Bruce Cozadd
Analyst · David Amsellem with Piper Jaffray. Please proceed
Thank you, Kathee. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. 2013 was an outstanding year for Jazz as we delivered strong top-line growth and continue to generate significant cash flow. During 2013, we saw continued sales growth of Xyrem and Erwinaze, as well as further development and enhancement of our infrastructure to support our corporate development efforts. 2014 is off to a great start. We delivered on our corporate development strategy completing the acquisition of Gentium and acquiring the rights to a late stage investigational compound ADX-N05 from Aerial Biopharma. We completed our tender offer for Gentium's Ordinary Shares and American depository shares and owned approximately 98% of the company. We have been working with our colleagues of Gentium to ensure a smooth transition and integration of employees and functions, and look forward to our planned launch of Defitelio in the European Union over the course of the year. ADX-N05 or JZP 1-10 as we refer to it now is in development for the treatment of excessive daytime sleepiness in patients with narcolepsy. We will provide more detail in our plans for JZP 1-10 and Defitelio later in the call. Earlier this month, we launched Versacloz, our new product for treatment of patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia and for reducing the risk of recurrent suicidal behavior in patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Now, I will update you on key products in the commercial and development portfolio. Kate will then review our results for the fourth quarter and full year 2013 and provide 2014 financial guidance. I will start with our sleep franchise. Xyrem remains a key driver of our growth. During the fourth quarter of 2013, we achieved 10% volume growth compared to the same period of 2012, our fifth consecutive quarter of low-double-digit volume growth. The average number of active Xyrem patients grew to approximately 11,250 during the quarter, compared to 10,450 in the same period of 2012. Our efforts to expand the prescriber universe through our focus on low-to-mid-decile positions contributed a strong volume growth throughout 2013. Increasing the use of Xyrem in our current prescriber, identifying new physicians to add to our call universe and expanding the size of our sales force from 80 to 100 sales representatives are part of our plan to maximize the opportunity to deliver continued growth of Xyrem. The new sales representatives began covering their territories at the beginning of January. We continue to make investments in narcolepsy physician education and disease awareness programs, which we believe are contributing to increased awareness and diagnoses of narcolepsy. We're pleased with yearly response to these efforts. However, narcolepsy remains a large area of unmet medical need and less than half of this population has received a diagnosis of narcolepsy. During late 2013, we initiated a disease awareness campaign in two pilot cities Charlotte and Indianapolis using unbranded TV commercials to educate the public on the symptoms of narcolepsy. We had a strong response in the pilot cities during two month test period with more than 1500 hits, the physician finder tool and over 600 requests for further information about narcolepsy from narcolepsylink.com. We are in a process of evaluating the impact of this unbranded disease awareness campaign on the diagnosis of narcolepsy which will help inform our decision on whether to expand in other regions later this year. Turning to a brief regulatory update. The process with FDA to finalize REMS documents for Xyrem remains ongoing. And unfortunately, we have not reached agreement on key terms, including whether the Xyrem deemed REM should be modified to enable the distribution of Xyrem through more than one pharmacy. While we had hope to reach agreement with FDA on the Xyrem REMS without the need to initiate formal dispute resolution procedures, a recent FDA communications office compelled us to initiate dispute resolution procedures which we will do by the end of this month. There are no prescribed timeline for this process and we do not know how we will unfold. Based on currently available information related to the safe distribution of Xyrem, we continue to believe that a distribution system based on a single central pharmacy is the safest and most appropriate way to distribute Xyrem while ensuring patients and public safety. Separately, as we mentioned in last quarter, FDA requested an initial meeting with us and the current and the filers to begin negotiations of the single shared REMS for Xyrem and potential generic versions of the product. That meeting was held last month and follow-up is ongoing. We continue to believe that development of a single shared REMS is complex and that there are many issues that need to be resolved during the process. Regarding the ANDA litigation against Roxane last week the court extended the discovery period by five months to late October. Therefore, we now anticipate that a trial would not occur until late 2014 at the earliest. Of course, in light of the uncertain time with any complex litigation matter actually timing may differ. Now I will spend a few moments talking about our two R&D programs in the sleep franchise. Regarding JZP-110, as a remainder we plan to evaluate this compound to treat excessive day time sleepiness in patients with narcolepsy and in patients with obstructive food apnea. We are formulating plans for our Phase 2 development program and anticipate request in an end to Phase 2 meeting with FDA targeted for midyear. We plan t provide more information regarding our planned Phase 2 program after we have met with FDA and finalized our plans. Regarding JZP-386, our deuterium-modified analog of sodium oxybate license from Concert, we have submitted the investigational medicinal product dossier at the end of 2013 to support a first in human trial this year in Europe. We have received the appropriate regulatory approvals to move ahead in human trials and are working to manufacture clinical products of the study. We anticipate beginning clinical studies this year when this is complete. Now, let's turn to Erwinaze, which continues to perform well. We are continuing our efforts to educate health care providers on the importance of identifying hypersensitivity reactions, E. coli drug asparaginases, and acute lymphoblastic leukemia. With respect to our IV study submission, the FDA has request for the supplemental biological license application as an efficacy data was included in the original label amendment submission in December. We expect to submit the sPLA to FDA later this quarter. Also, we have finalized our study protocol for the planned trial in young adults. This study is expected the beginning enrolment in the second quarter and we anticipate in rolling approximately 30 patients age 18 to 39. Moving to Asparec, we have discussed our plans with FDA and are currently working a large cooperative oncology study group to finalize the study protocol for our Phase 2, 3 study in children and we will update eon the expected timing of first patient in once the protocol is finalized. Next I will comment on Prialt, our non-opioid intrathecally administered drug for adults with severe chronic pain. As I have mentioned previously, we made important progress during 2013 on our long term growth strategy for Prialt including our navigator program, collaborations with Medtronic and initiation of our PRISM Prialt registry. We believe these initiatives are important to increasing Prialt's penetration in the intrathecal pain therapy market and we observed some positive trends during the fourth quarter. In our Medtronic collaboration, sales teams have been working closely to identify new account opportunities and we have received multiple physician referrals. We have several joint physician education programs planned in 2014. Finally, we are on track with patient enrollment in the PRISM registry and a planning of series of abstracts and posters that include interim data analysis beginning the second half of 2014. Finally, with respect to Defitelio, we are focused on approval of our patient registry protocol through the European Medicines Agency, Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee or PRAC. The registry is required as part of post-approval commitment for Defitelio. We plan to launch the product in selected EU countries over the course of 2014 and expect the begin these efforts in the first half subject to Defitelio's patient registry design receiving the anticipated positive recommendation from PRAC and opening the registry for recruitment. Pricing and reimbursement submissions are underway in many EU markets for such approvals that required prelaunch. Timing for pricing and reimbursement approvals in EU varies by country with a range of one month to over a year. We expect to receive approvals for key EU markets such as the UK and Germany in the second quarter. Our emphasis is on establishing solid pricing foundation for a common EU price for Defitelio. The Defitelio launch meeting is planned to coincide with the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation meeting in Milan at the end of March. We anticipate a combined total Erwinaze, Defitelio EU sales force of approximately 35 representatives once we receive approval pricing and reimbursement in all EU countries over the next year. This is a rolling process and we plan to begin our launch efforts with approximately 14 sales representatives. Our efforts will be focused on driving awareness with severe hepatic veno-occlusive disease or VOD, the importance of early diagnosis and treatment and communicating a therapeutic value of Defitelio. We are excited about the near term commercial opportunity to provide this therapy to patients with severe VOD in the EU and eager to continue the development of this compound and other potential indications where there are significant unmet medical news such as the prevention of VOD and the prevention of acute graft vs. host disease. Regarding the U.S., we are in the process of evaluating comments from FDA regarding the defibrotide dataset and planned to request an FDA meeting to discuss the regulatory pathway for defibrotide. We also plan to work with Sigma-Tau, who has commercial rights to market the defibrotide in the Americas as we access and determine next steps for an NDA submission including whether we can submit an NDA to FDA with the current dataset or whether we will need to collect further data prior to submitting to FDA. Separately, we announced today that Kate is stepping down Chief Financial Officer to pursue other interests, and that Matt Young will be succeeding Kate as CFO. As some of you may know, Kate has been traveling from her home in the LA area to our Palo Alto office for years and we thank her for that dedication and the significant contribution she has made. Kate has played a key role in developing and implementing our growth strategy and in creating shareholder value as well as expanding and strengthening of the company's finance and corporate development organizations. We will certainly miss Kate, but we are well-positioned for the future. As part of our succession planning process we seek key individuals that fit well with our corporate values and culture of demonstrating effective leadership. We hire Matt Young, a highly experienced life sciences investment banker in early 2013 to head up our corporate development group. Matt has successfully led a corporate -wide effort to develop proactive corporate development strategy and execute against that strategy. The Gentium and JZP-110 transactions are early results of this effort. I'm pleased that Matt will be succeeding Kate as CFO reporting to me. Matt's knowledge in our business and strong leadership and extensive experience in life science banking positions position him well for success in his expanded role. Kate, let me turn the call over to you.