Biogen Inc.

Good morning. My name is Cynthia, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Biogen third quarter 2024 earnings call and business update. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. Please limit yourself to one question to allow other participants time for questions. If you require any further follow-up, you may press star 1 again to rejoin the queue. Today's conference is being recorded. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dr. Stephen Amato, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Dr. Amato, you may begin your conference.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Biogen's third quarter 2024 earnings call. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. We provide a comprehensive list of risk factors in our SEC filings, which I encourage you to review. Our earnings release and other documents related to our results, as well as reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP results discussed on this call, can be found in the Investors section of Biogen.com. We have also posted the slides on our website that will be used during this call. On today's call, I am joined by our President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Wiebacher, Dr. Priya Singhal, Head of Development, Mike McDonald, Chief Financial Officer, as well as our Head and President of North America, Alicia Alaimo, who will be available for Q&A. We will make some opening comments, and then we'll move to the Q&A session. To allow us to get through as many questions as possible, we kindly ask that you limit yourself to one question. I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. I'll start Start first by thanking you, Steve, for stepping up as interim head of IR and done a great job of preparing us for this quarter. Also earlier this week, we announced the retirement plans of our CFO, Mike McDonald, and also the appointment of his successor, Robin Kramer. But Mike is still very firmly in the saddle as CFO, and we will be recognizing his significant contribution to Biogen with the fourth quarter earnings call later. So I think Biogen has made significant and very strong progress over the last two years. And I do think the company is well positioned for the future. Our launches are progressing well with good sequential quarter-over-quarter growth. Our cost base has been significantly reduced. But more importantly, a value-for-money approach to spending, I think, has been embedded in our culture. The acquisitions we've done to date have been well received and are already creating value. And I think we have a strong late-stage pipeline emerging. So if we turn first to the launches, let's start talking about Lakembi. Now, although Lakembi revenue in the U.S. continues to be below the expectations of our collaboration, and the prescriber base is not expanded to the extent that we had anticipated, Global revenue still grew by 66% in the third quarter as compared to the second quarter. And we've got continued uptake outside the US and new prescriber growth of nearly 40% in the US. The collaboration continues to refine the commercial strategy and we're seeing benefits from an increase in our sales force, really who started out there in the field from 1st of September. And we continue to evaluate opportunities to potentially accelerate our business. Now, we've continued to see some healthcare systems who are treating expand and extend and expanding their treatment sites in the U.S. And more recently, we're starting to see large infusion networks activating in high population geographies to help absorb patient demand.