Jeff Ludwig
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright. Please proceed with your question
09:36 Hey, thanks, Alan. Appreciate it and thanks to everyone for joining our fourth quarter earnings call. Before, I move into the commercial review, just a reminder that I will be making forward-looking statements. Commercially, we remain focused on three areas: number one, leveraging the evolving positive clinical data for NERLYNX; two, engaging and educating patients to ask for NERLYNX; and three, increasing our impact to field force execution and evolution. It is great to see progress being made to help support women battling breast cancer overall, but this market clearly remains under penetrated and more must be done and we clearly believe that NERLYNX can play a bigger role in helping patients throughout their journey. 10:21 We were happy to announce in Q4 that NERLYNX was included in two important NCCN Clinical Practice Guideline Updates for the treatment of breast cancer. The first update added NERLYNX to the body of the guidelines for the treatment of adjuvant HER2 positive breast cancer under the heading useful in certain circumstances. Previously NERLYNX was included as a footnote only. The updated guidelines recommends considering extended adjuvant neratinib for patients with HR positive, HER-2 positive disease with a perceived high risk of reoccurrence. 10:51 The second update involved inclusion of dose escalation as an approach to improve the tolerability of neratinib in the treatment of adjuvant HER-2 positive breast cancer. These NCCN updates are important as many institutions practices and clinicians’ references guidelines in the treatment decisions. As highlighted on our Q3 earnings call, we implemented some important organizational changes in Q4. These changes were implemented based on the evolving oncology marketplace and were designed to streamline our commercial organization, not only to better align our financial resources, but as importantly to simplify reporting structures, reduce layers of management and improve overall ownership and execution at the customer level. 11:36 We revised targeting to help our teams better focus our efforts and started building out a core strategic accounts team to better align with our largest customers. Although it's still early, I'm happy with the overall transition and the new organizational structure. I believe we are in a better position to adapt to the evolving marketplace and focus our efforts where they matter most. With that high-level update, let me transition to some of the U.S. commercial slides, and I will provide some additional insights along the way. Once I finish my remarks, I will turn the call over to Maximo who will review the full financial results. 12:11 On Slide 3, our distribution model has not changed. We have two channels that provide NERLYNX to patients. We refer to these as our specialty pharmacy channel and our specialty distributor channel or in-office dispensing channel. The majority of our business continues to flow through the specialty pharmacy channel more specifically in Q4 approximately 76% of our business went through this channel, with the remaining 24% of the business flowing through the specialty distributor channel. This is in line with what we reported in the Q3 earnings call as well. 12:43 Slide 4 shows U.S. quarterly net sales of NERLYNX since FDA approval. As Alan noted, our net product sales were $51 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. This is an increase from the $43.4 million we reported in Q3 of 2021. We have consistently seen increases in inventory in the fourth quarter of each year since launch and we estimate that approximately $5 million of the fourth quarter net revenue is attributed to that increase in inventory. 13:13 Slide 5 shows the bottles of NERLYNX sold by quarter since launch. Please note, this slide shows ex-factory bottles sold, so it represents sales in your specialty pharmacy and specialty distribution channel and not end-user demand. We sold 3,454 bottles of NERLYNX in Q4 of 2021, which is an increase of 507 bottles from our Q3 2021 bottle sales of 2,947. We estimate that about 345 bottles are attributed to the increase in inventory that occurred in Q4. 13:50 Let me provide some additional insight into the business. New prescriptions and new patient starts are an important leading indicator for our business. These new patient starts turning to refills, which will influence subsequent quarters in terms of total bottles sold. As we have previously discussed, we tend to see a decline in new patient starts in the fourth quarter with the subsequent increase in the first quarter of the following year. This is driven largely by some patients deciding to delay starting on therapy until after the holidays. 14:21 As Alan mentioned, we did see a decline in new patient starts represented by NRx by about 8% in Q4, compared to Q3. This is a smaller decline that we have seen in the last several years, but nonetheless still a decline. The positive change is that year-over-year fourth quarter new patient starts are flat. In addition, we paid close attention to enrollments, which is another important leading indicator. Enrollments really represent the intention to prescribe and there is a strong correlation between enrollments and subsequent new patient starts. 14:54 Similar to new patient starts, we have historically seen a drop in Q4 enrollments with the subsequent increase in Q1. This year, we did not see a decline in Q4 enrollments, as they were flat to Q3 and were 2% higher than Q4 of last year. We do continue to see an increase in the number of patients qualifying for free drug through our patient assistance program, which is being driven largely by the limited availability of co-pay support from the foundations. This is contributing to the decline in NRx compared to enrollments being flat. 15:28 As previously reported, we were excited to have dose escalation added to our label in late June for both our extended adjuvant indication, as well as our metastatic indication. In addition, again, we are pleased that NCCN updated their Clinical Practice Guidelines for breast cancer to include dose escalation in early stage breast cancer. 15:46 As you can see, we saw an increase in the adoption of dose escalation in the fourth quarter were over 60% of patients were started on NERLYNX at a lower dose. We are pleased with the increasing adoption of dose escalation and believe that this increased adoption will improve the overall tolerability of NERLYNX, increased the average length of therapy and ultimately allow more patients to receive the full benefit of NERLYNX. 16:11 Slide 7 highlights the strategic collaborations we have formed across the globe with the goal of making NERLYNX available to more patients around the world. We continue to be pleased with our global partners with the progress being made. As mentioned on the Q3 earnings call, we were pleased that NERLYNX received extended adjuvant approval in South Korea, metastatic regulatory approval in Taiwan and it was officially launched in Peru, all in early Q4. 16:38 Additional recent highlights include regulatory approval in Chile in the metastatic setting, regulatory approval in both Brazil and Mexico in the extended adjuvant setting an official launch in South Korea. On top of that we are extremely pleased that in December of 2021, we were notified by our partner Pierre Fabre that NERLYNX was added to China's National Reimbursement Drug List or NRDL for 2022. NRDL approval is an important milestone and will significantly increase access to women battling early stage breast cancer in China. We are continuing to work closely with the partners and look forward to future potential launches in additional countries in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. 17:24 Now Puma was founded on a commitment to making a difference in the lives of patients and their families battling breast cancer. I want to thank the commercial team for their passion and commitment to making such a difference. We know more must be done and we will not stop until we have achieved our goals. 17:39 I’m now going to turn the call over to Maximo for a review of our financial results. Maximo?