qrxpharma announces strategic partnership with, page-9

With due respect, your numbers are, as we say in the vernacular, whack.

210 plus billion scrips for pain relief in the US. Sounds about right. But, the vast majority of those are for non-opioid pain relief and even for the opioids, the vast majority are for oral opioids.

IV opioids in the US are used primarily in two settings, one in hospital for pain relief after major surgery, and the second in hospital and hospice for end-of-life palliative care. In the case of surgery the period of time on IV opiods rarely exceeds a week, and at end of life, any opioid use rarely exceeds a month or so, even in extreme cases, and IV opioid use rarely exceeds a few days.

So, lets look at the numbers. About 7 million surgeries requiring a hospital stay were performed in the United States during 2006 (the last year I could find figures for). So lets bump that to 10 million to get current. Some of these probably do not require IV morphine, but let's ignore that and say that all do, and that the IV is requires for four days average. That would be four doses a day for four days, giving 160 million doses annually. You are looking at a 5% market penetration for MOXduo, so you can expect to see 8 million doses annually. That's pretty respectable, but it is not a number in the billions, sorry to say.

To this 8 million doses we have to add the expected usage for end of life palliative care. about 1.5 million people pass through hospice care in the United States annually. Not all of them require opioid pain medication, in fact the number requiring serious pain alleviation is only about one third, and even those are normally given oral medication. IV drugs are used when a patient has lost the ability to swallow. If IV morphine is given for 10 days at end of live for 500,000 individuals, we are talking of 20,000,000 doses. At a market penetration of 5% that would indicate MOXduo sales of an additional 1 million doses.

One could then expect annual sales of about 9 million doses in the United States. What this would mean to QRX in terms of royalty revenue: the normal cost of a dose of morphine in a hospital setting is about $15. If QRX earns a 10% royalty on sales, it seems that an annual cash flow of $13 to $14 million is a reasonable expectation for MOXduo IV.

I leave it to others to determine what this might imply for the QRX share price.