Doug Ingram
Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open
Thank you, Mary. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining Sarepta Therapeutics Third Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. I am pleased to report another quarter of strong and consistent performance as we continue to hit our milestones and report positive data readouts across our multiplatform portfolio. Starting with our quarterly performance; serving the Duchenne community with our 3 approved RNA-based therapies, revenue once again exceeds guidance. In our second quarter call, we raised our full year net product revenue guidance by $30 million to a range of $565 million to $570 million. We have overperformed to that guidance and exceeded analyst estimates with net product revenue standing at $166.9 million for the third quarter. That's a 37% increase over the same quarter last year. As we have never taken a price increase for our therapies and have priced all of our therapies at parity, our revenue beat comes entirely from the team's ability to serve the Duchenne community and for the benefit our therapies provide to the lives of those with Duchenne. As I've mentioned before, even during the most difficult period of the pandemic, the adherence rates for our therapies have remained well above 90%, speaking to the value of our therapies to those living with Duchenne. Based on our overperformance, we have once again increased our full year net product revenue guidance. Our new guidance for full year 2021 is in a range of $605 million to $615 million of $40 million above our previous guidance, $70 million above our initial guidance this year and representing at the midpoint, a 34% growth over the prior year. Our performance this quarter represents our 20th consecutive quarter of positive growth. And based on our updated revenue guidance for 2021, we will have a compounded annual growth of 40% from full year 2017 to the end of 2021. We anticipate this strong growth to continue in 2022. Our Chief Commercial Officer, Dallan Murray, will comment further on performance in a moment. Having recently completed an equity raise, bolstering our cash position by approximately $550 million, we stand in a strong financial position to fund our pipeline successes with over $2 billion of cash and cash equivalents currently on our balance sheet, augmented with strong product revenue. With our cross-platform successes this year, we are fortunate to be so well funded, consider where we stand as we track out of 2021. Starting with our gene therapy programs, we made great progress with SRP-9001, as the evidence base for this highly differentiated and potentially transformative therapy continues to build. Earlier this year, we announced the expression results from the first 11 patients in Cohort 1 of ENDEAVOR or Study 103, our first trial evaluating our commercially representative SRP-9001 material. Across all measures, that's genome copies per nucleus, western blot expression, protein positive fibers and intensity, we saw results that were as good or better than our previous experience with our clinical supply material. We have by now dosed sub 77 Duchenne children with our therapy across 3 studies. And roughly 3 weeks ago, we provided a further update on the clinical evidence generated to date. In our proof-of-concept study 101 at 3 years, Duchenne patients continue to perform markedly better than the natural history of this aggressively degenerating disease would predict, achieving a 9-point improvement on the 34-point North Star Ambulatory Assessment scaler, NSAA. And that's against natural history with a p-value of less than 0.0001. In our blinded placebo-controlled Study 102 Part 1, we had previously reported that in the baseline matched 4-year to 5-year-old cohort, at 48 weeks, the treated children performed statistically significantly and clinically meaningfully better than placebo at a p-value of 0.017 in. For the 6-year to 7-year-olds, we recently reported that when properly baseline and age matched against the natural history cohort, treated 6 to 7 year olds performed 3 points better than natural history with a statistical significance of 0.0129. And finally, but importantly, we reported that in our ENDEAVOUR study, at only 6 months, the first 11 patients in Cohort 1 have already improved against their own baselines by about 3 points when natural history would have predicted a 0.6% decline in NSAA over that same period of time. After an enormous amount of work and progress in CMC, in manufacturing, research, development and regulatory interaction, the FDA cleared us to commence our pivotal trial for SRP-9001 known as EMBARK, that is the first gene therapy pivotal trial for Duchenne in the United States. In early October, we announced the initiation of EMBARK. And on October 11, and at our SRP-9001 micro-dystrophin R&D Day, we provided more details on the design and key elements of the EMBARK study. The study is actively recruiting and will enroll 120 patients at dozens of sites in the United States, Europe and Asia. Looking forward, in addition to focusing on rapidly enrolling EMBARK, we will present the results from Part 2 of Study 102 for SRP-9001 in the first quarter of 2022. Study 102 will provide additional insight as we execute EMBARK, which is our pivotal trial. Beyond SRP-9001, we have seen consistently strong expression, safety and functional signals from our proof-of-concept study for SRP-9003, our gene therapy to treat limb-girdle muscular dystrophy Type 2E. We reported earlier this year that both U.S. and European regulators have suggested that the use of beta-sarcoglycan protein expression may be sufficient for accelerated and conditional approval, respectively. In addition to advancing this dialogue with the agency and designing an appropriate pivotal trial, our significant rate limiter is completion of the CMC work for commercially represented SRP-9003 material. We intend to complete this work next year. With our strengthened balance sheet, we intend to move our sixth program LGMD portfolio forward and are exploring the potential for a platform approach to simultaneously address our 3 sarcoglycan programs, covering LGMD Types 2E, 2C and 2D. Now, moving to our RNA franchise. Earlier this year, we announced positive results from Part A of our MOMENTUM trial, studying our next-generation peptide conjugated PMO the PPMO SRP-5051 that is designed to be an enhanced version of our PMO technology for Duchenne patients who are amenable to exon 51 skipping. In the 30 mg/kg cohort compared to eteplirsen, we saw 18x greater exon skipping, an eightfold greater level of dystrophin production, and we saw this in half the time and at 20% of the drug exposure of eteplirsen. We also saw a dose-dependent hypomagnesemia, but believe that it is both monitorable and manageable with prophylactic magnesium supplements. We then gained FDA's concurrence on the commencement of Part B of MOMENTUM, which will serve as the pivotal trial for SRP-5051. If confirmed in upcoming trials, our next-generation PPMOs will greatly extend the reach and impact of our RNA platform with the potential to treat as many as 80% of individuals with Duchenne and opening up approval opportunities outside of the United States. With our bolstered balance sheet, we intend to advance multiple additional PPMO therapies for other Duchenne mutations. In addition to these prioritized late-stage programs, we have the balance sheet and expertise to continue to advance our broader 40-plus program research and development pipeline, including therapies for additional neuromuscular, neurological and cardiomyopathy diseases, our work in new and improved delivery mechanisms and advanced AAV capsids and our work to improve gene therapy to permit dosing in the presence of preexisting antibodies and to empower redose. At the same time, we continue to further strengthen our first-in-class team of genetic medicine professionals across technical operations, research, development, regulatory strategy just to name a few. To that end, in early October, we celebrated the grand opening of our world-class 85,000 square foot genetic Therapy Center of Excellence in Columbus, Ohio. And we continue also to build our Gene Editing Innovation Center in Durham, North Carolina, which is focused on the advancement of CRISPR/Cas9. We have made exceptional progress in 2020, advancing our large multi-platform pipeline and sharpening our vision to be the leader in genetic medicines for the treatment of rare neuromuscular diseases and beyond. I would like to thank our partners, the clinical investigators and the families participating in our trials for their commitment and important role in our recent success. And I would also like to thank my exceptional team of professionals at Sarepta, a team that embraces with dedication, our mission of using cutting-edge science to improve the lives of those living with rare disease. Your tireless work and focus on execution shows in our advancements this year. And I am confident that it will translate into a better life for the many patients who depend on our work. And with that, let me turn the call over to Ian Estepan, who will provide an update on the financials. Ian?