Richard King
Analyst · Guggenheim Partners
Thank you, Jim and welcome everyone to this afternoon’s call. 2013 was a very successful and exciting year for AcelRx across three major areas of activity. First, clinical and regulatory; second, business development and licensing; and finally, the commencement and build out and expansion of our commercial capabilities. Success in these areas has propelled AcelRx from a purely clinical development stage company, to one that is establishing full commercial capability in advance of an anticipated U.S. launch. That transformation gone underway in the second half of 2013 and has continued to accelerate in 2014. During 2013, we announced positive results from two pivotal Phase 3 double blind placebo controlled studies of Zalviso in managing moderate to severe post-operative pain, which added to the positive results from the head to head study comparing Zalviso to IV PCA morphine that we announced in the fourth quarter of 2012. The data from these Phase 3 studies and the results of other clinical and pre-clinical work allowed us to file our New Drug Application or NDA for Zalviso in September of 2013. Subsequently, in December 2014 the FDA – sorry 2013, the FDA accepted the application for filing and confirmed a PDFUA action date of July 27, 2014. Our lead product Zalviso also known as the Sufentanil NanoTab System is a patient activated, non-invasive analgesia system which delivers 15mcg of Sufentanil per sublingual dose as needed for pain control subject to a 20 minute lockout period between doses. Our proposed indication for Zalviso is the management of moderate to severe acute pain in adult patients in the hospital setting. In its Phase 3 study, Zalviso demonstrated a consistently rapid onset of pain relief, faster impact than the intravenous morphine that is commonly used to manage moderate to severe pain in a hospital. Zalviso also demonstrated sustained and effective pain control as a mono-therapy for up to 72 hours after surgery. The observed adverse events in these studies were typical of opioid usage postoperatively generally mild-to-moderate in nature and similar in both active and placebo treatment groups of the majority of adverse events. We believe that as a result of the efficacy and tolerability of Zalviso, combined with the simplicity and patient centric nature of our Zalviso delivery device, patient satisfaction with Zalviso was high and again superior to an IV morphine comparator. Additionally, nurses managing these patients in our clinical studies reported high use of scores of Zalviso than IV morphine, reflecting the fact that they saw Zalviso as less time consuming and less bothersome for them in set up and patient management. If approved by the FDA, we believe Zalviso could provide hospital and patients with an attractive alternative to the current standard of care specific to the IV PCA delivered opioid such as morphine and hydromorphone. Now since the submission of the NDA in September, we have been in dialogue with the FDA and it appears to the agency’s actively reviewing the applications. The success demonstrated so far in our clinical developments of Zalviso and progress on the regulatory fronts has allowed us to move forward on our commercial activities, including data presentations and medical meetings, finalization of contract manufacturing capabilities, marketing research and building out our own commercial internal commercial team. Within AcelRx, we are establishing a commercial team behind David Chung, our Chief Commercial Officer. He is building a Zalviso focused marketing team with steps in hospital product marketing, marketing research and sales operations. We plan to bring ourselves management team onboard in mid-2014 ahead of our anticipated PDFUA date. We are also anticipating of adding a medical science liaison team ahead of the PDFUA date to highlight the challenges of postoperative pain management, particularly those associated with the IV PCA use. If Zalviso receives approval as planned, our expectation is to hire approximately one-third of our planned sales professionals, about 20 people, as key account managers during the third quarter of this year. These initial members of the sales team along, with our sales management team and the MSL team will pursue formulary positions for Zalviso in U.S hospitals. Based on our recent market research, this process can take from two to 12 months depending on the hospital, the number of products they have under reviewed at any one time, and on the frequency of P&T meetings. As a result of this time dependent process step, we anticipate hiring the remainder of the sales force about 45 additional sales professionals that will bring the total sales force size of approximately 65 in the first quarter of 2015, and at that point we will initiate a full commercial launch. As part of our Zalviso education and awareness efforts, last year we presented the Zalviso Phase 3 data at more than 20 meeting medical meetings, resulting in approximately 35 poster presentations, eight oral product presentations and 10 sponsored satellite symposiums. This activity will accelerate in 2014, as we conduct and present further analyses of the data that illustrate the potential value of Zalviso could offer to healthcare professionals. As we prepare for launch, we are also conducting additional market research. As noted previously, we’ve completed pharmacy and therapeutics committee at market research that defines the hospital decision process and the associated timelines, as well as the interest in adopting Zalviso to formulary. That research is yielding encouraging results, suggesting that over 40% of the hospitals surveyed are interested in adopting Zalviso based purely on the available clinical profile and irrespective of cost. And a further 40% is interested in making the product available on formulary subject to pricing that enables demonstration of a favorable cost benefit analysis. We’ve also conducted mock P&T committee meetings with directors of pharmacy from different regions of the U.S., to evaluate the receptivity to Zalviso and to evaluate the pharmacoeconomic rationale supporting product use, and continue to see encouraging feedback related to the pharmacoeconomics that can support Zalviso. We’ve also completed our initial segmentation and positioning work with both physicians and nurses. This combined with our P&T research is starting to clarify both the hospital type what early formulary adoption might occur and critically within the hospital, the characteristics of the healthcare professional specialty and individual characteristics that may support early usage of Zalviso in the hospital. This research is both confirming some previously health beliefs about where early adoption might occur, and also revealing some new opportunities to us about the potential for Zalviso usage. This work is still ongoing, but we’ll form the basis of our decisions about sales professional location based on hospital receptivity and physician targeting strategy based on individual [inaudible] receptivity. On the manufacturing front, we currently have manufacturing capacity for the first couple of years and have now production site at Patheon in Cincinnati, and we are in the final stages of building out largest scale commercial capacity at this site that should provide capacity for the next five to seven years. Now making Zalviso available in markets outside the U.S. has been an important, strategic and corporate goal for AcelRx. A major step towards achieving that objective was realized in December, when we entered into a commercialization agreement with Grunenthal for commercial rights in Europe and Australia, a territory with nearly 500 million people. If approved, Zalviso might become available for pain treatment within or dispensed by a hospital, hospice, nursing home or other medically supervised setting in these geographies. We are very pleased with the terms of the Grunenthal agreement that includes a $30 million upfront payment, $220 million in future development commercial milestones, plus tiered royalties on net sales in the percentage range of mid-teens to mid-20s. Approximately, a third of the $250 million combined upfront in milestones are associated with upfront and development and regulatory milestones, the remaining two-thirds of the milestone proceeds are associated with annual net sales achievements in the covered territories. Grunenthal will pursue and maintain the MAA for the drug portion of Zalviso, and AcelRx will pursue and maintain the CE Mark for the Zalviso device. We are preparing along with Grunenthal to file the MAA for the drug product of the Zalviso system in mid-2014, and plan to meet with the European Medicines Agency and also with the repertoire countries shortly to discuss the filings. In the meantime, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve learnt that the EMA has approved the brand name Zalviso for use in Europe, meaning that the brand will be recognizable as a global brand to physicians that are working in both the U.S. and in Europe. As you are aware, the device components of the Zalviso system will be CE marked for use in Europe and additionally AcelRx plans to become ISO 13485 certified in support of the CE mark. AcelRx has selected the notified body for the CE mark and is preparing for the presentation of the device materials to that group called PSI in the UK. We anticipate both ISO 13485 certification and CE Mark approval for the Zalviso device in the second half of 2014. AcelRx will manufacture and supply the drug and device elements of Zalviso from its U.S. contract manufacturing facilities to satisfy Grunenthal demands. Importantly, by adding Grunenthal’s ex-U.S. demand to AcelRx’s U.S. demand, we anticipate the to realize earlier economies of scale and reduced cost of goods associated with higher manufacturing volumes. We continue to engage in discussions with potential partners regarding commercial rights to Zalviso in additional geographic markets, such as Asia and South America. We remain committed to seeing Zalviso made available to patients around the world through partnerships, with organizations skilled in commercializing products in a hospital setting. In many parts of the world, the high custom IV pumps has prevented the use of IV PCA morphine and Zalviso’s much anticipated much lower cost may be an attractive alternative for these underserved markets. We believe that the demand for pain treatment and the size of the market continues to grow. Postoperative pain treatment is already a large market that exceeds $5 billion in annual sales based on estimates for the U.S., Japan and the five largest EU countries combined. In the U.S., we believe there are over 12 million procedures per year, where moderate to severe postoperative pain occurs and approximately 95% of these patients could be candidates for treatment with Zalviso. Within this post-surgical group, about two-thirds of the population is admitted as inpatient to the hospital where we will be attempting to replace IV PCA as the current standard of care for managing postoperative pain. In addition, about one-third of the population is ambulatory, meaning that they are in the hospital for less than 23 hours where an IV PCA system is too cumbersome to set up, but is simple to use non-invasive patient controlled analgesia system such as Zalviso may be appropriate and attractive. Our market research also indicates that there are in excess of 700 million hospital in patients with moderate to severe pain that is not postoperative, and that over two-third of the patient group can be candidates for treatment with Zalviso. This group will include hospitalized patients with a variety of clinical conditions that result in moderate severe pain, such as [inaudible], burns, sickle cell disease among others. Outside the U.S. in countries with advanced healthcare systems, we believe there are three to four times the many patients undergoing surgical procedures that result in moderate severe pain each year, where Zalvsio could provide effective and well-tolerated postsurgical pain management. In Europe, Grunenthal estimates that may be 17.5 million patients annually undergoing procedures resulting in moderate to severe pain that would be appropriate for management with Zalviso. Now let me turn my attention and update you briefly on ARX-04. ARX-04 is a product candidate in development for the treatment of moderate to severe acute pain, consisting of a 30 mcg of Sufentanil NanoTab and a single dose applicator that is administered by a healthcare professional. Last year, AcelRx reported top-line data showing that the primary endpoints was achieved in a placebo-controlled dose finding Phase 2 clinical trial of ARX-04 for acute pain. This study randomized 101 patients following bunionectomy surgery and found that patients treated with 30 mcg dose of Sufentanil NanoTab had significantly greater pain reduction as measured by Summed Pain Intensity Difference to baseline during the 12-hour trial period that placebo treated patients with a p value of .003. In December of last year, we completed an end of Phase 2 with the FDA to seek the agency’s feedback on our future development plans for ARX-04. To enable review as a 505 (b)(2) NDA, the agency requested a 500 patients safety database, consisting of 100 patients exposed to multiple doses of ARX-04 and 400 patients exposed to a single dose of ARX-04. The agency confirmed that the bunionectomy trial I just described could be considered as adequate and well controlled and would satisfy as a pivotal study. Therefore, a single additional Phase 3 registration study to be conducted in a model of pain using a split 12 primary endpoint would fulfill agency requirements for pivotal studies. We plan to begin this Phase 3 study during the second half of ‘14 and results should be available during the second half of 2015. In addition in the first half of 2014, we will conclude a single Phase 1 study, evaluating single and repeat dose PK with the goal of determining whether the initial exposure of patients in the Zalviso study program could satisfy the agency request to single dose patient exposures. We estimate the overall cost of ARX-04 Phase 3 program roughly $15 million, spread out over 2014 and 2015 with the majority of the expense in 2015. The Department of Defense remains interested in the ARX-04 product but with limitations in funding due to sequestration, AcelRx plans to advance the ARX-04 Phase 3 program forward on its own. ARX-04 may ultimately beneficial in a variety of amenity supervised settings, including use in battlefield injury, by paramedics during patient transport, in the emergency room or for postoperative patients following either shot today or ambulatory surgery who do not require more long-term patient analgesia. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than 130 million injury-related emergency department visits in 2010 in the U.Ss, with 95 million of these patients receiving some form of analgesic agent for pain. Additionally in 2006, there were 35 million ambulatory surgical procedures conducted in ambulatory surgery centers in the U.S., with patients being managed in the ASC typically for one to 12 hours for pain after the procedure. In addition, paramedics transport approximately 15 million patients annually with an estimated 20% of these patients requiring treatment for moderate to severe pain. All of these are potential opportunities for ARX-04. Our market research showed interest in ARX-04 was high in the four to five out of five range among healthcare provider including paramedics, ER nurses, ER physician and AFT surgeons. ER physicians said they would potentially use ARX-04 in 20% to 75% of their patients suffering from moderate to severe pain that primary interest stemming from the ability to rapid onset acute pain control without the need for a needle or an IV. We view the market opportunity for ARX-04 as differentiated from Zalviso since it deals with truly acute short term management of pain and at the same time complementary to Zalviso, since patient management is located in or affiliated to hospitals where our Zalviso commercial focus is centered. So with that overview, let me turn the call over to Jim who will review our financial results for 2013.