Silk Road Medical, Inc (NASDAQ:SILK) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And obviously the debt financing earlier this year and the recent equity financing give us a lot of financial flexibility as we push this business forward. And I’ll also just quickly add that this quarter was the first quarter where OpEx was not greater than revenue, it was roughly the same. And so having made a lot of investments to-date, we’re looking forward to leveraging those investments into the future against a growing top line.

Rick Wise: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you, Rick. Our next question will come from Adam Maeder of Piper Sandler. Adam, you will have the line in just a moment.

Adam Maeder: Hi, guys. Hopefully you can hear me, okay. Thank you for taking the questions and congrats on the progress. Maybe to start, I wanted to circle back on the implied Q4 guide. Lucas, I think you talked about some of the puts and takes and headwinds like selling days, staffing, holiday seasonality. But when I look at even the top end of the implied Q4 guide, it only assumes a low-single digit growth quarter-over-quarter. So feels pretty modest and conservative versus historical seasonal patterns. So in that context, any color you can provide on the business in the month of October and early November or should we really just interpret this as a good degree of conservatism? And then I have a follow-up or two. Thanks.

Lucas Buchanan: Yeah. I’m not sure history is our guide here in a rapidly growing business where the pace of inputs in terms of sales territory expansion and physician training and those things against the big variations and pandemic effects and lack of normalized kind of operating environments due to staffing and contrast and other issues. And so again I think we’ve raised by more than the Q3 beat with some caution around the puts and takes that we mentioned in the prepared remarks and you just reiterated. And so it’s a balance between the momentum in the business and some of that uncertainty.

Adam Maeder: Okay. Understood. Appreciate that color. And then maybe to follow up, I did want to ask about the Enflate balloon product. I do understand that more details are going to be shared at a later date. But at a high level, could you just help us understand exactly what that product does? Do you envision it will be used in all TCAR cases or specific patient anatomy? And then, I think I heard a slight lift to ASP in ’23, can you frame up what you mean by slight? Thank you.

Erica Rogers: Sure. I’ll take that one, Adam. Thanks for joining us. I’ll take the latter part first. As Lucas said, the way to think about the Enflate balloon is it really falls into the category of an accessory product similar to our micro-puncture kit and others that really improves the speed, the ease, convenience and safety of TCAR. The flagship products from an ASP point of view continue to be the stent and the ENROUTE Neuroprotection System. So that should give you a sense of how we kind of calibrate what Enflate will do for the procedural ASP. As it relates to how it will be utilized and kind of the rationale, a balloon is used in two parts of the procedure potentially. First, to prepare the lesion for the stent. If the physician feels like he wants to gain or she wants to gain some additional luminal diameter for example before placing that stent, there can be a balloon angioplasty of the lesion and then the stent is placed.

And furthermore, once the stent is in place, there may be a need to further expand the stent or touch it up with a balloon inflation. And so balloons have been used to-date in TCAR, but they’ve been using peripheral balloons designed for use in the leg vasculature primarily, which aren’t ergonomically ideal for use in a TCAR case. And so we took all of the things that we know about safely getting into the common carotid artery and put that into a design of a bespoke balloon for this procedure.