MorphoSys AG (NASDAQ:MOR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And look in longer term, so guidance is roughly from Monjuvi sales to be about flat this year. Do you think this year could be the peak sales because there’s more competition in subsequent years? Or do you think you might have some more growth from the existing US relapse or refractory DLBCL indication?

Jean-Paul Kress: Thanks for the question, James. So, I’ll address — this is Jean-Paul. I’ll address the Pela partnership question. So, as you can expect, the window we are operating in now less than 12 months for the pivotal data is extremely encouraging for us, and that means a lot of optionality. That being said, obviously the value creation opportunity is so important here that we would rather obviously wait for exercising these options later on after we know the results and we can publish them. But never say never. Right now we are focusing mostly on executing swiftly the trial, ensuring the right level of quality. We’ve been over-delivering on that. We’re very pleased. The team has done a great job. It’s also the reflection of the — very strong enthusiasm from the myelofibrosis community on pelabresib and the study.

So, it’s on the green and again, it means optionality for potential strategic moves and why not partnerships or others. So, we’ll keep you posted, of course. And on the second question regarding the Monjuvi outlook for the year, I’ll ask Sung to answer.

Sung Lee: Yeah. James, thanks for the questions. So, in my prepared comments, I did mention that we would be sequential down in quarter one, and this is just for the usual seasonal dynamics. We did have some inventory take up in quarter four, which is typical and what we’ve seen in the prior two years of launch. With that said, I think this quarter one is very different than the prior two years quarter ones where we saw an intense outbreak of COVID Delta, Omicron variants. And obviously, we don’t have that in this quarter one and therefore, we’re tracking right where we want to be, despite the fact that it was predictable that we would be sequentially down in quarter one. With regard to the rest of the year, yes, we would expect quarter one to, most likely be the low water remark for us, and we would expect some growth in the subsequent quarters.

But I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves here. We did give a guidance range for a reason, and that’s to factor in increasing competitive landscape. So, with your — with regard to your question about, will this be a peak year, I’ll just highlight that the upper end of the guidance does suggest modest year-over-year growth and, of course, the bottom end suggests year-over-year decline. So, I think it’s way too soon to say exactly where we fall in that range, but we feel we’re right on track to be within that guidance range.

Operator: The next question comes from Rajan Sharma from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Rajan Sharma: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Just on pelabresib, could you just kind of discuss your expectations for the clinical profile and specifically I guess what you think would constitute a best case outcome in terms of SVR and also total symptom score. And then specifically within total symptom score, what do you think are the most important underlying symptoms within that? And is there potential pelabresib to differentiate on any of these? And then just want to follow upon Monjuvi. So, in terms of the prescriber base, I think you’ve split out kind of the 70/30 between community and academic. Do you think that’s steady state now, or do you see that to change over the next kind of 12 to 24 months? Thanks.

Jean-Paul Kress: Thanks Rajan for the question. Tim will address the MANIFEST-2 question and Joe, the Monjuvi question, Tim, please.