Earnings Labs

Perspective Therapeutics, Inc. (CATX)

Q1 2018 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 14, 2017

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day everyone and welcome to the IsoRay First Quarter Fiscal 2018 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode [Operator Instructions]. Please also note today’s event is being recorded. At this time, I’d like to turn the conference call over to Ms. Stephanie Prince at PCG. Ma’am please go ahead.

Stephanie Prince

Analyst

Thank you, Jamie. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the IsoRay’s first quarter fiscal 2018 earnings conference call. With me on the call today are Tom LaVoy, Chairman and CEO; Bill Cavanagh, COO and Chief Scientific Officer; and Mike Krachon, VP of Sales and Marketing. IsoRay issued its first quarter earnings press release just a little while ago after the market closed. For those of you who’ve not seen the release yet, it is available on the Investor Relation section of the company’s website at isoray.com. Before starting the call, I’d like to remind you that today’s call will contain forward-looking statement as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These words can be identified such as believe, expect, anticipate, plans, project, seeks, and similar expressions and involves numerous risks and uncertainties and company’s actual results could differ materially from those anticipated or implied in these forward-looking statement as a result of certain factors set forth in the company’s filings with the SEC. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. With that I’d now like to turn the call over to Tom LaVoy. Tom?

Tom LaVoy

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

Thank you Stephanie and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to IsoRay’s first earnings conference call. We’re excited to share with you our recent results and provide a little perspective on our outlook for growth. We’re very excited about the changes that we have brought to IsoRay over the last 18 months, and believe we’re on a path that will result in continued growth and success. I’ll begin with an overview of our results for the first quarter and the state of the business, and then try to provide some targeted thoughts on our opportunities with different applications for our core Cesium-131 product. I’ll then turn the call over to Michael Krachon, our VP of sales and marketing who was previously at C.R. Bard and has years of experience in the prostate brachytherapy market. He’ll focus on our sales strategies and then discuss some of the sales and marketing initiatives. I’ll then end the call with a discussion of our first quarter results, operating initiatives and their financial impact, and guidance before opening the call for questions. To begin, I want to share IsoRay management team’s excitement about the progress that we’ve made over the last 18 months. We’ve reversed our revenue trend, we’ve contained our manufacturing costs, and we’ve put in place an infrastructure to provide the foundation for increased growth and efficiencies in coming quarters. In the first quarter of fiscal ’18 which we released today, we reported 1.2 million in revenue, a 12% year-over-year increase. This is the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year sales increases, following sales of 1.28 million and 1.37 million in the third and fourth quarter of fiscal 2017. And while prostate still accounts for 89% of our revenue, we are also making progress in other applications that we expect will diversify our revenue base in…

Mike Krachon

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

Thank you, Tom. I’m excited to share the progress that we have made over the last 15 months in building a foundation that will allow us to realize sustainable sales and revenue growth. As Tom noted, we needed to turn our trajectory and to do so, we needed to build a new platform to start from. Leveraging my experience in brachytherapy, we began by assessing the team reviewing the strategic direction of IsoRay Medical. As Tom mentioned, we settled on a two-pronged growth strategy to maintain our focus. The first prong is focused on re-medication of the prostate cancer market. This is the largest current outlet for permanent brachytherapy seed and provides [dietary] medical and opportunity to gain share and grow revenue. We estimate the potential of a prostate market and current domestic Cesium prices to be over $100 million. The second prong was a focus on developing the market and strengthening our relationships with key opinion leaders for the other surgical applications of Cesium-131, primarily as Tom mentioned brain, gynecological, head and neck and retroperitoneal sarcomas. I’ll now discuss these strategies and our progress is more detail. To support the focus on the prostate cancer market, we needed to develop the sales team competencies to support customer identification and delivering value to address their needs. In doing so, we ultimately hired five new account managers in our six territories and provided them with the expensive clinical, procedural and technical training. To further support the sales effort, we focused on six key elements necessary to support the growth of the business, collecting and publishing clinical data, social and traditional marketing programs, reimbursement support, procedural training, sales materials and product development opportunities to support our customers’ needs. Over the last 12 months, we have made tremendous strides in each of these…

Tom LaVoy

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

Thanks Mike. Now I want to provide a little more clarity on our financial statements. As I mentioned, we reported sales of 1.2 million for the first quarter. These results were somewhat muted by typical summer seasonality, but increasingly reflect the strategic reinvestment we discussed previously. During the quarter, general and administrative expenses decline by 9% compared to the prior quarter. We believe this is sustainable as well, as the drop primarily reflects lower legal expenses stemming from resolution of two law suits. On the manufacturing side, we are proceeding with the second phase of our automation project to expand capacity in our plant without additional labor. We’ve also increased our investment in R&D, which includes the collaborative development agreement with GammaTile and the other protocols we discussed earlier. At the same time, we’ve implemented operating efficiencies over the past 18 months that has resulted in sustainable gross profit improvement. In regards to our capital needs, at September 30, IsoRay had cash on hand of over $7 million and no debt. We will continue to review our financing alternatives over the next 6 to 9 months. We’ve not made any decisions in this regard and will continue to review our options. Turning to guidance, our outlook for fiscal 2018 ending next June 30 is for revenue growth of at least 20%, which will bring us to approximately 5.8 million for all of fiscal 2018. We expect revenue to progressively accelerate through the year as we continue to expand current accounts and add new accounts to our prostate and other surgical applications. Our ongoing manufacturing and process improvements will continue to support gross profit expansion as operating leverage kicks in with expanded sales. Looking ahead, we will continue to focus on our two-pronged growth strategy; growing the base of our prostate business with new customers and increased volume at existing customers in the most established and largest market for Cesium-131, and while new data continues to be published regarding efficacy of the treatment and efficacy of Cesium-131, we see growth potential, growth opportunities with high risk prostate patients over the coming years. In building a market for other applications, we continue to see good clinical results in our clinical trials for brain, gynecological, and head and neck cancers. As we continue to improve these results and gain acceptance in multiple institutions, IsoRay will be in a position to introduce our products into these treatments on an ever-wider commercial scale. In summary, we hope you share our excitement; we have a lot going on, on multiple fronts. Like many companies, we’re restricted as to when we can announce and discuss these developments. We are planning to continue these quarterly conference calls in order to enhance and expand our shareholder communication. Thank you for joining us today, and I’d now like to open the call for questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question today comes from Jason Kolbert from Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions.

Michael Okunewitch

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

Michael Okunewitch on behalf of Jason Kolbert. Just wanted to know if you could provide us with some color on how you see the growth in the brachytherapy market, and what kind of feedback you’ve been getting from treating physicians around the use of Cesium-131?

Tom LaVoy

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

I will turn that one over to Michael, if you’d like to comment on that Mike?

Mike Krachon

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

Yes, I think the feedback we’ve been getting from physicians as we speak with them is very positive. The centers that we have approached over the last 15 months have taken information and we started moving through their sales process to learn about it. I think historically there was not enough data for some event, you feel comfortable trying a new isotope; and with the recent publications, the Moran data showing long term nine-year outcomes, which showed a comparative and disease control and the Benoit data from new UPMC showing the positive side effect profile. We’ve had a very good response from that. I think overall the prostate market continues to have a lot of slow moving activity, so it’s taken us a little longer than I think I would have liked, but we are making good progress. I’m sorry, the first part of your question again.

Michael Okunewitch

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

Just a little color on how you see the growth in the brachytherapy market?

Mike Krachon

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

As I noted, I think that the ASCENDE-RT study that came out this year is one of the most impactful sets of data that we’ve seen in prostate cancer treatment or localized prostate cancer treatment in the last several years. It is a randomized study that showed the addition of brachytherapy for high risk data to be advantageous for the patient from a cancer control rate. And neurologists and physician are becoming aware of it and they are seeking out how they can go back into providing this procedure for their patients. Several centers that we have talked to over the last couple of months had stopped programs, and that data has kind of driven them back to looking at it a little more. I expect it’s going to take some time as they look at it, as they select some initial patients, as they get back into providing the procedure for it ramp up dramatically, but it’s certainly a very exciting development within that.

Michael Okunewitch

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

I just wanted to know also, if you could give us an update on the treated patients with brain cancer, particularly the little girl in Peru.

Tom LaVoy

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

She’s’ doing, as a matter of fact, fine. I think that particular young girl; I think she was eight at the time. She had undergone a course of Whole Brain radiation therapy, which had left her pretty significant neuropathies in her brain. As we’ve told everyone, we had a surgeon go and do a Cesium-131 implant. That tumor was inoperable on the brainstem , has disappeared and there is no sign of it. So, obviously it’s another great piece of information and a great story.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And gentlemen at this time, I am showing no additional questions, I’d like to turn the conference call back over for any closing remarks.

Tom LaVoy

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead with your questions

Thank you for joining us on our first quarterly conference call. The management team and all our employees are very excited about the company’s future growth outlook. We look forward to speaking with you again for our second fiscal quarterly call in February. Have good night everyone. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen that does conclude today’s conference call. We thank you for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.