Dr. Craig Granowitz
Thank you, Jeff. Heart failure is a multi-billion dollar market that is poised for substantial growth. Along with the increasing disease prevalence, this anticipated growth is being driven by new guideline recently issued by major cardiovascular societies in the United States and Europe, recommending the use of SGLT inhibitors as a pillar of care for treating heart failure. In addition, just last week, ACC issued a new document in the April addition of JAK entitled 2023 ACC Expert Consensus Decision Pathway on the management of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. The consensus recommended that SGLT inhibitors should be initiated in all individuals with HFpEF lacking contraindications. Consider together with the previous consensus guidelines, the SGLT class is the only medical therapy recommended in all HF patients regardless of ejection fraction. It is also important to note that, the SOLOIST Worsening Heart Failure study of sotagliflozin in recently hospitalized patients resulted in significantly lower total number of deaths from cardiovascular causes and hospitalizations, and urgent visits for heart failure than placebo regardless of left ventricular ejection fraction. Currently, of those $1.3 million hospitalizations a year, due to heart failure, data suggests that fewer than 10% of these patients are currently discharged with a prescription for an SGLT inhibitor. This provides an exceptional opportunity for sotagliflozin given its unique data showing its significant impact on that transition of care patient population. Turning to the next slide. As you can see, this group of patients from the SOLOIST trial while improving in their clinical journey remains at risk for future heart failure events as Jeff has noted in prior slides. As a reminder, the SOLOIST trial enrolled approximately 1,200 patients who had been hospitalized for heart failure and were transitioning out of the hospital. Double-blind randomized treatment began either in the hospital or within three days following their discharge. They were approximately 50% of patients in each of those two categories. As you can see in this slide and as a reminder, the primary endpoint of the trial was achieved with a statistically significant and clinically meaningful reduction of 33% in the composite total cardiovascular death, hospitalization for heart failure, and urgent heart failure visits with the need to treat only four patients for one year to avoid one endpoint event, a finding which is unsurpassed within the SGLT inhibitor class. The objective of the post hoc analysis presented by Dr. Bert Pitt at last year's American Heart Association Scientific Sessions was to evaluate the efficacy of sotagliflozin versus placebo at reducing hospital readmissions and mortality within 30 and 90 days after discharge from a heart failure hospitalization among the patients who began study treatment on or before the date of discharge. As a reminder, there were no differences between these two groups of patients for baseline characteristics or the primary endpoint. Presented here are the results for cardiovascular death and heart failure related events for 30 and 90 days post-discharge. You can see the sotagliflozin arm in blue begins to separate from placebo arm in red very early on and showed the treatment with sotagliflozin resulted in a statistically relative risk reduction versus placebo of approximately 50% for readmission, for non-fatal heart failure events, and for the composite of cardiovascular death and readmission for heart failure at both 30 and 90 days following hospital discharge. These findings are unique. They also underscore the benefit of early initiation of evidence-based heart failure therapy. Sotagliflozin is the first compound to demonstrate a reduction on both mortality and heart failure events for a treatment initiated during a heart failure hospitalization. Finally, we wanted to highlight key data just presented at the American College of Cardiology 72nd annual scientific session held in March of 2023 on the time to clinical benefit of sotagliflozin, which has also been published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, shortly thereafter. The study authors concluded that treatment with sotagliflozin led to a statistically significant reduction in the risk of the primary outcome by day 27 post randomization. These results were consistent across the left ventricular ejection fraction range, a finding that aligns with the recent ACC consensus statement that was just recently referenced. We believe that these data support and further extend the 30-day reduction in readmission results for sotagliflozin presented at the 2022 AHA meeting. That treatment with sotagliflozin results in an early and significant reduction in heart failure events in cardiovascular death, in the high cost, high risk, recently hospitalized patient with worsening heart failure. I'll now turn the call back over to Jeff to share more about our commercial launch preparations.