Aurinia Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:AUPH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Peter Greenleaf: Yeah. Well, let me start there, and I underscored it in our call today. I think 150 to 200-plus percent growth year-on-year is aggressive in light of the challenges everyone is facing in the start of the year with the Omicron variant, its impact on offices, our individual companies and our reps, the patients themselves, et cetera. Most companies are, I think, guiding to challenges in that area. And I think that kind of growth doubling — more than doubling up our business year-on-year is aggressive. And that was the context for my comments going into the conference, and it’s my context for the comments given today. In terms of how to think about how the forecast gates for the year, obviously, we don’t give quarter-on-quarter guidance, but what underlies us achieving these numbers is getting to — after the first quarter, getting back to significant growth in PSF for prescription start forms and maintaining an adherence level at or around what we’re seeing currently.

So again, as we estimated, somewhere around that 25% to 30% that we’ve seen coming out of our clinical trials. In addition, I think we have to see good persistency over time. But as I said earlier, it’s — with respect to how long patients have already been on drug, it’s sort of hard to qualify what we’ve seen and what we need to hold to. But all of those are factors, Joe.

Joseph Schwartz: Okay. Thanks for that color. And maybe just a quick housekeeping question, if I could, on the EU approval, hopefully, later this year. I think the range of milestones that you stand to gain is $15 million to $30 million. I was wondering — and that depends on the label, as I understand it. Can you share with us any more color on what kind of factors would determine whether you come out at the higher or the low-end of that milestone range?

Peter Greenleaf: Yeah, I’ll try to oversimplify it. If we come with a label that’s very similar to what we see in the US, you can feel confident that we’ll get a full $30 million. There are other areas such as length of therapy, et cetera, that if those were more constrained in Europe, we might get the lower end of that range. We feel really confident because of the AURORA 2 continuation study in a way that the 120-day comments came back that we should be on the upper end of that. But obviously, you never know until we actually get the approval, which is targeted for the back half of this year.

Joseph Schwartz: Excellent. Thanks very much for the help.

Peter Greenleaf: Thanks, Joe.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Stacy Ku with Cowen and Company. Please proceed with your question.

Stacy Ku: Good morning. Thanks for taking our questions. So we have one around the net pricing per patient for LUPKYNIS. How should we be thinking about Q4? As we — of the pricing to stay consistent with the Q4 metrics you provided around enrollment forms and conversion, it would apply that the pricing is much better than our initial $65,000 placeholder net pricing annually. So in our rough math, we’re getting closer to $100,000. So any guidance would be appreciated. And also related to this question, given the potentially stronger pricing as we think about Q1 and given all your commentary, do we expect to see the conversion of enrollment forms to drop significantly down from Q4? Thank you.

Peter Greenleaf: So let me start with the first. On net pricing, we maintained the previous guidance of $65,000 net or higher. And the reason that we are not giving sort of quarterly adjustments to this is it almost aligns directly with my previous commentary on patient persistency. Until we really know what the average dose is going to look like on a monthly basis, but more importantly, how the average length of therapy is going to look per patient, it’s hard to estimate and not give the Street over confidence in a number that could vary, right? What we can tell you is that we’re confident that right now our $65,000 net estimate or above is where we’re tracking. And it seems like that should stay consistent throughout. We’ve not commented on sort of breaking down net versus total number of patients on therapy, et cetera, because those numbers can swing around.