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United Therapeutics Corp (UTHR -0.30%)
Q3Â 2018 Earnings Conference Call
Oct. 31, 2018, 9:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good morning and welcome to the United Therapeutics Corporation Third Quarter 2018 Earnings Call. My name is Shelby and I will be your conference operator today. All participants are in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session portion of this earnings call. (Operator Instructions)
I will now turn the conference call over to James Edgemond, Chief Financial Officer of United Therapeutics. Sir, you may begin.
James Edgemond -- Chief Financial Officer
Hi, good morning. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the United Therapeutics third quarter 2018 earnings call. Accompanying me today on the earnings call are Dr. Martine Rothblatt, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Michael Benkowitz, our President and Chief Operating Officer and Mr. Andy Fisher, our Executive Vice President.
Remarks today will include forward-looking statements, representing our expectations or beliefs regarding future events. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. Our latest SEC filings including Form 10-K and 10-Q, contain additional information on these risks and uncertainties. We assume no obligation to update forward-looking statements.
Today's remarks may also include financial measures that were not prepared in accordance with US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release available on our website at www.unither.com.
Today's remarks may discuss the progress and results of clinical trials or other developments with respect to our products. These remarks are intended solely to educate investors and are not intended to serve as the basis for medical decision-making or to suggest that any products are safe and effective for any unapproved or investigational uses. Full prescribing information for the products is available on our website.
Now I will turn the call over to Dr. Rothblatt for an overview of our third quarter 2018 financial results and business activities of United Therapeutics.
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, James, and good morning, everybody dialing into the United Therapeutics third quarter 2018 earnings call. My name is Martine Rothblatt, I'm the Chairman and CEO. And in addition to Mr. Edgemond, our Chief Financial Officer, I'm also joined on the call today by Michael Benkowitz, our President and Chief Operating Officer and Mr. Andrew Fisher, who is joining us for his last earnings call before his retirement after 20 years at United Therapeutics. Thank you, Andy for all those years of service.
Well, I've got a lot of good things to share on this call. First and foremost, I'm super excited that during the past quarter we hit -- we hit the second highest number of patients on our treprostinil franchise that we've ever had. That's over 7,000 patients across Remodulin, Tyvaso and Orenitram, and it's very consistent with our expectations that we see our treprostinil franchise continuing to grow in terms of number of patients health year after year through the 99 -- 2019-2020 and into the 2020s. And the reason for this, notwithstanding the launch of generic Remodulin are the number of unique and differentiable factors that pertain to our various treprostinil products, Remodulin, Tyvaso and Orenitram.
Before I go into those differentiable aspects, let me mention the most important thing from a scientific standpoint is that, our research have shown that treprostinil uniquely activates the EP2 receptor in the pulmonary vascular bed. And this is something which is not matched by other prostacyclin analogues or prodrugs of prostacyclin and it seems to have a significant pharmacodynamic impacts that are particularly relevant to the progress of pulmonary hypertension and the natural history of the disease. So we feel very fortunate that the treprostinil franchise, our home franchise is one that uniquely activates this EP2 receptor in the pulmonary vasculature. But now let me describe how our privatization of that treprostinil franchise gives us some really exciting products and gives us the confidence to say that total patients on United Therapeutics treprostinil products are very, very likely, and we are quite confident that they will continue to grow year-after-year for the coming years.
So first, let me talk about Remodulin, which was the first treprostinil product that we launched. There are four unique features to Remodulin as it is today, and then there are four unique ways that Remodulin is going to advance above and beyond the entry point of any generic form of Remodulin.
First, Remodulin has an established safety profile and 15-plus years of supply chain reliability that is recognized by prescribing physicians. By the way, speaking of supply chain, I would like people to note that we've got some tremendous and talented staff at United Therapeutics responsible for supply chain. Some of you may have had a chance to interact with Beth Rhodes, our Senior Vice President for Global Supply Chain. She reports to my colleague, Mike Benkowitz here, right to my right and together they and their teams have done just a stellar job of ensuring a flawless supply chain for 15 plus years.
Second, Remodulin patient support services that generic manufacturers of Remodulin are not expected to offer. Third, physicians and payers have not historically encouraged substitution of existing lower cost PAH parenteral alternatives. And number four, Remodulin will remain a highly differentiated product and will be delivered through multiple next-generation drug delivery systems intended to enhance safety, tolerability and convenience for our patients. And that fourth factor is a great launching point for me to talk about the four different ways that Remodulin will permutate over the next several years and remain a proprietary important branded product of United Therapeutics.
First and foremost, the implanted system for Remodulin or implantable system for Remodulin ISR. This is a product that the FDA very graciously approved last year and is now going through a number of advancements to expand its reach beyond the initial patient population being helped -- helped to the many thousands of patients that we physicians and others believe are natural users of the implantable system for Remodulin.
Yesterday, we at United Therapeutics, had one of our monthly or every other month town meetings and we were honored to have one of the implantable system for Remodulin patients come to speak to all of the gathered Unitherian as we -- as we like to call ourselves. And this patient, for (inaudible) reasons, I will -- I'll leave her name, has had the implantable System for Remodulin inside her for some six years and it was -- she described the transformative experience that it had on her health. And in the audience was our top clinical development scientist responsible for this product, Dr. Lee Peterson and when the patient was introduced to Dr. Lee Peterson, the patient left up from her seat, which is something that she had the energy to do thanks to this kind of a product and embraced Dr. Peterson so strongly. There was just a a beautiful, beautiful sight to see. A clinical drug developer meets patient who's life has been transformed through this product.
So many thousands of people, I feel, are in the offing for the ISR product, which will keep -- be a major engine of treprostinil franchise's continued growth as we move through 2019 and into the 2020s.
Next up, on the subcu side is Unity. Unity is this disposable, super-high-tech PatchPump invented by the famed inventor Dean Kamen. And with Unity, patients will be able to have the peace of mind that their drug has delivered with an accuracy that heretofore has not been possible through mechanically driven pumps, and also a level of convenience which will save at least a dozen, and perhaps as many as two dozen steps involved in their daily or every other day preparation of subcutaneous Remodulin for used. So we expect this is going to have a big effect on compliance to having an effect on complete -- on convenience. And therefore, we think many patients who might otherwise have stepped back from subcutaneous forms of Remodulin will in fact step forward and this will be a second engine growing our continued number of patients on Remodulin.
Third and and very similar to Unity, but different and also important wave is SteadyMed's product Trevyent and we've mentioned in the Q that we filed today that we will be refiling the SteadyMed application for approval in the first half of 2019. And as many people who've followed the pulmonary hypertension spaces are aware the SteadyMed's product is a revolutionary piece of Israeli technology that allows perhaps the maximum of convenience because the -- each pump has a fixed-dose associated with it. And so, there's no real need to have the added complexity in the pump of titrating to a different dose, because that's done in the cartridge that the patient receives in the mail, and then throws away afterwards. There has been a truly excellent market outreach done by the SteadyMed folks through their phenomenal program and we really look forward to integrating all of the great folks at SteadyMed into United Therapeutics and relying on SteadyMed to fulfill its share of several thousand additional patients on treprostinil that will be part of what I mentioned. It's continued growth in United Therapeutics patients on treprostinil through 2019 and into the 2020s.
Next up, let me talk about the Remo Life program. This is a tremendous partnership that we have with the manufacturer of all of our pumps today Smiths Medical, certainly the leading names in the field of perineural drug delivery technology and our team together with the Smiths Medical folks have been hard at work developing this new Remo Life pump, which is really quite breathtaking because the first pump I've ever seen that's able to accommodate both intravenous as well as subcutaneous drug delivery. So it's a real ambidextrous player here. It's also going to be completely integrated with the patients' smartphone to allow data on the patients' use of the drug to seamlessly follow through the smartphone into the cloud and there of the cloud, it can be accessed by of their doctors, of course, with the prior consent from the patients as well as the payers, again with prior consent so that everybody is aware of exactly how much drug is in the patients reservoir at any one point in time. This will lead to savings across the entire system, reminders for the patient, a complete what we call the first ever smart pump system and we're really excited about that strategic initiative with Smiths Medical.
Before I roll on to why we'll get additional growth in Tyvaso and Orenitram, let me just mention in transition, our RemoPro product, which is a project to eliminate the subcutaneous site pain associated with Remodulin, which would also give rise to substantial additional thousands of patients accessing subcu Remodulin. And this RemoPro project has completed its first set of Phase 1 studies and we have successfully been able to mask the pain of the -- of the treprostinil molecule which is known to cause subcu pain when passing through the dermis. So a tremendous shout out to Dr. Ken Ferris and our other inventors at United Therapeutics, our chemistry team under (inaudible) who have been able to mask the subcutaneous pain and we are -- now have additional iterations going forward that will aim to optimize the pharmacokinetic profile, so that we can demonstrate a bioequivalence of our RemoPro drug with the Remodulin drug and thereby offer the patients the Unity pump, the SteadyMed pump and via the Smiths Medical smart pump subcutaneous version of it. a form of a Remodulin which does not cause site pain.
So I mean that's -- all of -- those are the only sources of our growth in treprostinil patients. I'm confident that we will continue to grow treprostinil patients over years to come. But actually there is two more, frankly even larger sources of growth. Now just going time sequentially here.
The next area is Tyvaso. I am pleased to announce that we have completed the necessary number of events that we need for the unblinding of the BEAT trial, which is a combination Tyvaso/ esuberaprost trial meant to show that when Tyvaso is so boosted with esuberaprost that there is a reduction in morbidity and mortality. That's great for the patients, allow patients to use our drug for a longer period of time and that -- that unblinding is scheduled to occur at the end of March of 2019. And then we are queuing ourselves up for a filing on esuberaprost in combination with Tyvaso for the end of August 2019.
So I do believe that that offers very positively for Tyvaso. Another amazing product that is going to cause many more patients to come on to Tyvaso, is the MannKind product, what we call the MannKind Technosphere. And this is an amazing device. Many of you in the pharma space, I'm sure have seen their products used in the inhaled diabetes area. It's really just palmable.It's the size of the smallest vaping device that you would tend to see. Maybe not the smallest because I know some of these high school kids got -- got things that the teachers can't see, but a step up from -- from the smallest, definitely palmable, and it's so cool to watch it because it integrates with your smartphone via Bluetooth and there's actually like -- as you -- as you turn the MannKind device to the left or to the right, you actually see a cartoon of it on your smartphone and the cartoon turns the same way that it turns just like a picture on the smartphone will go to portrait or landscape and when it's in the right orientation, you get a green check, if wrong orientation, you get like a red X, and then you can even get like a curve. So that if you breath along the curve, you see that your breathing is just right.
I mean, this is game-busters for compliance and for accurate deposition of Tyvaso for patient satisfaction. And the team at MannKind is one of the absolute best groups of people that we've ever had the honor to work with. They are now fully integrated into our clinical drug development group over in Research Triangle Park and I'm confident that once the MannKind device is approved that will offer yet additional thousands of patients on Tyvaso whichever -- I don't know if they will be called Tyvaso or something else, but inhaled treprostinil is what we call Tyvaso. Another very exciting development in the area of Tyvaso is our PR end program with the European company MedSpray and these guys are the leaders in a field of nano -- Nanosphere-based liquid powder deposition and -- with a device that requires no battery or electronic operation at all, we're able to have a deposition of this liquid powder that matches that that you get this Tyvaso.
So this study is entering Phase 1. Actually, I believe the first patients are being randomized into Phase 1 in this quarter and then we will have the commercial -- final commercial product form delivered to us around the third quarter of next year and then move right into a kind of a rapid Phase II, Phase III study at the -- at the end of ( 2019 ) and then into 2019 and into 2020. So very rapid advance in simultaneous dry powder with MannKind, liquid with MedSpray and the PRN showing that you throw esuberaprost on top of that, it all works longer and better. And anyway you add up one, two and three, to me it's like 6,000 more patients. I don't know, don't get hung up on the number six, could be much larger. So I think Tyvaso is another huge grower of United Therapeutics patients on treprostinil.
I don't get a little bit beyond the question time, let me just wrap up very rapidly here with Orenitram, which is the third reason. We believe that there will be many thousands of additional treprostinil patients. This is of course the Holy Grail of our drug delivery, which is you pop a pill. We announced our FREEDOM-EV results. We did it right after unblinding, because everybody was waiting for that. The most material data point is was the study positive or negative. Hell, yeah it was positive. It was damn positive and there were a lot of high-fives and everybody is very excited. The next step is that you prepare the NDA supplement and just the full dataset. I'm really happy to share with everybody that as we have gone through the full dataset, it is even better than we were able to announce immediately upon unblinding. I can't say anything more about the numbers because these things have to be pure reviewed and presented in the proper medical form and what not and of course the whole data set going to the FDA, but I can tell you that right after you unbind you get deeper and deeper into the data and on the most salient points of the study, the data is even better than what's originally announced. And I'm a 100% confident that, that is not a statement that we'll ever have to do walk back. So super excited about that. Once physicians see not only the initial data, once the FDA presents the initial data, and it's something that's in the label and can be accurately said with regard to the drug, not to mention this, the full data set and once that's in the label and can be actively described to the physicians, I really think in most instances, the physician will feel that for the appropriate patient, the only drug to prescribe would be Orenitram in combination with background therapy. Certainly, the only prostanoid to prescribe would be Orenitram. So that of course augurs many thousands of additional patients on treprostinil.
Well, thank you for joining me on the introductory portion of the call. I hope I gave you a sense of confidence. The data behind the confidence, the substance behind the confidence that we have at United Therapeutics treprostinil franchise is going to continue to grow many thousands of patients more, year after year, after this very exciting reach of our second highest level of treprostinil patients which we reached during this past quarter. Now I'd like to open up the lines for any questions to our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. James Edgemond, our President, Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Michael Benkowitz , and our wonderful Senior VP and Associate Deputy General Counsel, Head of Strategic Planning and Investor Relations and many other things, that Andy has done with the best of spirits and the best of abilities over these years.
Operator, please open up the call.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
(Operator Instructions) And our first question comes from Chris Shibutani from Cowen. Your line is now open.
Chris Shibutani -- Cowen and Company, LLC -- Analyst
Good morning. Thank you very much. Two questions, number one, Martine you're highlighting this patient number, which is something that we would really benefit from the ability to get a better sense of perspective on how to interpret that. Can you give us a little bit more background in terms of this, obviously there's been probably growth in the use of treatments at earlier stages which might support a growing number of patients, but can you put some perspective, is there anything in terms of revenue per patient, or what do we do with this 7,000 number in terms of, I'm trying to figure out how to translate over to our view of how to think about the future. And then I have a follow-up question on expenses for James. But for you on the patient number Martine?
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Okay. So the drug industry has been critiqued for price increases and I think that it's a dodgy but necessary statistic in terms of looking at how well a company doing in terms of revenue, because a lot of companies they just keep increasing our prices, now fortunately, that has been moderated in recent months or quarters to the industry is trying to keep the price increases in the single digit percentages. Just for the record, and not saying that we're better than anybody else, I just wanted to say what the fact is, United Therapeutics has never taken a double-digit price increase ever in our entire history.
And so we got to $1.5 billion a year in revenue the hard way by doing good clinical trials, good clinical science and explaining the results to doctors and the doctors took the appropriate decision. So if I was in your shoes, I would say, wow total number of patients on treprostinil that is a really good metric for me to use to understand how well this company is doing, like if generics were eating their lunch then by definition, the total number of patients on treprostinil would be less, you now that as you could see that's not happening here. Now if you, we don't like to go into the minutiae of how many patients are on this path and the other version of our drug. And as you can tell from my introductory remarks, we are in the process of kind of cloning three versions of our drugs into like 12 versions of our drugs and it will be four different flavors of Remodulin, there already are three different flavors, so it'll be four different flavors of Tyvaso. And I didn't have time to talk about what we're doing in terms of our Orenitram, our combo pill and Orenitram once daily pill all that stuffs going forward as well. So we're not going to go into the minutiae of each particular product and how many thousands of patients are in each particular product but I do think that I completely agree with you that the total number of United Therapeutics patients on treprostinil is an excellent barometer of how well the Company is doing. Now in terms of pricing and in terms of what does that mean in terms of revenues, I think a kind of a rough metric and this is all based on publicly accessible information, every product has its own reimbursement profile, every product has its own rebate profile based on the Part B, Part D, Medicare, private, particular contracts with particular payers, not to mention the fact that our products unlike those of most of our competitors are tight tradable which makes it gets more complicated to figure it out, but I think a conservative metric would be say 150 k per patient per year -- number of patients on the drug. You know, is going to be a rough estimate of what the company, net revenues is going to be.
James, can you talk about the expense question. Did you not know the expense question?
James Edgemond -- Chief Financial Officer
No, he was going to circle back on the expense question.
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Chris, you have the expense question ready? Operator, next call.
Operator
And our next question comes from Geoff Meacham from Barclays. Your line is now open.
Jason Eron Zemansky -- Barclays Bank PLC -- Analyst
Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking my call, this is Jason on for Jeff. I was hoping you could, if you could talk a little bit more broadly about and thinking about the lifecycle management strategy, what the conversion rates would be like in moving patients over to all these various devices, especially given kind of the payer headwinds, what do you foresee the conversion rates being like, how do you anticipate managing them and what do you ultimately expect those rates to be? Thanks so much.
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Jason. I don't really think it's a lifecycle management question at all. I think it's a question of all of our existing products, the patients are locked and loaded on those products, very rare as I mentioned in my introductory remarks for payers to rip a patient off of products that they're depending upon for sustaining their life in a disease that patients that have a handful of expected years of life. Instead, I think it'a matter of a pipeline that's actually pouring forth a number of new products, the Implantable System for Remodulin was the first such new product, the RemUnity is another new product, the Trevyent is another new product and the RemoPro is another new product, the Remo Life with Smiths Medical is another new product, the Tysuberprost is another new product and Mannkind and so on and so forth.
So all of these products are not products that are swapping in and out of our existing patient base, all of the growth we are seeing is organic growth, we are eating into the Uptravi space we are eating into the Opsumit space, we're eating into the newly diagnosed patients space. There are every year literally thousands of new patients diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. I didn't have a chance in my introductory remarks to talk about the WHO Group 3 stage where we're conducting our Phase III trials in COPD and ILD forms of pulmonary hypertension. Tens of thousands of patients which have gone untreated completely. I didn't have a chance in my introductory remarks to talk about the WHO Group 2 space for patients with left heart failure. But with preserved ejection fraction our best estimates well over 100,000 of those patients have been completely untreated. And so it's the movement into these spaces with new products coming out of our pipeline, that's where the organic growth is coming from. Next question please.
Operator
Thank you. And our next question comes from Terence Flynn from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.
Terence Flynn -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I was just wondering Martine if you can comment on latest thoughts on capital allocation. Specifically, how you're thinking about repurchases versus business development and maybe expanding the pipeline beyond PAH. Thanks a lot.
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks Terence for that question. I'm going to pass it over to James as he's our Chief Financial Officer. I will just mention though at the tail of the question that we are expanding beyond pulmonary hypertension. And just to make sure everybody on the is aware, during the past quarter, we acquired the exclusive rights to a very, very exciting product for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which is not associated with pulmonary hypertension. There is another subset of pulmonary fibrosis, which is associated with pulmonary hypertension. We have a Phase III trial now enrolling patients called the PERFECT trial and it's enrolling quite well. That's a growth opportunity for Tyvaso, part of the thousands of new patients I mentioned before, but we also have this tremendous regenerative medicine type of product based on the Wnt pathway from Samumed in pulmonary fibrosis offering Phase 1 results. We're going to be taken into Phase II and Phase III. but James let me pass to you -- the turn over to you on the capital allocation.
James Edgemond -- Chief Financial Officer
Good morning Terence. Thanks for the question. And so Terence, our capital allocation priorities, I would say remain unchanged and consistent with what we've talked about previously. And so, we're first going to invest in R&D opportunities that support our business mission. And second, investing in value creating business development activities. Martine mentioned some of those briefly just a moment ago. And third, historically, we have done share repurchase, but that will be a third priority. So again, I think the framework that we've applied has been consistent. And I think if you go back to the third quarter, we've executed against that framework as we discussed before.
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Excellent James. I'd like to add one last point Terence, and that is we have not had a chance on our quarterly calls to talk very much about our oncology franchise, and it's probably something that I really take responsibility for. I should have provided the shareholders with more visibility into our oncology franchise. It's a -- it's a really beautiful drug because I'm talking here about Unituxin and that based on the -- the label, it has reduced the death rate in the patients who end up dying from neuroblastoma by just about 50% in the -- in the subset of neuroblastoma patients to which it applies. That means that there are literally hundreds of kids that, thanks to Unituxin, are going to be able to grow up and live a normal life without a fear of cancer haunting them, without needing to take any continuing drugs to keep their cancer in check. I wish it worked a 100% of the time, but I'm grateful that it works 50% of the time, and we have a number of physicians that are beginning to test Unituxin in other GD2 responsive cancers, of which there are several dozens.
So we teamed up with a company called Precision Oncology to analyze all the different GD2 cancers and go through a comprehensive precision medicine based on set of assays to determine which were our -- which was our best shot for our dinutuximab, the proper chemical name of Unituxin, and anyway, the best shot turns out to be small-cell lung cancer, followed by certain forms of glioma, followed by certain forms of melanoma. And so, we embarked on first to Phase II, then Phase III on a study of dinutuximab in small-cell lung cancer. And we've now completed enrollment just this past quarter of over 450 patients in that -- DISTINCT is the name of the Phase III study of dinutuximab for small-cell lung cancer. Our business development market research people have told me that they see this as a $2 billion market. So I think that's -- that's pretty impressive and it definitely is a strong step outside of pulmonary hypertension.
I'll also mention in that vein that that we are -- there are forms of neuroblastoma for which Unituxin is not currently approved and we are pursuing approval on the additional forms of neuroblastoma, for which it is not currently approved. There are some clinician testing of it in some soft tissue cancers, different types of sarcomas, so that's another significant opportunity. Finally, very recently, we obtained exclusive rights from St. Jude to a humanized form of our dinutuximab molecule. And this coming quarter, we will be pretty much wrapping up the construction of our production facility for the humanized dinutuximab. I have to say that the only drug we have or product that we have that I have not been able to keep the amount of inventory that I would like because -- because of the size of our facilities and the amount of sales is dinutuximab. So with this new facility, we will be able to ramp up our production of humanized dinutuximab which once we do the appropriate comparability studies and obtained FDA approval, I think it will be a general drug for the -- kids to take and the adults for that matter, and will really be a drug that can move our cancer franchise to its full $2 billion value proposition that I mentioned earlier. Next question?
Operator
And our next question comes from Liana Moussatos from Wedbush Securities. Your line is now open.
Liana Moussatos -- Wedbush Securities -- Analyst
Thank you. What are the next steps and timing to get RemoPro approved and do you plan to replace all subcutaneous products with RemoPro?
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Thanks Liana. So nice to your hear voice this morning. It will really -- it will probably be the case. I would find it hard to understand why anybody would do a non-RemoPro version of treprostinil when there was the RemoPro version available. You could see on the label that it's not for regular treprostinil, I don't know the exact number, but somewhere like 90% of the patients suffer subcutaneous site pain and erythema. So it's a -- it's a very high proportion. Some of those patients get used to it, some never do. I will tell you I've tried it on myself and it hurts like hell. So I really -- if you don't need to have it, I recommend you not do it. But, if you have a pain-free way that's a kind of things that you get these hockey-stick curves in terms of patient take-up that if something -- it causes pain and the doctor says, oh, good news I've got a painless version of your -- your product, of your drug. It's like OK, which just changed yesterday and in fact, it doesn't even have to be completely pain free. You say to any normal human being I will give you something that causes half the pain (inaudible), people will be happy with half the pain. So I do believe, Liana, that the RemoPro product delivered through our Unity system and delivered through our Trevyent system, SteadyMed system and delivered through Smiths smartpump Remo Life system will be the overwhelming -- almost exclusive rate that people will take treprostinil subcutaneously. Next question?
Operator
And our last question comes from Jessica Fye from JP Morgan. Your line is now open.
Yuko Oku -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. -- Analyst
Hi, this is Yuko on for Jessica. Thank you for taking our questions. Could you provide any color to when we expect Sandoz will begin launch of generic Remodulin and what do you think may be delaying the launcher and then what about Teva, Par and Reddy's and is there a reason to think their product wont be approved to launch?
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Well, thank you for your question and I am joined today by our President, Chief Operating Officer, Mike Benkowitz. Among his many other responsibilites Mike also oversees all commercial operations at United Therapeutics, all relationships with payers, many other key responsibilities. So Mike can you please help the JP Morgan analyst.
Michael Benkowitz -- President, Chief Operating Officer
I'll try. I mean, at this point, or at this date and time, we're not aware that Sandoz has launched because we've heard they've not launched and we don't really -- don't have any additional information as to why -- why they haven't launched or when they will launch, but we know that and I think they could have launched back in June and as we said, they should have end up launched. As for the other companies, we are not aware if they received any -- that they received approval either. So we probably have to talk to them to understand what the status is (inaudible).
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Super, mike. Thank you so much, everybody for joining our call. The bottom line here is the same as the top line. Second best number of patient found our treprostinil franchise ever. And the forecast is for continued growth in total patients on treprostinil through Remodulin, Tyvaso or Orenitram and the ever-growing number of new forms of those molecules that provide advantages to physicians and providing patient care. As well as growth outside of pulmonary hypertension now into pulmonary fibrosis and it's a small cell lung cancer. Thank you very much.
Operator
Thank you for participating in today's United Therapeutics Corporation Conference Call. A rebroadcast will be available for replay for one week by dialing 1855-859-2056 with international callers dialing 1404-537-3406 and using access code 417-91-47.
Duration: 44 minutes
Call participants:
James Edgemond -- Chief Financial Officer
Martine Rothblatt -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Chris Shibutani -- Cowen and Company, LLC -- Analyst
Jason Eron Zemansky -- Barclays Bank PLC -- Analyst
Terence Flynn -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Liana Moussatos -- Wedbush Securities -- Analyst
Yuko Oku -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. -- Analyst
Michael Benkowitz -- President, Chief Operating Officer
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