Video Transcript
You know, you and I can eat tons of phosphorus rich foods, and our body has a way of eliminating potentially dangerous high levels of phosphorus. And it doesn’t happen for you or I, but for dialysis patients who, who have essentially zero kidney function, when they eat food, the phosphorus has to go somewhere. It’s not going out in the urine because these patients are not urinating and it builds up in their blood and slowly kills ‘em.
The, the realization for me, coming to Unicycive was that there are a lot of patients for whom the market leading product Renvela wasn’t working for them. And the reason that it wasn’t working is because patients have to take this huge amount of pills. I’ve got a pill bottle here. I can show you in my hands how many pills patients take a day.
This is one of the challenging things here because a lot of the symptoms are silent. You know, people call Hyperphosphatemia silent killer, and the reason it’s silent is because you can’t feel the increase of phosphorus in your blood necessarily. Now, when phosphorus gets really, really high, patients report an itching sensation, and it could be rather severe form of itching, but most patients don’t get to that level. So you could say, well, oh, you know, non-compliance for pills, maybe that’s not a big deal. But in this case, it’s a super big deal because if you fail to achieve target phosphorus goals, then then your health suffers as a result of that.
What lantam carbonate does through a, a patented proprietary nanoparticle technology is, is be able to shrink the size of these pills because of the potency of the, of the parent drug. In our, in our product. At the end of the day, what it results in is a dramatic reduction in the pill burden that patients experience. And, as I said, these are pills that take for every meal for the rest of their lives.
If you look at the percentage of patients who, you know, across the range of US dialysis patients who are achieving targeted serum phosphorus levels, full, 75% of patients aren’t achieving the, the rate that they should. And by not hitting those targets, they’re exposing themselves to higher risk of mortality.
So this connection to patient outcomes in terms of death and hospitalization, non-compliance and pill burden becomes a really important continuum. And I think it’s easy to get lost in the idea of a lower pill burden seems like a trivial thing in this case. It’s anything but that.
So why don’t patients take the drugs that they’re prescribed? I think it’s both frustration, a degree of shame, and then probably some denial. Because I’m sure that doctors ask patient all the time, “your phosphorus is high, are you taking your phosphate binders?” And they say, “yes, I’m taking my phosphate binders.” But obviously they’re not, or they’re not taking all of their prescription.
In a sense, if the tools that we’re offering to patients to control their hyperphosphatemia are inconvenient or cause side effects or all these different things, maybe thebest approach isn’t to scold the patient for coming in and getting a blood test where they’re shown to be hyperphosphatemia and probably not complying with their phosphate binders. But maybe a better thing to do is offer them a phosphate binder they actually take.