GILD
#Hi <UNK>.
Yes so Japan is an exciting opportunity for us, and as you may know, it's the first product we have launched in Japan.
So on the back of this, we are actually establishing or have established our Japanese entity and we hope that that entity will be a platform in the future for us to launch a whole series of future products, not just in the hepatitis C space.
So it's exciting.
We have launched for Sovaldi for GT 2.
We launched that late in May, the 25th of May, we got pricing agreement and launched.
And it's gotten off to a good start, although it is extremely early days.
There are around 200,000 GT2 patients in Japan who were diagnosed, and as I already mentioned, have really no interferon-free option other than Sovaldi.
So we are very happy to be able to help meet that unmet medical need.
We are working to agree pricing on Harvoni.
We should have that agreed fairly soon, and we are confident that that will be a happy outcome for everyone and we shouldn't have any delays in launch.
There are no statutory discounts on pricing in the first years.
There is a statutory system, and it's typically 2% to 5% discounts every two years or so that we have seen historically.
We would envision that that would happen.
There is also a mechanism whereby you have to forecast your revenues going forward, and there is a system of capping prices based on whether you go through that ceiling that you have self-agreed.
So there are mechanisms, but there is no discounts, per se, on a day-to-day basis and we wouldn't expect any discounts on Sovaldi or Harvoni at least for the first two years.
Well, I think we have to just stand back and look at our product and recognize that there is incredible amount of value and incredible amount of innovation, first of all in Sovaldi, then Harvoni, and then in what we're calling our wave 3 and wave 4 products.
I think it's that innovation that is our negotiation strength really, and I think all payers would like fundamentally to make highly innovative medicines that work incredibly well available to their patients.
And so we have to negotiate and come up with terms that work for both sides.
But we are very optimistic and we work very hard to keep good contacts with the payers across the US to make sure that they're fully aware of what's coming next and making sure that we're all on the same page.
So I think we're quietly confident that we can continue to have strong and good relationships and high levels of access to all of our medicines and especially our next HCV innovation.
That's a good question.
We haven't really given long-term guidance.
I think overall, relative to our launches, we will continue to expand geographically, which will drive some of the costs, and as <UNK> articulated, we are focused a lot on bringing additional patients to care and looking at linking to the care.
I don't see that being major incremental steps up in terms of SG&A.
So there is no significant trend difference in what I'd say, but I am hard pressed to give you too far a look forward without providing additional guidance.
Relative to R&D, I think we have always taken approach that we'll advance things in the clinic as it makes sense, right.
We feel good with the level of spend we have today, but we are very optimistic about our pipeline.
So you could see absolute dollars go up.
Where that falls relative to percentage of revenue is something that will be to be determined as we provide guidance in 2016 and beyond.
Sure.
Thank you, Candace.
Thank you for joining us today.
We appreciate your continued interest in Gilead, and the team here looks forward to providing you with updates on future progress.
