Okay, great. Thanks for joining us, everybody. I'm Terence Flynn, the US Biopharma analyst here at Morgan Stanley. Very pleased to be hosting Royalty Pharma this morning. Before we get started, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. With that, I'm happy to be here with Pablo Legorreta, who is the company's founder and CEO, and Terry Coyne, who's the company's CFO. Thank you both so much for joining me today. Really appreciate the time here as we're right back in the thick of it post the summer.
Again, I always like to start off just with kind of because it is a unique business model, just, you know, Pablo, kind of give us an overview of kind of the strategy, and then, you know, as you think about evolving that, is there anything you know that you're considering as you look at the kind of the forward opportunity set here? I mean, we talked a lot about, you know, the synthetic opportunity. I saw you just announced one, another deal yesterday there, but, you know, that is a newer element of the strategy, so maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit more. But again, thanks for coming.
Thanks, Terence, and thank you for the invitation to speak at your conference. And welcome everyone. I am the founder and CEO. I've been building this company with an amazing team for the last 27 years and really trying to figure out how Royalty Pharma can fund this incredible ecosystem that we all work in, which has an incredible purpose and mission to develop drugs for humans. And it's been, you know, a long time since we started. The business model has evolved quite a bit. When I started, the initial idea was just to acquire royalties and approved products from the original innovators, which in many cases were academic institutions, research hospitals, and in many cases, the scientists associated with those institutions.
But as time went by, and as we were trying to figure out how to expand the universe of opportunities for Royalty Pharma, in 2012, we took a really important turn and, you know, changed again the business model where... So we decided to go out and have discussions with biotech and pharma management teams and offer to fund late-stage clinical trials and create a royalty. So when that happened, the business changed because in addition to acquiring existing royalties and approved products, which we still do today, we also started to fund phase III, and in some cases, even phase II, trials. When you look at...
When we decided to do that in 2012, from that point on to today, we have deployed about $25 billion of capital, of which about 60% roughly is an approved product, where the royalty already existed. And the remaining 40%, which is about $10 billion when you do the math of $25 billion, 40% is in products that where there was no royalty, and we had conversations with companies, management teams, offered to fund phase II, phase III, and then we created the royalty. Contractually, the companies agreed to pay us a royalty.
So that expanded dramatically our TAM, our addressable market, and made the business interesting because, you know, when you look at Royalty Pharma, just as an example, Terence, last year, 2023, the team at Royalty Pharma, myself and the team, I don't participate in every meeting because there's so many now, but we had 400. We reviewed 400 investment opportunities. So that means that we're reviewing actually, probably two a day, something like that. And what happens is that management teams, you know, call us. We're also calling on them very proactively, and they come, they meet, we have a Zoom call, an hour long, sometimes we do two of them, and they tell us their story. You know, what are they developing? Why are they excited? What trials they're thinking of running?
And then we decide if we wanna proceed or not. Of this 400 or so opportunities, just to give you a sense, last year, we actually ended up signing confidentiality agreements with about 120 of those 400 or so opportunities. So the 280 that we decided not to proceed were for various reasons. We were not, you know, excited about the product, the data, the commercial opportunity, but also in many cases, we're actually looking at things that are early-stage, maybe phase I, phase II. It could even be preclinical if there's an interesting platform technology that we're interested in learning about. But what happens is we tell management teams, "We listen, we learn." They tell us what they're thinking about doing. We take note, and we tell management teams, "It's too early.
Why don't we meet in a year or two?" But for us, having that initial meeting where we learn about the product, and you know, get to know the management team, gives us very good insights because then we can check in a year or two, did the management deliver? Did they do what they told us they were gonna do? So that's more or less the process. What happened last year is, of the 120 opportunities, we now sign a confidentiality agreement. We get incredible data, data that, in many cases, the public investors don't have access to because we have patient-level data, phase I, phase II, you know, safety, efficacy data for all the patients. We have access to the FDA minutes, where we can judge, you know, how the FDA views the program, the product, what concerns FDA.
We have access to all of that, and then what happens is that we decide if we wanna proceed, and we ended up last year, again, from the 120 where we signed CDAs. We did 90 in-depth reviews, and that's when the team takes a very deep, you know. We do weeks, months of diligence. And then, you know, we did 9 deals last year, deployed $4 billion of capital. So that's the business today, what we do every day. And interestingly, we did an analysis recently where we said, "Okay, since 2020, when we went public, how much capital have we deployed?" $15 billion.
What stood out that was pretty interesting, and we knew that this was the case, but it was interesting just to see the data, is that it turned out that of the $15 billion of capital, 40%, $6 billion, were repeat deals, where we're actually doing a second or third deal with a company that we've already done business with. And what the reflections or the conclusions from this data is that Royalty Pharma has really created this incredible franchise and a great name with management teams, and they see us as being incredibly constructive, a real partner, willing to take risks, willing to work with management teams. Not only...
Because one of the big distinctions that I think we see every day, and we even hear it back from the companies we do business with, is that they see us as a real partner, not only as a capital provider, where a lot of the people that are trying to imitate us and that, you know, have started to do what we do, other funds, some of the PE firms that have done this, they are very transactional. They see themselves as capital providers. In our case, we want to really develop strong relationships with management teams and be there to help them. And also, a lot of the... You've asked about the business, how it's changed.
We really started to push, about five years ago, data, claims data that we share with the companies, and we- by doing that, we're adding value to the development process, to the management teams, and data that we can talk about that later, but it's data that they hardly have access to. It costs a lot of money, takes a lot of... You know, we have a team of six biostatisticians that help us analyze that, but we can talk about that later. Anyway, that's what's happened with the business, and we see... We are incredibly excited about the deal flow and the opportunities that we see, and it's honestly getting better and better as time goes by.
Great. Well, that segues to one of my other questions, is just the kind of current deal landscape. I mean, you talked about 2023 and the metrics there, but just as you look at the kind of forward opportunity set here through back half of 2024, how is that shaping up? I know, you know, Terry's mentioned before that again, you know, it's better to look at it on an annual basis. But again, as you look at kind of H2 of the year, anything notable that you guys want to call out? How's that shaping up?
So happy to have, my partner and colleague, Terry, answer so I don't monopolize the conversation.
Yeah. So, Terence, it's a great question. The deal flow has been really strong. I mean, we've had a great year so far, north of $2 billion. We've made some really nice additions to the portfolio. And, you know, I don't think we don't feel like we're done. You never know when things are gonna... When sort-
Yeah
... of extras are gonna get to the finish line. But, you know, the one, the one we announced a couple of days ago-
Yeah
... was, you know, something that might not have been necessarily on our radar a month ago.
Right.
And so, like, I mean, we are always tracking these things.
Yeah
... but these deals can happen quickly for a variety of reasons. And so for us, it's the beauty of our model is that we can kind of... We're following every exciting asset that's out there, and we're thinking about ways to, you know, become partners with these companies. And so... And we can move really fast.
Yeah.
And I think that that's a major competitive advantage of ours.
Yeah.
I would also just highlight the deal that we announced the other day with Ascendis. This is the second transaction we did with them.
Yeah.
We have a lot of examples of multiple transactions with partners, which we think.
Yeah
... is super important for our business model.
Yeah. Well, maybe just talk about the kind of macro environment and how that might shape the business going into 2025. Like, if we do get a rate cut here in September, what are kind of the implications for your business? As I know, that had seemed to be a focus when rates were going up, you know, what would be the impact on the business? I know you guys had a view, but now, if we're coming out the other side of that, just, you know, level set us for how to think about-
You know-
-the implications.
We really view ourselves as rate agnostic.
Yeah.
You know, our business is gonna be doing well, regardless of the rate environment, and I think that that was a certainly a perception in the market, that we were a rate-sensitive business. And I think what we've shown, what we've tried to demonstrate, is that, you know, as rates increased and as our cost of capital inevitably went up a little bit, we're able to get slightly better returns, and that's the flexibility in our business model. And it also has kind of accelerated an expanding opportunity set. So we don't feel like the rate environment is particularly, you know, a driver of our business in any one way.
We're happy to have, you know, we're happy that rates seem to be heading in a lower direction because we, you know, over time, we will be in the debt markets again, and certainly would like to be borrowing at lower rates.
Right.
But overall, for the business, it's not really a driver.
The reality is that, you know, we've been in business for 27 years, so you can imagine that in 27 years, we've been already through-
Yeah
... so many business cycles-
Right
... where, you know, there's been so much money going into biotech, funding a lot of companies, and then it dries up. And again, you know, so we've been through tough markets, great markets for biotech, and in every one of those times, we've been able to find incredible opportunities for us to invest in. The capital needs of this ecosystem are so gigantic. You know, we calculate that the biotech ecosystem, the, you know, thousands of companies, biotech companies that are out there, will require about $1 trillion of funding over the next decade, to basically fund their pipelines. And we think it's about 400, 450 , maybe 500 , somewhere in that range, over the next five years. So it's very significant.
And what's so interesting for us to see is that if you look at the conventional ways biotech has funded itself, and you look at, you know, initial IPOs, follow-on offerings, licensing deals, the share of the funding, if you look at the last five years, which is $260 billion that was raised by biotech to fund, you know, their pipelines over the last five years. The share that was this thing we call synthetic royalties that we invested, where we actually go and fund a phase II, phase III trial, was only 3% of the $260 billion.
Right.
So that figure is gonna grow. There's no question about it. It's gonna grow. And, you know, we think that just synthetics for us in the next five years could be, it's 4% of the capital needed, it's $60 billion. If it's 8%, it will be $36 billion. And we guided our investors to about $10-$12 billion of capital deployed by Royalty Pharma over the next five years. A conservative number for sure, because we're deploying $3-$4 billion per year, and obviously $10-$12 over five years is less than that.
Right.
But, we want to over deliver on the-
Understood.
Yeah.
The kind of corollary related question is just, you know, the returns. Terry, you kind of alluded to this, but just maybe talk us through, you know, there's obviously you know, commercial product return profile, and then there's the pre-commercial return profile. What is that? How is that tracked? And then, you know, how does it look from a kind of go forward kind of returns that you're targeting?
So it's pretty consistent. Well, I mean, what we've said is that for approved products, we're targeting high single digits to low double-digit-
Yeah
Returns. I would say, you know, the way we think about that, though, is on kind of a risk-adjusted basis. We wanna be investing in things where we see upside, and if the rate environment, as rates have increased, that kind of the return hurdle has increased a little bit as well. So maybe before, there may have been some deals, we were getting 9%, now we're getting 11 or 12, and
Unlevered.
Unle- unlevered-
Unlevered
... is a really important point.
Yeah.
And, you know, then for development stage assets, we're still targeting teens returns, and those obviously have... We want those to have upside, where it can get into the twenties. But obviously, they, we could, you know, lose our investment as well. And that's the nice thing about our big diversified portfolios. We can make those types of investments, and with the expectation that, you know, if we made five investments in development stage assets, one of those assets, hopefully just one, fails, but maybe one or two, and we'll still be just fine.
We're gonna look for things where we see a lot of upside, like some of the investments we've made recently with Frexalimab, which was in a deal we announced earlier this year for a product that's in development by Sanofi for multiple sclerosis. We see a lot of upside with that product. It's obviously still in phase III trial, so there's a lot of things that need to happen still. Then, like the Lp(a) investments. So we, you know, we try to make investments, particularly in the development stage assets, where there's really that opportunity for outsized returns-
If-
to compensate for the risk, that there is risk.
If you look at the statistics of the $10 billion that we have deployed in unapproved products, I think 75%-77% already got approved. So there's another 25% that is still to see. Turns out that if you look at our pipeline, and you look at the exciting drugs in our pipeline, you know, KarXT, Bristol Myers acquired Karuna for $14 billion because of that product. And you look at the data that that product has, it's very attractive. But at this point, de-risked, it's highly, highly likely it's gonna get approved. Same thing for Seltorexant, product totally under the radar screen.
Yeah.
You know, we bought a royalty that's mid-single digits for $60 million in that product. You know, it was in development when we bought it. Now, J&J has put that product in a category of drugs where they think it could be $1 billion to $5 billion. It's a very wide range, but, you know, it's certainly billion plus, maybe a couple billion. And, you know, de-risked, we think it's, you know, really. Then Cytokinetics, right? With other cardiovascular drugs, also amazing data de-risk. So when you look at the fact that we have this pipeline with incredibly attractive drugs, where a lot of them have now been de-risked, that success rate will probably end up in the, you know, north of 80%-85%, I don't know, up to 90%, for all of our unapproved investments.
You know, it's a part of our business that is significant, driving growth, and providing, you know, investors with an exposure to, you know, really attractive drugs that, you know, have blockbuster potential. Could drive very significant, you know, growth and returns for us. And where, you know, for them to invest in those drugs, you need to invest in J&J if you... Or in, you know, Bristol Myers with Karuna. Do you want to invest in Bristol Myers, where there's a lot of other things, or, you know, might you consider investing in Royalty Pharma, where you get exposure to those attractive drugs in a much more focused way?
Yeah. What maybe, you know, one kind of related question is just on the return profile. I think, you know, one area of pushback is just the competitive landscape. You mentioned some of the private equity funds trying to kind of get into this area. And so as you think about the moats that you've built, you talked about some of these in terms of the relationships. Maybe just remind us of kind of some of the other, you know, moats others would have to kind of surmount to kind of come into this business. And I think you also have provided a metric where not just the repeat business, but also the where it's like the deals that you are the sole party that's like there-
Yeah.
That's bidding for the asset.
Yeah.
'Cause I think that's the other perception externally, is that, you know, all these processes are now, like, auctioned out, and so they're effectively like-
Not the case.
No, I know, and I know you guys have some data on this.
Yeah.
So again, maybe talk to the barriers beyond, you know, those you already did, and then some of the dynamics there in terms of, you know, the process.
The deal that we announced yesterday-
Yeah
Was a one-on-one conversation, zero competition.
Okay
... with this company. It didn't even go to that-
Yeah
Because we did a prior deal with them.
Right.
They were happy-
Yeah
... you know, and they see us as a very, constructive partner.
Yeah.
But I'll let Terry answer. One thing I was gonna say, when you talk about moats, we initially. When I started this business, it was a more conventional investment vehicle with, you know, the kind of economics that you get in investment vehicles that are high.
Yeah.
And in 2003, I decided to change the structure and create a company kind of vehicle, ongoing business, you know, not a serial.
Yeah.
All of the private equity firms has the serial funds, right? And we changed that in 2003 , and we also, you know, created the ability for us to use incredibly attractive funding in the form of debt that has... So we, I, I don't know if the audience understands that Royalty Pharma today, for example, has $7.8 billion of debt outstanding, of which we have 30-year tranches where, you know... Imagine 30- year, okay? That's almost like equity capital, where you have money, you know, I think we have $2 billion in, in, in 30-year tranches. When you have that kind of-
Investment-grade debt.
Investment-grade debt. When you have, you know, $2 billion of capital where you pay it in thirty years, it's, it's sort of equity, you know. Like, we can make investments in royalties that have 15 years, two investments, and that capital is there funding it, right? Then we have 20-year tranches, 10-year tranches, so we have a weighted average duration of 14 years. And our cost of debt, it's fixed at 3.05% or three, something like that, three point-
Yeah.
Close, yeah. It is incredibly... It's an advantage that we have, that is really amazing. You know, when you look at some PE firms that have investment vehicles that are sort of serial, you know, they raise money from investors, promising investors high-teens returns. They cannot buy royalties at 11%-12% when you promise investors high-teens, because they have also friction. They have all of the expenses, you know, management fees, carries, and they don't have access to leverage. We do. So, you know, all of this moats-
Yeah
We solved that problem in 2003, 20 years ago.
Right.
These other investors are, have the structure I had 20 years ago, right? So the lead we have versus them is very significant. The other is scale. You know, we bought a royalty from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for $3.3 billion. We've, we've invested so far, on, Roche's Evrysdi, buying royalties from PTC. The first deal was $650 million, not yet approved, but de-risked because the data was out. Then we bought $1 billion, last year on that, that asset, and this year, another $250 million. So we invested $1.9 billion in that, specific product, which is for spinal muscular atrophy. Incredible drug! The scale we have allows us to make those investments so difficult for a, you know, investment vehicle.
One of the PE firms has $4 billion of capital. How can they put $2 billion into one asset? Not possible. You look at the 20 deals that are 500 million or more in size, I think we've done 17 of the 20 or-
Yeah
16 of the 20. You know, we have an 80%, close to 80% market share, dominant market share in large deals, another moat. But then the other thing that is interesting, when you have a business that produces $3 billion of revenue recurring last year, and we have, you know, this very attractive, predictable growth in our top line, because it's very well diversified and, and, you know, has a duration also of 13 years. You know, when you look at the duration of our products and looking at when patents expire, it exceeds many of the big pharmas, where the durations are 10 years, nine years, 12 years. We're at, you know, 14, and we're always adding new things, so extending the duration.
So when we have that, you know, top line growing predictable, we can take risk and fund unapproved products and do it at scale, where we've done $10 billion over the last, you know, 10 or so years. I think it might be $8 billion over the last five years. So that, again, gives us an incredible advantage and moat, where we can be talking to all of these biotech companies that need money and funding their trials, and we can do it, and we can suffer a loss of... and we did, you know, $275 million dollar write-up. Didn't mean much to us when you look at the scale, that kind of, write-off of that nature. So all of these things add to a very, very unique business that I honestly believe is irreproducible.
If someone today told me, "Pablo, I'll give you $20 billion, can you recreate Royalty Pharma?" Impossible. I couldn't do it, starting from scratch. And it's impossible to do because a lot of the products that we have in our portfolio are... To build the portfolio we have today, where we have royalties on, you know, the Vertex cystic fibrosis on, you know, Tremfya, on Trelegy, you know, many of those investments we did 10 years ago, 14 years ago, eight years ago. So to reproduce this portfolio takes that long.
Yeah.
It's a very unique business with incredible moats, but.
Yeah, I just the data point on the single payer, like, what's that mix look like roughly?
We haven't updated that number-
Okay.
But we certainly will update it, you know, at our next investor day. But I would say it's, you know, it's consistent. We're seeing a lot of the transactions this year where, you know, really just us with sort of a side-by-side negotiation.
Yeah.
And then oftentimes, even when, you know, they do hire an advisor, it's more of a market check. They wanna make sure they're getting a fair price from us. We're trying to pay a fair price.
Yeah.
And so we're happy for people to do a market check. We know we're gonna be a great partner. So, you know, even in those situations, we would sort of characterize that as a limited auction-
Yeah
... where they've more or less ticked that they wanna work with Royalty Pharma.
Okay.
But they need to make sure that they're getting a fair price. I think, you know, we really see ourselves and feel it every day, that we are the partner of choice, and-
They tell us that.
We take a lot of pride in that, and it's because of the relationships that the team has, that, you know, when you're going through contract negotiations, you're viewed as a constructive counterparty. And, you know, companies are gonna face difficult times down the road sometimes, and we need to be constructive there. You know, we have a reputation for that. And so those are all examples of why, you know, why we honestly feel like our business, the moat has gotten wider.
Yeah.
The gap between us and the competition has gotten wider.
Yeah. Okay, great. Maybe one more on the strategy side before we go into some of the portfolio. The first round of IRA negotiations, you know, came out a couple of weeks ago. You guys have talked about this before, but I'm more interested in kind of the forward, like any kind of key learnings from that. And then as you think about the business model on the forward, obviously, you have the luxury of being able to kind of pivot into different therapeutic areas, right? And, you know, depending on, you know, Medicare mix, et c. So strategically, you know, any takeaways from that, that first round of negotiations, and then what does this mean for your kind of go forward?
Yeah, I would say, you know, when we saw... We only had one product on the initial list, Imbruvica. It seemed like that was fairly constructive. It certainly wasn't the doomsday scenario that some people had feared, and I think that, you know, we feel like that hopefully paints a good picture for some of the oncology products that people have been - that investors and analysts have been concerned about-
Yeah
... in the future, and that there is still gonna be a very dynamic oncology market longer term, which is super important for the world, but you know, I think that it's funny, we haven't made any investments really since IRA was announced that had much IRA exposure.
Right.
I wouldn't say that's by design.
Okay.
We will make investments in that space and, for products that have a lot of IRA exposure.
Yeah.
We'll just take a sort of a scenario-based approach and, you know, ultimately, these products are super important for patients. The data, you know, is really strong, and we think those are the products we want to invest in. They'll be reimbursed, you know, no matter what. And so that's kind of our overall view.
Yeah. Okay, great. Maybe just on the portfolio. I mean, you mentioned the Ascendis deal for Yorvipath. Maybe just again, 'cause that's one of the newer ones. What was attractive about, you know, that asset, this market, as you think about that one? And that's one of the synthetic deals that-
Yeah, yeah
... you know, you were talking about before, Pablo, in terms of carving out and the opportunity set. So maybe just a little bit more details, given that's one of the newer deals.
Do you want to-
Yeah, so it's a... That deal hits home on a couple of key things for us. So one, it's a huge unmet need. There really hasn't been much innovation there. There's a lot of need for patients with hypoparathyroidism. And we think Ascendis is gonna be a great partner to launch that drug. They've done well with Skytrofa, where we already have an investment. And, you know, I think that it was... For us, it was a relatively small investment, but when you piece the two of them together, it's both of them were about $150 million, so $300 million total. Attractive returns and a product that we think, you know, clearly has blockbuster potential.
And so, you know, we're excited about it.
Even though there was some data yesterday that maybe surprised people about Skytrofa, I don't know if you follow that. We just looked at it today. It actually, the guidance that they lowered it to $220-$240. We were at about $210, and analysts were about $210. You know, so somehow expectations got a little bit ahead of themselves, and now they've come down. But, you know, it's actually totally in line with what we had initially forecasted. But, you know, great partner, totally focused company. And, again, you know, second deal with them, and it was-
Yeah
... yeah, win-win.
You know, again, another one you mentioned is KarXT. Bristol acquired Karuna for access. This is a PDUFA date coming up here in September. Maybe just what drove the interest in this, you know, asset segment of the market. And, you know, the other question we get a lot is just competitive dynamics relative to the AbbVie asset in emraclidine. And so maybe just a little bit elaborate on that market, because, again, that's another newer product cycle that we're gonna be watching as we go into 2025.
Yeah, I think there's huge potential when you look at CNS, and I think there's just, you know, great innovation taking place. And, you know, we, we've actually, I mean, you probably have seen that we have this other investment recently with the Teva asset, where we funded that. And, you know, I, I think when we looked at the whole landscape, you know, the KarXT stood out as a product with, you know, really great data. You know, good marketer. But in many of these cases, what ends up happening, which gives us, so we go into the situations assuming that the product is gonna remain in the hands of the company that's developing it.
But we also recognize that in many cases, there's a possibility, which happens so often with these biotechs, that they get acquired by bigger companies. You know, happened with, Immunomedics, and Gilead. Happened with, Nurtec and, Biohaven and Pfizer, and happened in the case of, Karuna and Bristol-Myers. And what then occurs when those transactions take place is that the product then moves to the hands of a much stronger marketer.
Yeah.
And it changes the competitive landscape. And so we feel really good about what happened there and the fact that, you know, we think that we go in with a conservative scenario, but now, you know, in the hands of a stronger company, it is likely to outperform. And, you know, this is when we see all of these unapproved investments that we model at the team's returns, and then, you know, things happen that the returns are significantly higher for us. But, you know, we take a holistic approach, and it's, you know, part of the way we look at things, with this expectations of eventually-
Yeah
... you know, change of control.
Yeah. What the other areas, you know, this is more on the development stage side, is Lp(a) is again, a novel, you know, target, for, CV indications. And again, you guys have a couple, you know, kind of doubled down in this area. So again, this is one of those where you're talking about how well you guys have a, what was it? You said 80% success rate effectively in the kind of pre-commercial deals. So what kind of drove the confidence here, and again, to even, like, go further and do two deals in the space? Like, what was kind of behind that?
Honestly, we don't see it as doubling down.
Okay.
We see it as investing in the class.
Okay.
Right? And we've done that repeatedly over decades. You know, we had royalties in Humira, Remicade, and Cimzia, so three drugs in TNFs. We have royalties in Nurtec and Emgality in migraine. Royalties anyway, you know, in MS, you know, Tysabri, Tecfidera, and now Frexalimab.
Right.
It's really a bet on the class.
Okay.
We feel very comfortable with those situations, and it actually has played out really well. Because also what happens in many of these cases, you would think that products. It does happen that maybe a product dominates, but often, you know, it, the patients have different biology, different profiles. So, you know, having two drugs in a class might allow, you know, patients to get a treatment because some will do better with one, and others with the other one. So that's the way we approach it. And for us, it was very interesting when we started to look at Lp(a) as a whole new class of drugs where, you know, you could treat this condition.
You know, that's not driven by habits, you know, what you eat, but really it's driven by genetics, and there's people that have, you know, this kind of genetic profile. If you test positive for Lp(a), you're at high risk of having, you know, an issue, cardiovascular issue. And what was really interesting to see when we looked at the two assets was that, you know, it was very clear that when patients were on the drugs, you know, the reduction was 80%-90%. And then they were in the hands of really big companies.
Yeah.
So, you know, all of those things when we looked at, you know, everything, it seemed to us that they were really attractive investments in the class. We were conservative because we also see a scenario, and this class could be, you know, in the $5-$10 billion range. But if the drugs eventually, through the long-term trials that are being run now, get into prevention, it could be much bigger than $10 billion. You know, it could exceed that, and that's the upside we see. It's not in our base case, but we see that as significant upside. What's exciting to us is that we're gonna start to see that data in the next year or two.
Yeah, next year will be your year.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Great! Well, I think we're up against time, but, Pablo, Terry, really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you so much.
Thank you for inviting us, and you know, I think that I will just finish by saying that Royalty Pharma is in an incredibly, incredibly strong position today with a team that is totally focused on the space. And I think we're really as time goes by, it's so great to see how we're building this very unique position in this ecosystem to fund innovation and to be really the leading, the dominant player, funding innovation in life sciences. And it's a business where if you look. You ask me: What's gonna happen in the next five to 10 years? It's gonna grow. There's no question about it. You know, the capital needs in this industry are so dramatic that it's gonna grow. And because we're the dominant player in the field, the business is gonna grow. It'll...
You know, you've seen us just, you know, point that the fact we're gonna have revenues greater than $5 billion, you know, not too long from now, so predictable growth, you know, with a very attractive return profile, and I think, you know, our valuation is at a very attractive point today. We are buying back our shares at Royalty Pharma, so we believe in the business, and anyway, I'll finish with that, but thank you.
Thank you, Pablo. Thank you, Terry.