Guardant Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:GH) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Daniel Leonard: Understood. And then for my follow-up, Helmy, could you elaborate further on the import of Galaxy I don’t recall that being a primary point in your talk track prior.

Helmy Eltoukhy: Yes. It’s sort of got kicked off with our partnership with Lunit. They’re a leader in AI, power digital pathology to really thinking about sort of the spatial genomics and special biomarker analysis space and using AI to sort of read those images. And the first application that we launched was PD-L1 — using AI to read that. And so it’s pretty powerful, even though it’s a relatively straightforward application, being able to find 20% of patients that might have been negative with manual it’s positive for PD-L1 as a very important therapeutic implication. So that’s really resonating with a lot of physicians helping to drive our growth in tissue, but it’s just the beginning in terms of what’s going to be possible as we sort of tie that in to our other tissue testing on the liquid side. So stay tuned.

Operator: Our next question comes from Andrew Brackmann with William Blair.

Andrew Brackmann: Maybe a couple for me. First, on the upcoming NCIE on readout, can you maybe just sort of level set us on your performance expectations there? Just sort of what constitutes success? And then as a follow-up on Steel CRC, I know it’s been asked in the past, but any update to your expectation on whether that goes to an advisory panel or not? Just sort of remind us on how you’re thinking about that potential?

Helmy Eltoukhy: Yes. So for the long, actually, we’ve shown a bunch of case control studies. This entry is going to be actually the first data that even we are going to see, which is a good indication of the performance of our testing screening relevant patient population, really in a mini screening kind of study. So we are waiting to see actually what that data is going to show. In terms of the bar, I mean when you look at this space of mine cancer, that the 15 million people at high risk, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, they have the adherence rate of less than 15%. Now that we are doing this study even we are seeing really the real world standard of care that even people are getting diagnosed with some relatively high-risk nodules, but again, just due to risk factor associated with biopsy, that biopsy is not getting done, that’s sometimes getting delayed till another imaging confirm still that even at that large iris modules contain to grow.

When you look at the reality of standard of care, it gives us a lot of excitement about the opportunity that blood faced screening and put on the table. If I got your second part of the question, right, about the ad an advisory for SHIELD CRC, we haven’t heard from agency that they want to call any an advisory Board so far. So probably if they like to do that, we should have cared already, but we’ll see like United agents choice of what they want to do. And — but so far, we haven’t got any indication at that.

Operator: The next question comes from Sung Ji Nam with Scotiabank.

Sung Ji Nam: Just a couple of quick ones for me or Ali. Maybe with the remind me again whether the clip peer-reviewed publication, is that an important milestone in terms of receiving the FDA approval?

Helmy Eltoukhy: FDA approval, no. Like FDA independently, they are looking at all the data and the details of data in their own hand, so not that period publication. Less it’s important for us for USPS review cycle reps. They do data reviews by a majority of cases when the evidence is published in care review ship that box and we are on track. We’ve done our part and we will see, but we should be able to have that [indiscernible].