Jon Cohen
Analyst · Jefferies. Your line is open
Thanks, Steve. And good afternoon, everyone. BioReference's core clinical business continues to make progress to return to a normalized pre-pandemic levels as more patients are visiting their physicians in person and sales people are allowed back into the offices. In fact, many of our clinical counts have already returned to pre-pandemic levels. BioReference's core testing volume at the end of the second quarter was up 55% versus the prior year period. Specifically, our women's health specialty testing business has been coming back nicely in the last couple of months with the clinical women's health business with an increased volume by 25% and revenue 35% when comparing Q2 2021 versus Q2 2020. Our oncology business also continues to make great progress with significant growth compared to 2019. Solid tumor is 140% over 2019 hematological malignancies liquid tumors is 105% over 2019. Cancer genomics is 107% over 2019 and myeloid is 209% since 2019. We continue to make investments in all these areas, particularly in the myeloid offerings with some new testing options. Our partnership initiative including large medical groups FQHCs, ACOs and health systems continue to experience month-over-month increases in patient visits. We have added several new ACOs and signed lab service agreements with several new hospitals this quarter. In addition, our business development efforts in partnering with large physician groups managing their physician office labs is paying-off with increased volumes. Our payer relations teams has increased our access across the country. And during the second quarter we received our renewal for the United Healthcare preferred lab network for an additional three years. In addition, BioReference and GeneDx will now provide us a high mark of Delaware 236,000 lives formerly exclusive to lab core. At the beginning of the year, we formally launched Scarlet Health, the on demand diagnostic service to expand digital health access. Scarlet brings our diagnostic services to patients preferred locations, which may be their home or their office for an on demand safe and convenient diagnostic experience. Currently, we are in 73 markets with Scarlet. We are continuing to invest significantly in Scarlet by adding new markets with the goal to reach 60% of the U.S. population in the next several months and 80% by early next year. We are seeing significant demands of Scarlet service across a multitude of commercial verticals. Now, let me turn my attention to COVID testing. Although COVID-19 cases have come off their highs with the administration of the vaccine nationwide, we continue to see significant interest in surveillance testing in our sports programs, school programs, and travel industry partners. We believe that many of these entities will continue their COVID-19 screening programs to the end of this year, and in certain cases into 2022. In addition, we have seen an increase in volumes over the last two weeks as a result of the Delta variant spreading across the country. I will speak more of the variants Delta variant in a couple of minutes. Today, we have performed over 17 million COVID-19 molecular tests. In the second quarter, we perform 2.9 million COVID test. We are averaging about 20,000 tests a day in July and a closely monitoring developments and demand shifts. In late March, we kicked-off a company-wide lab operations specimen acquisition, logistics procurement, customer service, cost reduction initiatives to right size our cost structure to match the declining COVID testing volumes and to drive efficiency gains in our core clinical lines of business. We are finding many savings opportunities especially in the overall labor and reagent inventory management originally associated with COVID expansion. In this quarter, we renewed our contractual relationships with the National Football League and Major League Soccer for next season, and Major League Baseball testing for this season. We also announced the first national program for COVID testing for the cruise industry, testing crew and guests for the Royal Caribbean cruise line. As I have mentioned on previous calls, our point-of-care testing capabilities have played an increasingly significant role in COVID offerings as we're experiencing a shift towards demand for screening capabilities on site. We now have over 240 point-of-care sites in operation around the country and have resulted over 240,000 point-of-care tests in Q2. In terms of our COVID-19 school testing program to support a return in [impel] in person classroom instruction. We are currently working with multiple school districts, including two of the three of the largest school systems in the country including New York City and Chicago. These agreements cover testing services for more than 1,500 schools to perform tests on public school students, principals and teachers. To-date, we have tested over 650,000 students. We continue to see strong interest in school-based testing programs. I'd like to briefly discuss the SARS-CoV-2 to Delta variant rapidly spreading across the country. The term variant refers to genetic variations in the SARS-CoV-2 which has been emerging and circulating around the world throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Viruses will constantly change through mutation and new variants of the virus are expected to occur. Over time new variants will emerge and others will disappear. These variants have may have act differently and require different treatments most notably are the B-117 Alpha, B-1351 beta, B-6172 delta, and the P-1 gamma variants, which seem to spread more easily and quickly than other variants, and are leading to more cases of COVID-19 in unvaccinated individuals. An increase in the number of cases will put strain on the healthcare resources lead to more hospitalizations as we're now seeing across the country and potentially more deaths. These variants are considered variants of concern by the CDC variants which there is evidence of an increase in transmissibility and potentially more severe disease. The Delta variant is estimated to rise up to 80% of new COVID testing as of July 19. While BioReference’s COVID-19 testing platforms do not specifically report the detection of any specific variant. Our platforms are not affected by the varying spike protein variants including Delta. For example, if an individual is infected with a Delta variant, the individual will receive a positive protein COVID-19 result. The result will not specify any type of variants. Our genetic testing volume GeneDx grew over 84% in the second quarter versus the prior period -- prior year period driven by our industry leading exome test offerings. There is substantial interest in our genome service across our existing client base, driven by a rapid genome offering. In late June of this year BioReference announced the appointment of Katherine Stueland as President and Chief Executive Officer of GeneDx, at global genomic subsidiaries. Katherine joined GeneDx from the Invitae Corporation where she served most recently as the Chief Commercial Officer. We are delighted to have her lead the GeneDx organization. And now let me turn it over to our CFO, Adam.