Good morning. I'm John Martin, Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences. I'm pleased to welcome you to Gilead's 2018 annual meeting of stockholders. Before I call the meeting to order, I'd like to introduce to you some of the members of the Gilead team. Sitting up front are members of the Board of Directors. John Cogan, Lead Independent Director, Jacqueline Barton, Kevin Sharer, Kevin Lofton, Richard Whitley, Gayle Wilson, Per Wold-Olsen, and Nicholas Moore, who's retiring as of this meeting. Thank you, Nick. Of course, John Milligan, Board Member, President, and Chief Executive Officer. We also have several members of our leadership team here this morning.
Robin Washington, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, John McHutchison, Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Research and Development, Gregg Alton, Executive Vice President, International Operations and Corporate Affairs, Katie Watson, Executive Vice President, Human Resources, Brett Pletcher, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Sung Lee, investor relations, and Amy Flood, public affairs. There are a number of other Gilead employees present, and they'll be available for questions after today's formal agenda is complete. I'd also like to introduce Chris Millette from Ernst & Young, our independent auditors. The meeting will now come to order. Brett Pletcher will serve as secretary for this meeting. We'll first cover the formal business of the meeting, as described in our proxy statement. Afterwards, we'll make a brief presentation on the company's business activities and address your questions.
The meeting will run in accordance with the agenda and procedures set forth in the rules of conduct given to you as you entered the meeting. The Board of Directors has appointed Christina Vico of Veaco Group as Inspector of Election at this meeting. Ms. Vico has taken and subscribed the customary oath of office to execute her duties with strict impartiality. We will file this oath with the records of the meeting. Her function is to determine the qualifications of voters, accept their votes, and when balloting on all matters is completed, to tally the ballots cast to each matter. Will the secretary please report on the stockholders' list and the mailing of the meeting notice?
I have a complete list of the stockholders of record of the company's common stock on March 16th, 2018, the record date for this meeting. I also have an affidavit from Broadridge certifying that on March 26th, 2018, a notice of annual meeting of stockholders of the company was disseminated to all stockholders of record on the record date.
Will the secretary please report on the existence of a quorum?
I have been informed by the Inspector of Election that proxies have been received for 1,117,036,821 shares of the 1,303,850,147 shares of common stock outstanding on the record date, which represents approximately 86% of the total number of outstanding shares. This constitutes a quorum for the transaction of business.
I hereby declare this meeting to be duly convened and the polls open for voting and the transaction of all business.
Does anyone present wish to submit proxies, whether or not they have submitted proxies to vote prior to now? Anyone need to vote at this meeting? No. If so, you can go back and talk to Ms. Vico back in the back corner.
In order to expedite the flow of business at this meeting, we intend to adhere to the following order of business. Each of the matters to be acted on by the shareholders today will be presented in the order set forth in the agenda. After presentation of all matters, I'll open the floor for questions or comments on the items of business. In order to ensure that the business of the meeting proceeds in an orderly fashion and that stockholders who wish to speak have a fair opportunity to do so, questions or comments shall be limited to the items of business listed on the agenda. The actual vote on each item, however, will be deferred until all of the matters to be acted upon have been discussed.
The first order of business is the election of nine directors to serve for the next year and until their successors are elected and qualified. The board nominees are John Cogan, Jacqueline Barton, Kevin Sharer, Kevin Lofton, John Martin, John Milligan, Richard Whitley, Gayle Wilson, and Per Wold-Olsen, each a current director of the company. The board of directors has recommended a vote in favor of each of the nominees. The second order of business is the ratification of the selection of Ernst & Young by the audit committee of the board of directors as the independent registered public accounting firm of Gilead for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2018. The board of directors has recommended a vote in favor of this proposal. The third item of business is the approval on an advisory basis of the compensation of our named executive officers as presented in the proxy statement.
The board of directors has recommended a vote in favor of this proposal. The fourth item of business is consideration of a stockholder proposal requesting that the board adopt a policy that the chairman of the board of directors be an independent director. The board of directors has recommended a vote against this proposal for the reasons set forth in the proxy statement. Mr. Jing Zhao will present the proposal. Mr. Zhao, please take the podium. As the proposal is described in the proxy statement and is being duly presented at this meeting, there is no need to read the proposal. Please limit your presentation to five minutes. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Proposal number four, for independent board chairman. Shareholders request our board of directors to adopt a policy and amend our governing documents as necessary to require henceforth that the chair of the board of directors, whenever possible, be an independent member of the board. The board would have the discretion to phase in this policy for the next CEO transition, implement it so it does not violate any existing agreement. If the board determines that a chair who was independent when selected is no longer independent, the board shall select a new chair who satisfies the requirements of the policy within a reasonable amount of time. Compliance with this policy is waived if no independent director is available and willing to serve as chairman. This proposal requests that all necessary steps be taken to accomplish the above.
Caterpillar is an example of a company recently changing course and naming an independent board chairman. Caterpillar has strongly opposed a shareholder proposal for an independent board chairman as recently as its 2016 annual meeting. Wells Fargo also changed course and named an independent board chairman in 2016. It was reported that 53 of the Standard & Poor's 1,500 firms separated these two positions in its 2015 report. This proposal topics won 50%-plus support at five major U.S. companies in 2013, including 73% support at Netflix. This proposal topped around 44% support at our 2017 annual meeting. This 44% support could have been higher if small shareholders had the same access to corporate governance information as large shareholders. A number of institutional investors said that a strong, objective chairman can best provide the necessary oversight of management.
The California Public Employees' Retirement System's global principles of accountable corporate governance recommends that a company's board should be chaired by an independent director, as does the Council of Institutional Investors. An independent director serving as chairman can help ensure the functioning of an effective board, as well to enhance the oversight of the CEO. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Zhao. The board's opposition statement for the stockholder proposal has been included in the proxy statement for all stockholders to consider. The fifth item of business is consideration of a stockholder proposal requesting that the board take steps to permit stockholder action by written consent. The board of directors has recommended a vote against this proposal for the reasons set forth in the proxy statement. Mr. Zhao will present the proposal.
Thank you again. Proposal number five, right to act by written consent. Shareholders request that the board of directors take such steps as may be necessary to permit written consent by shareholders entitled to cast the minimum number of votes that would be necessary to authorize the action at a meeting at which all shareholders entitled to vote thereon were present and voting. This written consent is to be consistent with giving shareholders the fullest power to act by written consent consistent with applicable law. This includes shareholders' ability to initiate any appropriate topics for written consent. Shareholders' right to act by written consent and to call a special meeting are two complementary ways to bring an important matter to the attention of both management and shareholders outside the annual meeting circle. This is important because there could be more than one year between annual meetings.
A shareholder's right to act by written consent is one method to equalize the restrictive provisions of Gilead Sciences for shareholders to call a special meeting. For instance, it now takes 20% of Gilead Sciences shareholders to call a special meeting, when many companies allow 10% of shareholders to do so. This proposal topic won majority shareholder support at 30 major companies in a single year. This included 67% support at both Allstate and Sprint last year. The topic won majority votes at Western Union, Ryder System, and four other companies. This proposal topic also won 48% support at 2017 Gilead Sciences annual meeting, up from 46% support in 2016. Support could have been higher if small shareholders had access to the same corporate governance information as large shareholders. According to Proxy Insight, 267 funds voted in favor, 85 opposed, and three abstained, including Vanguard.
We believe more funds and individual shareholders will vote for This year, given our company's continued underperformance relative to the Nasdaq, hundreds of major companies enable shareholders to act by written consent, including 64% of S&P 500 and 55% of the S&P 1500. Increase shareholder value. Please vote for right to act by consent. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Zhao. The board's opposition statement for a stockholder proposal has been included in the proxy statement for all shareholders to consider. Does any stockholder have a question or comment related to any of the proposals? If so, please proceed to the microphone located in the center of the aisle and wait to be recognized. Please identify yourself by name, organization, and as a stockholder or proxy holder, then proceed with your question or comment. As a courtesy to other stockholders present, please limit your questions or remarks to two minutes. Okay. The secretary will now conduct the voting.
I will now report on the voting of the stockholders at this meeting. Each share of common stock is entitled to one vote. The voting was conducted by proxy and written ballot. Having earlier requested stockholders intending to vote at this meeting to register their votes with Ms. Vico at the back of the room, the polls are now closed. The preliminary report of the inspector of election is as follows. The director nominees have been elected with between 97%-99% of the shares voting in favor of each director. The selection of Ernst & Young by the audit committee of the board of directors as the independent registered public accounting firm of Gilead for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2018, is ratified with approximately 97% of the shares voting in favor.
The advisory vote to approve the compensation of our named executive officers, as presented in the proxy statement, is approved with approximately 89% of the shares voting in favor. The shareholder proposal requesting the board adopt a policy that the chairman of the board of directors be an independent director was not approved, with approximately 45% of the shares voting in favor. The stockholder proposal requesting the board to take steps to permit stockholder action by written consent was approved with approximately 51% of the shares voting in favor. The final results of the voting will be reported in the Form 8-K within four business days from today.
This concludes the formal portion of our meeting. After adjournment, John Milligan, President and Chief Executive Officer, will provide a presentation on Gilead, then we'll entertain relevant questions from stockholders. Thank you. John.
Good morning, and welcome everybody. It's my pleasure to be able to present on Gilead Sciences and on behalf of the board of directors, a presentation on Gilead. I hope this will give you some idea of where the company is and where we have high expectations about where the company will be going in the future, then we'll have question and answer at the end. Here we go. That's me. I just want to say we will be making forward-looking statements during the course of this presentation. There are many risks associated with our business. I advise each of you to read our most recently filed 10-Q for more information on those risks and our upcoming filing of our most recent filed 10-K and our upcoming 10-Q for more information on those risks. I think today we can say that Gilead has had exceptional performance.
We are the scientific leader in HIV, where we have brought forward the most innovative products and treat the most number of patients. We've been highly innovative in liver diseases, and I'll talk about that through the course of this presentation and the work we've done in HCV and now in diseases like NASH. We've now become the leader in cell therapy through last year's acquisition of Kite Pharma, along with other technologies that we've brought forth to really push forth the most innovative and interesting technology that is now being used to battle cancer. We reach millions of patients worldwide. Globally, we have 38 different countries where we have direct representation and, of course, work through many partners globally to bring access to the remainder of the world.
We've treated about 1.7 million people with HCV, the vast majority of whom have been cured by these very short-term, very powerful medicines. In terms of HIV, we continue to broaden our global presence through our partnerships with the Indian generics and with our work, especially in the developing parts of the world in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America, where we now estimate that over 11.5 million people have access to one of Gilead's HIV medications and take them every single day, which is an amazing growth over the last 15 years when we started this program, when fewer than 30,000 people were being treated in this part of the world. We're positioned for growth.
We ended the year and the quarter with a very strong balance sheet with over $32 billion on our balance sheet, which is well-positioning us for future M&A and partnerships as we continue to broaden the categories that we'll participate in, trying to reach more patients with unmet medical needs globally. 2017 was a very transformative year for us. This is a presentation that we started at J.P. Morgan conference earlier this year. You can see the amazing growth that has occurred between 2012 and 2017. What's left out in the middle years is the massive growth that occurred from HCV.
That category is now winding down. You can see as we go into 2018, we expect revenue to be down further, all as a result of declining revenues associated with HCV, whereas our underlying business in HIV continues to grow very dramatically and very consistently and will be a future driver of growth, which makes this really a transformative year as we break out from the declines of HCV back into a growth phase with smaller HCV revenues, but increasing revenues associated with HIV and our future products. Over the last five years, we've had tremendous operational excellence, with over 13 U.S. NDAs filed. We have four of the top 10 pharmaceutical product launches of all history. We have one, two, three, and number nine. That is an amazing feat over those years. We have industry-leading margins at greater than 50%.
As I mentioned in the balance sheet, we have strong cash flows to support the company. In terms of shareholder return, as of the end of last year, we had 56% of our free cash flow have been returned to shareholders. We initiated a dividend program, which we have had three subsequent increases in the dividend rate, and we have reduced the share count by 14% through judicious use of stock buyback programs. Looking forward over the next five years, what do we see? Well, number 1, we see continued innovation and growth in HIV as our new TAF-based product and new innovative product that I'll talk about in a moment come to market.
We have new products for the treatment of liver disease and inflammatory diseases, a new category for us, these are products that are moving through the pipeline that I'll speak about in a moment. As I mentioned on my first slide, we've become a leader in cell therapy and intend to continue to build off that leadership. We will have continued operational excellence, trying to get the most out of our people and our processes for the benefit of patients and shareholders alike. HIV, as I mentioned, I think this is a growth story for Gilead, I just want to talk about the continued innovation. If you think about 2001 through 2014, this was all about TDF. That's tenofovir disoproxil fumarate for the chemists in the audience.
It is the active ingredient in VIREAD and has been one of the components of almost all our HIV drugs, including all our combination regimens. That led to such breakthrough products as ATRIPLA, the first single-tablet regimen, COMPLERA and Stribild, two other STRs that we've brought to market, which were hugely beneficial to patients. Beginning in 2005, we began to launch TAF-based products. TAF is tenofovir alafenamide. It allows a lower dose to be given to patients with the correct exposure. This was a very difficult molecule to synthesize and scale up. It has proven to be highly effective and safer in clinical studies than in our comparison with both TDF-containing regimens and other regimens. We have a product that has a very important attribute for patients. This product has now been approved in four different forms, including three STRs, and our most recent approval of Biktarvy.
Biktarvy is a single-tablet regimen containing TAF, emtricitabine, also known as FTC, and then importantly bictegravir. This is the first product with our new product bictegravir, which is an integrase inhibitor that does not require boosting, has a low dose, Biktarvy as an STR is the smallest pill that you can take as a single-tablet regimen once daily for the treatment of HIV. This is a very important product, and we're very pleased with both the way the labeling has gone, the outcome of the many clinical studies that we've run, and its uptake to date. We think the innovation in HIV is not over. We're thinking about what the future needs might be for HIV in patients, including things like long-acting injectables. Now, with a single-tablet regimen, you might think, what's better than and simpler than taking one pill once a day?
For many patients, especially patients who lead chaotic lives, they are unable to stay on regimens, even with the simplicity of a single-tablet regimen. We note that while there is a high level of treatment rates in most of the developed world, there are still a large number of people, larger than there should be, who don't seek therapy. Perhaps long-acting injectables could be an answer for them, and we're looking at injectables that could be given once monthly, perhaps as infrequently as once every three months, that could serve as a way to get these patients the medicine they need, bring their virus under control, and importantly, prevent those people from spreading the virus.
In many studies, we now know that treatment prevents the virus from being transmitted to other people and can stop the spread of HIV in the U.S. and throughout the world. We're very excited about this, and I apologize, this is the only chemical structure I'm going to show you today. This very, very complicated molecule is something called a capsid inhibitor. This is a molecule that has now gone into the clinic. It has the potential to be a very low volume injection. That's important because a small volume doesn't hurt very much. It's easy for a physician to administer and has the potential, at least based on animal studies, to be given very infrequently. It is a new category of product.
There are no capsid inhibitors currently marketed for the treatment of HIV, which means it has great flexibility in being used in patients who may have already become resistant to other patients or perhaps can be used in patients as upfront therapy or perhaps as prevention. If you can imagine the complexity of a life of somebody with HIV, the ability to infrequently inject for prevention of HIV could be a substitute for a vaccine and keep, again, the infection rate from spreading further than it does. We're also working on molecules for treatment-resistant HIV. Capsid inhibitor could be one of those. We've also entered into the clinic with a program that's called GS-9131. It is another nucleotide inhibitor reverse transcriptase, much like TDF and TAF, but with very different characteristics. We're now exploring its use in highly treatment-resistant patients.
Of course, we've embarked upon a program to try to see if we can eradicate the disease through different kinds of modalities. We also put grants out. We issued $20 million in grants to various academic institutions over the last year, seeking new ideas in how to potentially eradicate the disease from patients. In terms of thinking about TAF, Descovy-based regimens. Descovy is TAF plus emtricitabine. This is a product that is two of the three components. We call it the backbone of therapy, because then you add a third agent, such as a bictegravir onto that to make the regimen that you need.
In terms of all Descovy-containing regimens, and they're listed down on the lower right-hand side here by their trade names, we now find that whereas TDF-based or Truvada-based regimens had been the predominant form of use in the U.S., we now see that 65% of patients have switched to one of the several Descovy-based options that are available. That continues to grow very strongly. We're very pleased with how Descovy has been used. If we think about the future world, we think it's likely that Descovy will be the principal backbone in the majority of patients who are treated for HIV, the vast majority. Outside of the U.S., we also see very positive signs for the uptake of Descovy-based regimens in the larger European countries. For time's sake, I'm just going to highlight two here.
In France, we see that Genvoya, which launched just over a year ago, I should say, in France, but was approved a couple of years ago in Europe, has now become the number one regimen for the treatment of HIV in France. In Italy, we see Descovy itself has done extremely well. You notice that Odefsey and Genvoya, two other TAF-based regimens, are closely catching up with Descovy and very, very popular in Italy. This just shows and highlights the importance of Descovy-based regimens and TAF-based regimens globally. In terms of Biktarvy, it was just recently approved in the U.S. In February of this year, we had approval. It's just come to market. We anticipate in the EU it will be approved in the third quarter of this year. We just had a positive CHMP opinion.
It takes about two months from that opinion to get full EC approval, which allows us to then start to sell and negotiate prices in the European countries. We're very pleased that the US DHHS guidelines were recently updated to include Biktarvy as a recommended initial regimen for the treatment of HIV, based on its benefits as in our FDA prescribing information. We do, again, as I said, we think this will become the number one regimen for the treatment of HIV for both treatment naive, patients new to therapy, and patients who are switching off other regimens. We had about six weeks of sales in the first quarter, and the sales were about just over $35 million in the U.S. A very, very good start for this product. I want to talk a little bit about PrEP. PrEP is pre-exposure prophylaxis.
This is the ability of a person who doesn't have HIV to take a pill to try to prevent the acquisition of HIV, and it's particularly important in people, excuse me, not patients, but people who are at high risk of acquiring HIV. PrEP should be used in combination with other protective measures, such as condom use. We have found in clinical studies that the addition of Truvada to safer sex practices does lower the risk of becoming HIV positive, and this is growing in popularity in the U.S. We saw at the end of the last quarter, we had about 167,000 people in the U.S. who were using PrEP as part of their ways to prevent the acquisition of HIV. It's the only therapeutic that's approved for the treatment of preventing HIV.
It's interesting, we're seeing that people take their medicines fairly regularly. It's almost on par with what you would do if you were taking HIV medications. There is a consistency to taking the medication, which is good, because if you don't take your medicine for PrEP, you're not protected. It's not like a vaccine. You have to take it when you're at risk. We're also very interested in seeing if a Descovy-based regimen can also be used in PrEP. We're pleased to say that Descovy for PrEP, those trials fully enrolled far ahead of schedule. We are running a head-to-head study looking at Descovy versus a Truvada-based regimen to look at the benefits of Descovy, and that is running ahead of schedule. I'm going to turn my attention to liver diseases now, and turn first to HCV.
As I mentioned, we've had a very complete portfolio of HCV products. It's been a very interesting adventure of serial innovation. It's very unusual for a company to invent and then replace its medicines as quickly as we have in HCV. We brought Sovaldi to market in 2013. In 2014, Sovaldi was one of the best-selling medicines in the U.S. Of course, at the end of that year, we made it essentially obsolete by bringing Harvoni to market for the treatment of HCV, then subsequently, 2 years after that, brought Epclusa to market for the treatment of HIV. Whereas Sovaldi was one of the best-selling drugs in America in 2014, in the first quarter of this year, its sales were negligible. We have made it essentially obsolete by bringing newer, better medicines to market. We also recently brought Vosevi to market.
Vosevi is a product that contains 3 drugs and is very useful for patients who may have become resistant or failed other therapies. Across Gilead's portfolio, we have different options of 8 weeks, 12 weeks, and options for treatment-resistant patients that provide all the needs and high potential cure rates for nearly every patient out there. It's a very comprehensive portfolio. As we mentioned earlier, we are seeing a lower yet more predictable amount of sales. Prices have come down very dramatically over the course of the years as new competition has come to market. The prices that are represented by the prices are probably 4 to 5 times higher than what actually a patient would have to pay or a system would have to pay. Prices have come down dramatically. We've also seen fewer and fewer patients.
As you cure patients, new ones have to come in to the doctor to be diagnosed and treated. That market is becoming smaller, yet I think more stable and predictable, and frankly, a smaller part of our portfolio going forward. We do see it's a more stable market dynamic going forward, which means the growth of our underlying business can shine through and not be overshadowed by HCV. I mentioned in my earlier slide, we're moving on to new targets. We'll talk about NASH. NASH is a disease called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. This is a severe form of fatty liver disease. Fatty liver diseases in general are a growing problem across the globe.
There may be as many as 15 million people in America who have some form of NASH or fatty liver disease, and it is growing in prevalence as a result of diet and lifestyle, principally. NASH is a result of something called hepatocyte lipotoxicity. What does that mean? It means you have fat building up in cells. That cell has untoward effects, including killing off hepatocytes. That can lead to inflammation. That inflammation can lead to fibrosis, which can be very difficult on the architecture of the liver and cause decreased liver function over time. It's a cycle that goes on getting worse and worse. A patient, for example, which would have the most severe form of NASH, something called F4 NASH. F4 describes the state of fibrosis as being the worst. Those patients typically have a median lifespan of about 5 years.
NASH has become the number one reason for liver transplantation in the United States, replacing HCV and HBV as the cause, as we have great therapies and cures for those diseases. This is of growing importance and one that we have tackled with a number of products. We're going after hepatocyte lipotoxicity with two products. One's called an ACC inhibitor. This is a direct actor on the fatty acid production, we call GS-0976. The other is a little bit of an indirect actor on fatty acid synthesis called an FXR agonist or GS-0974. The most advanced program we have is really on that boundary of inflammatory disease and fibrosis. It does act on an inflammatory component.
It also seems to act on the fibrotic component of NASH, and that's our ASK1 inhibitor, which has now been given the generic name selonsertib, and it targets something that's upregulated and something called oxidative stress. When you're in an inflamed state, you're in oxidative stress. This targets some of the signaling and helps relieve the cell from that, causing a reduction in fibrosis in clinical studies so far. selonsertib is first-in-class molecule. It's very active. We can see that the targeted enzyme is very active in liver biopsies of patients with NASH, and it correlates well with the fibrotic state of the patient. We had very positive data, you can see on the lower right-hand side, showing that fewer patients got worse, more patients got better. To simplify this graph with increasing amounts of our ASK1 inhibitor.
That led us to embark upon two big phase III studies. We call them the STELLAR studies, STELLAR-3, which is in F3 patients with fibrosis, and STELLAR-4, which is in F4 patients with fibrosis. Those studies fully enrolled ahead of schedule, which means with the 48-week endpoint of these two studies, we will begin to have data sets available around the end of the year, probably announced next year, into early next year. If these two studies are positive, as we predicted from the phase II studies, this would allow us to file for approval and perhaps one of the first drugs to file for approval for NASH around the end of next year. This is a very exciting program in a brand-new product category where there currently aren't any treatments for disease, and we could have some of the first products available.
As we have with HIV and with HCV, we're not satisfied with a single product, we are embarking upon combination studies of our ASK1 inhibitor, along with several other agents. Excuse me. This looks at our phase II-B studies of NASH. We announced some of our II-A results at a meeting called the International Liver Conference, often known as EASL. Those data were designed to test the safety of various combinations. Each of those programs was deemed to be safe enough to go into larger studies, and we did see some really interesting activity in combining two mechanisms. Those were studies of only 12-week duration, which is perhaps a little too short to see the real benefit of a product or combination products.
As you can see here, we are embarking upon a comprehensive 350-patient study looking at various dual combinations of our products as compared with the monotherapies, as compared with placebo. With about 70 patients in each of these arms, we should have a pretty good idea of which combination would be the best to move forward into further studies of NASH, trying to do better, more good in this field than we might be able to with selonsertib alone. We will be pursuing this and have started to run these studies. I am going to turn to inflammation. I mentioned this earlier in my study. We are studying a molecule called filgotinib. This is something called a JAK1 inhibitor. It is very selective. The JAK pathway has been known to be involved in a lot of autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. We liked the preclinical profile of this program.
It became available for licensure after our partner, Galapagos, which is a European company, had acquired a fairly extensive human clinical data set of about 900 patients, where we felt that the safety and benefit of this program had the potential to be best in class. We have a lot of work to do to prove that, but we are very pleased with the selectivity of this versus JAK1. We like what we have seen in a lot of the preclinical models in terms of the potential toxicity. We are now running very large studies to look at how this program could be useful for diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease. We are currently running three big FINCH studies. I will show you on the next slide. These studies have fully enrolled with data anticipated by the end of this year.
We will, in the second half of this year, start to have data sets that show in large, well-controlled, randomized, and often active controlled studies, what this product looks like. We are also doing proof of concept studies in five additional disease areas that I will show you in a little bit. To date, we have collected about 1,700 patient years of treatment experience in various studies. We do think the responses are quite durable, and the safety profile is consistent with all the reported studies that we have had to date. This just looks at the overall filgotinib clinical research program. As you can see, there are five pivotal phase III studies, three in rheumatoid arthritis, as I described earlier. We have another one in ulcerative colitis, which will enroll 1,300 patients. That is ongoing and enrolling. One in Crohn's disease.
That is what CD stands for there, looking at both people who have experienced failure after going on a biologic that is used, generally something called a TNF alpha inhibitor, and also patients who are naive to therapy. We are looking at other inflammatory diseases. Some of these will start to play out during the course of this year and next year. These are phase II studies to see if we have activity at the highest dose of filgotinib in things like psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, lupus, Sjogren's syndrome, and uveitis. These products tend to have fairly broad activity, and we will continue to explore a range of activity for both safety and efficacy as we continue this program.
One thing that I learned about autoimmune and inflammatory diseases is how difficult it has been to study, and how the tools over the years have been fairly inadequate at really figuring out why patients respond or they don't respond to certain therapies, and importantly, why patients fail certain therapies. The science is unbelievably complicated. We formed a recent partnership with Verily because Verily had come up with something called their Immunoscape platform. This is a really sophisticated way to interrogate the human immune system in a way that was somewhat unimaginable because of the complexity of what they're doing and the data analysis that's required for each patient. They're able to segment human white blood cells into 24 different categories, interrogate gene expression across 1,300 genes, and then aggregate those data for each single patient.
That is a terabyte of data per patient, only companies like Verily, which is part of the Alphabet world, have access to the kind of data crunching capability to be able to do that. They have now established a baseline for what people without disease look like, we are working with them to look at our various clinical samples to ask the questions, what do patients respond look like? What changes in their immune system or not? For patients who don't respond, what does that look like? For patients who respond and then fail, what does that look like? We will have one of the most sophisticated data sets for really understanding what happens at the cellular level when a patient fails or responds to therapy. We think this could be useful in identifying the correct patients for coming onto therapy.
We think it could be useful for identifying which next therapy might be best for a patient, we think it might unleash new targets that we could go after to really do what hasn't been done, which is push the boundaries even higher in rheumatoid arthritis to give more patients better remission for longer periods of time. I'm clearly very excited about this. If you're a geek like I am in technology, this is the bringing together of high tech biology and science in a way that was unimaginable 10 years ago. We're very excited about this collaboration. Finally, in oncology, let's talk about the cell therapy revolution. This is another technology. The number of inventions and discoveries that had to come together to make this possible is just unimaginable.
Yet we figured out the immune system, we figured out gene engineering, we figured out how to insert genes, we figured out how to grow up cells, deliver them back to patients in a safe way that makes this kind of thing now possible to do on a commercial scale. Yes, CAR-T is the second approved, first for adults with diffuse large B-cell lymphomas and other aggressive B-cell malignancies to use a patient's own cells, genetically engineer them, put them back into the patient to fight their cancer, they're having some really strong effects in these patients. In Europe, this should be the first approved cellular therapy for the treatment of B-cell lymphomas, I think is really setting the bar for what we can do to cure cancer. In the U.S., we have 40 cancer centers already authorized.
This is a difficult process of training doctors, administrators, all the various people who care for patients. It's a very complicated process, and it is a program that is difficult to administer and has some severe side effects, so we want to be very careful about how we administer this. We're expanding our centers, and we think we'll have enough centers up and running so about 80% of patients in America are covered by the mid-year, and we'll cover the vast majority of geographies where those patients come from. I can say that this is a complicated product. New complicated products in hospitals come with some reimbursement challenges as it takes a while for places like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to come up with the drug reimbursement codes necessary so that the hospitals can get reimbursed for this.
We are working to increase that, and it's been going fairly consistent with our expectations, leading to about $40 million in net product revenues in the first quarter. There's a meeting called the ASH or the American Society of Hematology meeting. This was in Atlanta in 2017, this takes place in December every year. These are just a couple of the cool headlines that came out from various articles. CAR-T really took center stage at ASH. There were over 300 different abstracts from various institutions on what they're doing with CAR-Ts, as people have really started to understand the power of using one's own immune system to attack your own cancer, and the ability to keep that cancer in remission for a long period of time. Many good headlines about Kite and Gilead, and the results that were presented there.
Gilead and Kite had 97 different abstracts at ASH, it was a really important meeting for us. These are some of the data that came out at ASH. There was a concurrent "New England Journal of Medicine," that's NEJM up there, publication that came out. This is an updated data set to the data that went in for our U.S. label. You can see that we now have longer follow-up on more patients, almost twice as long a follow-up. In our extended group, we have an objective response rate to a response in patients of over 80%, 82%. That's pretty remarkable. These are patients who have failed generally four different kinds of therapy before they come on to our therapy and are in very, very bad shape. To have that kind of response rate is remarkable.
At some point, there was a complete remission rate in 58% of patients. The median duration of response has not been reached, and the median survival has not been reached because the patients are still doing well. That is really remarkable. As I mentioned, this does come with some side effects, which are considerable, including something called CRS. That is a cytokine release syndrome associated with cells expanding and attacking your cancer. There are neurological toxicities, generally an amnesia that occurs in patients that typically resolves with very little ongoing issues for those patients. One thing that we're proud of is that we enrolled patients, we were able to successfully manufacture for 99% of the patients who enrolled, and 91% of the patients who enrolled were able to receive their CAR T.
I will say that some of the patients are so sick that by the time you get the cells out, manufacture them back, That takes about 17 days. Some of these patients were not able to make it to the final infusion because their disease was so difficult, and they were so late stage, which is unfortunate. I've highlighted those things in the red box already. I just wanted to show you one cool slide. This is a Kaplan-Meier curve showing overall survival, You can see that there is a long tail, small numbers of patients, but there's a very long tail showing that patients who do respond and have a good response to CAR-T, that that can be a very durable response.
Again, this is a single infusion of cells, A single treatment that can persist for very long periods of time, We're studying the persistence. Those cells can stay in your body and continue to fight cancer. Some of the early studies done at the NCI, especially in pediatric patients, many patients have evidence of the CAR-T, the cancer-fighting cells, well beyond a decade. This is now something that can fight the disease in your body for a long period of time. Compared to historical controls, there's a 72% reduction in the risk of death compared to controls, That's astounding for such a late-stage disease. We're not going to be satisfied with just these patients.
We think that this could be a benefit for more patients in more categories and could be a huge benefit to patients and the system by going to earlier lines of therapy instead of waiting for multiple lines of additional extensive therapy that we could, in fact, save the system money. We have important studies going on. I'll point to ZUMA-5. Sorry, ZUMA-7 at the bottom. That is second-line therapy. We are comparing CAR-T therapy to the current second-line standard of care, which is a bone marrow transplant. We think there's an opportunity to perhaps have a better outcome for patients with a CAR-T therapy versus a bone marrow transplantation. We're exploring that in that clinical study of 350 patients. We're looking to expand our indications into different areas. We have this as KTE-C19.
This is our CD19 therapy with different manufacturing conditions, looking at mantle cell lymphoma and adult pediatric, adult lymphocytic leukemia. We're also expanding the number of tumors we're looking at, including multiple myeloma through our KITE-585 that targets something called BCMA, a known myeloma target. We're starting work in solid tumors with something called MAGE-A3/A6, looking at various solid tumors that express this, including non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma, and other cancers which are known to express this antigen. This is the first indication which a CAR-T is being used against a solid tumor, not a hematological tumor such as a lymphoma. What's next? This manufacturing process is complicated and expensive, We're trying to increase the efficiency of our manufacturing. We're trying to come up with cellular therapies that are safer and have greater efficacy in these patients.
We're exploring different ways to do that, we're looking at allogeneic cell therapy. What is allogeneic cell therapy? Currently today, we do something called autologous. That means we take your cells, we modify them, grow them back up, and put them back in you, so your body won't reject them because they're your own cells. An allogeneic is when a bone marrow transplant comes from one donor to the next. There are risks of rejection and something called graft-versus-host disease. We're trying to figure out if we can't come up with a way to have healthy volunteers donate their cells, engineer out the components that would cause graft-versus-host disease or rejection, put them back into patients, and have more of an off-the-shelf product. There'd be greater manufacturing efficiency, it could be done much more cheaply.
We can deliver it to patients much more quickly, those patients who are severely ill would have a chance to get CAR-T before it's too late. This could be a really important manufacturing process improvement for patients. We're accelerating this work through an acquisition and a collaboration. The acquisition with Cell Design Labs, that gives us some optionality on how to control cells. For example, we can now design CAR-Ts that have to target two different things before they would attack that cell. We also have a way to turn a switch on or off to turn off the CAR-T cell in case of untoward side effects. We also did a collaboration with Sangamo. Sangamo was one of the first gene-editing companies. It has a different kind of technology, but it's analogous to what you might have heard about with CRISPR-Cas9.
It's the ability to very efficiently and effectively target certain genes, either to knock them out or to introduce new gene sequences that could be useful, we're collaborating with them, trying to come up with ways to come up with an allogeneic strategy for not only CD19, but for a variety of different cancers. We have 10 different product categories we're looking at with Sangamo. We're continuing to bring in technology that will help us in CAR-T. Finally, just some closing thoughts on Gilead, then I have a couple of other slides. We're positioned as a leader across our core therapeutic areas with the current products and our emerging products. We have the financial strength to continue to build our pipeline, both internally, also through acquisitions and through partnerships, which we've shown that we will do.
We continue to have a science-focused culture that fosters waves of innovation. Last night's board dinner was all about continued innovation into the future. We have a continued focus on operational excellence and try to remain as lean a company as we can to do the things that we want to do for patients. We take our corporate social responsibility very seriously. This is the cover of our 2017 Year in Review. I urge you to go to our website to read it. It is a nice collection of the data and the stories about the work that we do around the globe, including the $400 million we donated in 2017 to more than 2,000 nonprofit organizations. We launched a pledge, it's called our Compass Program, which is redirecting and more specifically targeting the American South, where the HIV epidemic is growing at an alarmingly high rate.
We continue to push our medicines into low-income companies, not only our TDF-based regimens, but now our TAF-based regimens and our HBV regimens, targeting 130 low-income countries across the globe. We've been supporting worldwide efforts to try to eliminate HCV. We had a really nice map at our booth at the International Liver Congress showing eradication programs around the globe and the effect they're having, and some of our demonstration projects such as Iceland, our program in the Republic of Georgia, our program in Pakistan and Egypt, where the diseases have the highest prevalence and are hitting those societies the hardest. We also, in 2017, more than 40,000 people received no-cost treatment through our U.S. patient assistance programs. We're doing a lot of different things. We have a lot of different sustainability programs. They're too numerous to go in here.
I urge you to read our 62-page report on all the different things that we're doing across sustainability, across employee engagement, across diversity, and importantly, all the things we do for patients globally. I was just going to finish up with a picture of two of our workers at our El Segundo, California, facility. If you wonder what it looks like to manufacture CAR-T's, it's a lot of tanks of liquid nitrogen where we store cells. It's a lot of hoods where technicians and quality control people very carefully-