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 call over to Ben Church, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications at Experion. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to Asperion's third 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 Asperion. 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 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, November 2, 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, this conference call and webcast 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.asperian.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 corporate team at asperian.com to schedule time to speak with our team. With us today are Sheldon Koenig, President and CEO of Asperion, Rick Bartram, Chief Financial Officer of Asperion, Dr. Joanne Foody, our Chief Medical Officer, and Eric Warren, our Head of Sales and Marketing. I'll now turn the call over to Sheldon for prepared remarks. Sheldon?

Thanks, Ben, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to review our progress and recent business updates at Asperion. I am pleased to share all the significant strides taken by our team over these past months to position ourselves for long-term success as a nimble and innovative organization dedicated to addressing cardiovascular disease, which remains the number one killer in the United States and worldwide. As a reminder, we recently announced a transformative long-term growth plan to strengthen the organizational structure and internal processes of the company to facilitate better alignment with the current healthcare environment and the constraints driven by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that the changes we are implementing will enhance our ability to more efficiently deliver consistent growth in the near term and prepare us to scale up opportunistically in the future. Looking ahead, we anticipate steady consistent growth leading up to the top line readout of our clear outcome study during the first quarter of 2023. which, if successful, we believe will be a key inflection point in the demand for our commercial products Nexplatel and Nexoset. I am also thrilled to announce that last week we reached 80% of the required major adverse cardiac events accumulation, signifying that the study is tracking in line with expectations. We recently held an investor-facing fireside chat with the renowned Dr. Steven Nissen, who is the lead investigator in the CLEAR Outcomes trial, who affirmed his confidence in the quality of the trial that our team has kept on target all throughout the pandemic. By optimizing the organizational structure, we are also able to dramatically reduce our expense base, which Rick will touch upon shortly, to ensure the appropriate allocation of resources to successfully complete the CLEAR Outcomes study and advance the launch of our approved products. Given the concentrated nature of our existing customers, we expect to retain the vast majority of our current prescription volume with this new plan focused on the 80 core territories that drive 90% of our prescription volume, supported by increased utilization of non-personal promotion. With these additive tools, we will look to, one, target integrated delivery networks that partner with key opinion leaders at the top institutions recognized for their comprehensive cardiac care centers, two, drive interactions with the top 10,000 accessible providers most likely to prescribe our medicine, and three, support peer-to-peer education and scientific exchange through proven virtual forums and medical meetings. In the weeks ahead, we will continue to implement and execute these strategies along with those complementary initiatives we put in place during the third quarter. As we stated on October 18th, there are two headwinds that led to Nexletol and Nexlet prescription growth of 10% during the third quarter, inadequate access to HCPs, and prior authorizations. We believe the Salesforce 3Money efforts to focus on only the most effective territory and ramp in utilization of supplementary non-personal promotion tactics already underway are intended to address this first factor, while our prescription support program with Assembia that was introduced in August will help alleviate the prior authorization burden physicians previously avoided with a full buy-down copay card. This prescription support program will allow physicians to e-prescribe Nexlatal and Nexlavet to a centralized pharmacy that processes prior authorization, eases patient access, and mails medicine directly to the patient within a few days. On the Medicare side, we continue to see payer-covered prescription volumes increase as pull-through of our contracts improves. especially given the Humana win earlier this year. Even with shifts in patient volume mix, third quarter net price remains stable quarter over quarter, and we continue to expect additional positive impact in net pricing over time as our plans fully implement coverage of Nexlatal and Nexlazet and volumes scale up. With our new strategic framework in place to more efficiently grow our commercial products and the groundbreaking Clear Outcome Study underway, We believe we are poised to emerge as a leader in lipid management therapeutics with a keen focus on delivering benefits to patients. Now, I will turn it over to Rick to provide comments on the quarterly financial performance.