Royalty Pharma plc (NASDAQ:RPRX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Terry Coyne: Sure. with regard to the new Vertex triple, I think I would just reiterate what we’ve said previously that Trikafta sets a very high bar. And we expect that Trikafta will continue to be a very important contributor to Royalty Pharma over the long term. We saw the same Phase II data that everyone else saw. And I think at this point, it would be challenging to say that they are clearly — that the new triple is clearly differentiated. But we’ll need to see the full Phase III data, including the long-term safety as well to really understand that. In terms of your question around legal strategies, we just haven’t elaborated at this point. And I think we’ll continue to evaluate the situation and update investors at the appropriate time.

Christopher Hite: And with regard to your second question on if the equity markets came back strong and opened up for the biotech sector, would that impact our deal activity. I think what I would say is, just going back to that Slide 12, we had in our presentation just shows the growth of the market, generally speaking. And the — it’s really been a change of mindset, I believe, in the biopharmaceutical sector, broadly speaking, between large pharma, mid-cap pharma, biotech, where considering royalty monetization or synthetic royalties as a piece of your capital structure is an evolution that’s happening right now in the sector. And so whether the markets are really strong or not so strong, we think the mindset has been sort of evolving. And so we don’t really see that impacting our deal activity. There’s been a — just the evolution of the growth of this market as potentially a piece of the capital structure.

Pablo Legorreta: If you actually look at this with a bit more of perspective over the last 10, 15 years, we went through some incredibly strong equity capital market for biotech where huge amounts of capital were raised by the industry. And we still did incredibly well in those years, deploying multiple billions of dollars of capital every year in really exciting products. So I think the comment that Chris made is really key here because if the equity markets were to be more favorable again in the near term, the underlying really important shift in the way companies are funding themselves which now includes royalties, is a really strong tailwind we have for our industry. And then in addition to that, the other area we’re very excited about where we see a lot of potential interesting transactions and potentially transformative product is with big pharma.

And that is — an example of that is the transaction we did with Merck at the end of the year. And we’re very encouraged by that because we’re having discussions with many companies about potentially funding attractive products. And it’s a question also of just, again, continuing to have discussions with management teams explain how funding with royalties is beneficial to them. And that’s a really important underlying trends. But thank you for your question.

Operator: Our last question comes from Stephen Scala with Cowen.

Stephen Scala: I have 2 questions. The current trajectory of ibrutinib is increasingly concerning I am wondering if you believe AbbVie guidance adequately captures all risks? And how are the challenges similar to or different from what you expected 3 years ago? The second question is a little bit bigger picture for Pablo. It is clear that Royalty Pharma’s business has great momentum, a bright future and is very consistent. But many quarters, including this one, you get questioned about potential risks such as IRA and/or competition which you were asked about the CF situation with Vertex which you were asked about. Other quarters, you get asked about competition and sometimes even adverse tax legislation. Now these are real risks but they’re just manageable from your perspective and therefore, your answers tend to be kind of high level.