Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question is from the line of Jim Birchenough.
Jim Birchenough – Barclays Capital
Hi, guys, congratulations on the label expansion.
Louis Lange
Thank you.
Jim Birchenough – Barclays Capital
So, just a few questions. Number one, just wondering how you're going to position Ranexa with the new label? Are you going after the nitrate switch business or going after new patients? Just trying to understand that. And secondarily, in terms of the opportunity that you talked about just wondering if you could discuss the different options you have in terms of going it alone, expanding the contract sales force or partnering and what you think is really going to be the best way to maximize shareholder value?
Louis Lange
Great questions. So in terms of positioning, as you know, angina is a highly symptomatic disease, and so, we know, for example, when physicians use long-acting nitrates that they're seeing a lot of angina patients whether they're primary care docs or cardiologists, because essentially that all they're used for. So we will be targeting nitrates because we've got a far, far superior drug and just in the ED category alone, this is terrific. But, as you know, most angina patients are on two drugs or three drugs and really with the bradycardia reduction that we have, we have a club to be calcium channel blockers with, a big club, and we no longer contraindicated with diltiazem and verapamil, so that's going to be a direct target. And beta blockers is interesting. Of course, as people have said before, anyone see reductions are smaller than you see with other drugs, but the baseline is also smaller. The fact that beta blockers raise LDL and they raise A1c. So for diabetics, which is a third of the population, we have a club to hit beta blockers with. So depending on what the physician wants to get into, and what patients are on, we can actually go after all three categories. Remember, these are really old drugs. Most of them have never been studied over standard of care. We have a modern outcome study that nitrates lack and calcium channel blockers lack.
So, given our market share less than 1%, we feel very good about the growth here. And, we have been very, very cautious of not going off label, so we've carefully trained our sales reps, they've been very compliant, we basically have been promoting a QT prolonging drug. That's gone. We have never been able to say the things that we knew we're in the data. We can now say them. And we can now hand out the MERLIN papers. We can hand out other papers as they become available. And this will be just terrific education opportunity for us.
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