Coherus BioSciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHRS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Denny Lanfear: Chris, thanks for the question. With respect to Humira biosimilar’s projected revenues for ’23 and ’24, as I indicated a little earlier with Doug, I don’t think we’ll really have a good grip on that until we get past the July launch. We see what happens and how the jacking with the positioning of the formularies goes and so on. So I don’t want to give you imprecise information. Our case has a crystal ball here without basis. So I think we’ll just have to wait post launch and see how things pan out, but I think that’s a totally fair question to ask us on the November call with respect to Q3 and so on. With respect to the savings and where the savings came from, I’ll let McDavid Stilwell handle that. But I think that we have done a very complete job looking towards the bottom on the organization in a number of areas for savings. McDavid, were the key areas to savings came from for Chris’ answer.

McDavid Stilwell: Sure. Thanks, Chris. The expense reductions come across three main areas; headquarters’ headcount, development expenses, and manufacturing expenses. So we’re rethinking business processes across the company and asking how can we operate more efficiently. And then the Toripalimab joint development committee reducing the scope for the U.S. development plan from a broad development plan to the three studies that Theresa described. That’s also very significant in the overall expense reduction. And then finally, with respect to manufacturing, we are shifting the timing of certain manufacturing-related expenses and inventory building in order to reduce expenses near term. We have – what we’re not doing is we’re not significantly downsizing the customer-facing teams for UDENYCA or CIMERLI. And so we don’t expect that the workforce reduction will impact our ability to execute on our commercial plans and meet our revenue targets.

Denny Lanfear: One thing with respect to the – how we have approached this on the commercial side and maybe Paul Reider can comp a little further is we’re multi flexing these groups across both products, for example, the market access group that addresses the payers, right? We have those folks working on CIMERLI plus UDENYCA plus potentially Toripalimab and so forth. And the other area is also the internal operations group, the Data Analytics Group, they also get multiplex across these various products. We have additional bandwidth for even more products actually. But I think that we found good efficiencies there and I think Paul’s team is really working much, very much an integrated holistic sort of fashion. Paul, any particular comments on this?

Paul Reider: No, I would just reinforce that when we built the commercial team, we built it to scale and it was designed so that the multiple groups handle the portfolio. Denny mentioned the payer team. Our field reimbursement managers and importantly, our key accounts and strategic account teams that handle the big accounts for both oncology and retina. They’re dealing with the same GPO groups and others. And so, this provides us tremendous synergies and not having to add additional layers of groups. So we are taking advantage of those synergies and the launch of our products, managing headcount and capacity very carefully, but we feel we’re very right sized to be able to continue our multiple launches here in 2023.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Balaji Prasad of Barclays. Your line is open, Balaji.

Unidentified Analyst: This is a on for Balaji. Thanks for taking our questions. Just one quick one on the general stability issue and Toripalimab. Things like for the indication of NPC, it seems like you don’t have any concerns for general liability. So is it because the patient profile of NPC patients would help addressing the general ability issue or is it because there is currently no approved targeted therapy for NPC in the United States? Thank you.