Peter Maag
Analyst · Leerink. Your line is open
Thanks, Leigh. Good afternoon, everyone. It’s Saint Patrick's Day and since we are always starting with the patient story, I wanted to share this with you. I found Ernesto Antonio, an Irish, online. Since his transplant at the Mater Hospital, Dublin in 1999 he has undertaken a multitude of physical challenges on land and in water. He has done numerous half marathons, triathlons and an Ironman in Galway. He holds the marathon record for heart transplant patients. He swam the English Channel in a relay, cycled London to Paris last spring, climbed Kilimanjaro, raced across Scotland in two days and represented Ireland at the European Heart and Lung Transplant Games. His aim is to create awareness and promote organ donation. I find this inspirational, something Irish on Saint Patrick's Day. And one more patient story that makes CareDx employees and myself come to work every day. Now in this call I will touch on 2014 full year and our Q4 performance. I will also focus on a business update with a view on our growth drivers. I will then ask Ken to dive deeper into the financials for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year and he will provide guidance on 2015. I will close with some remarks and then we look forward to your questions. 2014 was a transformational year for CareDx and I'm proud of our many accomplishments. Highlights of the year included revenues were 27.3 million for the year 2014, which translated into a year-over-year revenue growth of 24%, largely driven by the solid volume growth from new and recurring use of AlloMap which had a 19% increase in 2014 over 2013. To recap other milestones, our strategic partner Illumina made a $5 million investment in support of our cell-free DNA initiatives and in the ImmuMetrix acquisition. Late last year the successful resolution of our royalty arbitration with Roche provided upside to our income statement and will further enhance our gross margin going forward, and of course, the completion of our IPO which has provided proceeds of 35.5 million that enables us to expand our R&D efforts. Now starting with our fourth quarter financial highlights, revenue was 8 million in the fourth quarter of 2014, increased 36% compared to the same period in 2013. AlloMap revenues were 6.7 million in the quarter, an increase of 16% versus 2013. We also posted a positive operating income of 0.4 million. I’ll let Ken speak to some of the details. Overall, we see these strong financials as a healthy platform for CareDx’s future. Turning to our business highlights along our three major activities. Number one, increase the utilization of AlloMap. Two, develop donor derived cell free DNA test and transplantation, and three, build on our strong foundations through adding inorganic growth opportunities. I will spend a few minutes providing an update on each of these objectives. Starting with AlloMap, we saw steady growth throughout the year. AlloMap was used for heart transplantations approximately 3,100 times in the quarter, representing an increase of 14% versus the fourth quarter of 2013. The number of centers adopting our technology through [formal] [ph] protocol development and incorporating AlloMap into their practice is a strong indicator of our progress in this area. Out of the now 109 transplant hospitals in the U.S., AlloMap is being used in a 110. In fact, as of the end of the fourth quarter, there were 48 centers with established AlloMap protocols up from 45 in the previous quarter. Now let me move to newly published clinical data. Validating the benefit of early use of AlloMap in transplant surveillance, the results of the e-IMAGE trial were accepted for publication by Circulation, the medical journal of the American Heart Association. e-IMAGE was a randomized controlled study of 60 patients performed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, which has performed more heart transplant procedures than any other medical center in the U.S. for the past two years. This study was led by Dr. Jon Kobashigawa, an internationally recognized leader. The e-IMAGE study observed clinical outcomes of heart transplant recipient who underwent rejection surveillance management with AlloMap beginning at 55 days post transplantation. The outcome at 18-month post transplantation in patients managed with AlloMap were similar to outcomes in patients managed with biopsy. In the AlloMap cohort, the gene expression profiling results were used to guide the tapering of steroids during the first 12 months post transplantation. The trial also suggests that AlloMap can be useful for guiding immunosuppression dosage reduction. Patients, as anticipated were more highly satisfied with their AlloMap surveillance care than patients in the biopsy cohort. This is a very encouraging outcome for CareDx as it establishes the use and benefits of early use of AlloMap post transplantation. This study follows our overall expectation that among the most compelling unmet medical needs in post-transplant surveillance is the personalization of care for patients. Namely, the more precise or optimized use of immune suppression therapy. On the reimbursement front, we continue to have positive coverage decisions from all the major carriers, an accomplishment that few other molecular diagnostic companies can claim. As of December 31, 2014, we have been reimbursed for approximately 79% of all AlloMap results delivered in the 12-month ended June 30, 2014. We expect this level to remain constant going forward. As part of our strategic objective to expand utilization of AlloMap we recently received expanded coverage decisions from two MAC jurisdictions. These decisions raised AlloMap reimbursements to four of the 12 MAC jurisdictions and it enables Medicare patient increased flexibility when seeking the benefits of AlloMap. The American Medical Association recently included AlloMap in its recommendations for a test-specific category 1 CPT code. This demonstrates that an additional independent organization has reviewed both the clinical evidence and adoption of AlloMap and has since a unique CPT code is warranted. As we assume that Medicare will continue to look to Palmetto for pricing. We don’t anticipate that this will impact AlloMap as most of our tests are covered by Medicare already. But we see the category 1 CPT code as a recognition of the strong evidence for AlloMap. Now let me turn to AlloMap usage. Our outcomes AlloMap registry study, OAR, continues see growing enrollment. This is an important initiative for us. Over a 1,000 samples from 364 patients enrolled in the study were received as of December 31, 2014, an impressive level in heart transplantation. The long-term outcome data collected will continue to build clinical evidence concerning the use of AlloMap as a surveillance solution in heart transplantation. We are often asked how we plan to fill grow AlloMap utilization? We estimate the total addressable market for AlloMap is roughly a $100 million. Let me break this into three segments. We believe that AlloMap surveillance protocols generally specific six to eight AlloMaps in the first year, which translates into 40% of the total addressable market. And two to four AlloMaps in the years two to five year post transplant, which captures another 40% and decreasing surveillance after five years that captures the remaining 20% of the addressable market. Commercial excellence and execution is critical to the success of CareDx. In order to further penetrate the market we will continue to follow a center by center approach and develop specific programs that allow us to further demonstrate the benefits of increasing the usage in three segments. For those transplants center with lower than anticipated testing in the early months post-transplant, the one year segment, we now have results from e-IMAGE to further demonstrate clinical utility from early use of AlloMap, 55 days post-transplant. If the leading transplant center in the world is using the test early why can't other centers follow suite? Dr. Kobashigawa is a leader in the field and he is using our surveillance solution early. This might have significant impact in the future. For the second segment, two to five years post-transplant, we believe the key to success of the establishment of a protocol and the optimization of workflow management. If we enable the centers to comply with their protocols, the number of AlloMaps per patient will increase. In many centers initiation of the OAR registry study have been a great starting point for establishing an AlloMap protocol. Furthermore, the registry intends to report an outcome and makes protocol adherence ever so important. Both segments two to five years post-transplant and greater than five years post-transplant can benefit from our AlloMap variability initiatives. Working with thought leaders in the field, we further investigate the hypothesis that the variability of AlloMap scores may inform clinicians about the long-term outcome of transplant patients. Ultimately, we believe that we will demonstrate that the standard deviation of sequential AlloMap scores enables patient stratification and helps clinicians to identify patients that are at a lower risk of poor outcome. We will continue to report on our AlloMap variability initiatives going forward. Partnerships are another key component to our strategy. Recently Diaxonhit, our partner in Europe, entered into an agreement with the Strasbourg University Hospital to facilitate AlloMap’s implementation in Europe. This is a significant step towards providing European heart transplant patients' access to AlloMap. In parallel, Diaxonhit is working with individual European health authorities to obtain reimbursement coverage. We continue to forecast very little revenue from Europe in 2015. Very timely the upcoming ISHLT congress is held in France and provides an unique platform to increase awareness in European clinicians of AlloMap and its use in transplant care. Next, I would like to spend a few minutes discussing the status of our cell-free DNA research and development. We continue to make significant progress in developing our pipeline of cell-free DNA test for heart and kidney transplant patients. Before I move into an update on individual activities, I would like to describe how we are thinking about the development in a broader framework. And this framework would be including the progress on our development trial programs, some regulatory considerations, our results and reimbursements and our intellectual property efforts. Now, we have structured our development trial program along three elements, analytical validity as the first one. Second is the clinical validity and three the clinical utility. Regarding the analytically validity part we have a cell-free DNA prototype test today and we anticipate having an analytically validated cell-free DNA test by the end of April. This is an important milestone. Using our heart samples we have been able to build a prototype for cell-free DNA test with which we can measure different levels of cell-free DNA accurately. We also have a dataset from our CARGO II sample that has been accepted as abstracts at the ISHLT. These results will be thoroughly discussed at the ISHLT meeting on April 12, 2017. Regarding clinical validity, with CARGO II, KARGO and D-OAR samples we have gathered insights that will further enhance our clinical validation effort. Let me mention that we are excited to contribute to this emerging field of cell-free DNA. There is a lot of buzz in the industry for non-invasive prenatal testing and early detection of cancer, and we are proud to contribute to the clinical translation of the port for the role of cell-free DNA in the field of transplantation. The cell-free DNA analysis in our D-OAR clinical trial provides valuable information for clinician and scientists to reflect on the specific use of cell-free DNA technology for heart transplant recipients with AlloMap. We are building scale in this trial with participation by three centers, 22 enrolled patients and 52 samples from as of December 31, 2014. The number of patients impacted by the additional information from cell-free DNA testing is limited, all the more reason to further advance our kidney studies to impact a much larger number of patients. Analysis of cell-free DNA in our 300 KARGO samples collected in 2004 were used to determine the range of cell-free DNA in kidney transplant patients. Samples with the adequate clinical information demonstrate the trends of increased cell-free DNA in samples with a rejection versus samples without one. As in separate studies by others, we confirmed observations in our study that serum samples have significant limitations. While KARGO has been informative, it has become clear that we need additional samples beyond KARGO to fully develop our cell-free DNA program for kidney. Therefore, we have made changes to our development program. For kidney we are now focused on the DART initiative. DART has two phases and replaces our anticipated KIDNA trial. DART is shorthand for the cell-free DNA in acute rejection in transplantation study. DART is anticipated to start earlier than our previously considered KIDNA trial and has the aim to collect samples from 200 patients in 10 or more centers and run for a minimum of 18 months with an interim readout opportunity after approximately 6 months. I mentioned that there are two phases to this study. DART 1 will establish clinical validity of cell-free DNA in kidney. DART 2 is intended to establish clinical utility. We will provide further details regarding timeline and further milestones for DART 2 later this year. Let me also touch on regulatory. Our plan is to move progressing of -- processing of cell-free DNA test from our research lab to our state-of-the-art CLIA licensed laboratory near South San Francisco at the end of the year in 2015. Our plans are progressing well. While we anticipate launching the cell-free DNA assay as a laboratory developed test, our prior experience in establishing FDA clearance for the AlloMap test positions us well regardless of when and how the FDA decides to regulate CLIA labs. Now I move to reimbursement. Since many transplantations are covered by Medicare, our reimbursement strategy has prioritized Medicare reimbursements. Most of you are aware that the Palmetto/MolDx evaluation process increased the level of evidence for application of reimbursement. In their communications last year they noted that clinical validity even though, used in the past for reimbursement decisions, will not be sufficient for seeking Medicare reimbursement in the future. Our plan, as outlined previously and concordance with our AlloMap studies will focus on establishing the clinical utility of cell-free DNA. As we are considering these changes in our reimbursement strategy, we anticipate that there won't be revenues for cell-free DNA in 2016. We also touched in this call on intellectual property. We continue to build our patent estate around the patent acquired with the ImmuMetrix acquisition and our previous efforts for approaches, applying targeted and shotgun sequencing technology to the field of post-transplant care. Now let me conclude the development section this call. We are really looking forward to the ISHLT this year. We have nine abstracts accepted by ISHLT. This included three abstracts on our OAR study, three on cell-free DNA and three investigator initiated trials on long-term outcomes and immune suppressant optimization. Two of the three cell-free DNA abstracts were accepted as oral presentations. We are looking forward to discuss in details after the congress. Before I turn the call over to Ken, I also want to welcome and introduce two experts in the diagnostic space to our leadership team. John Sninsky joins us in January as Chief Scientific Officer. John will head our product development initiative. He most recently served as the VP of Discovery Research at Celera Corporation. Following Celera’s acquisition by Quest Diagnostics, he served as the Alameda site head for Quest's Science & Innovation and oversaw organization-wide Bioinformatics. Earlier this month we welcomed Bill Hagstrom to our Board. Bill is an experienced and successful molecular diagnostic expert and operating executive. Bill was the founder and served as CEO of Crescendo Bioscience, which was acquired by Myriad Genetics in 2014. Both John and Bill support our passion for the advancement of diagnostics technology and post-transplant surveillance solutions to improve patient management and I look forward to their contributions. I will now turn the call over to Ken to review our financial highlights and to provide guidance for the year.