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 first quarter 2026 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 1 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 Mr. Tim Power, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Power, you may begin your conference.

Well, thank you, and good morning, and welcome to Biogen's first quarter 2026 earnings call. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements which involves 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 findings, which we 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 in this call, can be found in the investor section of Biogen.com. We've also posted the slides to our website that will be used during the call. On today's call, I'm joined by our President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Viebacker, Dr. Priya Singhal, Head of Development, and Robin Kramer, our Chief Financial Officer. Alicia Alimo, President of North America, will also be joining for the Q&A section of the call. We'll make some opening comments and move to the Q&A section. And to allow us to get through as many questions as possible, we kindly ask that you limit yourself to one question. And I'll now hand the call over to Chris.

Thank you, Tim. Good morning, everyone. So we've had a very strong start to the year. And, you know, I was thinking about where we have been as a company. In 2023, we had just completed four years of declining revenue and profit. And, you know, since then, we've been able to pretty much stabilize the business. And that's really been a huge amount of work by all of our teams. And, you know, the interesting thing about this business is it's not enough to just trim some costs. And we did have to cut some excess costs. But one of the things that we have really been doing is going through every single line of the P&L and thinking about are we investing for growth because you do have to invest in this business you you cannot save your way to prosperity and so there's been a lot of really careful thought about how do we how do we invest for growth be it in research and development or in commercial and you know as robin has talked about in the past um you know we actually have shifted a lot of costs 90 of our commercial costs were really behind the ms portfolio in 2023 and by shifting that um to our growth products um i think one of the things you see here on the on the first slide is that the growth products are now generating 850 million dollars in the first quarter and that's up 12 percent and the 12 percent is actually even a little bit of an understatement because spinraza declined slightly now spinraza decline mostly because of a timing of shipments and there was a one-off event last year on VAT, I think, in Europe somewhere. But remember, timing of shipments is a big thing at Biogen. Out of the 15,000 patients on Spinraza that we treat every year, about 9,000 are ex-US. And in a lot of countries, we only ship once or twice a year into those countries. So it tends to be lumpy by nature. What is good news is the new high-dose Spinraza. As you've seen, this has now been approved in the U.S., and we already have patients on the new dosage regimen. But it has already been approved in Japan, who's the first country to approve the high-dose, and then Europe. And we're getting a lot of positive feedback from those countries where it's been launched. Not only is this going to be significant in terms of competitiveness in a highly competitive area. But we're also seeing some anecdotal reports of switchbacks. You know, in this market, whenever you have one of these devastating diseases, efficacy is really paramount. And I think the high dose really should help us have an edge on the efficacy front in this market. So we're very happy to see the growth products growing like that. We look to our major opportunity with Lekembe. And as you know, over the past few years since launch, a lot has been done to try to improve the care pathway, make it easier for both physicians and patients. And the iClick is really fundamental to that. Last year, we had the approval for the maintenance indication. And you'll see numbers where we have significant numbers of patients who are continuing on after the first 18 months regimen to remove the plaques and going on to maintenance. We have a PDUFA date of May 24th for the induction subcutaneous. And again, we see this as an opportunity to facilitate the care pathway, improve patient convenience, and improve our a competitive profile versus Kusuma. So that's the business, the Biogen business is doing well. And now on top of that, we have to propose the pellets acquisition. We haven't yet closed. And so we're limited in what we can say. But obviously, this expands our commercial growth portfolio. There are two marketed products. And I'll just remind everybody that this is one molecule. It has three indications. And it has two brands. And, you know, as I talked to a number of investors on Cyfovir, there is this focus on ophthalmology. And what I think a lot of people forget is that geographic atrophy is really an autoimmune disease. And it is caused by the formation of lesions as a result of aberrant immune activity. And what we're really trying to do with geographic atrophy is to prevent the growth of these lesions. So when people start talking about visual acuity, that's probably going to be very difficult because the eye tends to adjust around these lesions. And what really is the goal of treatment is to prevent progression of the disease, which could potentially lead to blindness. There's a lot that we need to do in terms of thinking about how we really position this drug and where the benefit is. Impoveli is an enormous benefit to us. We have greater conviction every day on felzartamab, and we look forward to seeing the first data, and hopefully those data will realize our aspirations for this product, but You know, if you went back six, seven years ago, nobody was interested in nephrology. And now, you know, really with the advent of the FDA acceptance of proteinuria as a biomarker, a lot of companies have come into this space. And IGAM is obviously the biggest market in this. And so, as we think about recruiting for felzartamab and our prelaunch activities, You're finding that, you know, you've got a lot of companies out there that are recruiting in nephrology. I mean, Vertex is, Vera is, just to name a few, for example. And so within Povelli and with the addition of the Appellus team, we have a whole team ready to go in nephrology. And we'll be present in the nephrology offices, building those relationships, going to Congresses now with a marketed product and not a future product. And so we believe both in the growth of Empaveli, but what that can do for a whole mythology franchise at Biogen. And we're pretty excited about that, I have to say. And I think, you know, all the conversations that we've been having with the Appellus team leading up to a potential integration, I think there's, first of all, there's incredible talent in the Appellus team. But I think it's also fair to say that within Biogen, I think we can probably bring more resources to really support those teams. And, you know, I don't see a big inflection in Cyphovry, for example, but I do think there is an opportunity for a growing product there. And I think, as I say, Mpivelli within a broader nephrology franchise, that could be a game changer for Biogen in the future. So as we look at this, we do expect the acquisition to be accretive in 2027. And when you look out over the next few years, this materially increases Biogen's EPS outlook. And if I turn to the next chart here, Now, don't get your micrometers out here and try to measure these arrows here. This is meant to be illustrative of where we think this is going. If we just take what Wall Street thinks Biogen is going to do, I can't say that we would be happy with that, but that's what's out there in the public domain. It's roughly flat through 2030. Now, when you look at what a palace can do is You know, this allows Biogen to start growing now, is our belief. And then, you know, the pipeline starts to read out. We've got a lot of data readouts already starting this year and consecutively over the years. And, you know, as one investor told me, he said, I get this. Before, we had a pipeline coming on a flat business. Now, I see a pipeline coming on a growing business. And I think that's the fundamental difference in what the Appellus acquisition does for us. And, you know, we're still going to continue to do business development. You know, in all of this, we just acquired the China rights for Filtartumab. You know, that's an important market for IGAM, but China is a big important market for us. And Biogen has been relatively small in China. China is the world's second biggest pharmaceutical market. And so Filzantamab and acquiring these rights, not only just to acquire the worldwide rights for Pelza, but also really to build our business in China. So again, we continue to invest in growth, but I think a lot of the investments, a lot of the work that we have done over the last two, three years is now coming to fruition. And at least this is the vision. Now, we are very conscious of the fact that, you know, in business, 10% is strategy, 90% is execution. And so we need to now execute as a team to bring all of this, but at least this is the aspiration that we have for our company. With that, let's talk about that pipeline, and I'll pass it to Priya.