Karl Thiel

I do think that they're starting to come up out of it, so I think they're doing reasonably well.

I don't think this is a bad time to come to investors and say, look, we don't need to increase the dividend right now, we've got better uses for the capital.

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We're seeing things that have been affected both by budget cuts and then also by the government shutdown.

I don't want to underplay any of this, because every agency that gets cut can have a big impact.

But I would say the most important ones

Near-term for investors is FDA.

The good news there is that FDA is largely funded by user fees, so drug companies literally pay for their own reviews, which does mitigate the impact somewhat.

The agency has said something like 86% of employees are still active, and that keeps them active even through the government shutdown.

The bad news in that regard is that there are certain things that they cannot do during the government shutdown.

One of them is, accept new NDAs or BLAs.

You cannot accept any new drug application that requires a user fee payment, because literally, there's nobody to operate the till.

If you're trying to submit a new drug, you can't do it during

the shutdown.

This is one of those things that if the shutdown is a few weeks, hopefully that doesn't impact things too much.