Exact Sciences released its first quarter 2019 earnings yesterday, posting a 79 percent gain in quarterly revenues.
Motley Fool transcribed the earnings call.
Note: Lightly edited for style and clarity.
Five quotes from the call:
1. CEO and President Kevin Conroy on Exact's long-term goal: "Cologuard's momentum gives us confidence we'll reach our long-term goal of at least 40 percent share of the U.S. colon cancer screening market."
2. Mr. Conroy on Exact's 2019 priorities: "The Exact Sciences team is focused on three priorities in 2019: powering our partnership with Pfizer, enhancing Cologuard and advancing our pipeline of blood-based cancer diagnostic tests."
3. Mr. Conroy on the decision to attempt to expand Cologuard's indication: "To expand access to Cologuard and its total market potential to nearly $18 billion, we recently submitted our application to the FDA for a label expansion to age 45. Expanding Cologuard's FDA label to the nearly 19 million average-risk Americans between ages 45 and 49 is an important opportunity. More than 10 percent of the total years of life lost to colorectal cancer are due to a diagnosis between ages 45 and 49. This exceeds the impact and every five-year age group above age 70."
4. Mr. Conroy on Cologuard 2.0: "We have seen data; it's quite promising internally and our goal with Cologuard 2.0 is to maintain the same level of sensitivity for detecting cancer — 92 percent, and 90 percent stage 1 — so when you're in a screening setting you don't want to miss cancers, especially early-stage cancers. And then our primary goal thereafter is to improve the specificity and therefore lower the false-positive rate."
5. On Cologuard's resonance in the GI community: "We have 8,000 ordering doctors, but they've ordered very thinly in the GI community, but yet we know they influence their primary care networks. ... Clearly GI are biased a colonoscopy, but they also recognize the value of a noninvasive test and they recognize the value of Cologuard as the best noninvasive test available, and now that it has universal coverage, we see that there is a real partnership opportunity here that will enable us to grow this brand, a 40 percent market share over time."