Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. (ACOR) on Q1 2021 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
Operator: Welcome to Acorda Therapeutics First Quarter 2021 Financial and Business Update. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a question-and-answer session to follow. Please be advised, that this call is being recorded at the company's request. I will now introduce your host for today's call Tierney Saccavino, Executive Vice President, Corporate Communications at Acorda. Please go ahead.
Tierney Saccavino: Thanks, Philip. Good afternoon, everyone. Before we begin, let me remind you that our presentation will contain forward-looking statements. Detailed disclosures can be found in our SEC filings, which are public and we encourage you to refer to those filings. And I'll now pass the call over to our CEO, Ron Cohen.
Ron Cohen: Thanks, Tierney. Welcome everyone. Starting with INBRIJA net revenue for the first quarter of 2021 was $5 million, that's a 13% increase over the first quarter of 2020. We are pleased to see this increase, despite the significant impact of the pandemic on the INBRIJA launch. As we've discussed previously, the first quarter historically has been lower than the preceding fourth quarter and the lowest sales quarter of the year due to a number of seasonal factors. And as we expected sales increased markedly in March and April into May of 2021 relative to January and February. AMPYRA net revenue for the first quarter was $20.3 million that's about the same as in Q1 2020. And that's the first time, we've seen stable yearly quarter-over-quarter net sales since AMPYRA went generic in September 2018. We believe that that is due to the strategies that we've executed to maintain the brand, the strength of the AMPYRA brand is an important contributor to Acorda's financial stability and to our goal of becoming cash flow neutral on a run rate basis by the end of 2022. Moving to accelerating INBRIJA's trajectory. As a reminder, INBRIJA is Inhaled Levodopa it's indicated to address the return of symptoms or off periods that many people with Parkinson's experience in between doses of their regularly scheduled medication. Despite the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw encouraging signs of growth in INBRIJA compared to the first quarter of 2020. As I mentioned, we saw a 13% year-over-year increase in net sales. We saw a 5% increase in total prescriptions and very importantly a 25% increase in organic growth over Q1 2020. Organic growth is measured by dispensed cartons, which most accurately reflect demand. This 25% increase represents an acceleration of the approximately 17% organic growth that we saw between Q4 2020 over Q4 2019. I'm sorry. That's right Q4 2020 over Q4 2019. I'm going to discuss this in more depth on the next slide. So recall that INBRIJA is an as-needed therapy and patients can take it up to a maximum of five times per day, but they're not required to take it if they don't feel that their off periods require it. Overall 44% of all INBRIJA patients are regular users and that's defined as taking an average of at least one dose a day obviously, all the way up to 5, but an average of at least one dose a day. And importantly, of those regular users 70% are still on therapy a year later. We've also been pleased to see that the average consumption for regular users is 2.8 doses per day up from 2.5 doses in April of 2020. In addition to the importance of maintaining these regular users, we're also focused on growing the brand by bringing new patients to therapy and converting them to regular users, which I'll discuss on the next slide.
Operator: Your first question is from the line of Sam.
Unidentified Analyst: Yes. Hi. This is Sam. I'm a retail investor with Acorda. So I have a question about note deal in June, I think, Ron you mentioned you are working to address that note. Are you planning to pay out of the cash or using shares?
Ron Cohen: Yes. So obviously, the Catalent transaction and the $74 million that we brought in that upfront on that has shored up the balance sheet very well. We are looking at alternatives absent a better alternative. We would have to retire the debt in June, and we are still looking at that.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. So potentially to finance the debt get another loan or so you are looking at all options?
Ron Cohen: Yes, we are. And again, I just want to say, we're about a month away from the due date. So we are prepared to retire the debt in June. And -- in the time until then we're continuing to explore options. But if there are not better alternatives than simply retiring it we would do that.
Unidentified Analyst: All right. Thank you, Ron. Thank you for your answers, yes.
Operator: And there are no questions in queue at this time.
Ron Cohen: All right. Well, thank you everyone for joining us. We are pleased with the progress and we look forward to updating you next quarter. Have a great rest of your week.
Operator: That does conclude today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Have a great.
