William Lewis
Analyst · Guggenheim
Thank you, Bryan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining for joining us. Insmed's business is off to a strong start in 2026. Commercially, BRINSUPRI delivered strong sequential growth and continues to outpace all past specialty respiratory launch analogs while establishing a new playbook for excellence for a commercial launch. And once again, ARIKAYCE grew year-over-year, which is especially impressive given it is in its eighth year since launch. Both products remain firmly on track to achieve their respective revenue guidance for the year. Clinically, we made meaningful progress, highlighted by clearly positive and potentially practice-changing results for ARIKAYCE in our Phase IIIb ENCORE study. Additionally, we continue to make steady progress on TPIP's Phase III development with PH-ILD and PAH trials now underway and trial designs for our PPF and IPF studies nearing finalization. As we look ahead, we will continue to focus on maximizing the impact of BRINSUPRI in patients with a current bronchiectasis diagnosis while also working to increase awareness and proper diagnosis of patients with COPD and asthma who may also be bronchiectatic. In parallel, we are moving quickly to submit the ENCORE data to regulatory authorities in the U.S. and Japan, which we believe have the potential to support an expanded label for ARIKAYCE in the first half of 2027 and a $1 billion-plus peak sales opportunity for that brand. TPIP will remain a central priority for us as well as we execute on our 4 Phase III trials while also generating long-term data from our Phase II open-label extension studies. Supplementing all these initiatives is our early-stage pipeline, which we expect will continue to produce an average of 1 to 2 INDs per year. We also intend to supplement our pipeline with select business development efforts. Financially, we are well resourced to execute on all of these initiatives as we advance toward cash flow positivity next year. Let's turn now to discuss BRINSUPRI's progress in more detail. BRINSUPRI's launch continues to exceed our expectations, delivering 44% sequential growth off of an already strong prior quarter baseline. We were particularly pleased by the strength of this growth because it occurred in the calendar first quarter, which tends to demonstrate slower growth for medicines given plan changes, out-of-pocket cost resets and reauthorization dynamics. In fact, when you look at the basket of strong respiratory launches that we have cited in the past, sequential growth for those products slowed significantly during their first calendar Q1, delivering only around 9% sequential growth on average. Of course, those past analog launches were impacted by the Medicare coverage gap, which was eliminated beginning in 2025 under the Inflation Reduction Act. But if you expand this analog analysis to include comparably strong launches since the coverage gap was removed, you've noticed that BRINSUPRI's sequential growth rate is actually higher than those of WINREVAIR and Rezdiffra, which in the first calendar Q1 of their respective launches generated between 30% and 40% sequential growth versus Q4. Notably, we did not raise the price of BRINSUPRI at the start of 2026, and the impact from inventory stocking this quarter was negligible. We are extremely pleased with how BRINSUPRI has performed to date and remain confident in our 2026 revenue guidance of at least $1 billion. If we achieve this level of revenue generation, it would place BRINSUPRI among the most impressive launches in our industry's history. We believe that we are setting a new standard for drug launches with BRINSUPRI, which is why we intend to open our playbook and share a lot of detail with you today regarding the metrics we are tracking to gauge this launch's success. Sharing these details is meant to simultaneously help you better understand the components driving BRINSUPRI's performance so far and also why we are so enthusiastic about the future of this launch. As we walk through our dashboard with you, we will highlight the following key observations. BRINSUPRI has healthy organic demand, and we believe we have treated nearly all patients who are ready and waiting for treatment at the time of approval. Payer access is excellent. We have supported a very high percentage of patients through our inLighten patient support program, reflecting strong patient engagement with their treatment. Time to prescription refill rates are ahead of industry benchmarks. Treatment continuation rates remain high. We are broadening and deepening our prescriber base with a lot more opportunity to continue to drive that forward. And our education and outreach efforts, which have already yielded positive results have really just begun to accelerate. Let's dig deeper on each of these items and start with a closer look at patient demand. We believe BRINSUPRI's organic demand is steadily growing. To understand what we mean by organic demand, some context is helpful. We expanded our sales force 10 months before approval so they could promote ARIKAYCE and build disease awareness for bronchiectasis. This effort drove significant interest and helped to build a base of patients who are ready and waiting for a new treatment option at the time of BRINSUPRI's launch. This included nearly 70,000 self-identified patients who registered on our website before approval. The vast majority of whom were being managed at larger institutions, which were involved in our clinical trials and very familiar with BRINSUPRI. Some of those physicians even shared with us that they were maintaining lists of patients for whom they wanted to prescribe BRINSUPRI when it was approved. By proactively doing this early work, we were able to successfully accelerate new patient demand into the early part of the launch. As we noted at the time we launched, larger institutions typically take a few weeks to a couple of months to add new drugs to their electronic medical record systems before prescriptions can be written. As a result, most of these ready and waiting patients receive prescriptions in Q4 and to a lesser extent, in Q1. We estimate approximately 3,500 such patients were embedded in the 9,000 new patient starts we saw in Q4, which is supported by comparing the elevated Q4 prescribing volumes at these institutions to the steady pace we have seen in recent months. Similarly, in Q1, we estimate that about 1,500 of the roughly 7,800 new patients who started treatment in the quarter were part of this ready and waiting patient group. As we enter the second quarter, we believe this surge from ready and waiting patients is now complete. What remains is organic demand, and that demand is growing. In fact, we believe we have seen a steady increase in organic demand in each quarter since we launched as illustrated by the dark blue boxes on this slide. While total new patient additions in Q1 came in lower than Q4, this was due to a significant influx of ready and waiting patients in Q4. Further, the growth that we have seen in the latter part of Q1 gives us confidence that BRINSUPRI's organic growth is really just getting started. The second quarter will be the first period that we believe will not benefit from a component of ready and waiting demand, but we expect organic new patient demand to continue to grow sequentially from Q2 through the rest of the year. Now before we move on to discuss other launch metrics, I want to add a word about Symphony script data. We have noticed that Symphony TRx data has historically been valuable as a directional predictor for total dispenses for BRINSUPRI. Having said that, Symphony NRx data has not been as helpful in predicting new patient starts, and we don't know if either measure will be helpful in the future, but it's worth calling out that Symphony TRx has been proportionately well aligned with reality in past periods. Another crucial component of any healthy launch is a favorable payer access environment. Initially, in a world without established policies, payer approval rates tend to be higher. Our strategy at launch was to focus physician prescribing and payer access on patients with 2 or more exacerbations where payer approval would be most favorable. As a result of this strategy, I'm pleased to say that the initial expected high rate of payer approval has continued. In fact, the approval rate for patients processed through our specialty pharmacies has been impressive at nearly 90% since launch. Also encouragingly, the time required for payer approval, while inherently variable has been less than a week for the majority of patients so far, which is well ahead of our internal benchmarks. Overall, we are extremely pleased by what we have seen in terms of patient access to date. These strong approval rates are aligned with our ambition to make access to BRINSUPRI as frictionless as possible for patients. Now just as important as getting patients access to treatment is supporting their successful use of the medicine. We are pleased that more than 80% of patients on BRINSUPRI have signed up for our inLighten patient support program, which is designed to help patients navigate the practical aspects of initiating and managing treatment with a specialty therapy. Separately, we continue to hear feedback from patients that they are feeling better on BRINSUPRI. This positive patient experience, coupled with BRINSUPRI's favorable safety profile are together driving the very high compliance rates and relatively low discontinuation rates that we have observed thus far. To be more specific on each of these measures, a reasonable industry benchmark for compliance is that a patient would refill a 30-day prescription around every 37 days. This accounts for practical logistics like remembering to take each dose on schedule and order the next prescription as well as the time it takes for the medicine to be delivered. So far, we have seen BRINSUPRI prescriptions refilled at a much faster pace, nearly every 30 days, which we believe speaks to patients' positive experience with the treatment, motivating them to continue therapy with minimal interruption. Turning to continuation rates. As with any treatment, there will always be patients who choose to stop taking their medicine. Daily oral tablets generally have higher continuation rates in the real world than many other classes of medicine. Well-tolerated oral medicines like generic statins, see around 70% of patients remaining on therapy at 6 months. So far, BRINSUPRI's continuation rate is tracking slightly above these analogs. Overall, we believe this high continuation rate adds evidence that patient experience with BRINSUPRI is largely positive. Our area of greatest focus is continuing to deepen and broaden BRINSUPRI prescribing. In terms of broadening the number of physicians who have written a prescription for BRINSUPRI, we feel we are on a very strong trajectory. As of the end of the first quarter, our cumulative total writers topped 5,000, which accounts for more than 1/4 of all pulmonologists in the U.S. There remain large institutions who still have not written their first prescription for BRINSUPRI, so there is plenty of opportunity to expand that prescriber base. We also see significant opportunity to increase prescribing depth. At the end of December, approximately 1,800 physicians had prescribed BRINSUPRI to only one patient. By the first quarter of 2026, roughly half of those physicians have prescribed it to at least one additional patient. We believe this trend represents our greatest growth opportunity, which will be reinforced by the consistently positive feedback we hear from patients and physicians about their experience with the medicine. As awareness continues to build and patients share their experiences during office visits, we expect physicians will grow more comfortable prescribing BRINSUPRI, naturally accelerating its use. In addition, we are encouraged by the fact that more than 20% of BRINSUPRI's prescribers have written it for at least 5 patients. And importantly, this group goes well beyond just physicians in large academic centers. This represents both the progress we have made on deepening prescribing and also the opportunity that is still in front of us to potentially expand prescribing among the remaining 80%. We anticipate the dialogue within the treating community facilitated by gatherings like the American Thoracic Society Meeting, which kicks off later this month, could further encourage physicians to trial or expand their prescribing behaviors as news of positive patient experiences spreads. Collectively, we see expanded prescribing from existing trialing physicians and broadened physician adoption as 2 positive trends, which, if extended, could enable even greater growth than is suggested by the current $1 billion-plus guidance we have reiterated today. We are also accelerating our work to increase awareness and proper diagnosis of bronchiectasis through appropriate education. Just yesterday, we announced the launch of a new diagnosis-focused disease education campaign called Suspect BE. This campaign features Emmy Award-winning TV host, Ty Pennington, and draws on his personal experience of caring for his mother who has lived with bronchiectasis for more than 40 years, including an extended period of time before she received the appropriate diagnosis. We also have plans for direct health care provider education and medical congress presence later this year to further support these efforts. From our point of view, we believe now is the time to elevate disease awareness to enable earlier and more accurate diagnosis of bronchiectasis. I'd also like to highlight the recently announced initiative from the American Thoracic Society aimed at addressing the underdiagnosis of bronchiectasis in the U.S. This ATS initiative will analyze electronic health records across 7 large academic medical systems to identify potential patterns of misdiagnosis. Based on these insights, the ATS initiative intends to pilot scalable solutions such as electronic health record-based prompts that automatically flag potential signs of bronchiectasis and continuing medical education modules for physicians to help improve the detection of bronchiectasis. Importantly, it also intends to determine how many patients within these medical systems are currently diagnosed with COPD or asthma and may also have undiagnosed bronchiectasis. We commend ATS for leading this effort to identify a potentially large and underserved population of COPD and asthma patients who may also have bronchiectasis, but have not been diagnosed. By improving recognition, these insights could drive better outcomes for current and future bronchiectasis patients by increasing the likelihood they will be appropriately diagnosed and gain access to care sooner. In summary, we see strong and growing organic demand. Payer access and patient compliance and continuation rates are exceeding expectations. We see further opportunity in broadening and deepening physician prescribing, while other groups like ATS are taking the initiative with new and significant efforts to raise awareness and improve diagnosis of bronchiectasis. Let me now shift to ARIKAYCE. Remarkably, ARIKAYCE continues to show year-over-year growth even now in its eighth year of launch, targeting only refractory NTM MAC patients. In March, we announced the clinical success of the Phase IIIb ENCORE trial in newly diagnosed NTM MAC patients, a far larger population than refractory. ARIKAYCE, in combination with a multidrug treatment regimen, delivered a statistically significant outcome on the patient-reported respiratory symptom score primary endpoint compared to the multidrug active control arm. This end point is the most important factor for U.S. regulators. The ARIKAYCE arm also demonstrated earlier, greater and more durable culture conversion throughout the study with statistically significant benefits at every prespecified time point, including at month 15 or 3 months off therapy, which is the most important factor for Japanese regulators. Importantly, the ENCORE data make a very compelling case for using ARIKAYCE earlier in the treatment paradigm for patients with an NTM MAC lung infection. As a reminder, in our Phase III CONVERT study in refractory NTM MAC, we observed the treatment with ARIKAYCE resulted in about 30% of patients clearing the bacteria from their sputum after 6 months on treatment. ENCORE showed us that if you treat earlier, you can convert well over 80% of patients to negative sputum cultures in that same period of time. And this conversion is likely to be durable. ARIKAYCE was also better tolerated in the earlier NTM MAC lung infection setting with much lower rates of discontinuation compared to the CONVERT study. Now that we have these data and a well-defined target product profile, we will be conducting market research to understand how the product might be perceived and used by the prescribing community, which will give us a clearer view of the opportunity. We are working to submit the ENCORE data to regulators in the U.S. and Japan in the second half of this year. If successful, these label updates could increase the addressable market for ARIKAYCE from around 30,000 patients today to more than 200,000 patients next year, potentially turning ARIKAYCE into a blockbuster brand with no new competition on the horizon of which we are aware. Let me now turn to TPIP. TPIP represents a very substantial late-stage opportunity where we are pursuing 4 Phase III trials with very meaningful addressable patient populations for each. We are very excited to announce that last month, we opened our first site in the Phase III PALM PAH study of TPIP. Based on the FDA's feedback, this study, if successful, will be the only registrational trial required for potential regulatory approval for the treatment of PAH. Additionally, data from our Phase IIb 24-month open-label extension study in PAH is now expected in the third quarter of this year and will include safety and certain efficacy measures through the first 12 months of the open-label period. As a reminder, this OLE gave investigators the option to continue to increase the dose of TPIP beyond the 640-microgram maximum dose allowed in the initial Phase IIb trial. During the OLE, we have not required or encouraged uptitration. That said, we are pleased to report that about 1/4 of the participants in the OLE have achieved doses that are higher than the 640 micrograms, and that 7 out of the 91 patients who entered the OLE have gone on to reach the new maximum dose of 1,280 micrograms. Given the absence of a placebo group in this open-label portion to which we can compare TPIP's effects, a good outcome for this update in our view would be to see that patients are able to sustain the best-in-class improvements in 6-minute walk, NT-proBNP and functional class measures that were demonstrated in the 16-week randomization portion of the trial over this much longer treatment period. For those who have increased their dosage since starting the OLE, we would want to potentially see some discernible improvement in those efficacy measures compared to what was shown in the randomized trial, along with a consistent safety profile with what we've seen in the Phase II trials. We will also be interested to see the impact of treatment with TPIP for the patients who are initially randomized to the placebo arm of the trial. We look forward to sharing these data once available. Moving now to our other 3 TPIP studies. In the ongoing Phase III PALM-ILD study, we are encouraged by the trial's progress with patients having been randomized in 7 different countries so far. We are also pleased to see that we are recruiting patients even in the U.S. despite competition from other marketed treprostinil products that could discourage physicians from enrolling patients into a placebo-controlled trial. We believe this willingness to enroll patients reflects excitement for the clinical trial results shown for TPIP to date, given that doctors know their patients will gain access to TPIP either at the start of the trial for those randomized to the TPIP arm or after the 24-week study period completes for those who are initially randomized to the placebo arm. We believe this represents a very positive early sign for future adoption should the medicine continue to show positive results and gain regulatory approval. We also continue to anticipate initiating a Phase III study in PPF in the second half of this year to be followed shortly thereafter by a study in IPF. Recent positive clinical data in IPF from another treprostinil product has added to our enthusiasm about the potential opportunity for TPIP in both PPF and IPF. The mechanism by which benefit may be seen in these patient populations is not fully understood yet, but it is believed that treprostinil demonstrates its antifibrotic effects via multiple pathways, including inhibitory impacts on fibroblasts and that those effects may be dose dependent. As a result, we believe TPIP may be more beneficial by virtue of being able to deliver a greater dose of treprostinil. In this way, we think TPIP could represent the optimization of treprostinil therapy, enabling continuous delivery of much higher doses of treprostinil directly to the lung using once-daily administration. As a result, since treprostinil has now been shown in other studies to deliver positive results for patients with IPF, we believe TPIP has the potential to provide even greater benefits for those patients. So let's recap. In a year that will be defined by execution, we remain focused on delivering across our commercial and late-stage clinical programs. BRINSUPRI is setting the bar for commercial success with exceptional progress across each of its key launch metrics, keeping us on track to achieve our ambitious full year revenue guidance of at least $1 billion in global net revenues. ARIKAYCE continues to grow in its current indication. Looking ahead, we see the potential for substantial growth next year if the FDA and PMDA approve a broader label for all MAC lung infection patients in each of these regions. And for TPIP, we have recently initiated our Phase III study in patients with PAH while continuing to enroll patients in our ongoing PALM-ILD study and finalize our trial designs for PPF and IPF. We anticipate announcing data from our open-label extension programs in PAH in the third quarter of this year. I have not spent any time today on our pipeline beyond our 3 most advanced programs, but these continue to progress as well. INS1148, INS1033 and gene therapies for DMD and ALS are all advancing to or in the clinic, and we look forward to future updates about these programs as clinical data becomes available. We believe in continuing to build out our pipeline through research and select business development and efforts in both areas continue at a robust pace. With that, I'd like to now turn the call over to Sara.