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ACADIA PHARMACEUTICALS INC at Biotechnology Industry Organization BIO CEO & Investor Conference - Final.

Article Excerpt
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Good morning. We're going to go ahead and begin our next presentation. Presenting for Acadia Pharmaceuticals will be Dr. Uli Hacksell, CEO.

ULI HACKSELL, CEO, ACADIA PHARMACEUTICALS: Thank you, and good morning. Let me first say that I'm going to make forward-looking statements today. And therefore, I encourage you to read those risk factors that we have filed with the SEC.

Now Acadia is a CNS-focused company. We have four major product candidates that we are moving forward that focus on major pharmaceutical markets where there are unmet medical need with current therapies. Our lead product is pimavanserin, which is a Phase III program in development for Parkinson's disease psychosis and where we have kept all the rights.

We also have a number of other product candidates in our pipeline that provide many other opportunities for value-driving milestones. And I think it's important to note in this kind of financial climate that we have a solid financial position. This is Acadia's four key product candidates. You can see that pimavanserin is in Phase III for Parkinson's disease psychosis. We have also shown in proof of concept studies very interesting data, both in schizophrenia and in sleep maintenance insomnia with pimavanserin.

Behind pimavanserin, we have two collaborations with Allergan, one in chronic pain, which is a Phase II program, and one in glaucoma. That's a Phase I program. Both of these programs are run by Allergan. They've paid for the development and Acadia receives milestones and royalties. Finally, we have ACP-106, which is a serotonin compound with applications in neuropsychiatry and sleep that currently is in IND track development.

In this presentation, I will focus very much on our lead product pimavanserin. This is a selective 5-HT2A inverse agonist or antagonist with very strong IP and with an outstanding safety and tolerability profile. We think that it has the potential to address neurological and psychiatric indications that are really underserved by current antipsychotic drugs.

We have been -- done a number of trials with pimavanserin, treated over 400 patients. And we can say now on the basis of these studies that we have an outstanding safety tolerability profile, that we have repeatedly demonstrated antipsychotic efficacy within schizophrenia and in Parkinson's disease psychosis. And we also have one feature of pimavanserin that is very important. It has long duration of action and in the CNS indications, this is in fact a great advantage. So pimavanserin has a half life of around 55 hours.

Now let's take a step back and look at the current antipsychotics and the antipsychotic market in general. This is, by the way, a huge market. It's over $18 billion currently. And the leading antipsychotic drugs are all multi-billion dollar blockbusters.

It's interesting, if you try to look at what defines the sales, what kind of indications define the sales for antipsychotics and you see now that schizophrenia is not a dominant part of the sales. In fact, equally large are the sales to the older patients. And this is very important for the understanding of the opportunity with pimavanserin because the use of antipsychotics in the elderly is clearly not a very good kind of therapeutic approach.

All the antipsychotic drugs, whether we're talking about old or new ones, have a black-box warning for use in elderly...

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