J.P. Morgan 2026: Signals of Renewed Interest in Sleep Medicine

Pharmaceutical Executive; As you arrive this year at The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference what signals are you seeing around renewed interest in sleep medicine, and how is that influencing your positioning in the space?

Graham Goodrich: I think what we've been seeing for quite some time is that we believe that the category which we're interested in, in our lead product candidate AD109 is focused on obstructive sleep apnea, and we're seeing a bit of a revolution in this category. It has been dominated by devices and oral appliances and difficult surgeries for probably over the past 30 years, and we're seeing renewed interest in a category for a couple of reasons. One, wearables. Everybody's got a wearable nowadays, and there's a lot more screening going on. The costs of diagnosis have gone down. There's a home sleep testing, boom right now, once, not so long ago, the majority of people diagnosed with sleep apnea had to go in a lab overnight to get tested. Now, you can quickly get diagnosed through a home sleep test. And I think there's another growing appreciation about the link between sleep apnea and other chronic diseases. We talk about sleep apnea as a chronic disease, but it's really also an accelerant for other chronic diseases, because when you take away someone's oxygen and reduce their quality of sleep, it has a systemic effect, and that has shown up in the risk for cardiovascular events, cardio metabolic conditions, neurological diseases like Alzheimer's, even things like cancer.

So it's one of those tips of the pyramid type disease states, and we're now have a much better understanding of how it affects other chronic diseases. And then, more broadly, we've also seen, you know, new advances in treatment, certainly Tirzeptide and the role that GLP ones can play in supporting OSA has renewed discussion about possible new ways that we could go about treating sleep apnea that are distinct from the traditional standard of care, which is has been PAP.

Then certainly, I think apne med has made a lot of buzz about the possibility of introducing the first oral product to treat sleep apnea. And that is kind of mind blowing for people that have been in the category, that you could potentially treat sleep apnea with a once a day pill. So yeah, we've seen a lot more interest. And also as we move toward our commercialization phase with two positive phase three studies and our pathway to submit an NDA to the FDA, we're certainly getting a lot of interest and attention, and we feel like the markets, as you know, are also responding well, and we're hoping that 2026 is a bit of a rebound for the category.