, they can write it much easier. And we also see with this distribution model that we’re seeing more usage kind of post IV. When a patient is hospitalized, they receive two doses and then boy, or two doses of IV, well, we can send them home with phorosix and kind of finish the diuresis job. And you can really it’s hard to do that in a community hospital where there’s a hospitalist and maybe the cardiologist is involved, but they’re just you got to worry about discharge.

With an IDN, that’s so much more seamless. So we’re seeing a big increase in our IDN distribution model and with our IDN sales, and we think that’s going to continue. So we’ll keep with the three SPs. We have direct relationships now with Kaiser, Geisinger, Cygn Cleveland Clinic. And then we’ll be also expanding into the VA this year as well, the direct

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: model. Got it. Maybe just on the ID endpoint, if we could drill deeper a little bit. How do you expect new or I guess maybe the existing ID agreements to sort of drive growth for FURO six in 2025? Is it a meaningful contributor or

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: It’s becoming more and more meaningful every quarter. I think we’ve said it could be 20%, twenty five % of the business. I think it can be significantly higher than that. Now some of it does cannibalize your existing business because as I said, you need underlying demand to really bring the IDNs to the table. But we’re seeing we’re implementing pull through programs every time we have one of these relationships.

Every IDN is different in how much influence they have. Obviously, Kaiser can really push things for you. Other ones are a little bit, hey, we have it, we’ll let the doctors know. But it’s always a good thing for the rep to be able to, when they’re detailing the physician, to say, hey, we’re in your pharmacy, we’re in the IDN, we have you can order this really easy. There’s a kind of a blessing on the therapy, if I will, when you’re actually kind of on contract in the pharmacies, working with the plan.

One thing we’ve spent a lot of time on in the last six to nine months is developing protocols, having them blessed and then being able to send out protocols to new IDNs on what so and so IDN is doing. With Kaiser, we have an initiative they’ve undertaken to do they’re doing actually a study with their home health care nurses. We’ve educated all of them. And when that patient gets home, you want to keep them home from the hospital. How are we going to keep them home?

You can use Ferosix to do that. So we really think all of those things are really what’s going to drive. But it’s not just about getting an IDN contract. It’s really about pulling the product through, using protocols, working with the IDN and the physicians to start establishing protocols, pre admission, post discharge. I’d love one day to be in the ER.

Now it’s difficult, again, in a community hospital ER, patient comes in with worsening heart failure, that ER doc probably doesn’t want to be the last name on that chart, so they path of least resistance is just admit him into the hospital. With an IDN model, you can think of that a little differently. You can give them a dose of Pharosix while they’re in the ER, see how they respond, see if they stabilize, send them home with four or five Pharosix, maybe even eat the cost of that if you want to admit them in the ER, receive the DRG, send them home with Pharosix, Medicare pays for it, great. If they don’t, you still made money. So it’s just a lot of different things you can do within a closed network.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: For sure. Maybe pivoting a little bit to CKD and that approval there, you mentioned you just recently got that. How does this indication expansion fit within your broader vision for 03/2006, just the company overall?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Yes, with the company, we really look at the cardiorenal spaces where we want to be. Again, the heart and the kidney are so intertwined. In fact, with we fought really hard with the FDA on the label for CKD and we ended up with a wonderful label, very expansive, no restrictions. They wanted to kind of separate the indications. And we talked to a lot of nephrologists who had said, I don’t even know sometimes this patient has heart failure or I just know they have fluid overload and I have to deal with it.

So we were able with the FDA to get a broad label, that is for edema caused by kidney disease or cardiovascular or heart failure, including nephrotic syndrome. So we have a really broad label, but it’s part of kind of where we want to be is really in that cardiorenal space. And so that’s really the vision for the company, really looking at kind of innovative patient centric care in the cardiorenal space.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Got it. That’s a helpful overview. I guess, how large of a product do you think FURO6 could be in CKD relative to heart failure? And I guess, where do you see penetration in the CKD shaping up over the next couple of years?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: So it’s interesting. We know that there are nephrologists that are treating heart failure, edema from heart failure with or without CKD. They’re already doing it. They have a relationship with the cardiologist. And you think kind of a rank and file cardiologist, not only talking about heart failure clinics, but rank and file cardiologist sees a lot of different things in a day.

A nephrologist deals with fluid. That’s what they do. So they’re kind of more comfortable even with dosing. They’re much more aggressive on dosing. They what we’ve heard is that they’d use for o six and keep them on their oral and add for o six to it.

They talk a lot about, I got to get this patient dry, I got to get this patient dry, which is a little different than how when you talk to a cardiologist about how they think about it. And if you actually look at the profile of an nephrologist versus a cardiologist, and I’ll take the heart failure specialist out of this for a minute. They’re actually writing more diuretics than even a cardiologist. They use a lot of non loop diuretics like metolizone, which has kind of an interesting safety profile. So we really think we don’t think of it as this much in kidney and this much in heart failure.

We think about this much coming from nephrology and this much coming from cardiology. And it’s about thirty five percent to forty percent coming from nephrology. That was a long answer to your question, but about thirty five percent to forty percent. We know there’s seven hundred thousand patients, as I mentioned before, that have edema, and this is pre dialysis, have edema caused by kidney disease that do not have heart failure at all. So Got it.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: That’s very helpful. I guess like any learnings from the heart failure launch, which you could apply to the CKD launch?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: So many. I mean, so many learnings from it goes all the way from targeting like what’s the best way to target position. This isn’t like your typical oral product where we know how much every doc writes, we know what he writes, we know how to this is creating a market. And what we thought, we just thought, boy, anyone who writes a lot of loop diuretics, that’s our target. That’s it.

That’s how we’re deciling them. Well, that’s not the right way to do it. So there was a lot of trial and error, when we first launched just around targeting a physician. There’s an affiliation with a heart failure clinic. What does that mean?

So we’ve got those learnings around how to target nephrology. I think we’ve also done we did a lot of market research in heart failure. We’ve probably done more, more targeted research because we understand the questions to ask better. I can give you an example on our we did an awareness trial and usage baseline before the cardiology launch. I mean, it’s about 10% awareness of unaided awareness of Pharosix.

It’s thirty one percent in nephrology prior to launch. The hub, we did change out hubs. I think you know that, Nick, remember that was painful. It’s always painful as hell when you change out a hub. Ours was as painful as hell.

We’ve got a better hub. We’ve got a hub that can handle the volume, a hub that can reach patients. You would think a symptomatic patient would pick up a phone call because I’m waiting for this drug, they don’t. They see, again, these are usually elderly patients, see a number they don’t recognize, they don’t pick it up. So texting them, calling them, FedEx a letter to them because it’s getting to that patient.

Now you can educate the physician, make sure the patient knows we’re going to call. So it’s all of these things in the hub, removing the friction, even from if they need any clinical notes, how to set that up. Our new portal is so much easier for doctors to use. So and then it’s just in services, how we used to in service. We’ve now found a way to be way more efficient, which allows us to make more calls, more frequency, more reach.

So I think it’s all of those things that we feel comfortable that we’re going to have a quicker uptake in nephrology than we did in cardiology.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: For sure. You mentioned you expanded the sales force in heart failure last year. I guess, how are you thinking about future expansions around the CKD launch? And how many reps would you add ultimately and where you’re at right now?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Yes. This has evolved a bit, maybe even since we last spoke. We’ve always said we probably need to get to about $125,000,000 1 hundred and 20 million dollars to $125,000,000 is the total number to service both indications. And I think we’ve always been leaning to kind of combine them, so the reps have two call points. We cut territories and it’s pretty clear that these nephrology territories are look very different than a cardiology only territory.

So I think our thinking now is we might actually have a kind of a specialty nephrology sales force that will call on nephrologists of about 30 people. This is we’re still looking at territories, and we’ll continue to expand our key accounts who will call on the IDNs. And they’re not just they’re not national account managers that go in and do a contract. They do that, but they have to pull it through. So they’re working with physicians, they’re coordinating with our reps to pull it through.

But that’s where we think the eventual size will be about 120 to

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: 125 reps. Got it. That’s super helpful. Maybe in the last minute or so, I just wanted to ask, current cash position runway from here? I know you did a big financing last year.

How are you planning to allocate that capital across commercial expansion, the pipeline, the auto injector, etcetera?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Yes. So the vast majority is being spent on commercial. We did the raise, we said, based on our operating plan, this is this will get us to profitability. We’re still saying that this gets us to profitability. Now, the vast majority will be spent commercially.

You’re going to have 100 or so reps out there. That’s going to cost $37,000,000 to $40,000,000 a year. Our R and D, we’re probably looking at $2,500,000 to $3,000,000 a quarter on that. We want to stay opportunistic. We’re looking at we’re bringing on a forty milligram dose.

So we’ll have an eighty milligram in the auto injector, a forty milligram on the auto injector. We’re looking to do a dialer dose where a patient can actually, after the physician’s instructions, could maybe click once, click twice, click three times. This is really about dose flexibility that’s really coming from a nephrologist on dose flexibility. So that’s really it’s going to be more on the commercial, but we’re going to continue to invest in the R and D.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Got it. Maybe just a quick question on the auto injector. When do you expect that to come online?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: We expect to file it mid this year and then have it in the first launch it in the first half of next year.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Got it. Just in the last thirty seconds, I don’t know if the audience had any questions, feel free to jump in. I can keep rolling. I guess beyond heart failure, beyond CKD, what other indications or therapeutic areas are you excited about?

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: We think we can expand the current label into liver disease. And then we still think there’s a market for a subcutaneous beta lactam antibiotic. Ceftriaxone is the most broad spectrum, probably the one that would be best. They come with a lot of challenges from patient reconstitution, which we don’t love, because there’s not really technology to do that. But I think we’d be really starting to look harder at taking that forward.

We’ve done clinical work on that. We’ve met with the FDA a number of times. There’s clearly an unmet need in an IV strength, anti infective broad spectrum with gram negative coverage that would have a big appetite in the market. So I think that’s something that we’re going to continue to try and advance.

Nick Gassik, VP in Equity Research, Leerink Partners: Super interesting. I think we’re all out of time here, but John, always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us.

John Tucker, President and CEO, SC Pharma: Thanks, Nick. Appreciate it.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.