Recurrent Respiratory Papillomatosis Treatments Before Papzimeos

Pharmaceutical Executive: How was Recurrent Respiratory Papillomatosis treated before Papzimeos?

Helen Sabzevari: So maybe I should just first say a little bit about this disease. It's a debilitating disease, as you mentioned, for short, RRP, for Recurrent Respiratory Papillomatosis. This is a disease that the root cause of it is the infection by HPV six and or 11. And it can happen from childhood as the children pass through the birth canal of the mothers, or in the adult, through a sexual transmission and what basically happens to the patients with this disease is that they start developing these benign tumors on a vocal cord or the trachea, and it affects the speech or breathing of this patient. So for the past 100 years almost, this disease has been known, but there has not been any FDA approved treatment for these patients. The only thing that can be done or was able to be done for this patient, I should say, was repeated surgeries in order to just remove these tumors from the throat region from a vocal cord so the patients can breathe. And you can imagine, we have had patients that they have hundreds of surgeries, and some of our patients, they had this disease from an age of one. So imagining that you take your child every practically month or every other month, to a surgery room, just so the child can breathe. Or for adults that they come down with this disease, it's quite debilitating. The physicians had no choice except this, repeated surgeries that, they are well aware adds to the risk for the patients, not only the risk of the surgeries, but the damage to the vocal cords and to the trachea. And the reality of the situation is the surgery is not a treatment. It's just sort of trying to keep the disease under sort of for a short period of time under control.