Geoff Meacham
Let's switch gears to the filgotinib and the NASH portfolio and I'll have Jason do a few NASH questions. But just to the filgotinib program, you have a successful phase 3, you have another couple of studies coming out of them, and the priority should be an indicator of success there. But maybe, so from a development standpoint, how much of a strategic priority would you say filgotinib is? I mean, it's not liver disease. It's not - it's sort of an outlier, but it is - there are big markets and obviously, filgotinib could be differentiated in a very, very, very large market. So maybe just if you're sort of ranking your sort of pipeline and maybe your business priorities like where does that one fit in?
John McHutchison
We started inflammation and really got going on this a number of years ago and then the filgotinib opportunity presented itself. So, it's one of the four top programs right now in terms of advanced clinical stage development. It's the HIV programs, the NASH programs, the filgotinib programs and some other things and of course cell therapy. So it's one of our four biggest most advanced programs. Look, the drug is differentiated. Let me - I have two more phase, we have two more phase 3 trials that need to read out that'll allow us to put our package together for rheumatoid arthritis.
More importantly, it's the most advanced JAK inhibitor in development for Crohn's disease and I believe - we believe will be second in ulcerative colitis. They're in less competitive markets or not as aggressively competitive as rheumatoid arthritis and this differentiating factor is important. This JAK1 specificity, different rates of thromboembolism infection, platelets, anemia, hemoglobin, preventing less hemoglobin reduction, et cetera, let's see what the entire phase 3 package is and then we'll be able to move it forward. It's also the backbone in our inflammation therapeutic area upon which we will build by adding other drugs or additional drugs for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases.
Geoff Meacham
When you look across the universe of indications that other JAK inhibitors are going after, atopic derma is one, is there - do we have another wave of phase 3s with filgotinib or do you feel like that's a combination approach that you just mentioned with other assets?
John McHutchison
So, we have, it's a great question. We have five other diseases, we avoided the skin actually and didn't go down - we thought about atopic dermatitis, but we have uveitis, Sjögren's disease, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, where we've announced that we will start a phase 3 program and lupus, particularly skin lupus and other types of Lupus. So they are the indications that we thought we should explore in proof of concept trials in phase 2. This was done after a careful analysis of the commercial opportunities and the necessity and need in those diseases.
Geoff Meacham
Obviously, if you're worried about the safety from the ongoing, the study, you wouldn't have started these phase 3s. I mean, should we read into that and I'm saying with respect to the filing?
John McHutchison
We've been bullish, we started those phase 2 trials a while ago before we had any safety data from phase 3. But we felt confident in the - when we started the relationship with Galapagos, the amount of phase 2 data they had in rheumatoid arthritis and in Crohn's disease from the Fitzroy study was a large data set for any company with the JAK inhibitor in phase 2. So we felt confident then, we continue to feel confident now. Let me - let us allow the next phase 2, phase 3 programs to read out, but they will have a very large data set which happens this quarter.