Peter D. Meldrum
Analyst · Piper Jaffray
Thank you, Scott. To start off, I would like to briefly highlight our financial performance for the third fiscal quarter. I am pleased to announce that Myriad delivered a strong quarter with both revenues and earnings exceeding consensus forecast. More importantly, the company was able to grow revenues at a 21% year-over-year in the third quarter, representing our seventh consecutive quarter where top line growth exceeded 20%. These results are a testament to the dedication and commitment of our employees, and I'm proud of the entire Myriad team. Every segment of our business grew in the third quarter. But I'd like to highlight 1 area in particular that was exceptionally strong. Our Women's Health franchise grew 35% year-over-year. The Women's Health team has done an outstanding job growing this business segment through innovative marketing techniques, such as our online Hereditary Cancer Quiz, and our focus on high-volume touch points such as mammography and imaging centers. Earnings per share in the third quarter was $0.46, up 34% year-over-year. And I believe these strong results demonstrate the continued leverage of our business model. Myriad looks to build upon this leverage going forward as we focus on growing our core markets, diversifying our business through our strong product pipeline and broadening our international reach as Myriad transforms into a global molecular diagnostic company. I'm also pleased to announce that we are raising our financial guidance for the 2013 fiscal year. We are now predicting revenues of $595 million to $600 million, representing a 20% to 21% top line growth compared to our prior fiscal year. The strong growth performance follows our 23% revenue increase last year. On the bottom line, we are calling for earnings per share of $1.65 to $1.67, representing earnings per share growth of 27% to 28%. Our strong earnings and cash generation has allowed us to continue to honor our pledge of returning cash to shareholders through our share repurchase program. As you may recall from our last earnings call, Myriad's Board authorized another $200 million share repurchase program. During the third quarter, Myriad repurchased approximately $45 million of stock. In aggregate, we have now repurchased over 24 million shares at an average rated price per share of $21.65, representing over 25% of our outstanding shares. We have approximately $175 million remaining on our existing repurchase authorization. And we'll continue to actively repurchase stock at price thresholds that we believe are not reflective of a long-term value of the company. Now I'd like to highlight some of the important events that transpired through our third fiscal quarter. First, we announced a companion diagnostic collaboration with PharmaMar, employing our new Homologous Recombination Deficiency or HRD test. Myriad's HRD test is able to detect when the tumor has lost the ability to repair DNA damage, regardless of the genomic causation. We believe HRD will be the gold standard in detecting whether a patient's tumor has lost its DNA repair function, making the patient a good candidate for DNA-damaging drugs such as the platinum-based therapies and PARP-inhibitors. As you may recall in the study we presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium at the end of last year, 70% of the triple negative breast cancer patients with a high HRD score saw their tumors shrink and had minimal residual disease, while only 12% of the breast cancer patients with a low HRD score responded to carboplatin-based therapy. The body of evidence to support HRD as a companion test for these therapeutic classes is growing. And we believe 490,000 patients each year could be candidates for DNA-damaging drugs, which would represent a $2 billion market opportunity for our HRD test. Myriad is a content-driven company. Instead of focusing on developing DNA sequencing technologies, we are committed to understanding the cause of disease and elucidating the role genes play in the disease process. In addition to the many genes discovered by Myriad scientists and collaborators, we are constantly looking for new discoveries and attractive in-licensing opportunities. As announced this afternoon, Myriad has acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to the MITF gene. MITF is an important gene in predicting the hereditary cancer risk from melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer, and renal cell carcinoma, the most common type of kidney cancer. Patients with mutations in the MITF gene have a 14-fold increased risk of developing melanoma or kidney cancer during their lifetime. We will incorporate this important gene in our new next-generation hereditary cancer panel in the future. Our hereditary cancer panel will provide patients and their physicians with critical life-saving information on a broad spectrum of cancers. Additionally, Myriad is pleased to announce that during the third quarter, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force clarified BRACAnalysis as a preventive service under the Affordable Care Act. This ruling will ensure that women with a family history of breast or ovarian cancer can now be tested with no patient out-of-pocket cost sharing for all non-grandfathered, private insurance plans. According to published studies, a vast majority of private insurance plans will lose their grandfathered status by 2014. Women will no longer have to worry about the cost when deciding on whether or not to pursue the life-saving testing provided by BRACAnalysis. And this comes at an important time as the percentage of high deductible plans has nearly tripled in just the last few years. From a business standpoint, this decision should reduce the small cancellation rate due to patient out-of-pocket costs concerned, and lessen some of the seasonality we have typically seen throughout the year. During the third quarter, Noridian, the Medicare administrative contractor for our region, announced its pricing for the new molecular pathology codes. Integrated BRACAnalysis was priced at $3,382, an 8.1% discount to the average private insurance reimbursement rates. And COLARIS was priced at $4,343, a 14.3% premium to the average private pay reimbursement price. Since Medicare reimbursement is so close to our current private insurance reimbursement rates, and since none of our private contracts are based on the Medicare rate, we believe that Medicare pricing will not have an impact, either positively or negatively, on our private insurance reimbursement in the future. I would now like to make a few comments surrounding the upcoming Supreme Court decision, as I know it is an area of key concern to the investment community. Of the over 500 patent claims around our BRACAnalysis test, only 9 claims are at issue in the Supreme Court case. Five claims cover the composition of matter of isolated DNA, and 4 claims cover the composition of matter of complementary or cDNA. Neither isolated DNA nor cDNA exist in nature, but are the result of specific human intervention in the laboratory. For the last 30 years, in every industrialized country in the world, both isolated DNA and cDNA have been patent-eligible. And this policy has been twice upheld by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. I would also note that 2 amicus briefs, 1 from Dr. Eric Lander, Head of the Human Genome Project, and the other from the United States government through the Solicitor General, supported the patentability of cDNA, which encompasses the probes and primers used in our BRACAnalysis test. As we look to the future of hereditary cancer testing, we envision moving away from single gene, single cancer test and believe that a pancancer panel, such as our hereditary cancer panel, will dominate the market. From a content and intellectual property standpoint, Myriad has, in addition to composition of matter patent claims, strong method of use patent protection around the many of the key genes that may be important in any pancancer panel, including BRCA1, BRCA2, DMS2, RAD51C, MYH, PALB2, P16, P10, ELAC2, and our recently acquired MITF gene. Coupled with our knowledge of the role these genes play in hereditary cancers, we believe Myriad's competitive position will remain strong well into the future. Myriad is a pioneer in the molecular diagnostic field and we are committed to maintaining our leadership position. Finally, Myriad is focused and always will be focused on the patient. And we will continue to pursue our strategic vision of improving patient care to the development and marketing of novel molecular diagnostic tests across multiple medical specialties. We will strive to answer the most pressing questions from the physician and the patient. We are entering an exciting period for the company as we look to transition to the next generation of hereditary pancancer testing. And greatly extend our product reach into new markets, both here in the United States and throughout the world. I look forward to talking more about our vision for the company and our strategic initiatives at our upcoming Analyst and Investor Day in New York on May 9. Now, I'm pleased to turn the call over to mark, who will provide an operational update.