Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Our first question will come from Alan Carr with Needham.
Alan Carr – Needham
Could you clarify a bit your financial guidance for ’08? You said that your expenses for this year, you ended with 110, but I was wondering if your guidance for this year includes an assumption for partnerships.
Jack Lief
So the guidance for this year, what Robert said, was that we will wait till our next quarterly conference call which is expected to be next month, and the reason for that, of course, is in a couple of weeks, we are going to be announcing the BLOOM data, and if the BLOOM data is as positive as I think it will be, we will have a different guidance than if the BLOOM data were negative, and I think it’s pretty mature since we are only a few weeks away from that event. Robert, do you have anything to add to that?
Robert Hoffman
Only that the guidance I did give was for 2009, the external expenses including lorcaserin was $50 to $60 million.
Alan Carr – Needham & Company
Can you give us an update on the abuse potential study for lorcaserin as to where that stands and can you tells us a bit how that one is designed?
William Shanahan
We are doing two studies. One in rats and then one in humans, and both of those are ongoing, and basically with the human study, we look at some other drugs and see in in experienced drug users if there is any preference for our drug versus known scheduled drugs, so it’s actually a 7-period crossover study, so we are looking at several doses of our drug and some competitor drugs, potential comparators.
Alan Carr – Needham & Company
Is the outcome here whether or not they like the drugs, some sort of likeability type response from the subjects? How does that work?
William Shanahan
Yes. It is. It is basically a likeability to see if there is anything there that would make the drug to have abuse potential.
Jack Lief
This is a standard test that, as far as I know, all centrally acting drugs need to do prior to FDA approval, so we are not doing anything different than you would normally expect other drugs to be involved with.
Alan Carr – Needham & Company
Have disclosed the doses that you are evaluating in the trial?
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