Eamonn P. Hobbs
Analyst · Roth Capital Partners
Thanks, Doug and good afternoon, everyone. Since our call with you in early August, the team at Delcath has achieved several significant milestones. Most important of these was FDA acceptance of our New Drug Application for our proprietary chemosaturation system with melphalan hydrochloride for injection for substantive review. As we announced recently, the FDA has designated a PDUFA goal date of June 15, 2013. Acceptance of our NDA is the combination of many months of work and we hope represents the first step towards U.S. commercialization. Also during the quarter, we continued to implement our launch in Europe, completing applications for interim reimbursement in key markets and signing our exclusive distribution agreements in Italy and Spain. Recently, we also received regulatory approval for our Generation Two CHEMOSAT Delivery System in Australia and have satisfied all the requirements to affix the CE Mark to the Hepatic CHEMOSAT Delivery System device for interhepatic arterial delivery and extracorporeal filtration of doxorubicin in October 2012, which helps establish a pathway for regulatory approval in large key Asian markets. These developments help lay the foundation for realizing the full potential of our system in the U.S. and other markets around the world. After reviewing these achievements with you briefly, I will turn the call over to Graham for a review of our financial results. I'll begin with the most important development for Delcath in many years, the FDA's acceptance of our NDA. This is a tremendously important development, not only for Delcath but for the patients in the U.S. who have a critical need for our treatment. We look forward to working closely with the agency throughout the review process with the goal of securing approval of our application. Our most important objective is to be able to provide patients in the U.S. with unresectable metastatic melanoma in the liver a new option for treating their disease. The NDA was accepted with our Generation Two hemofiltration cartridge included as a technical change in the chemistry manufacturing and control module of the NDA. Assuming our NDA is approved, this potentially represents the rapid availability of Gen 2 for U.S. patients we've always hoped for, and will help enhance our launch of the system in the United States. Our NDA has been assigned a Prescription Drug User Fee Act or PDUFA goal date of June 15, 2013. FDA also advised us that we should expect an Oncology Drug Advisory Committee or ODAC panel to be convened as part of the review process. No date has been set and we will announce the date once it has been determined. While we work with the FDA on review of our application we continue to move forward with our expanded access program in the United States. As you know, the FDA accepted our amendments to our Investigational New Drug or IND application and our EAP to include the Generation Two filter. These amendments permit physicians at select U.S. cancer centers to use the Generation Two system in expanded access and compassionate use cases after they obtain Institutional Review Board or IRB approval. We expect to enroll 6 centers under the EAP all of which were Phase III trial sites. One of which, has already obtained IRB approval and the others are in various stages of their IRB approval process. We are also working with each site to finalize the clinical trial agreements necessary to begin treatments under the program and we continue to expect patient treatments under the EAP program to begin this fall. This program will play a valuable role in providing access to patients in urgent need of our treatment while our NDA is under review. As we said on our last call, the IND amendments also laid the groundwork for the use of Generation Two system in the clinical trials we have planned as part of our clinical development program, and it is our intention to use Gen 2 in all upcoming perspective clinical trials. Turning now to Europe, we are continuing to execute on our rollout plan. As we stated previously, revenues for this year are expected to be minimal and weighted towards our fourth quarter with sales driven primarily by the centers we have activated so far and by third-party distributors. Drivers continue to be the current status of reimbursement which is critical to our commercialization efforts and expanding our clinical experience. We continue to address both elements in parallel. On the reimbursement front, a concentrated effort is underway in 3 EU markets we believe offer the quickest path to establishing reimbursement namely, Italy, Germany and the U.K.. In Italy, we learned this week that the CHEMOSAT procedure can be reimbursed under an existing diagnosis related group code or DRG, this is highly significant news in that we believe it provides us with our first national reimbursement mechanism for CHEMOSAT procedures in Europe, and these procedures are now eligible to be reimbursed in Italy. We believe the reimbursement under this code will be between EUR 11,000 and EUR 16,000 depending on the region in Italy. And while not ideal, we believe this provides a viable pathway to reimbursed procedures in Italy. To potentially increase the level of reimbursement, we will continue to seek additional, supplemental new technology payments, and potentially pursue a new national DRG specific to CHEMOSAT. In Germany, we have submitted 2 extraordinary insurance effort applications to date and we and the sponsoring institution are awaiting response. These are case-by-case applications for reimbursement. Additionally, 12 centers agreed to sponsor a new diagnostic and therapeutic method application or NUB, as it's known in Germany. The German Radiology Society has also agreed to sponsor that application. An NUB is a specific reimbursement payment for a new technology treatment paid to the sponsoring hospitals. If approved, this NUB application will be sufficient to provide referral coverage across Germany. We are hopeful that all of the reimbursement activity in Germany will lead to a positive response in the first quarter of next year and enable all German patients to be covered for CHEMOSAT procedures. In the U.K., our lead centers are seeking to gain PCT or primary care trust funding which we hope will be granted in Q1 of 2013. This would allow us to perform CHEMOSAT procedures in 3 to 4 key centers in the U.K. with referrals being made nationwide. The U.K. is currently reorganizing its health care system and our partner centers are preparing to apply for reimbursement from a new national body in April. This will provide us with the opportunity to seek interim reimbursement for CHEMOSAT on a nationwide basis, and it is worth pointing out that we are supported by key members of this new national body. Pursuit of reimbursement in other key European markets is continuing but the time frame for success in these markets is a work in progress. While we pursue reimbursement, we are seeking to build clinical experience by sponsoring investigator initiated trials or IITs with leading EU key opinion leaders and have approached -- that have approached us to support new clinical research. Currently, we hope to initiate one IIT of CHEMOSAT with melphalan in primary liver cancer or HCC at a major institution in Germany in the first quarter of next year, and additional IITs are on the drawing board for centers in Spain, The Netherlands and France for 2013. In addition to building our clinical case, these small trials help drive clinical experience in key centers which we hope will facilitate wider usage once reimbursement mechanisms are working and become available. In addition to IITs, we also expect to activate our EU patient registry by the end of this year. This registry will serve as a standardized safety and efficacy database for up to 15 centers in all 7 EU markets. Three of our initial launch and training centers are currently applying for ethical approvals and we expect that the first patient would be enrolled in the registry by the end of December. Going forward, this registry will serve as a viable source of case studies and clinical outcomes and will further drive clinical adoption. As we have communicated in the past, our EU commercialization strategy includes a mix of both direct sales channels in our own field force and indirect sales channels through third-party distributors. During the third quarter, we entered into our first European third-party distributor agreement with reputable companies in Italy and Spain. And we have already received the first distributor order for Italy. Of course, our ramp up in sales will continue to be dependent on the efforts to gain clinical adoption and regional reimbursement. The existing DRG code for Italy, I mentioned earlier, will be of particular benefit in the near term, while we pursue an additional supplemental new technology payments and/or a new higher reimbursing CHEMOSAT specific DRG in that country. Turning to symposia, at the annual meeting of the Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology Society for Europe or CIRSE held in Lisbon, Portugal in mid-September, physicians from Italy and Germany shared their experience with and benefits of the Generation Two CHEMOSAT in treating patients with cancers in the liver. Specifically, they discussed CHEMOSAT's ability to directly treat the liver by addressing both visible tumors and micro-metastases with higher dosing designed to improve tumor killing efficiency thereby, potentially allowing additional time to treat disease outside the liver that is not imminently life-threatening. Later that month, at the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology or ESMO in Vienna, Austria, leading clinicians presented findings from their experiences in the use of CHEMOSAT and the potential role they play in the management of European patients with cancers in the liver. Both the symposia were well attended by clinicians throughout Europe and there is strong interest in offering patients the benefit of CHEMOSAT treatment. Turning to other developments, we are pleased with the regulatory approvals we've received in the recent weeks. In late October, we received approval in Australia for our Generation 2 CHEMOSAT Delivery System device for interhepatic arterial delivery with extracorporeal filtration with melphalan. This approval is another significant milestone for Delcath since it represents our first approval of the Generation Two system in the Pacific Rim and enhances our opportunity to address a market of potentially $50 million to $70 million. We are currently evaluating multiple exclusive distributor candidates to help develop the Australian market. To support clinical adoption and eventually, training of CHEMOSAT with melphalan throughout the Pacific Rim, we plan to initiate an IIT in primary liver cancer or HCC at Kobe University Hospital in Japan that we hope will eventually serve as our main training location for Asia. As we announced recently, we have satisfied all of the requirements to affix the CE Mark to the Hepatic CHEMOSAT Delivery System device for intrahepatic arterial delivery and extracorporeal filtration of doxorubicin. This helps establish a pathway for regulatory approval in large key Asian markets. Doxorubicin is an established chemotherapeutic agent commonly used to treat hepatocellular carcinoma or HCC which is the most common primary malignant tumor and is substantially more prevalent in Asia than Western economies. Unlike melphalan, the drug we used to launch CHEMOSAT in Europe and as part of our NDA in the U.S., doxorubicin is approved and readily available in many Asian markets. With the CE Mark for Delivery System device for intrahepatic arterial delivery and extracorporeal filtration of doxorubicin in hand, we can now submit the product testing specifications to the Chinese state FDA for their evaluation by the end of 2012. In China, establishment of product testing centers would enable Delcath to import the CHEMOSAT system into China and use it in human patients for clinical trials. At the same time, we believe the CE Mark for the Hepatic CHEMOSAT Delivery System device for interhepatic arterial delivery and extracorporeal filtration of doxorubicin would help us advance partnership discussions in China. Meanwhile, the CE Mark for the CHEMOSAT Delivery System device for use with doxorubicin has put us in a position to submit a product registration for CHEMOSAT to the Korean FDA. We intend to submit this application by year end. As with China, this submission activity would advance partnership discussions for the Korean market. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Graham Miao for review of our financial results, and then we'll take a few questions. Graham?