Enrique Conterno
Analyst · SVB Leerink. Your line is now open
Thank you, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter 2020 earnings call. Despite the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, on behalf of FibroGen, I'd like to reassure patients, health care providers, investigators and stakeholders of our continued commitment to bring our potential first-in-class medicines to patients suffering from chronic and life-threatening conditions. We continue to monitor the situation closely. To our employees and our patients and to the health care providers, regulators and countless others who interact with FibroGen, please know our thoughts are you and your families. I want take a moment to welcome both Dr. Aoife Brennan, and Dr. Ben Cravatt to our Board of Directors at this exciting point in Fibrogen's history. Aoife's experience in rare diseases and clinical development and Ben's world-class expertise in biology and chemistry will provide invaluable perspective to our Board. With today's earnings call, we are implementing a new format with a goal to improving communications with the investment community and other stakeholders. I will begin by providing a high-level summary of the most important accomplishments and developments from the second quarter. Pat Cotroneo, our CFO, will then review the financials. After which, we will open up the call to your questions. Today's updates will include our China results, U.S. regulatory review and our clinical trials. We hope this new format will result in more time for us to have a constructive dialogue. So let us get started with our strong China results. With a return to a new normal business environment in China, we are pleased to report net sales of roxadustat of $15.7 million for the second quarter. This represents an increase from the $5 million in China net sales reported the first quarter. We are most encouraged by the trajectory of the launch, which is being driven by both an expansion in hospital listings and continued adoption. Hospital listings continue to be a key focus of our launch efforts. Notably, as of the end of the second quarter, roxadustat was listed as hospitals representing over 45% of the CKD anemia market opportunity in China. This is in comparison to the over 30% reported at the end of the first quarter. We're especially pleased with the penetration at top-tier Class IIIA institutions, which are generally the larger ones and the hospitals were key opinion leaders and early adopters practice. We continue to see broad roxadustat utilization across different patient populations, including in the hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis and non-dialysis populations. Utilization across these different patient populations bodes well for long-term success and provides important learnings as we prepare to launch roxadustat in the U.S. and other countries. Finally, we recently amended our China collaboration with AstraZeneca. The new agreement more optimally aligns both FibroGen and AstraZeneca to maximize the economic value of the roxadustat franchise and will result in improved and more predictable economics and profitability for FibroGen. We look forward to keeping you updated as we advanced our long-term goal of making roxadustat the standard of care in treating China's CKD anemia patients. Let us turn now to the U.S. regulatory review and commercial preparation for roxadustat. We had our mid-cycle review with the FDA in June and continue to expect an FDA decision on the roxadustat NDA by the PDUFA date of December 20, 2020. The FDA has indicated that an advisory committee meeting is not planned at this time. Overall, we are pleased with the cadence of an engagement with the FDA. While future interaction with the FDA are planned, given the proximity of label discussions, we will no longer be commenting on those interactions until the PDUFA date. On the commercial front, we appointed Thane Wettig to the newly created position of Chief Commercial Officer, where he will lead FibroGen's commercialization efforts. Thane brings more than 30 years of global biopharmaceutical leadership and experience, and we welcome his leadership in this area. Thane is working closely with our partners, AstraZeneca and Astellas, to ensure ruxadustat will reach as many CKD anemia patients as possible on a worldwide basis. We continue to work closely with AstraZeneca regarding U.S. launch preparation activities. Within the next few months, we expect to have submitted up to 10 manuscripts covering the Phase III data, both individual trial and pooled data sets. At the upcoming American Society of Nephrology Congress in October, we expect to present a meaningful number of abstracts on roxadustat and HIF-PHI science. We continue to engage with CMS on the Transitional Drug Add-on Payment Adjustment, or TDAPA. Finally, disease awareness activities imperative to reframing the primary defect of CKD anemia from one of EPO and iron deficiency to an oxygen sensing deficit are underway in the U.S. In Europe, the filing for roxadustat for the treatment of anemia in adult patients with chronic kidney disease was accepted by the European Medicines Agency in May. Our partner, Astellas, expects a European approval decision mid-2021. Moving now to our pipeline, starting with newly initiated clinical trials. In June, we initiated two separate trials studying pamrevlumab in patients hospitalized with COVID-19. In the U.S., we initiated a Phase II study investigating the efficacy and safety of pamrevlumab in hospitalized patients with acute coronavirus infection. This multicenter trial will enroll approximately 130 patients with COVID-19 and will assess patient time to and on ventilatory support. In Italy, a Phase II/III investigator-initiated trial investigating the efficacy and safety of pamrevlumab in approximately 68 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 was started. The primary objective of this study is to assess the effect of pamrevlumab on blood oxygenation in patients with COVID-19 infection in the acute and post-acute settings. The majority of patients suffering from severe forms of COVID-19 have bilateral interstitial pneumonia causing reduction in oxygenation and severe respiratory failure. The administration of our anti-CTGF antibody, pamrevlumab, could protect the lung from the immediate consequences of the infection presented as acute respiratory distress syndrome. Now moving to an update of our ongoing clinical trials, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to present challenges to the conduct of clinical trials across our industry. The most effective of our trial continues to be pamrevlumab's ZEPHYRUS IPF trial in which we temporarily paused enrollment for two months due to the vulnerability of this patient with severely compromised lung function. We have reopened ZEPHYRUS for enrollment and the remainders of our studies in locally advanced and resectable pancreatic cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome and chemotherapy-induced anemia continue enrollment, albeit at slower rates. We expect to initiate LELANTOS, a Phase III trial of pamrevlumab in patients with non-ambulatory Duchenne muscular dystrophy this quarter, and we plan to publish updated two-year data from a recently completed Phase II DMD before year end. We remain focused on accelerating enrollment of all of our ongoing clinical trials while ensuring patient safety. I will now turn the call over to Pat Cotroneo, our CFO, to review the financials. Pat?