Todd Bazemore
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is now open
Thank you, Mark, and good morning. I'd like to begin with INVELTYS, our twice-daily, postsurgical ocular steroid. In the second quarter, there were approximately 21,000 prescriptions of INVELTYS reported by Symphony Health, which represents a decrease of approximately 51% compared to the first quarter of 2020. This decrease was due to the impact of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which was felt most acutely in the month of April. Total cataract procedures in Q2 of 2020 were down 50% compared to Q2 of 2019. The market did begin to recover in late April as states began to allow elective surgical procedures to recommence. Since then, total INVELTYS prescriptions have achieved strong growth, going from 544 prescriptions written during the week ended April 17 to over 3,000 prescriptions during the week ended July 24. INVELTYS weekly prescription volumes are steadily building back towards the pre-COVID levels. We are encouraged by this significant recovery which is also reflected in the most recent month-over-month data and compares favorably versus the steroid market more broadly. As of July 24, INVELTYS prescriptions were up 12.8% in the most recent 4 weeks versus prior 4 weeks compared to the branded and generic steroid markets, which were up 4.1% and 3.4%, respectively. And prior to the onset of COVID-19 pandemic, INVELTYS prescriptions were tracking up quarter-over-quarter, suggesting continued growth trends and strong demand. We believe the strength of our recovery reflects the strong clinical profile of INVELTYS, a positive reception to INVELTYS among our target eye care professionals and the effectiveness of the Kala sales team. While we suspended substantially all in-person interactions with our customers, including visits to physicians' offices, clinics and hospitals early in the pandemic, our sales force continued to provide support virtually through both telephone and web-based technologies. We continue to follow recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as federal, state and local governments and have slowly been able to return our sales representatives to the field. As of July 1, all territories were cleared for in-person field activities. All our representatives have been educated on appropriate local and regional procedures, have been provided personal protective equipment, and we are conducting daily health screenings of our sales team to ensure both their own and our customers' safety. While we are very encouraged by these trends and believe they bode well for INVELTYS over the long term, we recognize that the ongoing surge or future surges in COVID cases may result in some states reinstating restrictions on elective procedures or limiting the ability of our sales force to engage in person, which could again impact INVELTYS sales. As we stated last quarter, we continue to expect that the ongoing pandemic will negatively affect full year INVELTYS revenue. In recent months, our commercial team has also been busy with launch preparations for EYSUVIS. As we stated previously, many of our call targets for INVELTYS overlap with those for EYSUVIS, which will enable us to launch shortly after approval, relying initially on our existing 56 sales professionals to target the top dry eye prescribers. Together, these prescribers represent about 70% of all dry eye prescriptions. Shortly after launch and pending the status of the COVID-19 pandemic, we will begin expanding our existing sales force to a total of approximately 100 to 125 representatives, which we believe will allow us to effectively cover the eye care professionals who are responsible for about 85% of all dry eye prescriptions. We are in the process of training our existing reps on the dry eye disease state. And in parallel, our account director team has begun engaging payers in dry eye disease state discussions. We plan to leverage these payer discussions to quickly drive clinical presentations and formulary reviews of EYSUVIS, if and when approved. As Mark noted earlier, we believe that EYSUVIS represents a tremendous commercial opportunity with the potential to treat millions of patients and a total addressable market potential in excess of $8 billion annually. As we continue to engage in market research with ophthalmologists, optometrists and patients in advance of a potential launch, we remain steadfast in our belief that EYSUVIS may be suitable for the vast majority of patients with dry eye disease, including those requiring a first-line prescription therapy for short-term treatment. In our market research, eye care professionals report the potential to prescribe EYSUVIS in over half of all of their dry eye patients. And more than 90% of patients indicated they would ask their physicians about EYSUVIS in hopes of finding a short-term treatment that can provide rapid relief from the signs and symptoms of their dry eye disease. We are incredibly excited about the opportunity to deliver on the promise of EYSUVIS for these patients. Next month, we will host a key opinion leader event to speak more specifically to the unmet need in dry eye disease and the opportunity for EYSUVIS. This event will feature 2 dry eye experts: Dr. Edward J. Holland, the Director of Cornea Services at Cincinnati Eye Institute and Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Cincinnati; and Dr. Kelly K. Nichols, the Dean of and Professor at the School of Optometry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Holland and Dr. Nichols will speak to their own experiences treating patients with dry eye disease as well as the need for new therapeutic options. We will also review our clinical data supporting the potential approval of EYSUVIS, and we look forward to sharing additional details on our ongoing launch preparations for EYSUVIS at that time. I will now turn the call over to Mary to discuss our financial results.