MedImmune at Thomas Weisel Partners Healthcare Conference - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

IAN SOMAIYA, MODERATOR, ANALYST, THOMAS WEISEL PARTNERS: All right. Good afternoon. My name is Ian Somaiya. I'm the Biologics Analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners. The next presenting company is MedImmune. It's a pleasure for me to invite--or introduce David Mott, who is the Vice Chairman, President and CEO of MedImmune. So we'll be starting off with a short presentation. And then, we'll move directly into a Q&A session. David?

DAVID MOTT, VICE CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, MEDIMMUNE: Thank you very much, Ian. I think I've got five to seven slides or something just to sort of orient us all about the business. And I'll try to keep it real informal to get everybody ready emotionally for a good Q&A session. I need to begin by warning you, because my General Counsel tells me to, that I am going to have some forward-looking statements in my comments based on our current assumptions about the business. Invariably, some of those will prove to be wrong and that could materially affect our financial results. You are encouraged to consult our risk factors before making an investment decision.

MedImmune is actually getting to be a bit of an old-timer by biotech standards. We've been around for about 18 years now. Frighteningly enough, I've been there for 15 of those, which I think makes me get to be an old-timer now. We are now generating over the last 12 months about $1.25 billion in revenues. We are investing at a prodigious rate to drive future growth in R&D with over 400 million going into R&D over the last 12 months, a little over 30% of product sales.

We have the good fortune of being very well capitalized with a little over $2 billion of cash on the balance sheet at the end of last quarter when we last reported our financial results. We currently have--actually it's a little up over this--about 2,500 employees in the business. We're based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, just outside of Washington, right up the road from the FDA in Rockville.

And we have four marketed products - Synagis, which is far and away the largest product, generates over 80% of the top line for us now, recombinantly produced humanized monoclonal antibody for prevention of viral pneumonia in high risk kids, primarily meaning kids that are born prematurely or have heart or lung disease.

And then, we have Ethyol, our first cancer product, which is a supportive care product for chemo and radiation therapy patients. Cytogam, a polyclonal antibody product for treatment and prevention of CMV in solid organ transplant patients. And we're just about to enter the commercialization phase for FluMist, our intranasal live attenuated flu vaccine technology.

We are rather active in R&D with over 40 different programs currently in development, including 15 that are in the clinic now. We're focused in the areas of infectious disease, oncology, and inflammatory disease or autoimmune disease. We try to stay focused around areas of innovation where we have the opportunity to introduce proprietary products that meet large unmet medical needs. And clearly, we have a strong leadership position in pediatrics, in respiratory infectious disease, and in all things related to antibody and vaccine technology.

Two of the things I really wanted to hit on in just my opening comments here are that we had a tough year last year - our first ever in over a decade of hitting or exceeding our Synagis sales. We had a bad year last year. We have focused intensely this year on making sure that that doesn't happen again, and we're actually off to a great start. And I wanted to share with you all some of the reasons why we're pretty positive about how things are going thus far in preparation for this year's RSV season, as well as, secondly, for this year's flu season where we're now beginning to get ready for what we hope will be the launch of CAIV-T, our next generation version of FluMist next year.

On the RSV side, we really have increased our operational effectiveness and efficiency in the business in every single functional area within sales and marketing. We have also completed a substantial expansion of our sales capabilities, adding over 125 new sales professionals to the organization in May and June. We have done that probably two to three months ahead of schedule, which I think will have a big impact on the effectiveness of that sales organization as we head into this year's fall RSV season.

We have also completely reworked our distribution network and our strategy for contracting with our specialty pharmacy partners to ensure that we're actually incentivizing behaviors that advance our business more effectively than we were in the past. And we are probably four months ahead of where we were last year in rolling out our distributor network to our customers for this year's RSV season.

We have implemented an entirely new and a much more customer-focused managed care approach. We have a new marketing strategy really focused on enhancing compliance and getting directly to …