Jaguar Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAGX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Jaguar Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAGX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 14, 2024

Operator: Before I turn the call over to management, I’d like to remind you that management may make forward-looking statements, relating to such matters as continued growth prospects for the company, uncertainties regarding market acceptance of products, the impact of competitive products and pricing, industry trends, and productive initiatives, including products in the development stage, which may not achieve scientific objectives or meet stringent regulatory requirements. Forward-looking statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in such forward-looking statements. These statements are based on currently available information and management’s current assumptions, expectations, and projections about future events.

While management believes its assumptions, expectations, and projections are reasonable in view of currently available information, you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The company’s actual results may differ materially from those discussed during this webcast for a variety of reasons, including those described in the forward-looking statements and risk factor sections of the company’s Form 10-K for the year 2023, which was filed on April 1, 2024, and its other filings with the SEC, which are available on the investor relations section of Jaguar’s website. Except as required by law, Jaguar undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements contained in this presentation to reflect new information, future events, or otherwise.

Additionally, please note the company supplements its condensed consolidated financial statements presented on a GAAP basis by providing non-GAAP EBITDA and non-GAAP recurring EBITDA. Jaguar believes that the disclosure items of these non-GAAP measures provide investors with additional information that reflects the basis upon which company management assesses and operates the business. These non-GAAP financial measures should be viewed in isolation or as substitutes for GAAP net sales and GAAP net loss and are not substitutes for or superior to measures of financial performance in conformity with GAAP. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time, it’s my pleasure to turn the call over to Lisa Conte, Jaguar Health’s Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer.

Lisa, the floor is yours.

Lisa Conte: [Audio gap]

Q&A Session

Operator: And Peter, just wanted to confirm your line is not on mute. Line’s on mute. It.

Lisa Conte: Three, two, one. Here we go. Earnings call for the first quarter, 2024. Hello, thank you all for joining our webcast for the first quarter of 2024. My name is Lisa Conte. I’m the Founder, President and CEO of Jaguar Health and our wholly-owned subsidiary, Napo Pharmaceuticals, and I am the chairman of our Italian subsidiary, Napo Therapeutics. As usual, I may use the words Jaguar and Napo interchangeably when I’m referring to our company and our company activities. Following my comments this morning, our CFO Carol Lizak will provide a recap of the financial highlights for the first quarter of 2024. However, I apologize Carol, I’m going to steal your thunder somewhat because I am so pleased to report our combined Q1 2024 net revenue of approximately $2.4 million, for our prescription and non-prescription products, increased approximately 20% versus Q1 2023 last year and increased approximately 4% versus the fourth quarter of 2023.

And you’ll hear more financial highlights from Carol shortly. Now I will once again address what I feel is the burning question that I continue to legitimately hear from shareholders the timing of the release of results from our on target trial. We are upgrading our timing expectation. We expect the top-line results to be imminent, not forthcoming as I’ve indicated before, but upgrading to imminent. Until the results are released, we at Jaguar remain blinded to them. As a reminder, the OnTarget Trial is our Pivotal Phase 3 Trial of Crofelemer , which is our novel plant based prescription drug trade name Mytesi. And the trial is for the Prophylaxis or the prevention of cancer therapy related diarrhea, which we refer to as CTD in patients with all solid tumor types on targeted therapy with or without cytotoxic chemotherapy, and we have referred to that as a basket trial, aiming for a broad label, based on the results of the trial.

We thankfully now live in the age of targeted therapies for cancer treatment ad thanks to these amazing drugs, cancer patients and metastatic cancer patients are now living longer five, 10, 20 years. Targeted therapies, though, can lead to severe side effects. I’d like to describe the shifting paradigm we’re experiencing in the cancer care community. Metastatic patients, as I mentioned, for example, are living longer, though living longer on these targeted therapies that they’re taking indefinitely. Hence, the side effects often continue indefinitely. Sometimes these side effects become therapy limiting, meaning the patient must go off or reduce their drug to a sub therapeutic level, a sub therapeutic level of their life saving treatment, or go off their life saving treatment.

Side effects are graded in severity from one to four and even side effects of grade one or two. So the least severe one or two can dramatically decrease patient comfort, dignity, quality of life and critically, their ability to adhere to their cancer treatment regimen, as I mentioned. Research publications on these therapies often referred to grade one and two side effects, not grade three and four, grade one and two side effects as tolerable toxicities and we have to ask ourselves tolerable to whom? For example, let’s take cancer therapy related Diarrhea. Grade two is four to six loose, watery stools, a day with potential incontinence. How is that tolerable? How is that tolerable indefinitely? Oral mucositis, for example, is a various levels of pain resembling broken glass in your mouth, with a hotness like a habanero pepper.

Who wants to live like that? Who can live like that indefinitely? A prominent cancer patient advocate, a person living with metastatic lung cancer for 15 years now, speaks about the 21 distinct side effects of cancer treatment that she has managed throughout her continuing battle with cancer. Obviously, there is an abundance of unmet medical need in cancer supportive care and there are no acceptable toxicities. Our goal is to achieve a leadership role and continue a leadership role in oncology supportive care, and we at Jaguar Napo are evaluating additional commercial opportunities in this area to supplement our efforts in CTD-Cancer Therapy related Diarrhea and now oral mucositis. Oral mucositis, as announced recently, we have expanded Jaguars commercial footprint beyond HIV supportive care at this moment to include cancer related supportive care, with our recent in license of the FDA approved oral mucositis prescription production Gelclair, and for the US market, this is our first building block into this new franchise.

Napo exhibited at the Oncology Nursing Society Congress last month in Washington DC, where we drove awareness among the oncology nursing community about our expanding focus on cancer supportive care as nurses play, of course, a vital role in providing integrative supportive care to cancer survivors, cancer patients under treatment to meet the various physical, psychological and social support needs. The reception to Glenn — Gelclair at this conference and we had a booth at the ONS conference was fantastic. Numerous oncology nurses told us how pleased they were to learn that this product, which was available in the US a number of years ago, is coming back. Gelclair is paradigm shifting and fits with our model of paradigm shifting solutions in supportive care.

In addressing mucositis, in that it’s soothing, it’s calming, it’s protective to the patient, it’s an adhesion to the patient wounds, not just an attempt to numb the mouth to pain, as is the approach with current available treatments. It’s clear from the conversations we had at the ONS conference with nurses from around the country that Gelclair is beloved by the treating community and patients. And we’re so pleased to say it’s back. The next large oncology event at which we will exhibit is the American Society of Clinical Oncology, ASCO. It’s the annual meeting which always takes place in Chicago this year, May 31 to June 4. It’s the largest cancer gathering each year, attended by more than 40,000 oncology professionals and from around the world.

I’ll now turn to our second shot on goal, our other shot on goal, and that for Crofelemer, and that is our focus on rare disease indications of Crofelemer. This is a distinct formulation of a Crofelemer, distinct from mitosis and therefore a distinct product. It’s highly meant to be a highly concentrated, liquid administered. Jaguar has five clinical efforts across the globe, North America, Europe and the Middle east, including multiple FDA and international regulatory filings to support clinical testing of Crofelemer for intestinal failure associated with short bowel syndrome and the ultra-rare pediatric indication of congenital diarrheal diseases. And very specifically, you’ll hear MVID microbial inclusion disease, which is a very specific congenital diarrheal disorder.

I just returned yesterday, or actually last week from an overseas trip to meet with professionals and their patients. Several of our clinical investigators, and I have to say the humble nature and devotion of these healthcare professionals to their patients and their patients are frequently on parental nutrition for as long as 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Some of them don’t leave hospital care for years at a time. This is catastrophic for the patient. Yet, as I mentioned, the nature of the healthcare providers was absolutely heartwarming. The entire Jaguar Napo team that I was with couldn’t help feeling that these healthcare professionals are doing God’s work and I mean that in the colloquial sense, not the religious sense, though it is interesting because one of the hospitals that we were visiting was right next to the Vatican.

Our goal, our near-term clinical benchmark for intestinal failure, is to generate clinical proof of concept in both the MVID and the short bowel syndrome patients in support of potential reimbursed early patient access generation in 2024 for Crofelemer for these rare diseases. And we do have orphan designation for both short bowel syndrome and MVID in the US and Europe, but to generate the early patient access in Europe, which is a program that does not exist in the United States. So to wrap this up through the process of sustainably bringing Crofelemer from a tree in the rainforest to a product Mytesi in any pharmacy we want across the United States, currently for the supportive care indication of adults living with HIV AIDS, who have non-infectious diarrhea; we at Jaguar have gained a great deal of experience about educating healthcare professionals and patients and payers about the paradigm shifting mechanism of action.

We learned too from the veterinarian pet parent response to our Crofelemer prescription product Canalevia, which is conditions Canalevia- CA1, which is conditionally approved by the center of Veterinary Medicine of the FDA for chemotherapy-induced diarrhea of dogs. We have a deep, deep dedication to patient supportive care. Now is the time and we look forward to continuing to develop and commercialize prescription pharmaceuticals for essential supportive care and management of neglected symptoms across multiple complicated disease states for patients in need all around the world. We will now hear from our CFO, Carol Lizak, regarding the financial highlights from the first quarter of 2024 and then I will be back. Thank you.

Carol Lizak: [Audio gap] and Canalevia CA1 and the Company’s non prescription products was approximately $2.4 million in the first quarter of 2024, representing an increase of approximately 20% over the combined net revenue in the first quarter of 2023, which totaled approximately $2 million and an increase of approximately 4% over the combined net revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023, which totaled about $2.3 million. Mytesi prescription volume decreased in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the fourth quarter of 2023 by 7%, which occurs every year as commercial and Medicare insurance deductibles reset and result in higher co-pays for patients in Q1, prescriptions decreased slightly by 2.5% in the first quarter of 2024, compared to the first quarter of 2023.

Prescription volume differs from the invoiced sales volume, which reflects, among other factors, varying buying patterns among specialty pharmacies in the closed network as they manage their inventory levels. Loss from operations decreased by $1.6 million from $9.9 million in the quarter ended March 31, 2023, to $8.2 million during the same period in 2024. Non-GAAP recurring EBITDA for the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2023 were net loss of $7.5 million and $9 million, respectively. Net loss attributable to common shareholders decreased by approximately $2.9 million from $12.2 million in the quarter ended March 31, $2023 to $9.2 million in the same period in 2024. That concludes my recap of high level financials for first quarter of 2024.

I will now hand the discussion back to Lisa.

Lisa Conte: Thank you Carol, and thank you all who joined this call. I do want to just clarify something that I said earlier, and that’s regarding early patient access for Crofelemer for intestinal failure in Europe. So I mentioned that it’s based on proof of concept results. Those results, though it may start coming in 2024 and 2025, we would expect the early patient access reimbursed program, therefore, based on those results, to occur in 2025. And with that, I want to thank you all again. We’re highly, highly energized about all the important near-term initiatives, including newly the upcoming launch of Gelclair and what is now imminent results from OnTarget for Cancer Therapy related Diarrhea Phase 3 Clinical Trial for Crofelemer.

And this is a formulation that we currently have on the market Mytesi. Thank you all for the support of our mission to develop and commercialize prescription pharmaceuticals plant based for essential supportive care and management of neglected symptoms across multiple complicated disease states, with a very strong focus right now on cancer patients in need around the world. And that’s the conclusion of our call for today. Have a good day.

Operator:

Q – Unidentified Analyst:

Unidentified Company Representative: