All right. I think we'll get started. Welcome back to the 46th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. My name is Myles Minter. I am a senior biotech analyst here at the firm. I am joined here with Matt Phipps, who is the head of biotech research as well. We cover argenx together. With that, I need to point you to important disclosures that are available to everyone in this room and listening online at williamblair.com. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce Karl Gubitz, the Chief Financial Officer of argenx as well. Sitting in the audience we have Alexandra Roy, who is senior director of IR. With that, I will pass it over to Karl.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Myles. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, I've been with argenx now for just over five years. I joined argenx when it was essentially an R&D center in Belgium. Today, we are a fully integrated global company, built on the success of VYVGART, our lead asset. I'll talk about that a little bit more. Market cap of around EUR 50 billion and growing. Growing a lot up until now and a lot of future growth. I'll take you through the deck. I'll show you a few slides. If I can leave you with two things about argenx, one is growth. Yes, we've grown a lot. 17 quarters of consecutive growth, typically about 100% year-over-year growth.
The last quarter was a little bit lower at 63%. There's still a lot of growth in the short term, in the medium term, and the long term in terms of revenues, and there's also growth in terms of profitability. The scale of the company, the scale of revenues now allows you see that profitability increase is falling through to the profit line, and you see it falling through to the cash generation line. Growth is the one thing I please want you to remember. The second one is execution. We get the question a lot about what makes argenx different. We can talk about the focus on the patient, entrepreneurial science, innovation, the way we scale as a company, the way we think about scaling. I truly believe it's unique. We're a EUR 50 billion market company. We've got less than 2,000 colleagues. It really makes us unique.
Why does it matter for you? It matters for you because execution. As a company, we are super focused on execution. We had a few setbacks like all biotechs. It's part of the industry. We haven't missed a beat in terms of execution, and that focus on execution will continue. If you remember two things from today, my talk here would've been successful. Growth, execution. Thank you. Okay, I can stop now, huh? We set ourselves a really big ambition, which is the ambition for 2030. We want to have 50,000 patients on treatment. The last time we gave you a patient number was at the end of last year. We had 19,000 patients, one nine, on treatment. We're going to get to that 50,000. We have multiple paths to getting there.
Currently, we only have two indications, well, three if you count ITP in Japan, but that's very small. We are working our way to adding multiple indications. We can all do the math, and you can also just with the two indications which we already have, we're going to get close to 50,000 patients in any case. Very ambitious, but achievable target for patients. I know there's some accountants, and remember, I'm the CFO in the room. In terms of dollar per patient, MG is around $225. CIDP, our second indication, is around $450,000 per patient. You can all do the math on where this is going to get you. The second target for Vision 2030 is 10 labeled indications. We have two at the moment.
We want to have 10, and that's our plan, and I can show you how we're going to get there by the end of this decade. In terms of driving that future growth, long-term sustainable growth well into the next decade, five new molecules in phase III. That's over and above what we currently have in phase III. That is our vision. It is ambitious, but we believe we can get there. What are we doing this year? The priorities for 2026. Impact more patients with VYVGART, that is revenue growth now. I'll talk about it later on, how are we going to get there? What are the growth drivers we have today? I'll get into those a little bit later. The second thing we do is this company is built on VYVGART. VYVGART is an FcRn.
The FcRn class, we believe, is going to be very sizable. How do we ensure that we continue to build the class and we play a leadership role in this class well into the next decade? That's why we have our second generation FcRn's. We have our combo strategy. We have our orals. I'll talk about all of that. A lot of our focus is pulling that through. The last, on the right-hand side is call it other innovation. As I said, this company is built on VYVGART, once-in-a-decade drug, but we want to show you that our model, our technology is repeatable and scalable. We've got other assets which we believe are a product in a pipeline, but what we're doing with VYVGART, we can do again and again, and we're pulling that through. That is our objectives for 2026.
Usually, we keep the finances until the end, but since you, Myles, got the CFO to be up here today, we're going to start with the finances. That's the revenue curve there. 17 quarters in a row, growing, growing. Always growing. Very, very impressive. To maintain that growth curve, you need new innovation, and I'm going to talk about that new innovation because we have it in hand. You will see on the top there we typically prepare review revenues versus the consecutive quarters because year-over-year is quite high. I'll go to the P&L, and this is where you already start seeing the scale of a P&L falling through to profitability. On the top line, growth of 63%, operating profit growing at 183%, EUR 400 million in the quarter.
That, by the way, also fell through to the cash generation slide, where we ended the quarter at EUR 4.9 billion. This is just me trying to illustrate that we're going to be very disciplined in how we scale the company, how we build capabilities. The fact that we have cash today, the fact that you can buy things doesn't mean you should be buying them. The days of biotechs and pharma owning everything, manufacturing all through the value chain, we believe those days are gone. It is a disadvantage. You need to focus on what you're really good at, then you need to build capabilities outside the company. You have a flexible P&L. You can toggle it up and down as you want, and you can get true expertise in those areas if you do it right. That is what we're doing as a company.
With all the new indications and new products, we believe we can keep that revenue line growing, which will then give you that profitability I was referencing. Just some of our data points which we talk about today. MG stands for myasthenia gravis. That's our first indication. CIDP is our second indication. Those are the two indications which we've launched in the U.S. Those two indications drives that EUR 1.3 billion revenues in Q1, which I showed you, and that is across all the different presentations. We have an IV, we have a physician-administered subQ, we call it VYVGART Hytrulo, and we have a PFS, a prefilled syringe for self-injection, which is a 20-second injection. Really important because the PFS for self-injection is the key differentiator from the competition.
Typically, you go to infusion center, you get infused, takes hours, or you can literally walk to your fridge, you can take out the injection, inject yourself. You can take the injection on a holiday. You can throw it in your bag for 30 days. We've democratized the treatment of MG and CIDP with PFS. Our competitors cannot get there because we have exclusivity on the Halozyme technology, which allows you to do the self-injection. On the top in the quarter, we gave you the data point in the last quarterly earnings a few weeks ago. New patient starts amongst the highest quarters since the start. That is just a short way of saying that the growth is not stopping. For MG and CIDP, we will have continued growth in those indications even after 17 quarters and even before you add the new indications and label expansions I will reference.
5,000 prescribers in the U.S. It's going really well. Earlier line use, so important because in MG, 80% of the patients are not yet on a biologic. VYVGART, of course, is a biologic. All the new innovations are biologics. You add all of them together, it's around 20% of the market. 80% is still out there to be captured. You're not going to capture 100% of it, but the share of biologic will be substantially higher than 20% in a few years. VYVGART is getting that first-line patient in terms of biologic. Four out of five physicians will start you with VYVGART today. There's a lot of competition out there. They all typically behind VYVGART. As I already said, PFS, prefilled syringe for self-injection, is what's driving the growth.
In terms of where are we now with myasthenia gravis, when we launched, we talked about 17,000 patients in the U.S. These are U.S. numbers. The 25,000 there on the right, that is the patients which we believe are the subset of those earlier patient lines, which we can capture for VYVGART, which will be VYVGART patients, because patients will always start with MESTINON and steroids, but many of them should be converted to VYVGART patients. That is where we're going to get the growth from, and that is being driven by PFS. Seronegative is a label expansion. It is acetylcholine-positive patients was our original ADAPT study, what got approved through the ADAPT study. Now we add seronegative, which basically expands the label. We've got the broadest label out there. What this means in the physician office, you walk in, you present yourself as a gMG patient.
The physician then needs to do your test to see are you acetylcholine-positive, are you MuSK, or what are you, before the payer will approve. VYVGART, only VYVGART, you don't need to do that test anymore because we've got all of gMG, generalized myasthenia gravis. The next one is ocular. That's 7,000 patients. Think of ocular as even before you're generalized into generalized myasthenia gravis, you have ocular. It's those even earlier patient lines. 85% of those patients generalize into a gMG. We've got the study result. We're going to file. Hopefully next year we're going to launch. We're going to add another 7,000 patients, and that will help us strengthen ourselves as that first-line biologic because only us will have ocular on the label. Long way of saying plenty of growth in gMG. I've talked about the broadest label.
I can just say ADAPT was the original study, acetylcholine receptor-positive, then we've got seronegative, and then the last one is ocular. Very similar efficacy across the three subsets. The next one is CIDP. 42,000 patients in the U.S. 24,000 patients are being treated. 12,000 of them are not adequately treated. We get our patients currently in that 12,000 patients, and over time we can move up earlier. What's driving that moving up earlier is continued experience, feedback from patients, physicians, and also arming them with data. Some of the data, which we shared at the recent medical conference, says that nearly 90% of patients or naive patients showed a treatment effect with VYVGART, which is really important because you don't have to step through anything else. If you have a naive patient, just put them on VYVGART.
The other one was sustained benefit after 96 weeks. What is important when we speak to docs is that VYVGART is not just a more convenient IVIG, because IVIG is what most patients start on. That is, again, infusion, takes time, side effects. With VYVGART, 22nd injection, so much easier. It's not just more convenient. We also have a regain of function data from the study, from the ADHERE study. Half of the patients which entered the study in a wheelchair walked out of the study. This is what's so encouraging working at the company. We open our company meetings with patients. Simple things. Patients can't wash their hair, can't walk to the mailbox. You hear stories about, "I am playing golf now.
I can go on holidays." The impact on patient is so motivating, and this is why we're doing what we do at a biotech like argenx. Behind that, the next readout in Q3, we're going to have myositis. Myositis is a basket study, three different myositis types. We're going to get that phase III data in Q3. If you add all three together, it's around 70,000 patients in the U.S. Really sizable opportunity. This is a prototype Vyvgart indication or argenx indication. Huge unmet need. IMNM in particular, for example, 20,000 patients with basically no treatment options. If we get that data in a few weeks, few months, in Q3, we can transform those patient lives. On the right-hand side is Sjögren's. We're also in phase III. We're going to get that data next year. Over 300,000 patients.
We can all do the math of what that could mean if these studies read out positively. I remind you, these are all IgG-mediated diseases. This is what MG is. This is what CIDP is. This is what we believe these are. There are always a risk, saying these studies are going to work, might not work, but it is a de-risk asset which we have in VYVGART. This is how we build the FcRn franchise. Remember, we have got VYVGART, VYVGART Hytrulo . Truly, I talked about the different presentations. We've got an auto-injector coming next year. Nobody can get to an auto-injector because we've got the exclusivity on Halozyme technology. We also have got the exclusivity on the electrified technology, which is another way of concentrating the drug for FcRn. Nobody can copy that.
We've got the combo studies, the auto-injector, and the next gens are really important because how do you sustain your FcRn into the next decade? You do life cycle planning. We already have 213. VYVGART is dosed depending on the indication, either every second week or every week. We've got a longer-acting version of that now, 213. It's phase III-ready. We can roll off. We can take all our existing indications and move them to this more convenient dosing, similar to SOLIRIS, ULTOMIRIS of AZ. We've got 124, which is still in phase I. We hope to pull that through this year. If we have two next gens, we can play with life cycle management versus going into broader indications at a different price point, which in the long term, I think will be very beneficial.
We also have with unnatural products, oral program, which we're working on. Over here is our pipeline. On the left, about 25 IIP programs. This is the heart of argenx. This is how we get innovation in. Our discovery organization is actually quite small. We build antibodies. How we get the novel biology in is collaborating with typically academic institutions. All our innovation is sourced like that. You can come and visit us in Ghent. Our labs are actually relatively small for the size of a company, because we believe you can hire hundreds and thousands of scientists. You're not going to copy the knowledge out there in these academic centers. If you can tap into that successfully and build an operating model, this is what we have done, and we've done it multiple times.
On the right-hand side, maybe on the registrational, those are all phase III assets, which are going to read out in the next year or two. On the proof of concept, we also have all the other assets, which I won't get into now. These are the assets, the readouts which we're going to have this year. myositis, as I said, shortly. Sjögren's later this year. ITP, next year. We haven't talked about empasiprubart, MMN, we will also have this year. As I said, this company is built on VYVGART, but we want to show you that we can do it again and again. The first one on deck is EMPA. It's our second asset. It's a C2 blocker. We have the multifocal motor neuropathy data. The phase II data was spectacular.
We've backed that up with open label extension data, which we showed earlier this year in January. We showed that to the investor community. If we can replicate the phase II in the phase III study, we do it head-to-head with IVIG, because MMN patients are all on IG. The primary endpoint is to show non-inferiority with a secondary showing superiority, because we believe we can get there, but let's see what the data says. That will be the first indication of your second asset, which we believe will also be a product in a pipeline. Attractive de-risk profile of phase III studies. I won't go into that now. Basically, I hope that you, as I started, growing this year, MG, CIDP, driven by PFS. In the medium term, myositis, Sjögren's, ITP, MMN for our second asset.
In the long term, changing from VYVGART to an FcRn strategy with multiple next gens, combos, orals, and the rest of the pipeline. All of that in a company where we're already profitable, where we already have operating leverage, which we can pull through. We stand on our own legs, and then we can also use the cash which we are generating to think about business development longer term, to make sure that we augment our very exciting pipeline. With that, I'll stop.
Sounds good. Thanks very much, Karl. We can take questions from the room as well. Perhaps I'll start in the seven and a half minutes we have left. I think I got the message. I think it was growth and execution.
Thank you.
Previously, I've heard Karen describe the growth potential for the company from the VYVGART franchise as potentially linear in nature. You've just got approval in seronegative patients. I think you're going to get approval in ocular given the data that you've shown. You're moving to earlier lines of therapy. In MG alone, the biologics class is growing and has massive potential to grow. That almost seems exponential to me. Maybe you can help quantify for us. I know you don't guide, but maybe you can help quantify for us what you see the growth potential to be in 2026 and then 2027 as more of those factors come into play for VYVGART.
As a company, we do not guide. Two reasons for that. One is I think we're happy with the broad alignment in the street where the street puts us, and also because we've got these binary events, which makes a big difference. I can show you. I won't show you, but internally we have, of course, our different scenarios, and one is there and another one is here and everything in between because it depends. If Sjögren's read out positively 300,000 patients at the prices we're talking about, we can all do the math. We're not going to guide. To your point, I think what we need to do as a company is to explain these significant and multiple growth drivers. We have to explain that VYVGART, to some extent, has been de-risked. Although, of course, with every study, there's always clinical risk.
I think as a company, we will continue to grow. We're not going to talk about inflection point. I think as a company, we will say that our growth has been fairly consistent. To continue that, you need new innovation because we hold on to our patients. An MG patient should be an MG patient basically for a very, very long time. You do lose patients for whatever reasons. As your base business grow, you lose small percentages of that. Small percentages starts to add up to a lot of patient, and you need to continue to feed the funnel at the top, and that's why you need the new innovation. All of this innovation, I think, is going to help us maintain that, call it, linear growth.
We get a lot of questions considering you're a global organization with the net prices that you described earlier in the presentation. We get a lot of questions on the risk of most favored nations and pricing there long term. How do you see that playing out for argenx currently?
Yeah. I think international reference pricing has always been an issue for pharma companies, but the U.S. was always excluded from that. I think what happened with the new administration is that the U.S. is now really part of international reference pricing, and we don't think that will change. The current administration will come and go, but the impact on pricing will probably stay. How does it impact argenx? We're a fairly new company. We've been fairly disciplined in pricing in a narrow band, so our exposure is, I would say, less than most companies. Unlikely that we're going to enter into a voluntary agreement because I think we can manage on the way we are now. Looking forward, I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I think there will probably be a little bit of a reset, maybe U.S. prices come down a little bit, the rest of the world comes up a little bit, because companies will be forced to price within a narrow price band. You will not expose your U.S. business by pricing at a substantially lower ex-U.S. going forward. I don't think anybody will do that.
Karl, you mentioned lifecycle management with ARGX-213 and ARGX-124. I guess, do you need to see more data from ARGX-124 before making that determination?
Yep.
New indications, which ones kind of follow on? Are there any external data points that you're also evaluating in trying to make those decisions?
Our patent life on Vyvgart runs till 2036 at the moment. We keep on filing patents to extend that, but currently 2036. If in terms of life cycle planning, if you look at analogs, you probably need your next gen on the market early in the next decade, call it 2031, 2032. We've got time. We need to start moving soon. We want to see the ARGX-124 data. That's the second generation FcRn. We've got ARGX-213. ARGX-213, which is once a month dosing, is ready. We can start with it today. We want to see ARGX-124, the second asset. We want to compare the two. Firstly, do we really have to? Because maybe we don't. We think we will have to.
If we have to, which one is best suited for life cycle management, and which one is best suited for broader indications at a different price point? We will have that data this year. In a few months, or by the end of this year, we will be able to talk about that and when we're going to make those decisions and when we're going to start.
Beautiful. Well, it's fantastic to see the growth story evolve at argenx. It really is a unicorn in the biotech industry, I think. With that, we will conclude here. The breakout session is upstairs.