Amgen Inc.

My name is Julie Ann, and I will be your conference facilitator today for Amgen's first quarter full year 2023 financial results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. There will be a question and answer session at the conclusion of the last speaker's prepared remarks. In order to ensure that everyone has a chance to participate, we would like to request that you limit yourself to asking one question during the Q&A session. To ask a question, please press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. I would now like to introduce Arvind Sood, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Sood, you may now begin.

Thank you, Julianne. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our call to discuss our results for the first quarter of 2023. Strong unit volume growth that sets up the stage nicely for improved outlook for the balance of the year. These are some of the key themes that you are going to hear about today. Chairman and CEO Bob Bradway will lead the call with some prepared remarks, followed by a broader review of our performance by other members of our leadership team. You should have received a link to our slides that we have posted. Through the course of our discussion today, we'll make some forward-looking statements and use non-GAAP financial measures to describe our performance, and just a reminder that actual results can vary materially. So with that, I would like to turn the call over to Bob. Bob?

Okay, thank you, Arvind, and let me thank all of you for joining our call. I'll begin by calling your attention to the 14% volume growth we delivered in the first quarter. It illustrates two points worth keeping in mind when thinking about the remainder of the year and beyond. First, the COVID front seemed to have finally turned the page on the pandemic in terms of its impact on the overall healthcare system. For example, we've seen year-over-year prescription growth across most specialties in the U.S., including cardiology and oncology. And that's good news because it suggests that patients are returning to their pre-pandemic routines with doctor visits once again enabling appropriate diagnoses and treatments. It's obviously something that bodes well for our portfolio of medicines. Second, we're seeing that the demand for medicines is resilient despite the current macroeconomic challenges. Repatha, Vanity, Blinsito, and Coprolis, for example, all delivered record sales in the quarter, driven by extremely strong growth in volumes of 33%, 55%, 49%, and 18% respectively. We don't see this volume-driven growth as a single quarter phenomenon either. Rather, we see this as the potential for these medicines and others in our portfolio to reach many more patients over time and contribute substantially to our long-term growth. Take Repatha. We believe there's tremendous upside opportunity for Repatha at a time when most high-risk cardiovascular patients still never reach their recommended LDL levels or do so only for a brief, insufficient period of time. The global public health crisis in heart disease demands that all players in the system work together to drive change, and with Repatha, we've proven we have a proven innovation that we know can be an essential part of the solution. Two of our newest medicines, Tezspire and Tabneos, achieved quarter-over-quarter volume growth in the U.S. of 28% and 27% respectively. Tezspire has enjoyed strong adoption in the U.S. by both allergists and pulmonologists, and a recently approved pre-filled pen gives patients the option for self-administration. A few quarters into our ownership of Tavneos, we're convinced that our deep experience in rheumatology and nephrology will enable us to bring this first-in-class medicine to many more patients who can benefit from it. Outside the U.S., volumes grew more than 20% in the quarter. In the Asia-Pacific region in particular, we generated nearly 50% volume growth as we expand the number of patients we serve in Japan and China, two of the world's most rapidly aging nations, with medicines like Repatha and Prolia. Amgen's R&D investment was up 12% in the quarter. That growth reflects the investments we are making in registration-enabling trials for several potential new first-in-class medicines, including Opaziran in heart disease, rocatinlamab in inflammation, and bemerituzumab and terlatumab in cancer. All four of these medicines are quintessentially Amgen. for innovative molecules that deliver large effect sizes against serious diseases for which new treatments are very much needed. We are pursuing a number of significant new indications for Tespire, Blinsido, and Lumicras as well. We look forward to several data readouts from our pipeline, mainly in the second half of the year. We continue to invest heavily in early research. where we've built a differentiated set of capabilities over the past decade that position us well to take advantage of the rapid convergence of biology and technology that we see happening today. At a time when the world marvels at ChatGPT, we've been deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning in our research labs for some time now, giving us dry lab capabilities that, when applied to biologics development, have already yielded improved success rates and reduced cycle times beyond our initial expectations. This is indeed an exciting time for biologic innovation. We remain optimistic about our announced acquisition of Horizon, and similar to our experience with Tavenios, the more time we've spent with the team at Horizon, the more excited we've become about the potential to bring Amgen's capabilities and global presence to bear on Horizon's portfolio of first-in-class innovative medicines and its pipeline. It's an exciting time for all of us at Amgen, and the demand for innovative medicines has proven to be resilient and growing around the world at the same time that our ability to innovate has never been greater. As always, I'm grateful to my Amgen colleagues around the world for their commitment to patients and to our business. Now let me turn over to Murdo.