PAVmed Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Lucid Diagnostics Second Quarter 2025 Business Update Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt Riley, Lucid Diagnostics Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for participating in today's business update call. Joining me today on the call are Dr. Elishon Acklog, Chairman and CEO of Lucid Diagnostics, along with Dennis McGrath, Chief Financial Officer. The press release announcing our business update and financial results is available on Lucid's website. Please take a moment to read the disclaimers about forward-looking statements in the press release. The business update, press release, and the conference call all include forward-looking statements, and these forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are described in the disclaimer and in our filings of the SEC. For a list and a description of these and other important risks and uncertainties that may affect future operations, see Part 1, Item 1A, entitled Risk Factors and Lucid's most recent annual report on Forms 10-K, filed with the SEC, and any subsequent updates filed in quarter reports on Forms 10-Q and subsequent Forms 8-K. Except as required by law, LUCID disclaims any intentions or obligations to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect changes in expectations or in events, conditions, or circumstances on which the expectations may be based or that may affect the likelihood that actual results will differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the call over to Dr. Leshawn Ackog, Chairman and CEO of LUCID. Go ahead, Leshawn.

Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our quarterly update call today. As always, I'd like to thank our long-term shareholders for your ongoing support and commitment. Our team really remains singularly focused on driving this enterprise towards its substantial commercial potential and enhance our long-term shareholder value. Since our last update, the biggest development and near-term milestone is the upcoming LCD CAC meeting, which will be the main focus of today's call. We're really excited about this. We see this meeting as a very strong indicator of progress towards a positive Medicare coverage policy outcome. And we really believe that we're in the final stages of this process. We're excited that we've kind of reached this moment in time with very clear and now concrete steps ahead of us to navigate and to succeed. Thanks to our financings earlier this year, we have plenty of runway, and we're well-positioned to successfully navigate these final steps. We'll talk about this a little bit more later, but we've already begun to take proactive steps to ensure that once Medicare coverage is secured, we will be able to accelerate eCigar's commercialization and ultimately capitalize on this very large market opportunity that we face. Let's start with some key highlights related to our commercial execution. eCigar test volume for the second quarter was 2,756 tests. This is within our target range of 2,500 to 3,000 tests per quarter. And I'm really happy that the team continues to be successful at maintaining this level of volume, this target volume, while focusing on contractually guaranteed revenue opportunities and now with a new focus on Medicare patients. Revenue was $1.2 million. That's a 40% increase in revenue from the first quarter and matches our previous quarterly high. We're very excited to partner with HOAG, a large health system, a world-class health system in Orange County, California, and we've launched a comprehensive e-cigar esophageal pre-cancer testing program in partnership with them. What's really exciting about this program is that it's system-wide across the healthcare delivery network, so it includes partnerships between gastroenterologists, including the lead, Dr. Kenneth Chang, who's a very passionate advocate for their mission to eradicate esophageal cancer in their region. It includes primary care. There are 200 primary care physicians that we'll be engaging with, as well as their concierge medicine part of the health system. We really believe this is a model for additional leading health systems, both in that region as well as elsewhere, basically related to building comprehensive programs around using Eastern Guard esophageal pre-cancer testing. We continue to drive our cash pay and contracted programs that we launched earlier this year. These target concierge medicine practices of self-insured entities, which include fire departments, municipalities, and employers. Very steady progress on this front. We have a robust pipeline that is continuing to fill. We are getting traction on both We're learning, our team is learning how to engage these concierge medicine practices, how to establish contracts, and then how to drive patients within the practice to e-cigar testing. And that's generating good traction so far. Same on the contracting side, particularly with contracting with fire departments and municipalities. And we look forward to seeing some yield from these efforts in the coming quarters. Of course, this effort is designed to complement our traditional reimbursement pathways with commercial payers as well as Medicare. Now let's discuss our recent strategic accomplishments. As I mentioned, we have a MoldyX Contractor Advisory Committee, or CAC, meeting that's scheduled for September 4th. That notice went out a few weeks ago. And I'm really excited about this and look forward to providing you with a lot greater context a little bit later on this call. We were excited to see that the Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield positive coverage policy for ESAGARD that we had announced earlier actually became effective. This is our first positive commercial coverage policy. It covers upstate New York, and it serves as a precedent, first for commercial payers. We've been able to cite this in our ongoing engagements with other commercial payers, including other regional Blue Cross Blue Shield plans and our engagement with the broader Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. So we've seen significant value in having this one under our belt. And actually even potentially for Medicare, we've highlighted the fact that we're starting to secure commercial coverage in our conversations with the leadership of the multi-exit programs. It also validates the strength of our clinical evidence base. including the clinical utility of this test and the overall health care economic arguments that we're making with other commercial payers. It's not just a theoretical policy. We are already seeing patients in this region that have Highmark that we're billing under this policy, and we remain deeply engaged on this front.