Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to today's Neurocrine Biosciences reports second quarter results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question-and-answer session. You may register to ask a question at any time by pressing the star and 1 on your touch-tone phone. Please note this call may be recorded. and I will be standing by should you need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to your Vice President of Investor Relations, Todd Tushla. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Wylie. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us on our second quarter 2021 earnings call. On today's call is Kevin Gorman, our Chief Executive Officer, Matt Abernethy, our Chief Financial Officer, Eiry Roberts, our Chief Medical Officer, Eric Benevich, our Chief Commercial Officer, and Kyle Gano, our Chief Business Development and Strategy Officer. During today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. I encourage you to review the risk factors discussed in our latest SEC filings. After our prepared remarks, we will then head into question-and-answer session, where we ask you to please limit yourself to one question so we can get to as many questions as possible. At this point, I'll hand the call over to Kevin Gorman. Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone.

As you saw in our earnings release just a little bit ago, we had a very good second quarter with ingresic prescriptions bouncing back strongly from the Q1 levels. We attribute this to two main factors, a lessening of the pandemic during Q2 and the very good work of our sales, marketing, and medical teams in utilizing new tools to educate and engage with healthcare providers today. Now, we are still in an environment where greater than 50% of psychiatry visits are telemedicine. But I think, as you can see, we are adapting well to this. Now, we exited Q2 strong, and this bodes well for Q3. However, we do face headwinds. You are all aware, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, that the pandemic has worsened in the past several weeks with the spread of the Delta variant. Now, in those pockets of the country that are less vaccinated, we are seeing clinics closing and offices are starting to restrict access to us. Also, while Q3 has, there's a seasonality where growth is not as strong as Q2 and Q4. We've said that now for four years. But we do anticipate sequential growth, acknowledging that the Delta variant adds more unpredictability versus prior years. But I want to emphasize the bottom line of this. In the short term, we have adapted to this new environment and are showing record prescriptions. In the long term, the fundamental opportunity to help more patients remains unchanged. Only two out of ten tardive dyskinesia patients are diagnosed, and only one out of ten are being treated consistent with APA guidelines, that is, with a VMAT2 inhibitor. We continue to invest substantial resources on Ingresa. and the rest of the team will go into this in greater detail on this call. Switching over, I'm very pleased with the progress of our pipeline. At the beginning of the year, we set off to start nine mid to late stage clinical trials this year and we are on track to initiate all nine by year end. This is no small feat considering a number of these clinical studies are in Europe where the region continues to be seriously impacted by COVID far more than the U.S., Credesafront and CAH, our precision medicine approach and various epilepsy indications and movement disorders, and our psychiatry programs are all moving forward nicely. So I'll turn the call over to my colleagues, starting with Matt.