Halozyme Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:HALO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Corinne Jenkins: Yes. Helpful. Thank you. And maybe one last one from us. It sounds like there is a number of partners that are kind of circling around the auto-injector, what’s your sense of some of the gating factors are things they’d like to better understand before actually signing on the deal. And what will they be exploring with the studies next year?

Helen Torley: Yes. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks. Really when we’ve been presenting it, we’ve had comments like fantastic breakthrough, never felt this was possible. And I think is a degree of innovation that’s referenced here, Corinne, that like with any new innovation there is always a period of inertia. And we’ll see is exactly what we saw with ENHANZE if I go back to, right when I was in the company and where we just on a couple of the deals that took a couple of companies to come in and do it. And then the waves happened after that. So I think we’re just seeing that traditional innovation adults incurred and people moving into the clinic now to test it is going to help generate additional data and just because it was so remarkable we show them a video of patients receiving the therapy and it’s invisible disease.

The patients had received 10ml into the abdomen, I think in just 30 seconds. So I think it’s a wonderful reflection of the innovation and people are doing their work now to evaluate that, think about it for their patient populations and in the case of one partner I mentioned moving into clinical study next year. So we’re going to see more of that over the next step in months, I believe.

Corinne Jenkins: Helpful. Thanks.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Butler with JMP Securities. Your line is open.

Jason Butler: Hi, thanks for taking the question. Just one on the accelerated buyback. I mean, now that you’re wrapping up this buyback, can you just talk to us about how you’re thinking about future return of shareholder capital. And I guess put that in the context of your appetite for bringing on new technologies. Thanks.

Helen Torley: Yes, I’ll ask Nicole to address that.

Nicole LaBrosse: Yes. Thank you, Jason. So as we think about our capital allocation strategy. It really remains unchanged. We’re focused on the three pillars that we’ve been focused on, which is really continuing to invest in our current platforms, continuing to return capital to shareholders and we’re very excited to take advantage of this buying opportunity now and accelerate the remaining portion on the current plan to do that starting this quarter. And then also again very much continuing to look for growing that revenue growth, that durability long term via M&A. We implemented the ASR this quarter because there are no near-term plans to grow via M&A and we wanted to deploy our capital in the best way to return value to shareholders, but that will very much continue to be a focus in those longer term as we grow the business.

Jason Butler: Great. And then just one more from me on Phesgo. Can you just speak to how you think about peak adoption here and how the self-administration product could drive whether it could drive further adoption subcu?

Helen Torley: Yes, Thanks, Jason. On Phesgo, on Roche’s comments obviously what we’re seeing every quarter is an increase in the overall conversion, but I’ll just mention that every quarter there’s always four to six countries being added which is diluting the overall conversion. So that 37%, 38% reflects a range from very recent start of conversion up all the way up to I think mentioned 92% conversion in Europe with a U.S. based on latest comments, maybe two quarters ago at 20% at that time. Roche has commented that they expect up to get to 50% conversion with that, obviously continuing to be a range of recently launched markets and also high conversion in those markets where we’re seeing resource constraints, nursing shortages, ID capacity constraints.