Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions). And our first question comes from the line of Imran Zafar with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.
Imran Zafar – Deutsche Bank
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to focus my first couple questions on commercialization. With the U.S. and EU data expected around yearend, I wanted to ask about your latest thinking in terms of sales and marketing. When do you start hiring sales reps? What size of sales force are you thinking about at this point? And then on the pricing side, you could have a product approved in the next few months in Canada. What's your latest thinking with the pricing? Thanks.
Sam Lynch
Okay, I will start and then Steve, I will also ask you to comment on those as well. I think, Imran, at this point, we really haven't changed essentially our thought process on any of those three issues, i.e. timing of hiring a sales force, the size and structure of the sales force or the pricing. Regarding the timing, I think we have been saying and I think our thoughts are continuing to be that we would start potentially hiring sales management later this year. Should we get approval in Canada over the next few months, we have a distributor already in place there. We might need to hire one or two people to help manage that relationship, but for terms of the U.S, we would expect obviously to wait until after we see the data of course before we would hire any of the key sales management there. And then we would obviously build that sales force out over the course of next year primarily.
In terms of the size of the U.S. sales force, we are continuing to look at that, but what we said so far is that, that will be a hybrid sales force with somewhere around 15 or so direct BMTI employees as sales management and product specialists, supplemented with roughly 75 or so independent reps. That's our current thinking at least and Steve may provide additional color on that.
And then pricing wise, again, we continue to look at that. We think it's still a little premature to set any pricing at this point. Understand your comment is very accurate, Imran, in that, should we get approval here shortly in Canada, we will have to set that price fairly soon. But I don't think we're prepared to comment yet on that this morning beyond what we've always said, which is we look at this marketplace as on the top end of the pricing we have products such as InFuse and OP-1 roughly $4500 or so an application.
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