Mark Crossley
Analyst · Stifel. Please go ahead
Thanks, Roberto. And good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Mark Crossley, CEO of Indivior. With me today to discuss our results and progress are Ryan Preblick, our Chief Financial Officer; and Dr. Christian Heidbreder, our Chief Scientific Officer. For today's call, I'll provide an overview of our strategic progress, after which Christian will provide a scientific update, and Ryan will conclude our formal remarks by detailing our financial performance and the full year 2022 guidance we published in our press release, we'll then move on to Q&A. Before I move on to my overview, I'll assume that everyone has read the forward-looking statements. I'm going to begin my formal remarks by first thanking our employees. The fact that Indivior has made such tremendous progress against the continuing backdrop of the pandemic speaks to the commitment of our people. Their passion for the focus on delivering for patients is truly humbling. Indeed, never has our purpose to deliver pioneering life-transforming treatments and our patient-centered vision, been more critical and relevant given that tragically, drug overdose deaths reached over 100,000 in the United States during the 12 month period for the first time ever. In short, the epidemic has gotten worse. And as you can see, the vast majority of these deaths are as a result of misuse of opioids, notably, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. What makes these statistics even more tragic is the fact that 10 million people-plus self-report misusing opioids, and over 3 million people have been diagnosed, while only 1.2 million have received treatment. This phenomena, known as the treatment gap, is one which we must approve on. The treatment gap is one element that motivates the entire Indivior team to advance our vision that all patients around the world will have access to evidence-based treatment for the chronic conditions and co-occurring disorders of addiction. Turning to the results and our strategic progress. As you saw in the full year results released earlier, we finished 2021 strongly. SUBLOCADE delivered excellent growth of 88% for the year to reach $244 million in net revenue. And we continued to benefit from the resilience of SUBOXONE Film, which I'll remind you we no longer promote. This allowed us to maintain a year end gross cash balance of over $1 billion even after the completion of the $100 million share buyback. These excellent results reflect relentless execution against our strategic priorities, the most important of which is building SUBLOCADE towards our $1 billion-plus net revenue goal. And as you've seen from our 2022 guidance, we expect to make further progress in the coming year with SUBLOCADE net revenue growth of over 50% at the mid-point. Within our guidance, we're planning for adjusted operating profit to be at similar levels for 2021. This guidance reflects planned reinvestment of film over-delivery behind annualizations of decisions taken in 2021 to support our long-acting injectables. Additionally, we have incremental investment behind continued advancement of our R&D pipeline, evidence generation behind SUBLOCADE, as well as efforts to enable a second source of supply for SUBLOCADE. We believe we're making these investments from a position of strength, and we intend to leverage this for the benefit of all our patients and stakeholders. The last thing I want to highlight here is that we are exploring the possible benefits of an additional US listing of our equity, the initial costs of which are also included in our OpEx guidance. I'll touch on the rationale in a few minutes. But our preliminary view is that a US listing will likely better align with our strategy and structure over time. Slide six shows the strategic priorities report card that we've been measuring our achievements against and holding ourselves accountable. As before, we have four key pillars, namely to build SUBLOCADE to over $1 billion, to diversify our revenue, to build and progress our pipeline and to optimize our operating model. I won't go into a lot of detail here as I and my colleagues will expand on a number of the actions we are taking against these strategic priorities to further our leadership position and our ability to deliver sustainable value creation. But I will say, we're pleased with how we've delivered across all four pillars in 2021. Most importantly, we continued to deliver sequential double-digit quarterly growth in SUBLOCADE despite the pandemic backdrop as we continue to expand our access and presence in Organized Health Systems, including the criminal justice system. On slide seven, the team accomplished all of the Organized Health System-related goals we set for ourselves in 2021. The vast majority of net revenue growth for SUBLOCADE is now being generated in the Organized Health System channel, and we expect this to continue as we have now opened up access to over 400 of our 500 priority Organized Health System targets. Since the majority of HCPs in the US who actively treat patients with OUD are affiliated with an organized system, our growth strategy is squarely focused on both expanding our reach to more HCPs, as well as increasing depth of prescribing. The capabilities we've established within our ecosystem model to drive the awareness of SUBLOCADE among these complex customers and to get these accounts up and running are now becoming a clear driver of growth. We've established a dedicated team specifically designed for this channel, consisting of clinical specialists, access directors, field reimbursement specialists and a hub to help with the patient journey. This is further supplemented in the second half of 2021 when we made the strategic decision to invest in a dedicated team focused on the opportunity to help patients in the criminal justice system. We also continue to build the scientific evidence base and claims behind SUBLOCADE. We're investing in new clinical studies that we believe will extend our scientific leadership and provide further differentiation. This new breakthrough science generated for the disease space is why we chose to expand our team of medical science liaisons in 2021 with annualization carrying into 2022. Additionally, Christian will provide more detail in a few moments regarding our continued evolution of science in the disease space, which represents a portion of the planned increase in R&D in 2022. On slide eight, I want to spend a moment on PERSERIS. We tend to focus much of our attention on SUBLOCADE, which is natural given the scale of the patient and commercial opportunity. However, we remain convinced that PERSERIS is an important asset in schizophrenia with the potential to deliver peak net revenue of $200 million to $300 million, given the size of the established market and the differentiated dosing advantages of our product. Net revenue progress has been hampered directly by the pandemic but also by the inability to expand to a national launch, while our access to health care providers was restricted. Achieving our peak net revenue goal for PERSERIS was always predicated on national sales force coverage, and so we made the decision in the second half of 2021 to double our commercial force beyond this important asset. We expect to complete the sales force expansion in the first half of this year, so we will enter the second half of 2022 operating at full effectiveness. On slide nine, beyond PERSERIS, our key initiative to diversify near term revenues is to seek regulatory approval and launch of our new products outside the US. As you're aware, net revenue has been under pressure in Europe and elsewhere from our legacy tablet-based treatments and an aggressive pricing environment that favors generics. With the progressive rollout of SUBLOCADE under the brand name SUBUTEX prolonged release and the European launch of SUBOXONE Film, we have the opportunity to reverse the year-over-year declines in net revenue. On slide 10, I'd like to expand on our decision to explore a US listing. From time to time, we've considered a US listing for our shares. With greater certainty and the confidence we have in our prospects, we believe now is the time to commence the work and build the capabilities to enable this strategic initiative if supported by shareholders. An additional US listing makes a great deal of sense for Indivior in terms of our go-forward strategy and the group structure. It would provide increased visibility in the US, which is the market most impacted by the opioid epidemic. The US represents 80% of our current revenue and is the lead market driving the future value behind SUBLOCADE. Additionally, there's a deeper pool of capital for biopharma opportunities, and the management team are located in the US. In short, and as I said earlier, our preliminary view is that this initiative would likely bring us enhanced opportunities to create shareholder value. Our intention, as aligned with the Board, is to gather insights and perspective on this strategic initiative via consultation with our shareholders during spring 2022. I mentioned earlier that we believe we're now in a position of strength, and I want to expand a little in my closing comments on why we are so excited and confident about the future for Indivior. First, opioid use disorder remains significantly under-treated. As I said earlier, over 10 million people have used opioids, but patients receiving BMAT treatment stood at less than 20% of that number despite the growth in treatment access in recent years. In addition, the tragedy of the opioid epidemic has accelerated through the COVID pandemic, reaching unprecedented levels. With growing awareness of the epidemic, increasing treatment capacity and political will to address the issue, which disproportionately impacts the US, we expect to help close the treatment gap moving forward, which should lead to the BMAT market expansion at mid to high single digit percentage rate for the foreseeable future. Second, we are the number one treatment provider for opioid use disorder and have the deepest understanding of the patient journey based on over two decades of developing and pioneering novel treatments. We believe SUBLOCADE is on track to become a $1 billion-plus drug as the first and only long-acting injectable approved in the US. And we have leveraged the same ATRIGEL delivery technology to create a differentiated long-acting injectable for schizophrenia in PERSERIS. Third, we're investing in long-term growth. As I just described, we're leveraging our financial strength to extend our leadership position in addiction, to accelerate our diversification efforts and to bolster our science and our pipeline. We have significantly invested behind SUBLOCADE growth by expanding our commercial capabilities focused on the Organized Health System channels, as well as doubling our sales capability for PERSERIS. The new science we're undertaking focused on SUBLOCADE will further reinforce our leadership position in addiction treatment. Finally, we're a management team committed to value creation. We've demonstrated our ability to reinvest and return capital to shareholders, all while increasing our profitability. Our capital allocation priorities continue to be reinvesting in the business and examining additive business development opportunities. Additionally, we will regularly evaluate our capital needs, and we'll look to return value to shareholders, if appropriate. Lastly, we're assessing the optimal listing structure for Indivior in full consultation with our shareholders. With that as an introduction, I'd like to hand over to Christian for his scientific update.