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Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals Ltd (KNSA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals Ltd (KNSA) Q2 2023

Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Company Participants

Rachel Frank - Associate Director of Investor Relations

Sanj Patel - Chief Executive Officer

Ross Moat - Senior VP & Chief Commercial Officer

Eben Tessari - Chief Operating Officer

Mark Ragosa - Senior VP & CFO

John Paolini - Senior VP & Chief Medical Officer

Conference Call Participants

Anupam Rama - JPMorgan

Paul Choi - Goldman Sachs

Alexandria Hammond - BofA

David Nierengarten - Wedbush Securities

Liisa Bayko - Evercore ISI

Presentation

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers presentation there will be a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rachel Frank, Head of Investor Relations.

Rachel Frank

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Kiniksa's call to discuss our second quarter 2023 financial results and recent portfolio execution.

Highlighting these results can be found on our website under the Investors and Media section.

As for the agenda, our Chief Executive Officer, Sanj Patel, will start with an introduction. Ross Moat, our Chief Commercial Officer, will provide an update on our outlet local execution. Then Mark Ragosa, our Chief Financial Officer, will review our second quarter 2023 financial results. And finally, Sanj return for closing remarks and will kick off the Q&A session, in which Eben Tessari, our Chief Operating Officer; and John Paolini, our Chief Medical Officer, will also be on the line.

Before getting started, please note that we will be making forward-looking statements today that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. Our review such statements and risk factors can be found on this slide as well as under the caption Risk Factors taking in our SEC filings. These statements speak only as of the date of this presentation, and we undertake no obligation to update such statements, except as required by law.

With that, I will turn it over to Sanj.

Sanj Patel

Thanks, Rachel, and good morning, everyone. I'm happy to review our second quarter 2023 financial results today. We've continued to execute across our cardiovascular and autoimmune franchises, positioning us for success and growth in 2023. On the commercial side, Q2 represented another quarter of growth for with a net product revenue of $54.5 million.

We're encouraged by our commercial execution to date, and we continue to see strong prescriber adoption and patient enrollments in the second quarter. We also remained encouraged by the high patient satisfaction, payer approval rates and the duration of therapy. Accordingly, we've now raised our 2023 ARCALYST guidance to $220 million to $230 million.

On the development side, we remain focused on enrolling the Phase II study KPL-404, which is our CD40 antagonist program in rheumatoid arthritis. This is designed to evaluate the efficacy, dose response, PK and safety of chronic subcu dosing over a duration of 12 weeks. We expect data from this study in the first half of next year.

Additionally, we continue to pursue collaborative study agreements with mavrilimumab to evaluate its potential in rare cardiovascular diseases. This is a molecule that we continue to be excited about, and it has the potential to impact a number of diseases.

With that, I'll turn it over to Ross to review our commercial execution of ARCALYST. Ross?

Ross Moat

Thank you, Sanj. I'm delighted to share further details on our second quarter 2023 commercial performance and the underlying drivers of our continued strong revenue growth.

In Q2, the net revenue for ARCALYST grew to $54.5 million. This represents approximately 100% year-over-year growth. The underlying driver of this success is our focus on a dual strategy of broadening the prescriber base as well as deepening the experience within existing prescribers to help as many patients with recurrent peritonitis as possible.

Total prescribers since the launch of ARCALYST in recurrent pericarditis are now greater than 1,250, which is a growth of more than 250 versus Q1. Additionally, repeat prescribers are at 23% of the much larger total prescribing base, highlighting an acceleration in new repeat prescribers. This demonstrates growing awareness and commercial experience with ARCALYST, which will help us in the future as more patients visit those physicians.

One of the important drivers of revenue continues to be duration of therapy. At the end of Q2, the approximate initial treatment period averaged around 14 months. When calculating for the restart rates and current duration of the subsequent treatment period, we are seeing that the average total duration of ARCALYST therapy was around 20 months.

Moving to Slide 8. We are making good progress in building the market and establish an ARCALYST as a standard of care in recurrent pericarditis, and we continue to have a huge opportunity ahead. Our focus has been on increasing the reach and frequency with physicians to enable familiarity with ARCALYST as well as interleukin-1 alpha and beta being the underlying drivers of recurrent pericarditis.

The need to rapidly increase awareness and knowledge informed the expansion of our field team in Q4 2022. This strategy led to a spike in activity with doctors we couldn't previously reach as well as an increased frequency on those that we've called on previously. In Q2, this has resulted in a substantial growth in the number of active patients on ARCALYST treatments, even after accounting for the stable rate of discontinuations off the growing base of total patients.

As our sales team focuses on continuing patient growth they are complemented by our direct-to-consumer digital marketing, where we're advancing education so patients can self advocate for ARCALYST where appropriate. We also remain committed to supporting the patient experience through Kiniksa One Connect program, including ensuring affordability for eligible patients who are prescribed ARCALYST....

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