Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, Inc. (OTCPK:PYNKF) Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call March 28, 2024, 4:30 PM ET
corporate participants
Jody Reitz-IR
Adrian Mendez – Chief Executive Officer
conference call participants
operator
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Perimeter Medical’s fourth quarter 2023 conference call. At this point, all lines are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will have a Q&A session. (Operator Instructions) This call was recorded on Thursday, March 28, 2024.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Jodi Regts. please continue.
Jody right
Thanks. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this conference call and webcast to provide Perimeter Medical Imaging AI or Perimeter’s fourth quarter and year-end 2023 results.
Joining today’s call are Perimeter CEO Adrian Mendes, who will provide an overview of Perimeter’s progress across the business; along with Sara Brien, Chief Financial Officer; and Andrew Berkeley, Perimeter’s Chief Innovation Officer, as we begin the Q&A session after our prepared remarks. , they can answer questions.
Please note that during this call, we will make certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding future financial condition, business strategy and strategic objectives, commercial activities and timelines, competitive conditions, research and development activities, anticipated costs and capital expenditures , research and clinical test results, and the potential benefits of our products, including Perimeter S Series OCT, Perimeter B Series OCT and Perimeter ImgAssist. Expected benefits from Perimeter’s updated version of ImgAssist AI, Perimeter’s ability to expand its user base and expected approvals of its proprietary AI, expectations for new products and their timing, and expectations for market expansion opportunities.
Forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond those anticipated Our controls include the risks and uncertainties described from time to time in our SEDAR filings. Our results may differ materially from those projected on today’s conference call. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement.For more information about the risks and uncertainties facing our business, management encourages you to review the company’s public information Documents and press releases are posted at sedarplus.ca. A press release summarizing this quarter’s update will be posted on the Investors section of our website at peritermed.com and submitted to SEDAR.
Now, I’d like to turn the call over to Adrian.
Adrian Mendes
Thanks, Jody. Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining our conference call. Today, I’ll first review where we are in 2023 and our progress since I joined the company mid-year. Following a comprehensive analysis of the business, we have focused on improving key areas of the business and I believe we have made significant progress in this regard.
Perimeter is entering an expansion phase of its development, and as such, our goal is to strengthen the company’s infrastructure to support our planned growth. We set clear goals to increase team morale, increase employee retention, and eliminate any silos that hinder effective collaboration across the organization, all in an effort to dramatically accelerate our execution.
We have made changes to our board of directors and senior executives to strengthen our leadership and focus on sales and marketing, finance and product innovation. We come together as a team to create a strong culture that enables us to achieve our ambitious business goals.
Before becoming CEO, I conducted a thorough investigation of Perimeter’s technology. And, as I concluded then, today we continue to see strong evidence that there is a compelling product market for Perimeter’s commercial S-Series OCT devices. Notably, we have made some significant investments in our sales organization over the past year and implemented some key process improvements.
As a reminder, Perimeter’s S-Series represents our flagship intraoperative OCT imaging technology, providing surgeons with image resolution capable of visualizing tissue structures at the cellular level down to the critical two millimeter depth we are seeing in the operating room in real time. Evaluate edges. We have maintained a strong sales pipeline with surgeons interested in learning more about and using our technology. Historically, however, sales cycles have been long.
A key achievement over the past year has been the significant increase in our clinical education and imaging training teams and the redeployment of resources to help eliminate bottlenecks in our sales cycle. We’ve also had high success placing more S-Series devices in existing customer networks. This shortens the sales cycle for these placements and leads to word-of-mouth referrals from surgeons to colleagues within their broader health network.
This is a turning point in Perimeter’s commercialization journey, and we believe these testimonials from surgeon end-users and other stakeholders in the broader healthcare system further validate the value of Perimeter’s technology and our goal of making it the standard of care in cancer. in surgery.
The network of early expert adopters with the ability and motivation to use our breakthrough technology continues to grow. In addition to laying the foundation for our early revenue streams, these customers provide us with a direct pipeline to collect additional product feedback from the field in order to iterate and improve current features.
This agile method is more commonly used in computer software and hardware development, and we have successfully applied this agile method not only to our current products, but also to support our future product pipeline. Let me pause here for a moment and talk about the ways we’re building a strong product pipeline and re-energizing product development at Perimeter.
In 2023, we promoted Andrew Berkeley, one of the co-founders of Perimeter, to the newly created chief innovation officer. This decision not only reflects well-deserved recognition of Andrew’s years of hard work, but also underscores our strong commitment to broadening our new product development pipeline and beyond.
Importantly, we formalized our product roadmap process and identified the many product innovations we expect to launch in the coming months. This gave me an insight into the progress being made in our next-generation artificial intelligence development and the critical trials underway. By way of background, Perimeter’s B-Series devices combine our innovative OCT platform with our proprietary ImgAssist AI technology. New enhanced AI leverages additional training material and our latest advances to demonstrate greater sensitivity, specificity, precision, and recall.
We recently published the results of a peer-reviewed retrospective study demonstrating that Perimeter’s deep learning model has high levels of sensitivity and specificity, accurately identifying 96.8% of pathologically positive margins. These results highlight the clinical feasibility of using OCT for AI-enhanced margin visualization in breast cancer surgery and its potential to reduce reoperation rates.
Following a productive interaction with the FDA last year, we successfully implemented a significantly enhanced artificial intelligence algorithm in an ongoing pivotal clinical trial under our existing research protocol. As a result, all clinical trial sites are now using newer artificial intelligence as patients continue to participate in ongoing studies. It is expected that the updated version of ImgAssist AI will facilitate more accurate classification and fewer false positives and false negatives.
Additionally, we received approval to enroll up to 531 subjects and successfully added new clinical trial sites at Mayo Clinic in Florida and Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle to support accelerated patient recruitment. While I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished over the past six to nine months, we are focused on the future and have ambitious goals to achieve in 2024.
In our clinical trials, patient enrollment is tracking well and actually trending better than the model. With the potential to become the new standard of care for breast conservation surgery, we look forward to updating you on our progress in advancing peripheral B-series OCT with ImgAssist AI.
We will execute our blueprint to further expand our reference sites and surgeon champions. We hope to expand our reach by connecting with high-potential surgeons, leveraging existing institutional relationships within the health care network, and identifying the best geographic areas, particularly those that offer the lowest barriers to entry and the lowest costs to support imaging training. Installation base.
Our go-to-market strategy is further supported by a strong intellectual property position protected by numerous patents and, importantly, a proprietary image library containing over 2 million breast cancer-related images. We will continue to adhere to our product development roadmap and leverage our extensive artificial intelligence and medical technology expertise to broaden our product lines.
Our world-class AI team develops models suitable for immediate application in healthcare settings and trains these models using our vast library of images to achieve industry-leading results. In fact, our use of AI goes well beyond standard image classification use cases, and our AI team is doing an incredible job deploying AI models across the entire technology stack to improve the customer experience in many different ways.
We’re excited to start sharing some of these advancements with you as they become available over the next year. I believe Perimeter’s AI leadership represents a key value driver as we build a product pipeline designed to improve social outcomes and expand our addressable market across a variety of tissue types beyond the breast.
Talk briefly about our financial situation. As of December 31, 2023, cash and cash equivalents were approximately $14 million. All of our current clinical and product development programs are on track and consistent with our current financial model. For further details, please see the annual report and press release filed today.
Before I wrap up, I want to highlight some important peer-reviewed research recently conducted at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. These data indicate that high reoperation rates after breast-conserving surgery persist and are associated with increased patient risks and adverse outcomes, warranting increased attention and continued efforts to reduce reoperation rates.
Perimeter’s mission statement is reinforced by the fact that this problem remains pervasive, with huge impacts on both a social and economic level. Our work at Perimeter is dedicated to directly addressing the significant costs and negative patient outcomes associated with reoperation. By providing innovative intraoperative imaging technology, our goal is to free patients from the emotional and physical trauma of a second surgery for residual cancer.
Our entire team is inspired by this mission. We see an opportunity here to truly make a difference in patients’ lives. We intend to execute our commercial, clinical and product development strategies and look forward to updating you on our progress.
Overall, I’m very excited about the future of Perimeter. 2024 is going to be a big year for us.
Now, I’ll start with the questions. operator?
question Time
operator
operator
Ladies and gentlemen, no questions at the moment. I will now turn the meeting back to Jodi Regts for closing remarks. please continue.
Jody right
Thanks. Thank you all for joining us today. We look forward to updating you on our progress. This concludes today’s call.
operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference call. We thank you for participating and ask that you disconnect.
