Esperion Therapeutics, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference call may be recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Ben Church, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications at Esperion. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and welcome to Aspirion's second quarter 2021 financial results and company update conference call. I'm Ben Church, and I'm responsible for investor relations and corporate communications here at Aspirion. I want to remind callers that the information discussed on the call today is covered under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. I caution listeners that management will be making forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied by our forward-looking statements due to the risks and uncertainties associated with the business. These forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements contained in today's press release and SEC filings. The content of this conference call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of the date of this live broadcast, August 3, 2021. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this conference call and webcast. As a reminder, the conference call and webcasts are being recorded and archived. We issued a press release this morning detailing the content of today's call. A copy can be found at www.esperian.com within the Investors and Media section. We will begin with prepared comments and then open the call for your questions. Following today's call, the team will be available for follow-up questions. Please email investorrelations at esperian.com to schedule a time to speak with our team. I'd now like to turn the call over to our President and CEO, Sheldon Koenig. Sheldon?

Thanks, Ben, and good morning, everyone. With me today for prepared remarks are Rick Bartram, Chief Financial Officer, and Dr. Joanne Fooding, Experion's new Chief Medical Officer. Also on the line is Eric Warren, our Vice President of U.S. Sales and Marketing. I brought Eric on board in January to integrate and lead a unified sales and marketing organization. Eric, who is a pharmacist by training, has 25 years of commercial experience focusing primarily on cardiometabolic and acute care medicine. He will be available for your questions at the end of this call as well. A special thanks to everyone joining us today for my first earnings call as president and CEO of Asperion. I'm excited to share with you all the great strides taken by Asperion over this past quarter to position ourselves for long-term success as a nimble, innovative organization solely focused on addressing cardiovascular disease. which remains the number one killer in the United States and worldwide. When I joined Aspirion in December of last year, the company had recently launched the first oral non-statin LDLC lowering medicine in nearly two decades, Nexlatol and Nexlavet. These are powerful first in class medicines with a novel mechanism of action and the potential to save patient lives. However, The commercial strategy was not yet maximizing the full potential of these medicines on top of the persisting COVID-19 pandemic headwinds. Having previously worked across many of the available LDL-C lowering medicines, I have deep experience of what it takes to capture growth in the cardiovascular market and immediately recognize the untapped potential of Nexlatal and Nexlozet. Flash forward to today. We have now made many of the changes that were needed to strengthen our foundation and begin to recognize the potential of Nexlatal and Nexlovet. This includes bringing diverse experience to our senior leadership team, streamlining our commercial strategy, and implementing refined positioning for our medicines, all of which is moving the trajectory of Nexlatal and Nexlovet in the right direction. Our results from the second quarter show that these initiatives are already gaining momentum and materializing into growth. Prescribing physicians and prescriptions per physician are at their highest yet and continue to demonstrate a consistent double-digit and high single-digit growth, respectively. In the quarter, Nexlatal and Nexluzet prescriptions grew 28 percent, with accelerating month-over-month growth. But most importantly, Our medicines have reached nearly 48,000 patients here in the U.S. Since the mid-April introduction of the revised product positioning, providers have expressed a clear understanding of where to prescribe Nexlatal and Nexlavet in patients that stand to gain the largest benefit. The revised Nexlatal and Nexlavet positioning has resonated with payers as well. and has been beneficial in our new market access approach focused on improving formulary status of our medicines, specifically among Medicare Part D payers. The success of these efforts is evident from the immediate response by Humana, adding both Nexotal and Nexoset to their formulary as of May 1st. We continue to have promising conversations with payers who acknowledge the need for additional treatment options on formularies to tackle the large patient population not yet at LDL-C goals. A strong priority for the team this quarter was maximizing the awareness and value of Nexotol and Nexozet and driving quality prescriptions. While our generous financial benefit copay programs supported patients and encouraged adoptions of our medicines throughout the first year of launch and the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe the second quarter was the appropriate time to adjust both the duration as well as the buy-down magnitude of our copay card program to typical industry standards. With our strong commercial coverage in place and an improved economic environment, these adjustments resulted in limited impact to patient access to our medicines. Volume of payer covered prescriptions improved and second quarter net price was more favorable. contributing to the 67% sequential growth in U.S. net product revenue. We continue to expect additional positive impact in net pricing over time as plans fully implement coverage and volumes scale up. Since assuming the role of CEO, I've taken additional steps to position Aspirion for long-term success, one of them being the addition of prominent cardiologist, Dr. Joanne Foody, as chief medical officer. While our priority is steadfast on driving commercial excellence of Nexlatal and Nexlavet, ensuring we are prepared to capitalize on our unprecedented cardiovascular outcomes trial and the potential of our early stage pipeline is vital. The importance of the clear outcome study cannot be emphasized enough, not just for Aspirion, but for the entire field of cardiovascular medicine. Not only could our clear outcomes trial be monumental for encouraging late adopters, payers, and a broader application of Nexlatal and Nexlozet, but a potential risk reduction label indicates acceptance of an entirely new patient population that past medicines could not benefit. Historically, every LDL cholesterol-lowering therapy affecting the cholesterol synthesis pathway, as Nexlatal and Nexlozet do, demonstrated consistent outcome improvements. This along with the unique and deliberate design of our clear outcomes trial gives me great confidence on what is to come. All signs indicate that clear outcomes, now a little more than a year away, will make history in cardiovascular health and potentially further our leadership position in bringing innovation to underserved patients. If I could say only one thing, it would be this. Asperion is evolving quickly to maximize the opportunities that lay ahead and is instilling a laser-focused mentality on driving operational excellence throughout both commercial side of the business and also in our clinical and development programs. I am proud of what this team has accomplished in this short amount of time and continually gain confidence in the trajectory of Aspirion and our future as a company. Now I'll turn the call over to Joanne to introduce herself and ask her to share with you all her motivation behind joining our team. Joanne?