Great. Good afternoon, everyone. My name's Jessica Fye. I'm a biotech analyst at J.P. Morgan, and we're continuing the 44th Annual Healthcare Conference today with Esperion. So first, you're going to hear a presentation from the company, and then we're going to have a Q&A session after that. So for everyone in the room, when you have a question, just raise your hand so someone can bring you a microphone for the webcast. And if you're listening online, you can just submit questions on the portal. I can ask them up here. So with that, let me pass it over to Esperion's CEO, Sheldon Koenig.
Great. Thank you, Jess. And good afternoon, everyone. On behalf of Esperion and all the employees that work there, it's always a privilege to be here at the J.P. Morgan Conference, and I really appreciate the time to talk about our Vision 2040. And really, what it's about is executing today while building for tomorrow. So what has got us here? First, a forward-looking statement. I won't read all of these, but they're on our website should you want to read them. Esperion, at a glance, right now, as you know, we're commercializing NEXLETOL, which is bempedoic acid, and NEXLIZET, bempedoic acid plus ezetimibe. We're in a very strong financial position. We hope to reach sustainable profitability in 2026. We have durable cash flows, a strong balance sheet, and a very attractive P&L profile. Our partnerships and pipelines we'll dive into deeper in this presentation.
As you know, we are working on a triple combination. I'll cover that in depth later, but as a reminder, it's essentially NEXLIZET plus a low dose of atorvastatin and a low dose of rosuvastatin, which gets you an LDL efficacy of anywhere between 65% and 71%. There's actually a phase 2a study that actually demonstrates this as well. ESP-2001, we first talked about this last year at our R&D day. This is a drug for the indication of primary sclerosing cholangitis. This is an orphan disease, very much unmet need. I'll go into the specifics of this drug and where we will be in 2026 with it. And then also just other discovery programs, our kidney program, et cetera, which we'll discuss more in the second half of 2026. But what got us here? Well, we have a multi-year proven track record of execution.
And I just said to Jess, and maybe a bit of a chip on her shoulder, but I'm going to say it again. This is the first JPMorgan in about four years where we've come, and there's no overhang. There's no convertible debt. There's no RIPA agreement, et c. There's no worry about cash. This is all about how do we execute and build a bigger and stronger organization. That's being done with a consistent U.S. commercial execution, our global partner execution with Daiichi Sankyo in Europe, and the recent launch of bempedoic acid in Japan by our partners, Otsuka. We've demonstrated disciplined financial management, and we will continue to do that. And our pipeline execution is a result of the fact of the growth that we've been able to demonstrate with our bempedoic acid franchise. We can spend some time and investment in our pipeline.
It's really created a very strong year for us. Let's go over the results quickly. Again, from a U.S. perspective, and we issued a press release this past Sunday where we pre-announced. When we look at our U.S. net sales, we talked about a range of $156 million to $160 million, total revenue of $400 million to $408 million. Our retail prescription equivalents grew 34% year over year. Our preliminary cash currently is $168 million. I would dare to say that not many companies are putting up numbers like this, regardless of what therapeutic area they're in. We're extremely proud of the growth that we've demonstrated. This has been the strongest year in Esperion's history. It's really driven by our commercial execution. Our commercial execution drove significant growth.
You see a little button on the right side, "Can't take a statin, make NEXLIZET happen." Just so everybody knows, statin intolerance is not just the inability of not taking a statin. Some people don't want to take a statin. Some people can't take a statin because of muscle ache, et cetera. But some people can take a statin, a low-dose statin. And we can either be used alone for those cases, or people who are taking a statin, they can use NEXLIZET or NEXLETOL. This is a large, unpenetrated market of over $70 million. And keep in mind, when the CLEAR Outcomes came out in 2023, and we received our label, actually in 2024, and we received our label in 2025, it expanded our TAM from 10 to 70 million patients. This is one of the largest markets, one of the largest therapeutic areas that's out there.
And how did we achieve such success? Well, our growing adoption, 34% growth, retail prescriptions year over year. We've shown 25% year over year growth in physicians writing the drug. Over 45,000 physicians now write this drug. And we have broad payer coverage. We have 90% coverage in commercial, 90% coverage in Medicare. It's all preferred, and we are not disadvantaged to any other lipid-lowering therapy. And the reason for that was the robustness of the CLEAR Outcomes Study. And so a year in review, if you just take a look across the pillars, our U.S. commercial growth, again, I've talked about the range, our market exclusivity, and this is important. We had four ANDA settlements last year. The largest one was Dr. Reddy in September, where all of these generic filers have settled for the year 2040.
Now, there are five others that remain, and we're currently in discussions with them. The only thing I would say is we feel very confident, hence the reason for Vision 2040. We're planning beyond 2031. We're planning for the next 14 years to continue to make our number one priority, NEXLIZET and NEXLETOL, stronger. I always say high tide floats all boats. That allows us to make investments in other areas, such as our pipeline advancement that I mentioned earlier. Also, from a global expansion perspective, again, Japan just recently launched. I can tell you they're off to an extremely good start, and they've only been in the market for one month. We've signed partnerships with HLS in Canada, Neopharm in Israel, and CSL Seqirus in both Australia and New Zealand. All of these markets to launch by the end of 2026.
And our partner milestones, we've received over $91 million in partner milestones this year. Just a quick side note, in our total revenue, if you remove milestones and adjust on a like-like basis, our total revenue grew 60%, six-zero, 60% year over year. So with that said, it's time to build on the future. Our Vision 2040 is grounded in proven execution and defines how we scale Esperion into a global multi-product pharmaceutical company. How are we going to do that? It's really built on three building blocks. We're going to move from execution to ambition. Again, 2040 is 14 years from now. That's a long time, and it's our runway to allow us to be a bigger organization. Our number one priority, as I mentioned, strengthening and expanding the bempedoic acid franchise. We believe this is a billion-dollar opportunity in the United States.
We know it's a billion-dollar opportunity in Daiichi Sankyo in Europe. And just as a fact, we think Daiichi Sankyo will achieve EUR 500 million sales by the end of 2026, early 2027. So they're well on their way. Build a diversified multi-product portfolio, and I'll go into depth with this a little bit later as I go deeper into each one of these building blocks. And of course, advance the next-generation ACLY pipeline. Our ambition is to achieve at least five marketed products by 2040 through a combination of business development and internal pipeline advancement. And when we speak about business development, what we speak about is how do we leverage our infrastructure and help companies who have an asset, who are unable to market or commercialize a product on their own because they don't have the same type of infrastructure that we do.
We've spent a lot of time building and fixing this company, and trust me, we're not going to do anything to ruin that. We're not going to do anything that would cause dilution, et cetera. We're looking at smart ways to bring in assets to help, again, make us a stronger organization. So let's focus on the first building block, which is strengthening and expanding the bempedoic acid franchise. Really, if we take a look at what are the major catalysts, the biggest one that's going to come into play is going to be by the end of February. These are the new U.S. guidelines that ACC/AHA will be coming out with.
I want to remind everyone, if you haven't had a chance, please take a look at the ESC guidelines that came out September 4th of last year, where bempedoic acid was essentially viewed as a foundational therapy in lipid-lowering therapy. Essentially, no longer can you use one agent to get to goal. Similar to hypertension and diabetes, it's all about combination therapy. And what the European Society of Cardiology said in their first late-breaking session to start off the meeting was the reason why bempedoic acid was added to the guidelines was due to compelling and practice-changing data. That's the CLEAR Outcomes, 14,000 patients, which shows that we have a 27% reduction in fatal and non-fatal MI, 19% reduction in revascularization. And if you look at primary prevention, your time to a first event reduction by almost 40%, 39% to be specific.
We will, of course, as I mentioned, continue to deal with the market exclusivity and the ANDA filings. Our commercial investment, I'll give guidance later, is steady, but we believe we have found the right balance between personal and digital promotion, and we do ROI analysis on every dollar we spent from a commercial perspective. Oral triple combination will be a game changer. And let me dig a little bit deeper into that right now. I've already talked about what the LDL reduction could be. I'll say it again. This has the opportunity to be a game changer from a perspective in one pill, you have the most efficacious LDL-lowering drug, and a physician has the choice of either using NEXLETOL on their own, NEXLIZET, or going to these combination therapies. Just as a quick aside, this is a regulatory pathway that is essentially bioequivalence and stability.
And our hope is that we'll launch these products sometime in the second half of 2027. And what's really interesting, and I think what really ties up the strength of our franchise is when people think about Esperion, they think about us as a U.S. company. I want you to change your mindset. I want you to think about bempedoic acid as a global franchise. What this cartoon demonstrates is where we've been present. I've mentioned many of these countries already. I've talked about what Daiichi Sankyo has been doing. Japan off to a great start. Israel is a small market, but nonetheless, they'll be launching this year. Australia and New Zealand is some significant opportunity, and Canada is a very large market. Currently, today, we are approved in 41 countries.
A side note, all those approvals, all the regulatory aspects, et cetera, were done by the regulatory department at Esperion. I always want to say congratulations to them because it's a lot of work, and they did a great job. Now, let's move on to building a diversified multi-product portfolio. What do we mean by this? We want to grow our portfolio through partnerships. I'll direct your attention to the cartoon in the center. We're really focused on cardiometabolic assets. What you see here are just a few: heart failure, lipid management, obesity. I would even put diabetes in there. Then we're also looking at areas of kidney and rare endocrine disease, and that also complements the work that we are doing at our pipeline. Why are we doing this? What does this mean? We're leveraging our established U.S. commercial infrastructure.
I've always said this before. We're not as big as Merck, Sanofi, all companies I worked at, but we have functions that those companies do. We just do it at a smaller scale, and we've been very successful in doing it. We're not looking for multi-billion-dollar acquisitions. We can't afford multi-billion-dollar acquisitions. We're looking for acquisitions that make sense, financially affordable, non-dilutive, and will be accretive immediately. And when I say accretive immediately, I don't want my new Chief Commercial Officer, John Harlow, to get scared, but if we do a deal on Wednesday, I want to start selling it on Thursday. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for assets that are either close to approved, are approved, nothing that's in the clinic. So stay tuned. We've been having a lot of conversations with organizations. We've screened a lot of organizations. We passed on many products.
We're taking our time. We want to make sure we find the right one, and I'm certain that we will, and then the last building block, if you will, is really advancing the next-generation ACLY pipeline. And I want to spend some time in just talking about what we're doing from an R&D perspective. We're leveraging the world-class ACLY platform to expand the pipeline, and how we're doing that is, again, our partnership with Evotec, with Stephen Pinkosky, who's in charge of research and development at Esperion. He is doing a lot of work in virtual screening. He has a lot of knowledge, and that's allowing us to do a lot of high-throughput screening. The eight million compounds that you see is not an exaggeration. We literally have been using artificial intelligence through our partnerships in order to screen what are some compounds that really make sense.
We've gotten down to the point where there's 500 compounds with different indications that we're looking at, whether it's in liver or in kidney. We've developed and we've come up with some multiple lead compounds. I want to focus on one right now, and that's primary sclerosing cholangitis, PSC, a high unmet need-driven significant market opportunity. If you haven't seen the R&D day that we conducted on April 24th of last year, I would encourage you. It's on our website. It's about four hours long. What's nice about it is it's a mix of key opinion leaders, our science, and patient testimonials. There are several patients, one of which who's needed two liver transplantations. There's another patient who's a teenager. I can tell you, ever since we've done that R&D day, we have gotten letters from family members, either as a sister, a daughter, a brother.
Is there any way I can get this drug now? Is there any way I can help in the studies, et cetera? Obviously, we're very early. We don't have a drug yet, and we're still going through initial studies. But that's why we're here. This is the type of work that we do in biotech, and this is the type of work that we're doing at Esperion. There's currently 76,000 patients who are diagnosed both in the U.S. and Europe on an annual basis, and this is greater than a $1 billion market opportunity. There's really no approved therapies that actually address the disease or the injury at the liver. And we feel, based upon our mechanism, we actually do address the disease and potentially could stave off liver transplantation and potentially extend life.
Where we are currently from a program perspective is we'll have some data coming out in the summertime, and this is data that will allow us to go to IND, and our hope will be that we will be in the clinic before the end of 2026 with ESP 2001. I want to give everyone just a quick transition to our operating expense guidance. Again, we're not giving revenue guidance, but our operating expense guidance, full-year R&D is $40-$50 million. Our 2026 SG&A $170-$195 million. Our OPEX overall guidance $210-$245 million. This reflects, of course, our continued investment in U.S. commercial execution.
If there's one takeaway I really want folks to have, that is not only will we be a successful company in the years to come and continue to grow, the only way we can do that is to invest and grow the bempedoic acid franchise, our number one priority. These dollars also support ESP-2001, our development of the triple combination, and maintains focus on our investment, spend, and return on investments. To summarize, again, from execution to ambition, it's focused on three building blocks. Strengthen and expand the bempedoic acid franchise. We're doing that by showing year-over-year growth, quarter-over-quarter growth, and double digits almost in every single category. Build a diversified multi-product portfolio, bring in a product that will be an accretive immediately and picking the right one, and advance our next-generation ACLY pipeline.
This is the team, and I want to congratulate all of the folks that are on this slide for working together, persevering for the last couple of years to get us to the point that we are, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a monumental success, and with that, just quick safety information because I showed a button of can't take a statin and make NEXLIZET happen. Everyone quickly read that, and we're ready to go for questions.
Great. Thank you. So as a reminder, if there's a question in the room, just raise your hand, and someone will bring over a microphone. But maybe I'll start just on the commercial side. I was hoping you could expand a little bit on your top commercial priorities for 2026 and how you're going to measure success.
Yeah. So our top priorities really are obviously to continue the momentum that we started in 2025. So we're going to continue this growth. A couple of things that we are doing, we've actually expanded our personal promotion to go from 20,000 to 40,000 physicians now. This is a mix of both primary care and cardiologists. Our digital footprint, we're actually expanding. We were targeting 60,000 physicians. We're now going to 80,000 physicians. Just a quick fact, we've measured that 25% of physicians that are just contacted via a digital asset, so an email or a banner ad, they've written the drug without personal promotion. So it really speaks to the fact that we have found this balance between personal promotion and digital. The other thing that's really going to help us is the guidelines that come out.
For once, it's not going to be us just talking about the benefits this product is and how well it works, but it's also going to be third-party guideline writers. And just as a quick aside, I can tell you that after the European Society guidelines came out, four days after that, our representatives had a detailing aid where they were allowed to go and educate physicians in the U.S. to show what they were doing in Europe. And then just as it relates to our investment, we're always looking at different areas within our investments where we can either dial up or dial down because we do return on investment of every initiative that we do. And if we see something that's working better than something else, we'll divert dollars there.
You had talked about expanding the sales force in 2026. What is your view of the optimal size and structure to maximize kind of reach, especially in primary care?
Yeah. So right now, we have 155 sales representatives. We have 15 reimbursement managers, one per region. We have 15 regions. And we are currently assessing where we need to either add or maybe even dial down in some situations where territories aren't profitable. Once we do that, we can decide what is the real add. But we're currently in that process. I think right now, we believe we have the optimal size sales force. And there could be some areas where there's large windshield time where we could add another representative, et cetera. But it goes back to that right balance. We have found the right balance between personal promotion and digital promotion. I won't mention company names, but we look at performance on a 13-by-13 week basis.
And there's companies out there selling lipid-lowering drugs with bigger budgets than ours, and we've been outgrowing them on a 13-by-13 week basis because I think we have been very smart about how to apply these dollars, where to send digital targeting versus personal promotion.
Okay. What are you seeing right now in terms of prescriber mix, so primary care versus cardiology or other specialties, and how do you see that evolving?
Yeah. Right now, it's about 50% primary care physicians, 40% cardiologists, and there's a 10% other. There's endocrinologists and some other mix. That's about right. I mean, if you look at ezetimibe, Zetia, the branded name as an analogy, it was about 60%-40%, 60% primary care, 40% cardiologists. That was more a function of just the amount of primary care physicians there are. And it's good because primary care physicians feel as though they can control and manage the patient without having to do a cardiology referral. So that's the mix right now. It was kind of 50%-50%, and it's starting to move a little bit.
Gotcha. You mentioned kind of digital marketing. Can you talk a little bit more about sort of patient activation in addition to prescriber activation, and what are the next steps in that area?
Yeah, so based upon the success that we had this year, we decided to go and activate consumers, and we did that in two ways. One, we started a non-branded consumer website, and then we also started to do essentially direct-to-consumer advertising, but not direct-to-consumer advertising that you see on national TV. We did it through connected TV, so Hulu, Netflix, et cetera. I think we've driven close to 3 million consumers to our website since we've done direct-to-consumer. I might be off a little bit on that number, but it's somewhere in that area. The impressions we were looking for were 18 million impressions in October, and we don't have the final numbers yet. We were already above 6 million impressions. It's a 60-second non-skippable commercial.
When we did market research, we found that 75% of the people watching it did not try to hit a skip button, which was important. 25% did, but 75% is a pretty good number. So we're going to continue to look at activating consumers in different ways. There's different strategies that we can do. And so when you think about it in whole, we're really looking at all the segments. We're activating physicians. Obviously, we're working with our payers to get access. We've done that. We're working with consumers so that they'll think about their health, go to a physician, ask about this drug. Whether we like it or not, statins are the foundation of therapy. And I should say, whether we like it or not, a lot of people don't want to take a statin, don't like statins, really are looking to address their cardiovascular health.
And this helps educate them as well. There's a reason why cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the world. And if we can be a part of the solution so that it's not, we're going to try to help educate physicians or patients as well.
So, question in the audience?
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for the presentation. So my question is on manufacturing responsibilities of bempedoic acid. So how is it split between yourself and Daiichi? Is Daiichi responsible for both U.S. and non-U.S. markets for manufacturing? And the second question related to this is that we do see COGS a bit on a higher side. So is there scope for gross margins to improve from year-round?
Yeah, great. I actually think that might be one of the just the questions too, so I can answer that now. So we do all the manufacturing. We do the manufacturing for Daiichi Sankyo and Otsuka. I think what you're potentially referring to is the tech transfer that we agreed upon. We just actually had a meeting with Daiichi Sankyo this morning about the progress of the tech transfer. Currently, they have approval, and they will start manufacturing NILEMDO. NILEMDO is NEXLETOL, that's bempedoic acid on itself. And NEXLIZET, they should have approval by the end of the year to manufacture that. Now, with that said, also, we do want to make sure that they're manufacturing quality product, of course, et cetera. It's important for us. And we've been working with them closely. Should that schedule persist, we're going to see a vast improvement in our gross margins.
We're going to see a decrease in our working capital. We're very excited about that. We're working with them closely. The question's timely because 7:00 A.M. Pacific time, we had that meeting with our head of manufacturing and marketing. We feel really good about where they are in the process right now.
Maybe coming back to commercial and specifically kind of on the access side. So you've talked about how prior auth and reimbursement barriers have largely been addressed. What, if any, are the remaining hurdles to broader adoption, and how are you supporting prescribers and patients to ensure frictionless access?
Yeah. So let me start first with the access. I mentioned this briefly. We have 90% access with Medicare, 90% in commercial. The split of the two is approximately 50-50. I can see Medicare probably growing a little bit more. Prior authorizations were the largest headwinds for these products before the CLEAR Outcomes study. In order to get bempedoic acid, it used to be you had to go through multiple statins and ezetimibe. One of our biggest ambitions, and it worked, was when we had the CLEAR Outcomes study, which we're presented in April 2024, label 2025. We went to payers, and we said to them, "You need to change your prior authorizations, otherwise we won't pay rebates." What does that mean? You've got to remove these step edits, and we gave them until June to do that, and they all did it.
And so we actually have a detail aid that actually says getting NEXLIZET or NEXLETOL has gotten easy, or it's never been easier than now. The copay, I think one of the biggest misperceptions is with Medicare, and our competitor has done this, I think. With Medicare, there's a thought that the copay is $138. It's actually only $35 in Medicare. And so we're making sure we educate physicians on that. But there's some plans, SilverScript, Caremark, Aetna, there's no prior authorization at all. You can write the drug. And that's very unusual for branded products. So I think the biggest challenge for us is still the education of what the perception of price is and what the real price is, and we've got that handled. But for us, it's just about greater pull-through. It's getting out there, getting to the right physicians, and pulling through more.
The average physician is writing more NEXLETOL and NEXLIZET than they ever had. It used to be somewhere in the 1.5. It's above 3, approaching 4. And we'd like to see that depth increase. We're seeing the breadth increase. We want to work more on the depth increasing. And we think post-guidelines, we're going to see that.
1.5 going to 3, and from there, what is that metric?
That's just looking at number of prescriptions that they are writing on a weekly basis.
Okay. Weekly.
Yeah, weekly. Yeah.
Great.
I think there's a question right here.
What's going to be the effect on the oral PCSK9s now that Merck has that priority voucher?
Can you repeat the question?
Yeah. So I'll answer on behalf of Merck, a company I used to work at. So yeah, they could be on the market, obviously, this year. They pretty much have publicly stated they're going after injectable PCSK9. Rob Davis, their CEO, actually put out a message on LinkedIn that specifically said that. I think the biggest drawback for that product is the fasting. Remember, these are chronic asymptomatic therapies, and you can't see your LDL lowering, and you can't feel it. And I know personally, when I wake up in the morning, I'd like to drink coffee and have something to eat, and I like to eat something before I go to bed, and I don't sleep eight hours, and so I can't take the drug. So that's, I think, going to be the biggest issue for the drug is the fasting. More importantly, though, their outcomes.
The ticket to the game in cardiovascular medicine is outcomes. That's one of the biggest hurdles we faced until we had the CLEAR Outcomes study. I went through all the reasons and how we've overcome them. Their outcomes, the CORALreef study, won't be available until late 2029, early 2030, and we can talk about it then, so.
And then what about if the Lp(a) takes off as a major diagnostic gets covered and everybody gets screened for Lp(a)?
Yeah. I mean, personally, I just got screened for Lp(a). So let's just talk a little bit about Lp(a). Lp(a) is genetic. You can't really modify it via diet or exercise. You can keep doing that, but it's not really going to have an effect. Keep in mind, if you take a look at the study for both alirocumab and evolocumab, so ODYSSEY and FOURIER, they both had comparable Lp(a) reductions, not too far different than the New Amsterdam product as well, and had no effect on residual risk reduction in their outcome studies. So I think the biggest question is, how modifiable is it? That's the question that all the key opinion leaders are saying. And the key opinion leaders I've spoken to, which is a lot of them, I think it's 50-50. 50% think, yeah, maybe there's something that can be done, 50% that can't.
But I think something that can be done that is recognized as a marker by AHA is reducing hsCRP. And I want to remind everybody that bempedoic acid reduces hsCRP, a marker for inflammation, by 36%. We know atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease, and we have a drug that we know if you modify hsCRP, it helps, we think. That's why we have the results that we have from the CLEAR Outcomes study. But the jury's still out for Lp(a), and we'll have to wait and see. We have no effect on Lp(a).
Thank you.
Yeah.
Can you give us an update on your Otsuka partnership in Japan? What's the status with the launch there?
Yeah. So Ben and I actually just came back, and Patty, we actually just came back from Japan, and they've been on the market for a month. I can't say what Ben's been saying to investors, but it's been robustly positive. I mean, they have done in a month, it's amazing how much they've sold. And in Japan, you're limited in the first year of how much product you can actually sell. It's more of a government rule. They have over 700 people in Japan that are marketing and selling this drug. They're very committed. Japan is the third largest lipid market after the United States and Germany. And so great partnership there. They'll be embarking on a pediatric study soon, which could give them an additional two years of patent exclusivity as well. So they're highly motivated, and they're doing a great job.
And keep in mind, we have a royalty stream that tiers from 12%-30% with them as well. So it's another stream of revenue that comes into the organization for us.
So you've talked about transitioning to sustainable profitability. With that in mind, what are your priorities going to be for capital allocation?
Yeah. So we gave our guidance earlier in the presentation, and we don't see any type of deviation from that. Again, we're being very diligent in our spend. And the goal is, it's not the only goal. We have a few goals this year, as you know, but the goal is to reach some type of sustainable profitability in the 2026 timeframe. We're almost there. We're close. And again, that's a big turnaround considering where we were when you and I first started asking questions four years ago. So we feel good about what we've achieved, and we'll be sure to update folks on a quarterly basis.
So maybe asking it slightly differently, let's assume you get there and the company is generating cash, then what are you going to do with it?
Yeah. So I think what we want to do there is really focus on our pipeline and also other potential other assets. Again, keeping in mind, we put a goal out there of having five assets by 2040. If you're counting, NEXLETOL and NEXLIZET counts as one. PSC, should it make it, counts as two. And so three more to go. If there's something that we could bring in sometime soon that again would be immediately accretive, there's three. And we'll see what happens over the next 14 years. But I think it allows us to reinvest into also the bempedoic acid franchise and continuing to make that bigger. There's things that we can do from a lifecycle management perspective that we have a lot of ideas as it relates to bempedoic acid and even combination therapies with other products.
So it's something that's on the drawing board, and once we get there, we can think about how to prioritize them.
So over the course of the week, I feel like we've heard a number of companies talking about how they're hunting for assets. So how do you position Esperion to compete for assets with other companies that want to acquire as well?
Yeah. A lot of the companies are bigger companies with a lot of money to spend. Some of those, we had someone today saying that they can do acquisitions up to $1-$2 billion. We're looking at, there's some companies out there, and there's a lot of them, and we don't have time to go into all of them today. They have one person, three people, four people. They have a product that could potentially generate $30-$40 million a quarter. And these are not the companies that big pharma is interested in or mid-size pharma is interested in. If anything, some of these companies have products that big pharma discarded, and these companies took them and developed them. And so we can play in that area, and we have support from people that would say, "Hey, if you ever need any help, we could help you," etc.
But we're not looking for things that are large. We can only afford so much, I guess, is the best way we could say it. And we're not going to do anything that would cause dilution to the organization to bring something on either.
Okay. Maybe thinking about the pipeline, what are the next milestones the street should be watching for, and how are you going to communicate progress on the pipeline?
Yeah, so in the June-July timeframe, we're somewhere around Q2. We hope to have two final tox studies done on PSC, and so we're having lots of discussions. We've had a few of us meet with investors this week. We've had two people, Tony and Patty, who are in the audience, going to different companies that are interested in our pipeline, and we've been updating them of what's happening, but as soon as we are IND-enabled, we'll be issuing a press release on that, and we hope to, again, be there sometime late 2026, and also during our quarterly earnings and so forth, if there's updates, we'll make sure we talk about it.
Okay, so maybe just the last one. You're talking about a Vision 2040. How do you see this company kind of evolving over time?
How I see it over time is something that's going to be very exciting. It's a company that is going to continue to grow the bempedoic acid franchise, make investments in our pipeline, conduct our business development. It's a company that's going to get larger, and I think that's what's exciting about it. You and I talked right before the conference or right before the interview that this company, a few years ago, from a capital structure, was in pretty bad shape. This is the first J.P. Morgan where we've come where there's no overhangs, and we can really focus on execution and building this to a bigger company, and then the question is strategics, etc. We have to operate the organization as though we're going to be on our own, and that's what we're doing.
I do think, though, we're creating something that's very exciting that's going to capture the interest of many people as we continue this march forward.
Great. All right. So we'll stop there. Thank you.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.