Welcome to Natera's 2021 third quarter financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following management's prepared remarks, we will hold a Q&A session. To ask a question at that time, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. If anyone has difficulty hearing the conference, please press star zero for operator assistance. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded today, November 4, 2021. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Michael Brophy, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.
Thanks, operator. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining our conference call to discuss the results of our third quarter of 2021. On the line is Steve Chapman, our CEO, Paul Billings, our Chief Medical Officer, and Solomon Moshkevich, General Manager of Oncology. Today's conference call is being broadcast live via webcast. We will be referring to a slide presentation that has been posted to investor.natera.com. A replay of the call will also be available at investor.natera.com. During the course of this conference call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding future events and our anticipated future performance, such as our operational and financial outlook and projections, our assumptions for that outlook, market size, partnerships, clinical studies, opportunities and strategies, and expectations for various current and future products, including product capabilities, expected release dates, reimbursement coverage, and related effects on our financial and operating results.
We caution you that such statements reflect our best judgment based on factors currently known to us and that actual events or results could differ materially. Please refer to documents we file from time to time with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K or 10-Q and the Form 8-K filed with today's press release. Those documents identify important risks and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those contained in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements made during the call are being made as of today. If this call is replayed or reviewed after today, the information presented during the call may not contain current or accurate information. Natera disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.
We will provide guidance on today's call, but will not provide any further guidance or updates on our performance during the quarter unless we do so in a public forum. We will quote a number of numeric or growth changes as we discuss our financial performance, and unless otherwise noted, each such reference represents a year-on-year comparison. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Steve.
Thanks, Michael. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We've got a packed session full of announcements, so let's get into the recent highlights. The very strong momentum in Q3 continued, as you can see from the metrics in the first bullet. We processed 407,000 units in Q3, which was approximately 55% growth over the same period of last year. Total revenues and product revenues were both up 61% and 62% respectively over the same period last year. That acceleration is being driven by continued strong growth in the women's health products and big contributions from oncology and transplant products. Those products are now large enough to shift our growth rates upward. We heard a lot in the market during the quarter about the impact the Delta variant was having on the healthcare businesses.
As you can see from our Q3 volume, we were able to blow through any headwinds COVID-19 presented. As a result of the continued momentum, we are raising our revenue guide beyond the range we just gave a couple of months ago in August. We are now guiding revenues to be $615 million-$625 million for the full year. We started the year guiding revenues at $500 million-$525 million. The top end of our range is now roughly $100 million above where it was at the start of the year. That gives you a sense of the traction we're having and we continue to see across the company. Michael will get into the full details of the guide later in the call.
In addition to the significant unit and revenue growth, we've got a set of transformative announcements in the transplant space. In kidney, we've continued to make significant progress. First is the launch of Prospera with quantification, which is a new technique only offered by Natera that has shown improved performance over earlier methods that report donor-derived cell-free DNA fraction alone. Second is the announcement of the results of the Trifecta study, which we believe is the largest prospective multi-site, fully biopsy-matched study ever performed in the kidney transplant space. The initial results exceeded our expectations and we believe could eliminate the need for costly multimodality approaches to bolster test performance. I'm also excited to discuss the major new Prospera commercial launches in heart and lung. In both organs, the commercial launch announcement was supported by significant new prospective data sets that we believe can redefine these fields.
In oncology, the major announcements continue to unfold. We had another strong colorectal study published in Clinical Cancer Research, where we introduced Signatera velocity as a clinically useful metric. The study demonstrated the value of calculating circulating tumor DNA growth rate over time, or velocity, such that patients with fast-growing tumors fare much worse than patients with slow-growing tumors. Velocity can't be calculated if you're only reporting out a positive or negative result, so we believe this will become a competitive advantage for Natera in recurrence monitoring, and we'll spend some time on this later in the call. More broadly, I think the launch of quantitative approaches in both oncology and transplant has a lot of parallels with our launch of the fetal fraction metric for Panorama back in 2013.
At that time, no other NIPT reported on fetal fraction, but physicians really gravitated to our test because of that result, and the metric has now become the gold standard and a requirement for the field. These new oncology and transplant metrics provide a window into a patient's underlying biology, which can offer a physician crucial context when designing how to incorporate a test result into clinical decision-making. Our technology lends itself to these types of metrics, further differentiating the clinical utility of our products across all areas of our business. I'm pleased that Natera continues to be a leader in the industry in this area of innovation. We were also very pleased to secure another major competitive win by being selected by NRG Oncology for the U.S. arm of the CIRCULATE trial.
You have seen the significance of the data sets coming out of CIRCULATE-Japan, and we now think winning the critical U.S. arm puts us even further ahead in terms of developing prospective validation data for colorectal cancer. These two trials, together with the work we are doing with BGI in China, make up the largest commercial CRC MRD markets when you consider both the incidence and the reimbursement landscape. Although we aren't going to do a deep dive on our Signatera pharma trials today, we are now fully enrolling patients into both the phase III IMvigor011 and ZEST trials we discussed on our last call, and our pharma pipeline continues to build. We are also now offering a broadplex product to our pharma partners in the RUO setting.
As you're aware, Natera can multiplex thousands of probes in a single reaction, so offering a broadplex test in the range of 50 or 100 or more targets is easy for us to do. We've only seen very targeted interest thus far in the broader plex offering, but for those who want it, we now have it available. We've been doing this kind of work upon request for a long time, but we've now made it available as part of our standard menu. In addition, Natera has developed a series of Signatera innovations that it intends to introduce in 2022 and 2023. As you know from our NIPT business, we're constantly innovating and pushing the limits of the technology. I'm also pleased to announce progress of the clinical launch of Signatera in China with our partner BGI.
Recently, BGI kicked off a multi-site prospective trial in GI cancers, including colorectal cancer. The study plans to enroll roughly 500 patients and includes many of the top academic centers across China. BGI plans to expand on this initiative and is kicking off a series of investigator-initiated trials across other cancer types. Gaining support from top academic centers and KOLs is important for broader clinical launch, which requires the Chinese FDA approval and we expect will take several years to achieve. Finally, we're excited to announce the details of our roadmap in early cancer detection. We've signed a partnership with Aarhus University that gives us access to a prospective 40,000-sample biobank of patients screened for colorectal cancer.
In addition, we've got an exclusive options to license Aarhus's IP, and we have access to their methylation signature, which is performing very well across all stages, which we plan to combine with our own methylation and ctDNA technology. As you can see, we've had a very busy quarter. I'll now jump into each of these, starting with the unit growth on the next set of slides. Our unit growth has really been accelerating recently, and I think this longer-term historical view gives us some context to the growth trajectory we've been on for the last four quarters. You can see that while we made steady, if lumpy, progress in prior years, the business has rocketed upward on a much steeper ramp since Q3 of last year. That is not a coincidence.
In women's health, the new ACOG guidelines came out roughly 12 months ago, and we launched both our transplant and oncology products in the second half of last year. We don't think this is a one-year trend. The NIPT market is still very under-penetrated compared to the 4-5 million pregnancies in the U.S., so there's a long way to go. Of course, we are just getting started in both transplant and oncology, both of which we're starting to see play out as significant opportunities. On the next slide, you can see the volume growth is clearly translating to revenue growth as well. You can see once again the scale-up in growth we've experienced in the last year. This is driven by both the volume trends and also continued improvement in the realized revenues per test or ASP.
We saw another nice increase in the blended ASPs in the business over Q2, which continues a multi-quarter trend going back to last year. We benefited from the volume mix shifting toward the newer, higher-priced products, and we also had some healthy appeals wins on older claims that came in through the quarter in women's health. Michael will spend more time on ASPs later in the call, but we still have plenty of room to run on ASPs across their various products. Okay, so we've got a fantastic set of milestones to now review in organ health. I want to start off by highlighting some broader trends that are occurring with our organ health products. First, we've expanded from a single organ product to now multiple organs with the launch of heart and lung.
Our technology is robust, and we're seeing it translates well across organs in a very cost-efficient way, which we think offers great expansion opportunity for Natera. Second, whereas at one point we only had retrospective data, that's now no longer the case. We now have significant prospective multi-site data. In some cases, we believe we now have the most significant prospective data in the space. Third, we focused on innovation to improve test performance, for example, with the launch of quantification, and now we're seeing AUCs that are exceptional from just ctDNA alone. These trends, expanding to other organs, producing high-quality multi-site prospective data sets, and delivering exceptional AUC through innovation, all support a path for rapid growth in Prospera. In kidney, it's been a little more than a year since we were awarded our local coverage decision for Prospera, and we started our commercial launch in earnest.
We are very pleased with the level of commercial traction we're generating so far. Of the top 100 transplant centers, 45 have now implemented Prospera routinely into their practice. We've also been pleased with the enrollment in our registry trial ProActive, where we now have more than 2,500 patients enrolled. You may recall there was external skepticism about whether we would be able to successfully enroll patients into this trial, but clearly we've done an exceptional job. This level of adoption among top centers just a little more than a year into the launch gives us confidence that our commercial plan is working. Now, with the addition of new organs, very strong multi-site prospective data, and our innovative quantitative approach, we're in an even better position to build on the momentum we've seen thus far. Let me talk now for a minute about Prospera with quantification.
Prospera is now the only commercially available cell-free DNA test for kidney rejection that provides three values, the quantity of the donor-derived cell-free DNA, the fraction of the donor-derived cell-free DNA, and the total amount of cell-free DNA on every report. Other available cell-free DNA tests only report on the fraction of donor-derived cell-free DNA alone, which has limitations, especially when the total cell-free DNA is high, which may result in false negatives. As you can see here on the left side of the slide, the percentage of the donor-derived cell-free DNA is a fraction that incorporates the absolute quantity of donor-derived cell-free DNA as the numerator and the total amount of cell-free DNA as the denominator. The donor-derived cell-free DNA comes from the donated organ, and the total cell-free DNA mostly comes from the recipient.
The fraction of donor-derived cell-free DNA can change significantly if the denominator or the recipient cell-free DNA is artificially increased. When reporting donor-derived cell-free DNA fraction alone, like our competitors do, doctors need to be very careful about any factors that might impact the denominator. There are 10 items on the right hand of the slide that we've identified in the literature that can impact the total cell-free DNA. Our hypothesis was that incorporating a measurement of the absolute quantity of cell-free DNA, rather than just the fraction alone into the result, would improve the sensitivity of the assay, and that's exactly what we're now seeing in our studies. To test our hypothesis, we performed a validation study of the Prospera with quantification method with UCLA that resulted in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, one of the premier journals.
The paper showcased the improved performance from Prospera with quantification in 41 kidney transplant recipients, nine of whom were experiencing rejection. Incorporating the quantity of donor-derived cell-free DNA with the fraction of donor-derived cell-free DNA improved the sensitivity of the Prospera test from initially identifying seven out of nine cases of rejection to then nine out of nine cases of active rejection, which were then confirmed with biopsy. This improvement has now been seen across several different independent data sets, a number of which are in submission for publication. The most significant data set comes from the Trifecta study, which I'll go into on the next slide. Yesterday, we announced the results of the Trifecta study. The Trifecta study is a multi-site prospective trial being led by Dr. Phil Halloran from the University of Alberta, a leading KOL in the field.
The study, which included more than 300 biopsy match samples and greater than 100 biopsy match rejections, is the largest multi-site prospective, fully biopsy match study ever performed in the space. In the study, we tested the AUC of Prospera with quantification to distinguish rejection from non-rejection using Banff 2019 criteria, and we showed an AUC of 0.81. We then used molecular pathology as the standard and showed an AUC of 0.89. There are recent studies that suggest that molecular pathology may be a better standard than Banff, suggesting that Prospera may be performing better than previously suspected. Finally, we also compared rejection versus quiescence, or essentially rejection versus exceptionally stable patients, resulting in an AUC of 0.91.
This last analysis, the comparison of rejection to quiescence, is similar in concept to that used by some of our competitors in their recent multimodality publications. Unfortunately, it isn't a very useful analysis clinically, which I'll touch on in a minute. Overall, the AUCs from the Trifecta study are exceptional. The definitive data is now in. Prospera with quantification performed very well, and Natera now has the largest fully biopsy match study that's ever been performed in the kidney transplant space. I wanna take a second to quickly touch on rejection versus quiescence because it's easy to get confused on the different types of analyses that are out there. Rejection versus non-rejection is different from rejection versus quiescence. Quiescence includes essentially only the most stable of stable patients. As you can see below, this type of analysis excludes intermediate patients, which really isn't practical in a real-world setting.
In most cases, it's not possible to determine a patient is quiescent without doing a biopsy first to determine if there are any non-rejection pathophysiological findings. That is why the vast majority of the papers in the field have assessed rejection versus non-rejection, which remains the main benchmark for performance. As you assess the landscape of testing available, keep in mind that the analysis being performed may be different than the intended use population and thus, the results may be less clinically useful. So far, from what we've seen, multimodality approaches have not been validated in rejection versus non-rejection cohorts, and their performance in that intended use population remains to be seen. Okay, on the next slide, I'm really pleased to provide details on the recent launch of Prospera in the heart transplant setting.
As I said before, it's been relatively easy for us to expand beyond kidney to other organs because of our robust core technology. In addition, it's also proving to be commercially efficient because we're able to leverage a lot of the same infrastructure in terms of nurse coordinators and customer support, so it's also been cost-efficient for us to enter this space. We think Prospera Heart offers compelling advantages versus our competing tests. Our validation study is a multi-site study that included greater than 250 prospective samples collected during 2020 and 2021 for the purpose of validating Prospera Heart and another 100 samples from a biopsy match biobank. You can see the results of the study on the right-hand side of the page.
The initial results were impressive, but then further improved with quantification, where we were able to achieve an area under the curve of 0.88. These are really exceptional AUCs in the heart transplant monitoring space, further underscoring the power of our technology. What's critical about these results is that the Prospera Heart test is delivering this exceptional AUC by performing cell-free DNA alone, and therefore, we believe there is no need for cumbersome and costly multimodality approaches to bolster test performance. Competitor tests in heart must be collected at a site that is set up for specialized handling because the sample must be immediately spun down and shipped on dry ice. Since our test is a simple blood test, patients can access our convenient mobile phlebotomy service, which can be important given the frequency of testing.
In addition, the competitive test in heart charges Medicare twice for every multimodality patient time point, since separate DNA and RNA tests are being performed on each patient. Because we are delivering excellent performance on a cell-free DNA-based test alone, Prospera Heart reduces the cost to the system and is less than half the price of the expensive multimodality approaches. We think this combination of test performance, convenience, and cost represents a compelling offering for physicians and patients. We keep the product expansion opportunities rolling on the next page with our lung transplant launch. We're getting a lot of the same efficiencies with this launch, the same robust Prospera workflow, and leveraging a lot of the same commercial infrastructure that we built. The sales and commercial teams overlap with the Heart team, so again, it's very efficient for us to go after this opportunity.
We think the validation data and results in lung are very strong. The study was run by the lung transplant program at The Ohio State University and was presented at CHEST a few weeks ago and very well received. Prospective study examined 204 plasma samples obtained with concurrent bronchoscopy biopsy procedures from 104 lung transplant recipients between September 2020 and June 2021. Using the Prospera Lung test, donor-derived cell-free DNA levels were compared across clinical histopathologic diagnostic cohorts. During the study, 35 episodes of acute rejection were analyzed. This study represents the largest trial of a commercially available donor-derived cell-free DNA test for lung transplant assessment, and once again, the AUC was incredibly strong, underscoring the power of our technology.
For both the heart and lung products, we plan to submit dossiers for Medicare reimbursement under the existing local coverage decision, and we anticipate receiving coverage in 2022. As you can see, we have a lot of exciting opportunities. We've made a lot of progress in kidney, and we're now expanding to other organs. We've been hard at work in developing very strong data sets, and now we have, in some cases, the largest prospective data sets available. We're innovating, we're launching improvements such as Prospera with quantification, and we're seeing exceptional AUCs. I think we're in an excellent position long term to compete very well in the organ health space. I'm gonna hand it over to Solomon in a minute to walk through all the recent news on Signatera, but first, I want to spend a moment describing the effort we have underway in early cancer detection.
Our strategy here is to pursue a capital-efficient development program that does not distract from the work we are doing with Signatera, but instead leverages the technology we are already developing, along with the data we're generating with our growing base of clinical and volumes in oncology. That last item is critical. Because we run an upfront exome on every Signatera sample, we're accumulating a data set of tens of thousands of early-stage cancer exomes that has never existed before. We can now interrogate that data set to assist in the design of a DNA-based signature that maximizes test performance. We've already completed the initial design of the colorectal cancer early screening DNA component. Now we're excited to validate and expand on that effort with our new partnership with Aarhus University.
In the partnership, we've secured access to a biobank of 40,000 colorectal screening samples, prospectively collected and with matched outcome data. More than half of the affected samples are Stage I or II cancers. We've also secured an exclusive option to license IP and access to a methylation signature from Aarhus, which demonstrated strong potential in a recently published study. The methylation signature alone reported an average sensitivity of 85% with a specificity of nine9% across Stage I-IV colorectal cancers. The performance was also very strong in early-stage cancers with an 80% sensitivity in stage I and 85% sensitivity in stage II cancers. We'll of course need to replicate these results, and we also believe we can improve upon the methylation signature by incorporating it into our own unique methylation workflow and adding in our DNA technology.
We'll start off with the colorectal assay and then have the potential to add additional cancer types in the future. While we continue to build on our lead with Signatera and MRD, we've got a targeted program running in this adjacent and very large market. I look forward to providing periodic updates on our progress here in the future. With that, let me now hand it over to Solomon to cover the other oncology updates. Solomon?
Thanks, Steve. I want to start on the next slide with our selection as the MRD partner for the U.S. arm of the CIRCULATE trial. We were very pleased to win a competitive process for this trial, which is funded by NCI, the National Cancer Institute, and led by NRG Oncology, a leading academic consortium with hundreds of clinical sites across the U.S. We have just started to see some of the potential for practice-changing data emerge from the Japanese arm of the CIRCULATE trial, and we think the U.S. arm is similarly destined to be the definitive prospective U.S. trial for MRD-guided management of colorectal cancer. You can see a summary of the trial design on the right-hand side of the page. Stage two and three colon cancer patients will get surgery as per the standard of care and then get serial MRD assessment with Signatera.
Patients that are MRD positive on Signatera will go on to chemotherapy, and that will be randomized between standard of care chemo, which is 3-6 months of FOLFOX, or an intensified regimen with FOLFIRINOX, which is standard treatment today for patients diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer. Also, just like in CIRCULATE Japan, Signatera MRD-negative patients will be randomized as well between standard of care chemotherapy versus no chemotherapy at all, just active surveillance. This is called de-escalation. We've highlighted this arm of the study on the slide because we believe it can eliminate unnecessary treatment for the majority of patients. Right now, adjuvant chemotherapy is standard for all stage three and high-risk stage two patients, even though we know that most patients are already cured by surgery alone and will not benefit from the chemotherapy.
The Japanese group may be able to report preliminary results from this de-escalation arm in the next year, and we think those results, plus the data from the U.S., will be enough to impact NCCN guidelines and could make it very unlikely that a study like this would ever be run again. I think this really highlights our competitive advantage as we've developed a multiyear lead in prospective clinical data, and we think winning this trial is going to significantly extend that leadership position. Okay, excited to get into a little more detail now on the new velocity data that Steve touched on earlier in his opening comments. In early October, we published a prospective study with 168 stage three colorectal cancer patients with a total of just over 1,200 blood samples analyzed.
First of all, the study recapitulated our strong test performance in early-stage CRC that we've published before, this time with a nice homogeneous population of stage III colorectal cancer. In addition, we also introduced and validated the new concept of ctDNA velocity. As Steve mentioned, Signatera gives more than a qualitative positive or negative result. Every Signatera test result comes with a count of tumor molecules per milliliter of plasma, which represents disease burden. As patients receive serial testing over time, physicians are able to monitor both the direction and the rate of change in that disease burden. You can visually see this rate of change on the chart on the right-hand side of the page. Each line represents one patient with ctDNA levels tracked over multiple time points.
You see the patients represented by the light blue lines have ctDNA levels increasing rapidly, while the patients represented by the dark blue lines have ctDNA that is still present, but it's growing more slowly. The data from this study confirms the intuition that patients with fast-growing tumors have much worse outcomes. Specifically, the box on the bottom left makes clear how stark the difference is. While all MRD positive patients ultimately went on to relapse, for patients with fast-growing tumors, less than half of them were still alive at the three-year mark. Meanwhile, for patients with slow-growing tumors, 100% of them were still alive at the three-year mark. We expect this prognostic feature to become increasingly important for oncologists as they work out exactly how to manage their MRD positive colorectal patients.
We also expect the concept to apply in other cancer types, similar to how PSA velocity is already measured today for prostate cancer. To our knowledge, Signatera is the only MRD test that has been validated for the assessment of ctDNA velocity, which is made possible by our unique approach to quantitation. I'm not going to touch on everything we have going on today in oncology because of time, but as Steve said at the top of the call, we're making a lot of progress in pharma, in China, and of course, with product innovation. We're looking forward to provide more updates on those fronts in the future. Now I'd like to hand it over to Michael to discuss the financials. Michael?
Thanks, Solomon. The next slide here is just the summary financial results for the quarter. Steve covered a lot of the trends on volumes and revenues. You see the revenue growth modestly outstripping the volume growth as ASP stepped up in the quarter. Underlying ASPs for our products stepped up modestly again in Q3 as we continued to add some wins from additional NIPT coverage.
We also benefited from roughly $5 million in revenue from cash collections from prior periods, which is historically more in the $1 million-$2 million range, but can be lumpy as we've discussed in the past. I call that out to give you some context for the revenue guide for the rest of the year, which implies significant sequential organic growth in Q4. We also got a bump in our realized collections per unit for Signatera from the ADLT pricing going into effect in Q3. We think that ADLT will continue to help grow Signatera ASPs as more and more patients that started with Signatera this year move to the recurrence monitoring setting, which is covered by the ADLT pricing.
Overall, though, we've chosen to let Signatera ASPs be much lower than they otherwise could be because we are taking in growing volumes from a range of indications that are not yet reimbursed. Signatera adoption across cancer types has exceeded our expectations so far, which is tough on gross margins in the immediate term, but we think is a very bullish sign for the longer-term potential of this market. You can see we improved gross margins meaningfully year-over-year, but still our gross margin for this quarter and for the rest of the year reflects this investment, if you will, in test volume ahead of reimbursement, particularly for Signatera. That's been balanced out by strong and growing gross margins for our NIPT and Horizon products that are now well above the blended average.
To that point, COGS per unit in the quarter were on track as NIPT COGS remained in the $150 range, and the path to reducing COGS over time remains intact. We still have a roadmap in place to meaningfully reduce Signatera COGS per unit over time, as we've discussed in the past. As we covered on our Q2 call, the R&D and SG&A lines also reflect the significant upfront investment we are making in oncology. In research and development, we are adding staff to execute on scaling the lab, along with the fulsome slate of clinical trial work we are doing with academic and pharma partners.
We've said before that we are not planning to sit back with our current product offerings with version 1.0 of Signatera and Prospera, and I think the update Solomon Moshkevich provided made clear how quickly we can turn OpEx investments into differentiating new features for Signatera and Prospera, in addition to the entirely new product launches Steve covered. This productivity also allows us to get more scale more quickly on the commercial operation we've built for these call points. We've needed to build sales channels into transplant and oncology setting this year, but now we can leverage these sales channels across organ types in transplant and a huge range of cancer types in oncology. Okay, I think that now gives you some background for the guide, that's on the next slide. We are raising the revenue guide for the third time this year.
As Steve discussed, this is a function of our efforts hitting on all cylinders across products, with commercial wins coming from all the new data we have generated and the sales teams getting increasingly productive in the transplant and oncology call points. We are trimming slightly on gross margins versus the most recent guide, but still better than where we started the year. This is driven by the new volumes outside of what's currently reimbursed, is accelerating as I described, and we think that's definitely worth doing. The build-out of the commercial effort continues to roll out as we described this summer, so we are holding that steady for the rest of the year. We are bumping up R&D to accelerate our participation in a range of clinical trials that have become available to us with the performance we've seen in both Prospera and Signatera.
We are still very comfortable with where we stand on the balance sheet. We can see the demand for our products in the field, and we see opportunities to capture share in markets that can endure for a very long time. We think the decision to remain in aggressive growth mode remains the right one. It's an exciting time for Natera, and we are very pleased to have been able to share these results with you. Now I'd like to turn it over to Q&A. Operator?
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star then one on your touch tone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. Our first question comes from the line of Tejas Savant with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys, good evening. Steve, one for you on the Aarhus Biobank sample project. Can you share some color on timelines for, you know, the launch and completion of your validation study? At what point do you expect to launch a prospective trial and launch commercially? Then I have a quick follow-up on the guide.
Yeah, thanks for the question. You know, we're really excited about this partnership. I mean, the methylation data that they published looks very strong. The biobank, you know, obviously is very significant. You know, we're very pleased to get access to this. You know, we hope to generate some combined data on the performance of DNA and the sort of version 2 of the methylation platform in 2022. You know, there's still a lot of work to do, you know, we're not putting out any timelines right now, but we do think we can generate some data during that timeframe.
That doesn't necessarily mean we'll complete the entire validation of the 40,000 sample cohort in that timeframe, but just that we would make some additional data available on the combined performance of the assay. Frankly, we actually hope that we can use this cohort itself to go to the FDA. We plan on going and speaking with the FDA about, you know, the use of this cohort. You know, we ultimately don't know what they're gonna say and, you know, we're not sort of hanging our hat on the fact that they're gonna accept this as the final validation. You know, once we go through that process, we'll have more insight into whether we, you know, need to execute a prospective trial or not. Certainly this cohort alone will provide
You know, I think very strong validation data that will give us significant confidence about making that decision to move forward to make the investment in a prospective cohort if we do that.
Got it. Very helpful. Michael, a quick follow-up on the guide. I mean, as you look at the fourth quarter in 2022, anything to worry here in terms of supply chain disruptions or consumable shortages or even sample shipping delays that could constrain upside in the near term for you?
No, I don't think so, Tejas. I mean, you know, you can see what the, you know, the implied growth in Q4, I think tells you that all the trends that we're seeing here in Q3 are looking really stable. It's not really, you know, not a one-time benefit or anything like that. You know, we were able to blow right through any concerns related to the Delta variant, as you can see in our Q3 performance. Maybe that affected us, but you just can't tell that in the numbers. We're feeling great about, you know, the trajectory that we're on.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tycho Peterson with JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks. And congrats on all the progress, guys. On Prospera, is Prospera with quant application an incremental pricing opportunity, or is that more about capturing market share? Secondly, on Prospera, obviously, your competitor has gotten in a fair amount of trouble. I'm just curious if there's blowback and how you think about that. I know there's not direct read-through for you guys. I had one follow-up on screening after that.
The Prospera with quantification technique is, you know, obviously something that's unique to Natera. It's performing exceptionally well. We've designed this in a way that, you know, we really don't have to do any additional workflow. Although I think we could go, you know, try to take price, you know, we made the decision to just pass this through as a benefit to patients and to physicians without increasing the price in any way. It's an exceptionally streamlined workflow where we've leveraged some novel microbiology and novel bioinformatics techniques to be able to provide this without really increasing our COGS. You know, with regards to some of the challenges with the competitive landscape, you know, we don't think that there's any blowback to Natera.
You know, I think we're in a very good position, and we look forward to competing hard.
And then on-
I think there was one.
Screening, I'm just curious.
One last one there.
Oh, go ahead. Yeah, on screening, I was just curious how you're thinking about kind of the multi-cancer opportunity. I mean, obviously it's great you've got the biobank of 40,000 samples for colorectal, but as we think about, you know, additional cancer indications, any rough sense of the timelines? I mean, will this be over the next year or two, or how do you think about multi-cancer?
I think our plan, you know, includes the ability to extend into additional cancers. I think we've, you know, enabled that opportunity through the partnership with Aarhus. As far as our internal methylation and DNA discovery work, we've built discovery platforms that aren't specific to colorectal that can extend into other cancer opportunities. While our initial focus is on generating the proof of concept and then validation data for colorectal, you know, moving towards the commercial launch, you know, longer term, our plan is to have a pan-cancer assay. The initial work will be focused on colorectal.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Puneet Souda with SVB Leerink. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, Steve. Thanks for taking the question. Just on the screening point, I just wanted to understand how are you positioning in terms of, you know, potential trial there, for CRC, is, you know, and in terms of, given the, you know, competition that's already out there are three trials in this space. So just wanted to understand how you're positioning for that. For the multi-cancer timing, for these trials, the large scale trials, those are obviously, you know, more than 50,000 patient or 100,000 patient trials. So how are you thinking about that sort of investment overall and the timing for that?
Yeah. I mean, our approach thus far is to take a very sort of cost-efficient approach, and sort of have some phase gates as we move along here. You know, so far, we've leveraged the significant amount of information that we have coming from all the tumor exomes that we've run, and we've used that to build a proprietary DNA-only aspect of the test. Now we're combining that with this methylation signature that we gained access to through the partnership with Aarhus that is performing very well, plus some internal discovery work and methylation workflow work that we're doing at Natera. We plan on putting those two things together, generating some proof of concept data in early 2022, and then running the 40,000-sample biobank thereafter.
Our hope is that 40,000 biobank itself is enough for us to get approval from the FDA for the test. Now, we don't know if that's the case. We haven't yet gone and spoken with the FDA, and it's very likely that it won't in fact be, you know, sufficient to get approval. You know, that's what we hope. If that turns out to be the case, that would be a massive win for us because we wouldn't then subsequently have to do the prospective study.
I think we plan on having that conversation with the FDA, you know, sooner rather than later, so we can understand if we do have to do a prospective trial, we can start planning for that, and start executing on that. Now, you know, in colorectal alone, you know, we think that the trial, you know, we look around at, you know, competitive trials are taking like in that kind of 3-year range. Now that's okay because we don't have to be the first test on the market. I think this is such a huge opportunity, that, you know, it's not necessarily just about being the first on the market, it's about, you know, doing it right and having the right test, having the right customer experience, having the right performance.
You know, if we see in the proof of concept and the subsequent validation data that we, you know, really have something here that we think is gonna be a winner, we're not gonna hesitate to pull the trigger, you know, on that prospective trial. As far as the much broader expansion to, you know, pan-cancer, you know, we're gonna have to get through some of these phase gates and hit some of these milestones before we can really talk about, you know, the timeline for doing a prospective study of that size.
Got it. That's super helpful. Then on Signatera, I just wanted to get a sense of the sort of catalyst path ahead, you know, events that we ought to be watching out for in terms of data sets and readouts for Signatera. We obviously saw your data on Uveal and a number of other data sets. So there is momentum here. In sort of in terms of thinking of, you know, larger indications, more impactful studies, just if you could just walk us through what are some of the things to watch out for and potential conferences where we should be expecting more data readouts around Signatera that are more meaningful? Thank you.
Yeah, sure. I'll make a comment, and then maybe, you know, Solomon, you can comment. You know, we have, I think, more than 50 different trials that are ongoing at any time or biobanks that are ongoing at any time, and various of those are gonna be reading out, you know, over the next kind of quarter, the next 6 months, the next 12 months. We've got a lot of data coming out, and that's really sort of broad across, you know, different cancer types. You know, I'm not gonna go through and sort of name each one, but, you know, there's additional data in GI.
You know, there's additional data in some of the cancer types, you know, like melanoma, for example, or, you know, other areas where you know, we haven't had significant readouts that we're pretty excited about. So, you know, stay tuned for what's coming. I do think in the near term one of the most significant readouts, or has the potential to be one of the most significant readouts, is coming at the ASCO GI conference you know, in the beginning of 2022, where we expect there to be another, you know, very significant report on the CIRCULATE-Japan study in the colorectal space. I think that's gonna be exciting and I think that has the potential to be market changing. Solomon, do you wanna add any additional comments there?
Sure. Yeah, I wanna reiterate we're looking forward to the data at ASCO GI. We also have multiple studies that have been submitted as manuscripts that are under review across many different GI cancers as well as skin cancer, ovarian cancer, some of the data which people had seen previously in a conference, multiple myeloma. We're looking at a pretty exciting slate of abstracts to send to AACR as well, which will be in the spring. You know, I think it's a little early to say exactly to what extent, you know, how we're gonna use these to extend our reimbursement pathway. We'll have those discussions with Medicare and with our other payers. There's a lot to look forward to here.
Got it. Super helpful. Last one, if I could just squeeze in in terms of ADLT reimbursement, was there any contribution in the quarter? Apologies if I missed that.
Yeah. Michael, you wanna take that?
Yeah, I'll take it. Yeah. We did get a modest bump in the quarter from the ADLT pricing. I think that's something that can be a continued tailwind for Signatera clinical volumes in these kind of reimbursed cancers, particularly as you get more and more patients that have started Signatera, they go through that first, you know, that six-month kind of adjuvant window, and then they flip into the recurrence monitoring indication. That's the indication that's reimbursed under the ADLT. As you kind of build a bigger base of patients that have gone through that first six months, the mix of your volumes is gonna shift toward that recurrence monitoring indication, and that will, you know, tend to be a tailwind for ASPs.
We did start to see a little bit of that in Q3.
Got it. Super helpful. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Catherine Schulte with Baird. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the questions. I guess first for Signatera, I believe you were waiting on the IO or umbrella LCD to be finalized, and then you could submit data packets for other indications to amend the billing article. Is that still your plan? And if so, what are the indications that you kind of have, you know, ready to go once we have a final LCD? Obviously, Medicare is running behind the schedule here. Have you heard anything from them in terms of timing?
Yeah. Thanks, Catherine. Just first on the timing, I think we had initially understood that the final LCD had to publish publicly in September. However, we've now clarified that September was the deadline for MolDX to send the LCD to CMS National for approval. We understand that that's taken place. You know, we've had a lot of consistent and positive dialogue with the MolDX program, and you know, their feedback is that the administrative process is just ongoing. You know, ultimately it's their process, but everything we've heard you know makes us think that it's on track and it's gonna be published soon. We'll have more updates on the timeline as we get them.
As far as submitting additional indications, you can basically go back and look at anywhere where we publish a paper. Muscle-invasive bladder cancer, neoadjuvant breast, you know, lung, et cetera. Anywhere where we publish the paper, you know, we think we're eligible to submit for reimbursement. As Solomon said a moment ago, you know, we have other papers in ovarian and, you know, so forth that are already submitted where, you know, we've in some cases gotten editor comments back already. We, you know, we have a pipeline of papers coming out. As a reminder, we've already submitted our tech assessment for stage IV colorectal cancer, you know, which we think would fall under the CRC LCD, which is already in final stage.
Okay. Got it. Maybe just going back to early detection, can you just talk through how you envision that playing out commercially? Is this something you plug into your women's health channel, or do you plan to go after the primary care market as well?
Yeah. I think there's some different options there. I mean, look, we're, you know, we've still got a long way to go before we're actually pulling the trigger on commercialization. You know, ultimately if we have a product that works well, that's reimbursed, you know, the commercialization part is easy. You know, that's something that we do exceptionally well. I think we'll have to deal with that when the time comes. Our women's health channel, I think, is an exceptional channel for commercialization. You know, we're now broadly covering the vast majority of women's health providers. As you know, you know, many women use their OBGYN or GYN as their primary care provider.
Yeah, lots of opportunities for commercialization, and we'll cross that bridge in the future.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Max Masucci with Cowen. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi. Congrats on a great update across the board. To start, you know, it's been over eight months since the launch of Altera, still early days, but, you know, how has the adoption been? You know, have customers been purchasing more on a standalone basis, or are most using the test in tandem with Signatera?
Yeah. Thanks, Max. You know, things are going well. I think, you know, obviously Signatera as a whole is going well. I mean, I'm looking at our volume growth, just in that clinical sector. You know, I think we're growing exceptionally well there. I think Altera generally has been ordered alongside Signatera. That's how we've been promoting it thus far. We really haven't been promoting it as the standalone indication. Yeah, I think we might in the future, but, you know, Signatera is such an enormous market, that I think we wanna keep our energy focused there.
As we bring on additional products in this space, you know, whether that be tissue-based comprehensive genomic profiling or a liquid biopsy-based comprehensive genomic profile, you know, we're gonna do it in the context of supporting Signatera.
Yeah. Makes sense. Maybe one question for Michael on the core NIPT business. Are you still seeing, you know, around 80% of NIPT tests include add-on microdeletions testing? I think you were getting paid somewhere in the range of 5%-10% of those microdeletion volumes about a year and a half ago. Has the attachment rate for microdeletions testing, you know, or the percentage of volumes that you're paid on changed at all over the past year and a half?
Yeah. Hey, thanks for the question, Max. Yeah, so on microdeletions, you know, the attachment rate has remained remarkably stable. It's in, you know, any given quarter, it's in that seven5%-80% attachment to NIPT within our direct channel. And the pricing for microdeletions in terms of our contracted rates with commercial payers is remarkably similar to that, which we have with NIPT. I mean, the contracted rates are in that kind of $600 range for microdeletions as a standalone product. So it's a lot of volume that we run, a lot of results we return to patients and then submit for reimbursement with a constructive contracted rate. Then as you alluded to, the fraction of time we get paid is quite low.
I mean, you know, percent paid rates on microdels are in that kind of single digit percentage kind of range, and so the resulting ASPs are, you know, it's only a few bucks out of ASP. That can change really meaningfully, when we can get the publication out, on the SMART data that we talked about earlier this year. And if we can use that data to see some guideline revisions in favor of microdeletion testing. I think that's something that we're very excited about seeing, you know, more developments on, going into 2022.
Makes sense. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Nowak with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Great. Good afternoon, everyone. What is your sales team hearing out in the field among OBGYNs? Is that level of training around averages now increasing with the ACOG decision out there? Does the field commentary at all change your expectations of this market ultimately hitting 80%-90% penetration? Just what is penetration right now?
Yeah, thanks. I think obviously since the guideline came out about a year, you know, a little over a year ago, you know, we've seen an acceleration in the percentage of a business that we're doing that's average risk versus high risk, and that's something that we've tracked. You know, we've also seen just an acceleration in volume overall.
I think there's still some big opportunities where, you know, average risk is not fully rolled out yet, you know, whether that's big MFM practices that are still sort of working through exactly how they're gonna offer it and how they're gonna roll it out to their community-based OBGYN practices, or whether it's big hospital systems that are, you know, sort of working through exactly, you know, how they're gonna integrate it routinely into practice or whether it's, you know, state Medicaid programs that are figuring out, you know, how they're gonna deal with coverage. It's not sort of this, you know, overnight switch where everybody immediately, you know, starts doing the testing.
But we still, you know, do firmly believe, you know, that that sort of nine0% plus market penetration will be hit, you know, in this sort of three-year timeframe. And that matches, I think, to the prior testing methodologies on the market. You know, I think they were kind of tapping out in the maybe low 80s, but, you know, given some of the performance improvements in NIPT, I do think you'll get to that kind of nine0% penetration range. We think overall, high-risk testing is probably in the high seven0s-low 80s, you know, and average risk testing is probably in the kind of high 20s, maybe low 30s at this point. We think Natera's market share now is close to 40% or something in that range.
We track our market share, and we can see the competitive market shares as well through these detailed market surveys that we do. We've been gaining share relative to the rest of the market, and we hope that trend continues.
If you take that penetration benefit still to go on prenatal, Signatera still in this very early phase of launch, it's in a single cancer, and then the big efforts you're making here in transplant, how are you thinking about growth going into 2022?
Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously there's a lot of stuff going on. You know, continuing to execute well across the business. A lot of exciting momentum in transplant, you know, as we announced today. You know, a lot of exciting momentum on Signatera. You know, very long way to go in NIPT. So there's a lot of excitement. Michael, do you wanna comment, you know, specifically on sort of how we're thinking about forecasting or, you know, what we're thinking about for 2022?
Yeah. I mean, I think that the trends that you saw in Q3, we think are pretty stable trends. I think you can see that through the guide that we have out there now for the full year. We've got a couple of pretty important product launches going with Natera and Prospera, and there's a lot for us to learn as we go through the next quarter or so on those launches. I mean, I anticipate providing a guide for 2022 on kind of the typical timeline. We'll give an update at the JP Morgan conference, and then we'll likely return with a formal guide in Q4.
You know, all these kind of trends, you can kind of see them, you know, Q2 and Q3 have been pretty stable and quite constructive.
All right. Thanks for the update. Appreciate it.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Massaro with BTIG. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Congrats on a strong quarter. I'm curious when you'd be able to comment on how much revenue contribution you're getting from transplant and oncology. You know, for what it's worth, I'm modeling about $20 million a piece for the full year of 2021. That's the first part. The second part is that, you know, I've seen some data that would suggest that the transplant centers are using both your test as well as the market leader at this current juncture. I haven't seen much evidence that we're seeing, you know, the incumbent getting swapped out for you. The other thing I'm hearing is that a lot of the revenue that perhaps you're generating is coming from registry trials as opposed to, you know, full-blown clinical use.
I'd be curious if you could comment on those three. Thank you.
Yeah. Maybe I'll comment on the transplant stuff, and then Michael, you can comment on the rest.
Yeah.
You know, I think, you know, when you look at, I think we showed a slide today that, you know, about 45 of the top 100 transplant centers are using Prospera regularly. I think that, you know, probably includes some centers that are splitting with CareDx. But that certainly includes some, you know, where we've displaced CareDx, you know, and they're using, you know, a very significant amount of testing.
You know, I think, look, we've always seen in diagnostics some doctors wanna use, you know, two different providers or maybe different doctors within a center wanna use two different providers, and that's fine because the overall market, you know, is still about kind of 8, nine, 10% penetrated, and there's just a very long way to go here in kidney. Now we're talking about going into heart, you know, we've launched, too, going to lung, and there's other organs that, you know, we think are gonna be important in the future as well. You know, it's a long way to go. As far as, you know, registry trials and so forth, you know, I think that that's not accurate. It's just simply not true.
There's a very small portion of the business that we're doing that's part of a registry trial, and the remainder is commercial testing.
Yeah. I'll pick up on just the breaking out of the different products. I think for us it's a matter of just getting to learn how these products perform quarter to quarter and what the right trends are, what the right growth trends are, so that we can feel great that we're accurately forecasting them and then being able to share those with you guys. Similar to my comment on the last question, we currently still have a lot to learn with these products.
I mean, I think in a lot of ways, Q3 was really the first full quarter where we had sales teams in place, and they had been in place long enough to kind of know which end is up and have a, you know, have a locked territory, and be able to be productive. It's not long until we'll be able to, you know, to give more detail and give more guidance on it. We're at the moment, you know, still learning and still watching the launches happen.
Awesome. If I can sneak one last one in. Congrats on the 40,000 samples from the university in Europe. I guess can you speak to you know why you decided to pursue that option as opposed to something else? I'm just curious you know. I believe the university is based in Denmark. Can you speak to you know the homogeneity of or heterogeneity of the samples and whether or not you think that the sample types would be rich enough for U.S. equivalents?
Yeah. I think the first thing is, you know, the public health sector there, I think does an exceptional job of, you know, collecting these extensive outcomes data. That's what gives you the opportunity to, you know, piggyback on something as exceptional as a well-curated, you know, 40,000 sample biobank. Part of the reason why we partner with them is because, you know, they have this exceptional biobank, they have great researchers, and they have this methylation signature that is delivering just exceptional performance. You know, if you look at, I think, across the different stages, 85% sensitivity with a nine9% specificity. That by itself actually is exceptional.
We're augmenting that to include our own methylation targets, and a DNA signature that we've mined from tens of thousands of colorectal exomes. The partnership made sense, based on, you know, what they brought to the table, what we brought to the table. Again, you know, it's a cost-efficient way for us to go after this. You know, as far as the population goes, I mean, look, that's one of the things we've got to have discussions about, when we go for a pre-submission meeting with the FDA, among other things. As I said before, you know, look, this probably or may not end up being the end all be all set that we need to get the test, you know, reimbursed.
We hope it will be, and we think we have a good case when we go make the pre-submission meeting. You know, ultimately, we might end up having to do a prospective trial. Now, if the test performs as we expect it to, and we continue to believe the market opportunity is as big as ever, you know, we think and others think it is, we will not hesitate to pull the trigger and run that trial, even if we're not gonna be the first to market, which we don't think matters. If you look at NIPT, we were the fourth to market, multiple years after others, and now we have, you know, 40% share.
You wanna have the best test, you wanna have the best distribution, the best customer experience, and you don't have to be first to market, to deliver that.
Great. Congrats, guys.
Thank you. This concludes today's question and answer session. Also, ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.