Innoviva, Inc. (INVA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Day 2 at the Bank of America Las Vegas conference. I'm Dan Lundquist, I'm the healthcare specialist. Very pleased today to have Innoviva with us, we have Steve Basso, the CFO, who's going to give a presentation. Steve?

Great. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for the introduction. It's really great to be here in Las Vegas at the conference, and it's exciting to see so much activity and innovation in this space. As Dan mentioned, my name is the CFO -- I'm Steve Basso, and I'm the CFO of Innoviva. I'd like to start today with giving a bit of a background of who we are as we're somewhat of an unusual company in this space. And then also give you a little sense of what we've been up to and why we're so excited about the performance and prospects of our business. So Innoviva was originally formed to maximize the value of the royalty streams coming from respiratory products that we had developed and licensed to GSK for commercialization. These royalty streams have done very well over the years and have turned Innoviva into a highly profitable company. And over the years, as our cash flows grew, Innoviva began to focus more on capital allocation strategies thoughtfully to deploy our cash flows into areas of high unmet medical need with strong growth potential and significant expected return in order to create long-term value for our shareholders. And as you'll see in the process, we have built a wholly owned operating business as well as made a number of significant investments in our business. And so as a result, today, Innoviva stands as comprised of 3 main assets: The first asset is our historical royalty portfolio from the respiratory drugs, which are currently marketed by GSK, that are expected to provide over $1 billion in revenue over the next 5 years; the second is our high-growth critical care and infectious disease hospital-focused therapeutics business, which we call Innoviva Specialty Therapeutics or IST. IST generated more than $70 million in revenue last year and is growing rapidly with the new launch XACDURO from September of last year; and finally, we have a diversified portfolio of mostly liquid strategic healthcare investments that is currently valued at over $600 million with a very attractive risk reward profile. With that backdrop, I'd like to now go into a little bit more detail about our royalties as well as our therapeutics platform and show why we are so excited about our prospects. So our royalty portfolio is the foundation for Innoviva. From this foundation, we received sizable revenues from 2 best-in-class respiratory therapies called BREO and ANORO, which are, again, commercialized by GSK that provide a dependable source of cash flows that has allowed us to create the other parts of our business. Our portfolio contributed over $0.25 billion in revenue last year. And based on 5-year analyst consensus projections, it will continue to deliver over $200 million a year. We're very excited about the prospects of this royalty portfolio because it has proven to be very differentiated as well as resilient. These drugs are some of the best selling respiratory drugs in the world. They're well characterized and trusted. And although they are somewhat mature in the U.S., the majority of revenues now come from ex U.S. territories where the competition is often not as strong, allowing for continued growth in many of the regions. All of this together has combined to help this portfolio significantly outperform expectations over the past years to continue to thrive across the world despite competitive pressures, and we anticipate robust performance from this portfolio, especially given the strong momentum we've seen coming into 2024. And finally, both royalty streams are very durable with meaningful longevity not only based on strong IP protection, but also an additional buffer based on manufacturing complexity that serves as a deep moat for potential new entrants, as we've seen with other similar drug devices in the past. The second core part of Innoviva, or IST, is a robust growing operating business in the infectious disease and critical care space, which we think has tremendous growth potential ahead. This IST business was designed based as a result of a specific investment thesis that we developed over the years. We saw the challenges that some infectious disease and critical care companies face despite high unmet need, which resulted in depressed valuations across the board. And we believe that by identifying differentiated assets, focusing on efficiency as well as operating at scale, we could create a profitable business via a roll-up strategy and IST today is just that. It was specifically designed to serve as a sustainable platform in the infectious disease and hospital space, and it has so far exceeded our expectations. The business is anchored by a portfolio of truly differentiated products that have strong synergies with each other as well as novel mechanisms of actions with the ability to affect significant changes in health outcomes and to save lives in areas such as septic shock, complicated intra-abdominal infections as well as carbapenem-resistant acinetobacter. And as mentioned, we also had a recent Phase III readout that could address significant unmet needs in STIs as well as the growing threat of resistant gonorrhea. All this translates into market opportunities across the board. Portfolio today is commercialized, being efficient and effective targeted operational platform with an experienced team that is some of the best concentration of therapeutic area expertise in the industry, including commercial, regulatory, medical and CMC. And the business today stands on a stable financial position, where we have not only a strong base of revenue as well as long remaining growth runway. Our 2 most established products, GIAPREZA and XERAVA have both solid utilization as well as market positions with growth drivers that are unlocking significant additional value. Additionally, we have a recent drug launch in XACDURO, as mentioned, that is in high-growth mode in a market of high unmet need and very few treatment options. And then lastly, we have the pre-NDA product in zoliflodacin that, if approved, will tap into what is likely to be the biggest market of all in the U.S. as well as the rest of the world. Each of these products has patents protecting them well into the 2030s with options for further extension and exclusivity. And so we are confident in the durability of these revenues. And finally, we believe that the current platform can not only serve as the foundation for organic, but inorganic growth as well. And we are pleased today with the operational delivery of our IST business as we manage to reenergize legacy products to successfully get approved and launch new products and to advance another potential therapy towards the NDA filing, all with a compact and highly productive workforce. And so if we look at Q4 -- I'm sorry, as we look at Q1 2024 as a review of our quarterly earnings, we're very pleased to see that both our royalty as well as our own product portfolio is showing robust performance. It's a very exciting time for Innoviva, and we are proud to be delivering innovation to patients in areas of critical unmet need. And so in summarize, we're very confident in the growth aspects of our business. We feel we're ideally positioned to drive additional strong cash flows going forward and to continually and thoughtfully allocate capital to create additional value for our shareholders. Thank you.

Great. Well, I guess we do have some time for Q&A. I'll look out into the field as I ask one. But I remember quite closely the -- when ANORO and BREO were coming up through the Glaxo portfolio. Maybe just kind of contextualize how you think about leveraging your expertise that you still have internally on other respiratory products, if that's something that you guys have kind of thought about going forward as well.

Yes, Dan, thanks for that. And I think what I would anchor that on is, as I mentioned, we look at sort of the IST portfolio as one that has significant operating leverage. Right now, the products that we have as I would say, only a few call points. And so I think it would be very efficient for us to add additional assets with similar call points in the business. But as we've seen with the health of the contribution of the strong cash flows not only from the royalties, but from our IST business, we think there's an opportunity to grow this substantially in other areas as well.

And just looking at the IST portfolio and thinking about kind of the rate backdrop, the biotech funding drop, have you seen more engagement from perhaps companies that have approved products in the hospital setting that just don't have necessarily the scale to continue to commercialize that might be opportunities to bring within the portfolio?