Steve Chapman
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is open
Thanks Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Let's get into the recent highlights. As we covered in our pre-announce, we had another phenomenal growth quarter. Q2 was the fastest year-on-year growth for both volumes and revenues we've had as a public company. And that's on a volume base that is now more than four times larger than when we went public. I'm pleased to announce that we've exceeded the top end of our pre-announcement ranges in unit’s processed, total revenue and product revenue. We processed 376,000 tests in Q2, which was approximately 61% growth over the same period last year. Total revenues and product revenues were both up 64% and approximately 71%, respectively over the same period last year. That acceleration is being driven by continued strong growth in the Women's Health business and big contributions from oncology and transplant. Those businesses are now large enough to contribute meaningfully and really shift our growth rates upward. Given all this momentum, we are excited to be raising the revenue guide for a second time this year. We started at $500 million to $525 million then upped that range to $550 million to $575 million in May. We are now raising our guidance once again to $600 million to $620 million in revenues for this year, up almost $100 million versus where we started in March. As we are having success with our new product launches we are also needing to accelerate investments we had planned to make over the next two years, which we are very happy to do. Mike will cover the full guide later in the call. We were also very excited to see the Women's Health business got to cash flow breakeven in the quarter. This was one of the top goals I announced when I took over as CEO in 2019 and I'm proud that our team achieved this while simultaneously hitting record growth rates. In oncology, we've continued to generate high-quality evidence. We now have 14 peer-reviewed publications with many more on the way. We're also excited to see the quality of evidence is progressing, shifting away from validation studies and focusing on outcomes data like overall survival for example. We recently had four newly published or presented prospective trials where outcomes data is available including three trials that measured overall survival and one that showed Signatera is predictive of treatment response. We believe these prospective trials with outcomes data is a significant step towards full adoption of MRD testing by physicians and professional societies. These studies have taken years to reach this stage and we think this clearly differentiates Signatera in the market and lays the groundwork for broad reimbursement and adoption. We were also very pleased to announce another high quality study yesterday that we think has the potential to unlock a new and large indication in breast cancer. The first patient has now been screened in a prospective multisite definitive ZEST trial, a new Phase III study with GSK that will evaluate the efficacy of niraparib in 800 breast cancer patients that are being monitored with Signatera after adjuvant treatment. Signatera received a Breakthrough Device designation from the FDA for this study and I'll go over the details of this trial later in the presentation. We've also made several key commercial strides with Signatera in the quarter. Our direct sales channel team is performing very well and the launch is accelerating. We also launched with Foundation Medicine in the pharma sector and with BGI in China. Each of these partners enables us to impact patients in a way that we would not have been able to reach on our own. Foundation Medicine currently has a substantial number of pharma partnerships and we believe is the market leader in tissue clinical volumes every year. BGI is a leading diagnostics player in China and has a formidable commercial channel and reimbursement expertise in that country. Both of these commercial launches are in their early stages and will take some time to get going, but we think each can contribute to Natera's growth in the coming years. We also had a major win on the reimbursement front, when we were awarded ADLT status for Signatera which moves our recurrence monitoring Medicare reimbursements from $795 per test to $3,500 per test. And finally, as most of you know, we've completed a follow-on equity offering that brought in roughly a net $551 million. We launched with a $350 million offering. And we're able to substantially upsize the raise in the process, due to the strong response we received from investors. As we will describe, we think we have a lot of high-return projects to fund. And we look forward to putting the capital to work. I'll spend more time on all of these developments later in the call. Okay. Let's drill into the unit growth on the next slide. I think this longer-term historical view is great, because it gives a sense of what our experience with Q2 has been in the past. Q2 has historically been slightly down sequentially versus Q1, driven by the seasonality in the Women's Health business where Q1 is typically very strong and Q2 is a lot softer for our existing accounts. This year as you can see, in the Q2 bar on the far right something different is happening. First, the growth in our Women's Health business has accelerated to a level that it has now completely overcome the negative impact of seasonality, we traditionally see in Q2. We are benefiting from our SMART trial data that was read out in January, which set a new bar in quality and science for NIPT validation data. And we're benefiting from the joint ACOG and SMFM practice bulletin recommending NIPT, for all pregnant women. We think we're clearly in the early stages of expanding from roughly 1.5 million NIPTs in the United States, to what could be more than four million NIPTs overtime. Second, the growth rates are compounded by the fact that our product launches in transplant and oncology are exceeding our internal expectations on a scale that is requiring us to accelerate capacity build-out and hire across the operations teams. Signatera volume is growing nicely, as we add new accounts every month and initiate more new patients for CRC and IO monitoring. We look forward to highlighting a few case studies later in the call. On the next slide, you can see that the volume growth is clearly translating to revenue growth as well, particularly in product revenues. We saw a nice increase in the blended ASPs in the business over Q1, which continues a multi-quarter trend going back to last year. While Women's Health ASPs were up modestly over Q1, most of the sequential improvement was really driven by the volume mix, since the transplant and oncology products have higher prices. I think that's a good sign for the rest of the year. As Mike will describe later on in the call we still think there's room for NIPT, ASPs to improve in the second half, based on the broader reimbursement trends we are seeing, particularly as we make steady progress with state Medicaid plans. Some of you will recall, when I was first named CEO in January of 2019, I said the top goal for the company was to get the Women's Health business to cash flow breakeven. Since then, we've been very, disciplined in our investments in that business. We've grown the ASPs. And we've reduced the COGS, while continuing to rapidly grow our volumes. So despite all the upside, we still have ahead of us in Women's Health, we estimate that now we are sustainably cash flow breakeven in that part of the business. I think that's an important case study for the overall company. We have now shown that once we make the necessary investments to establish the product and commercial channel, we can deliver continued growth, while optimizing COGS and being efficient with R&D and the sales team. As the volume grows in the new businesses we continue to benefit from the cost synergies by tapping into the scale and expertise, across our broader company. In the future, we can also apply several of the same COGS and operational savings strategies to the new businesses as well. Okay. So now let me move to Organ Health. We are tracking above our internal expectations for Prospera. And we believe the transplant market is still in the early stages of overall adoption, with a lot of room for future growth. In addition to growing our volumes, we're continuing to generate new evidence. Last week, a new study from UCLA was published in transplantation reports. In the study, the investigators ran both, Prospera and a competitive test on 15 patients, six of whom ultimately experienced a rejection. Using the validated 1% cutoff, the Prospera test correctly identified five out of six rejections versus four out of six for the competitor. This data is similar to a previously reported head-to-head study, where the Prospera test detected more cases of rejection than a competing test, using the validated 1% cutoff. In addition to the recent head-to-head study, we were also pleased to see Prospera perform extremely well in a cohort of patients that received a Simultaneous pancreas and kidney transplant. They are often referred to as SPK patients. It's important to perform well in this cohort, because multi-organ kidney transplants make up 8% of all kidney transplants. And these patients experience a 15% rate of rejection in the first year post-transplant. On the right side of the slide, is the data that was presented at the ATC Conference in June. In a cohort of 39 simultaneous pancreas and kidney transplant recipients plus solo pancreas transplant recipients, Prospera performed very well across all testing metrics delivering solid performance across the board. Testing SPK patients allows us to help a new sector of the population, that's important to our transplant physicians. In addition, this study is evidence that Prospera, could perform well in organ types beyond kidney transplant patients. For example, in this study, we performed well on solo pancreas transplant patients, in addition to the SPK patients. As we talked about in May, we think the pathway to reimbursement in a broader range of organ transplants was substantially opened up by the CMS local coverage decision that was published in the spring. This is very important for us, because it lays out efficient path to gain reimbursement in organs beyond kidney. As we showed above, we're now seeing early evidence that our test works well in other organs such as, pancreas transplant recipients. This LCD is expected to be active later this year and we're keeping our eye on what's happening here. All right. Let's transition to oncology. We've now published on Signatera in 14 peer-reviewed publications. The validation data supports initial adoption and reimbursement, as we've now demonstrated the analytical and clinical performance of the test across a broad range of cancer types. I mentioned the shift to prospective studies with outcomes data at the top of the call. This includes some very large prospective real-world interventional studies as well, like the CIRCULATE trial. The studies are critical differentiators, because they are larger, designed to change practice guidelines and they take years to mature. It's important to see the test performance hold up in the prospective real-world setting, where the focus shifts to verifiable patient outcomes, rather than analytical performance metrics. We started these more significant trials years ago and we're now starting to see that work come to fruition, as they read out. First, we were recently excited to present updated data at the ESMO GI Conference on the prospective real-world interventional CIRCULATE trial. There are now more than 2,000 patients enrolled in the study, with six months of follow-up available for the first 800 patients. We've maintained the high presurgical detection and longitudinal sensitivity and specificity to relapse from our validation studies in this prospective real-world setting and we finally got a substantive look at the initial outcomes data, based on MRD status. We are ecstatic to see that more than 99% of patients who are MRD-negative remain disease-free at the six-month median time point, regardless of whether they receive adjuvant chemotherapy or not. This is a huge step forward and I'll explain why on the next slide. There's a key clinical utility question that needs to be answered in stage III colorectal patients. Can we avoid giving chemotherapy for MRD-negative patients? Today, in stage III colorectal cancer, nearly 100% of patients get adjuvant chemotherapy, but about 50% of patients don't need it, because they're cured by surgery alone. One of the biggest objections we get from doctors is that, they aren't ready to stop giving chemotherapy to stage III patients which would be against the NCCN guidelines. They agree, MRD testing today can be helpful in stage III colorectal to decide between three months versus six months of adjuvant chemotherapy, but what they really want is to confidently avoid giving chemotherapy to MRD-negative patients. The CIRCULATE trial was designed to test this hypothesis that MRD-negative patients could safely be deescalated from chemotherapy after surgery. On the left, you'll see a diagram of the patient flow in the CIRCULATE trial. In the bottom arm, each MRD-negative patient is randomized to receive standard of care adjuvant chemotherapy or not. We believe the study will ultimately show that there's no benefit to receiving adjuvant chemotherapy for patients who are MRD-negative. The interim disease-free survival data strongly suggests that we are on track to validating that hypothesis, which could be a game-changer. This is a type of trial that can change guidelines and unlock one of the big clinical use cases that physicians are asking for, an indication where doctors simply won't use the test without this level of high-quality outcomes data. Since this trial was initiated three years ago, we believe this data will further differentiate us from further entrants in the market. We anticipate the results of the MRD-negative stratification will be presented for the first time at ASCO GI in January of 2022. If that reads out as we anticipated, that will be a defining moment for Signatera in colorectal cancer and we look forward to seeing the data. Deepening our data trove in colorectal cancer is one of our core strategies. And in addition to the new de-escalation indication described above, we also recently published a prospective trial in stage IV colorectal cancer that showed excellent performance, including overall survival results, unlocking another layer of colorectal utility beyond stage II and III. This paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology Precision Oncology was an analysis from the prospective PREDATOR clinical trial, following 112 patients with stage IV disease, who underwent surgery with curative intent. At the first time point, 30 days post-surgery, from a single time point alone, we had sensitivity to relapse of 72%. This increased to 91% when we were able to test a second follow-up blood draw on those patients who did not receive adjuvant chemo. In addition, 96% of patients who were MRD-negative at the single time point after surgery were still alive at the end of clinical follow-up, which lasted up to 54 months. That compares to just 52% overall survival for patients that were Signatera positive. The overall survival rate increased to 100%, when including patients who remained MRD-negative in the longitudinal setting. This paper addresses an important unmet clinical need. Since guidelines are currently vague on which stage IV colorectal patients should receive adjuvant chemotherapy after surgery with curative intent, it's currently recommended to monitor these patients closely for early signs of recurrence. On the basis of this publication, we have already submitted to Medicare to expand coverage under the current LCD to include stage IV oligometastatic patients, which we expect may come in late 2021 or early 2022. As a reminder, the opportunity here is sizable, as we estimate there are about 10,000 new diagnoses per year in stage IV oligometastatic colorectal cancer with the testing frequency similar to CEA, leading to a TAM of approximately 100,000 tests per year, which is sizable from historical standards. We're really proud of the studies we generated and we believe the shift to outcomes data, including prospective overall survival data, where we track patient outcomes for nearly five years and confirming one's validation data in a real-world interventional setting, is important to further penetrate the clinical market and get reimbursed at scale. We were also proud to see another prospective publication, with overall survival data this quarter in Nature, with the excellent results from the Phase III IMvigor010 muscle invasive bladder cancer trial that we did with Genentech. This trial was a major effort conducted over seven years to evaluate whether Genentech's immunotherapy drug atezolizumab could improve outcomes in the adjuvant muscle invasive bladder cancer patients. Before reading out the data Genentech prespecified an endpoint to evaluate patient response -- patients who were Signatera-positive after surgery, in addition to the all-comers format originally designed. When the trial failed to meet its primary endpoint in all-comers, we reported a significant treatment benefit in Signatera MRD-positive patients that received atezolizumab and no treatment benefit in the MRD-negative patients. This study showed that Signatera is predictive of treatment benefit in this setting. This predictive claim is very difficult to make and it can only be achieved through a high-quality study such as this one. In addition to our predictive claim, we reported prospective data showing MRD-negative patients have a much better overall survival than MRD-positive patients. Based on the strength of these results, Genentech has already started enrolling patients in a sequel Phase III trial IMvigor011 that will randomize to atezolizumab versus placebo among only those patients who test Signatera positive after surgery. Demand is now growing quickly across pharma and academic consortia to incorporate Signatera as a companion diagnostic in their pivotal randomized trials. This week we announced our second major Phase III drug trial the ZEST trial. This is a randomized multicenter placebo-controlled study sponsored by GSK to evaluate their PARP inhibitor niraparib in 800 patients with early-stage either triple-negative breast cancer or HR-positive HER2-negative BRCA-mutated breast cancer. Patients who test positive after standard of care definitive treatment will be randomized to receive niraparib versus placebo. If this trial is successful, it could create a potentially life-saving new treatment option for patients who test MRD-positive in this setting. Positive study results would provide support for doctors to prescribe this treatment in their office broadly which would be incredibly powerful for overall clinical adoption of Signatera. Some indications like breast cancer are best approached through these types of pharma partnerships because the clinical utility in breast cancer recurrence monitoring depends on new treatments being administered at the time of molecular recurrence. And that's not something a laboratory can generally take on by itself. So we're glad to be winning these types of big treatment on molecular recurrence trials which will unlock future clinical indications for Signatera. This project was made possible by the strong validation data we previously published in breast cancer including both the paper in Clinical Cancer Research and the I-SPY 2 data published in Annals of Oncology. Okay. I'm staying on Medicare for another minute. As we mentioned at the top of the call, we had a major breakthrough this summer when Signatera was awarded an ADLT status. Before this when a patient completed their adjuvant treatment monitoring period and entered recurrence monitoring our pricing for Signatera had been set at $795 per time point. Now with the ADLT status the reimbursement rate is $3,500 per blood draw for Medicare patients and we think this could be relatively stable over time. Given the nature of the longitudinal monitoring, over time a higher and higher percentage of blood draws will fall into this category which bodes well for the overall gross margin in the long-term. ADLT status is designed to reward innovation and the relevant statute requires several criteria to be met. A test must be unique in the marketplace satisfying a clinical need that no other commercially available test can address and also must employ a methodology that's based on a unique empirically driven algorithm. Signatera met these stringent criteria and we believe it will be difficult for any other future MRD competitor to achieve this status adding to our first mover advantage. This also gives us an important lever when contracting with commercial plans in the future and it helps our pharma business since Natera is extending its commercial leadership in MRD, which makes us more attractive as a companion diagnostic partner. Finally, looking forward, we are eagerly awaiting the finalization of our draft LCD for immunotherapy monitoring, which we expect to come through sometime earlier this year. We've been pleased with the initial adoption in this setting further validating our belief that Signatera can help inform difficult treatment decisions for patients receiving immunotherapy where standard imaging tools can be uninformative. The final slide highlights some of the near and longer-term indications we are targeting with Signatera. In the past, we focused this side exclusively on the near-term indications on the left-hand side of the page. These are indications where we've already generated excellent data and the clinical utility and use cases are very clear and we have line of sight to reimbursement with CMS and commercial launches in the near-term. Those near-term indications stack up about -- to about four million tests per year which is incredible from historical standards. This is roughly 10 times larger than the 400,000 tests per year in the traditional therapy selection market for example. However, despite this TAM being incredibly large from historical standards this is just the beginning. With several pivotal randomized trials now underway in colorectal, bladder, breast and others sponsored by pharma and leading academic consortia and with a strong pipeline of additional trials that may launch in the next 12 months to 18 months it's clear that some very large opportunities are beginning to stack up in both the US and globally including in Japan. We're simply looking at what we signed so far or have in front of us. We have a path to coverage of up to an additional nine million tests per year. This is exciting because although we're having significant growth now and we have an excellent runway to success in the near-term I could easily make the case that Signatera is really only scratching the surface and just at the beginning. And we could really hit full stride in the middle of this decade and beyond as these very large pivotal trials read out. So there's a lot of upside in the future. Finally, not on the slide, but important to our mission we were proud this quarter as two patient case studies were reported out in the national media from different providers in different parts of the country. One colorectal case was reported on NPR's Here & Now broadcast and one breast cancer case reported on ABC's Good Morning America. We want to thank those patients Bonnie and Mariel and their physicians for sharing how Signatera made an impact in their journeys. Okay. Now let me hand it over to Mike to discuss the financials. Mike?