RE:RE:Drug Efficacy Study Implementation (DESI) programLattice, Actually it was Wayne Kreppner who explained the softness in Donnatal revenue to the sales force being taken out of the field for 2 weeks in his response to a question from Martin Landry GMP Securities) during the con call on March 24:
Martin Landry
Okay that's fair. And the next question on Donnatal, looking at the IMS data, it feels like the scripts have declined a little bit in Q1 or at a more rapid pace than what we've seen historically. Just wondering if you could comment on that? Is there anything that's impacting Donnatal in Q1?
Wayne Kreppner
Hey Martin its Wayne. I would just say that from a Donnatal perspective, you have to recall that as I mentioned we have repositioned the sale force, so we actually took the sales force out of the field for about two weeks while we launched at new National Sales Meeting as the resources and retargeted some of those sales personnel.
And so we saw a little bit of softness around that period, because obviously this is just a mostly sensitive product that was going to remind our detail. So seeing the doctors on a repeated basis is important and so on that basis, we saw a little bit of softness, but we are not fully staffed in the new sales force and the sales efforts as of the end of February. So we expect that to take up as we go forward this year.
LaticelnExile wrote: The issue is not that another generic will be approved it is more a regulatory risk. A generic, Viberzi by Allergan was slaunched in December 2015 and has been aggresively taking market share in the IBS space. It is priced similarly to Donnatal and is considered a preventative treatment to the disease. Concordia did not let its investors know about the generic in the Q1-2016 con call and when asked why Donnatal scripts were down the CEO said it was because the sales reps were removed from their sales territory for two weeks to do corporate training. This lack of disclosure is one reason why Donnatal is specifically mentioned in many of the class action suits. (Really, did the CEO expect investors to believe that doctors stop prescribing it just because they don't get a visit from the sales reps? I think this was a lame excuse.) The issue with Donnatal is that it never had fda approval for efficacy and was only allowed to be marketed because it was approved for safety.
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