Kailera Therapeutics, Inc. Common Stock Bernstein Insights: Healthcare Leaders and Disruptors – 3rd Annual Healthcare Forum
Review the key takeaways and the transcript of this earnings call.
Transcript
Preview the first fifteen paragraphs, organized by speaker.
Fantastic. Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for being here with us today. My name is Courtney Breen. I am the BioPharma analyst here at Bernstein, and I am very, very privileged to have Jamie Coleman here, who is the Chief Commercial Officer at Kailera Therapeutics. Looking forward to a good conversation and getting to dive into some of the fun debates that are happening at the moment. Jamie, to start, maybe it would be useful if you could give a little bit of context on your background.
Yeah. Because I think that's pertinent to the conversation today, but also for those who don't know Kailera particularly well, what is the company, where do the drugs come from, and most importantly, why should a room of investors care about another GLP-1?
Yeah. Hi, everybody. Thanks for being here. As Courtney said, I'm Jamie Coleman, Chief Commercial Officer of Kailera Therapeutics. Kailera is about 2 years old. We're based out of Waltham, Massachusetts. We are advancing four, excuse me, clinical stage GLP-1 based programs. They span single, dual, and triple mechanism, injectable and oral, peptide and small molecule. We licensed the products from Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, which I'm guessing many have heard of at this point, but a major reputable player out of China. This really allows us, we have the ex-China rights to these, and they do all the early development, so it allows us to de-risk our own development and accelerate the innovation. I'll get back to why another GLP-1, but I joined Kailera from Lilly.
My last job at Lilly was as the head of marketing for Zepbound, so I had the privilege of bringing that product to market for Lilly. Before that job, I was leading the U.S. marketing of Trulicity. I kind of jokingly say the day that Ozempic became a weight loss drug overnight. It kind of felt like that inside. I've really been living this market for a long time. I absolutely love this space, and Kailera was just really attractive because the pipeline's exciting, the space is exciting. The investors were really renowned, and then our team of leaders was also very credible. I think why does the world need another GLP-1 is a great question, and I think there's so many ways we could take that. One is because there's just so many unmet needs. We've honestly barely gotten started.
There's so many ups and downs and all arounds that have happened over the last couple of years, but nonetheless, no matter how big it seems today, it's really maybe high single digit, low double digit treatment rates. There's tens of millions of people, probably 100 million people in the U.S., and 1 billion around the world that can still benefit. There really are continuing to be a lot of unmet needs. We'll talk about differentiation of our pipeline as we get into the conversation, but I think that's the reason. If you can take something proven, like a GLP-1 based mechanism, and make it better, why would you not?
Absolutely. You're absolutely right. There is so much opportunity, and so much need for these Yeah therapies over the long run.
Certainly the U.S. is at one stage in that Yeah kind of journey, but outside the U.S. is perhaps even, we're at a more nascent Even earlier.
Mm-hmm. kind of market development.
I do want to spend a couple of minutes on your journey here and how that might inform how you might approach this opportunity with Kailera. So back when you were at Lilly, you launched Zepbound into a market at about $1,000 in that environment. Net price has obviously come down materially since then. Kailera will be launching its asset as perhaps a fourth or fifth entrant. The market has evolved already materially. We are talking about a baseline in the range of $250 per month when we think about Medicare and commercial market continues to evolve and become a larger and larger presence. Additionally, Kailera is a biotech. You do not necessarily have the same distribution platforms, the same customer teams that perhaps Novo Nordisk or Lilly have. So how do we think about what does the obesity market look like as you begin to launch your assets?
how can Kailera win in that evolving environment with perhaps a different role that it can play in the market or Yeah a different way of working that it can use to compete?
Yeah. Maybe a quick little history lesson on pricing. You mentioned $1,000, which we all know is not what most people are paying, but that actually was already innovative because we priced it the same as the diabetes.
It was 35% less than Wegovy.
Yes. Lilly was a little bit ahead of the game, at least relative to Novo at that point.
We also launched, and a lot of people don't remember this, but we launched with this uncovered benefit where if you had commercial insurance but you didn't have obesity coverage, you could get it for $550. We actually had a self-pay option from day one. I'll come back to why that's relevant, because then we ran out of supply, which is a whole another issue, obviously. Then the compounding stuff happened. Our own self-pay option with the compounding made us realize, oh, people are willing to pay for this. That wasn't necessarily in the base assumption.
Then we see now Medicare and that. I think what we've seen is that you price molecules in pharma for value.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Continue the full translated transcript in StockNow.
Access every statement, the English original, and speaker-by-speaker history with StockNow Pro.
View the full transcript with ProCall participants
2 people spoke on this call — only 1 are shown here.
PARTICIPANT LIST
View participant details in StockNow.
Log in to see executives and analysts, their roles, and complete speaking history.
Log in to view all participantsKeep exploring