Understanding How Treatments Get Approved - What It Means for You

um so you know Sarah let's let's dive a little bit into um just off off the off the ground for patients who are listening right now who may have lived with sickle cell disease their whole life who've seen the treatment landscape change rapidly, dynamically, who live in this flux of hopefulness but also being cautious, who are trying to grapple with new treatments as this landscape changes very rapidly.

What outlook do you encourage these patients to have as they're thinking about new treatment landscapes?

Yeah.

That's a great question.

It's indeed hard, right? Because change is hard.

Even if it's positive change, sometimes change is hard.

And it's also not always... easy, I think, for people to understand if they're making right choices or not.

There's always gray areas in everything.

So I think when new treatments are coming across, it's really an advancement for the field.

And if there is a disease that deserves new treatments, it is definitely sickle cell disease, just because of the complexity of the disease, all of the different issues that people have to grapple with.

We are far from having solutions for the totality of the disease here.

So what we're trying to do now, and many people are trying to really create solutions by by developing new drugs.

And these new drugs, what is I think key, may be good for some people, but may not be the right choice for other people.

So as people are thinking about these things moving through the drug development process and going across the finish line and getting to approval, I think the most important thing that people can do is ask questions.

When they engage with their physicians, just or other health care providers, it's really just important to ask the questions that you want to ask.

And sometimes I think people hold back on asking all of the questions they actually deep down want to ask.

So I think that is the one of the biggest things you can do for yourself is making sure you ask whatever it is that you want to ask.

And what I would also say or encourage is when you are thinking about, hopefully there are going to be at some point many choices to pick from, you'll need to take some time and have more detailed discussions with physicians.

Sometimes you've already asked the question, but you want to ask it again, just to make sure you understand completely, that's good.

I am personally somebody who needs to have information repeated, you know, to myself, like over and over.

I know the team sometimes think like, well, I already told you so, but that's okay.

Because sometimes I just need a moment to fully wrap my brain around things.

And I think that is important when you're considering different options.