Hi, everybody. Welcome to day three of the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. My name is Hardik Parikh. I work in the equity research team covering large cap biopharma for our U.S. I wanna welcome Frank Lee, the freshly minted CEO of Pacira, up to the floor.
Thanks, Hardik, and good morning, everybody. After what, five days on the job, I can tell you, I've got it almost figured out. Give me another day. I thought I'd start with a little bit of a bio about myself, and maybe answer the question that many of you have, which is, why Pacira? Why Pacira, Frank? And so just a little bit of bio, 30+ years in the industry, most recently as CEO of Forma Therapeutics. We took a company there. I took over the reins from a CEO founder who had been there a while. We pivoted the company, built a great team, and took the company public.
And, after a while, a company by the name of Novo Nordisk took interest and, acquired the company about a year ago. So that was most recently, and prior to that, spent a lot of time here in the Bay Area, with Genentech, and also Genentech, Roche, after the acquisition, and was very fortunate to be a part of a number of great teams where we took products to multi-billion-dollar, billion-dollar status, and that was a wonderful thing. We did some great things for patients. And so that was most of my recent career. So again, 30+ years, and you might say, "Well, Frank, after a year of semi-retirement, why Pacira? What got you off the sidelines, so to speak?" And what I'd tell you is, I did my due diligence.
What I found here were really good products, and I think many of you know this. EXPAREL, ZILRETTA, iovera are very good products. Okay? I see some head nods. What I also found was a therapeutic area leader. So when I looked around, there were no other companies that were leaders like Pacira in the non-opioid pain management space, and that was very clear. I wanna talk to you a little bit about why I think that way. But when you see companies that have great products, and have the wherewithal to do those things that go beyond the product, that impact policy and reimbursement, you know you've got a therapeutic area leader on your hands, and that's Pacira. Then when you look forward, there's a real catalyst. This catalyst is called, NOPAIN .
We're gonna have a little quiz in the room here in a second, 'cause this is early in the morning. I want you a little bit more involved about what you think NOPAN is. 'Cause I love the way it sounds, but I wanna see if you actually know what it means, what it means for patients, and what it means for Pacira, what it means for you in this audience. Okay? So those are three important things, and also what I find here is a very strong, financially stable organization that can fund our growth, and a group of people who are super, super passionate about our mission. Okay, so that's what I found, and that's the answer to why Pacira.
Before I go further, I did wanna recognize Dave Stack and the team for an amazing 16 years in building this company. I know how hard it is to take a company from literally the very beginning to now helping over 13 million patients out there. That's 13 million. For those of you that work in rare orphan or specialty spaces, that's a lot. That's a lot, okay? So that's an amazing thing to build this kind of an organization, and I told Dave I'm super proud to be here, honored, humbled to be here. But as we now look to the next chapter, right, of this company's growth, sometimes, as we did at the Forma experience, a fresh set of eyes is a good thing.
A fresh set of eyes to take a look at things and to think about how we're gonna grow this company, going forward. And if there's one thing that you should take away from this talk this morning, is that we're gonna be sharply focused on growth. And we'll talk about what that means, going forward here, okay? So here's some disclosures. So our mission here is very, very clear. Our mission is to transform the lives of patients by expanding access to non-opioid treatment options. And that's a very compelling mission for the people in our company, and personally, it's a very important mission to me for a lot of reasons, okay? And I hope that many of you this resonates for you as well, okay?
From a vision standpoint, as I mentioned earlier, here today, we are the leaders when it comes to non-opioid pain management options. So Pacira is the leader. Before we go too much further, I wanna share a story with you. It's a story about Carrie and her son, Taylor. Now, Taylor was an amazing athlete, played a lot of sports. Unfortunately, he got injured. He hurt his shoulder, he had surgery, and subsequent to surgery, he was prescribed opioids, and over time, he became addicted, and through an accidental overdose, he died at the age of 20. At the age of 20.
And so it's stories like this, and also the data that started to emerge, that compelled Pacira to say, "Hey, we should do something here." 'Cause I have to tell you that, before joining Pacira, I always thought addiction was something that happened way over there, you know, outside of the hospital. This was something about people taking these pills when they shouldn't be taking them. And in fact, that does. Of course, that takes place. But also, despite the best efforts of our medical professionals and caregivers, these kind of surgeries can lead to addiction, okay? So when we saw that seven years ago, we rallied not only Pacira, but now a group, a coalition that makes up over 100 organizations, and got this legislation called NOPAIN passed, and it's gonna take effect in January 2025. Okay?
So think about that now. How many companies have the leadership to stand up and say, "This is what we've gotta do," and to make it happen after seven years? And I'm gonna tell you that, when I heard the story about many times when the company could have given up, all right? And the company didn't, because this mission is super, super important. So here are our products. You know about our products. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about EXPAREL, all right? Because it really pertains to this NOPAIN opportunity for patients. So I wanna go back here a little bit, and this is the audience interactive part. And for those of you online, I wanna see your hands, too. So how many of you know what NOPAIN is, by show of hands?
How many of you know what NOPAIN is? Okay, we got about, just for everybody in the room, about, I would say, 5%, if I do my eyeballing. Okay. So if you don't know, let me, let me share with you what it is, okay? Because it's super, super important. I'm sort of a simple-minded person in many ways, so I've gotta kinda figure out, what's the problem? And simply, what's the solution, and what's the opportunity? And if you can't roll that off your tongue, then you don't really know what it is. So what's the problem? The problem is that these medicines are bundled in a procedure. Okay, they're bundled. They're right in there. So, as you know, our providers are under tremendous, tremendous financial pressure.
And so many times, our providers wanna do the right thing for patients, but they have a hard time doing it, okay? Hard time doing it. So what is NOPAIN ? NOPAIN says, "Hey, let's pull this medicine out of that bundle so they don't have to make those kind of trade-off choices. Let's reimburse it at average selling price plus 6." I'm sure many of you know what that is. If you ever followed Genentech back in the day, you know what ASP plus 6 is, okay? All right, so let's pull it out of the bundle, reimburse it ASP plus 6, and specifically, it's gonna be the case in hospital outpatient departments for patients who are under CMS. So when you do that kind of math, you wind up with about 3.5 million patients.
When you add in commercial payers, that's another 2.5, making it about 6 million patients in the HOPD setting. Right now, right now, it's not reimbursed that way in HOPD. Okay? Now, if you think about 340B pricing, and if you think about the GPO contracts that we're putting in place, this is gonna provide a favorable entry point, acquisition cost, and reimbursement. So it's a tremendous opportunity for patients, it's a tremendous opportunity for the people who take care of patients, and it's good for our stakeholders and the institutions. They don't have to make these hard trade-off decisions, and it's good for the company. And this is because of seven years' worth of work, okay? So what I'm very proud to say is that this legislation benefits a wide array of products. Okay?
So you can see here that six products will benefit from NOPAIN legislation going forward, in addition to EXPAREL. At a high level, and we can provide more granularity as the year goes on and we get ready, this is gonna turn EXPAREL into a blockbuster product, over $1 billion. And what that means is, we're helping a heck of a lot more patients. Heck of a lot more. And by the way, today, this year, we're gonna touch more than 2 million patients, which is really remarkable. Really remarkable. And if you think about what this means now in opening up more access to patients, substantial amount of access, there's gonna be a groundswell here, right? And what's also gonna do is tip the balance toward making EXPAREL easier to access.
So if you have to think about, "Hey, in the hospital, I do this, in the HOPD, I do this," and if you're CMS, you do this, if you're a commercial payer, you do this, if you're ASC, you do this, and et cetera, et cetera, that, that's not the easy button that we want, all right? So we're starting to tip the balance towards this being more readily accessible to patients. So let's talk about what we're doing right now. We're getting these GPO contracts in place. It's gonna have an impact, single digit, on gross nets. Yeah, it will. But this opens up access, okay? And again, I'm gonna come back to, if any of you have been to hospitals recently, they are under substantial pressure. And I don't have to go through a lot of reasons why. You know it, right?
So we're a part of the solution here with GPOs. And as you know, we recently went and got involved in the 340B program, and we'll continue to update you on how we're thinking about that. Lower extremity launch. So as you know, we were recently approved for lower extremity launch. We think that this is gonna be a $100 million opportunity over time. Our sales force is ready to go. In fact, at the end of this month, I'll be there with them, and they're super excited to bring this new use of EXPAREL to physicians and patients. And this makes it now super easy. This is a broad coverage now of pretty much every surgical procedure you can think about.
Again, making it very easy to think about EXPAREL, and where to use it, and how to use it. I talked earlier about our financial position. We are in very solid ground here, okay? As you can see here, sales were at about $668 million, is the way we rounded last year. You can see that $280 million on the balance sheet, and EBITDA around 210. So a very solid company. And, as we grow, as we grow units in the top line, our margins will also, over time, get more favorable. But I wanna emphasize that we'll be focused on growing, growing use of EXPAREL going forward. And it makes a lot of sense, right?
Because in the near term, we've got the lower extremity launch, something that's very compelling when you take a look at dataset, and you should. It was against an active comparator, and very good data. Second, this year, we're gonna be spending a lot of time, a lot of time meeting the what I would say, the complexities and the challenges of our customers, meeting them where they are, because they operate in very complex environments, tough environments, and we've got to be up to serving them in a way that they can utilize EXPAREL easily, right? So what that means is, we have to up our game when it comes to access and reimbursement, and making sure that's not an issue this year. What we also have to do is...
And if you all are indicative of our customers, in the sense that, do they know about NOPAIN ? So if you think about this now, it's such a big opportunity for us. We think about it internally as almost like a new product launch. And when you think about it that way, you would track your progress. You would say, "Hey, do our customers, do our stakeholders, are they aware of NOPAIN ? Are they educated about NOPAIN ? Can they can they tell us what the problem, the solution, and the opportunity is? And are they getting ready? Are they taking action to make sure that this sticks in their organizations?" 'Cause as you know, many of these organizations have a number of processes and things that they have to go through to implement new reimbursement.
So we're gonna track that over time, because this is a very big opportunity, and, like I said, we're gonna meet the sophistication and complexity of the market going forward. So let me just summarize real quick, and then we'll go to Q&A. The main takeaway here is we're gonna be sharply focused on growth. We've got great products, there's no question about that. We've got this catalyst, called NOPAIN , ahead of us. We have the lower extremity launch here and now, that'll be a good tailwind for us. And overall, what hopefully you took away from just this brief talk, is that, Pacira is the leader in this NOPAIN space, and we're well poised now to grow going forward.
So 2024 will be a year that we'll get ready, and 2025 and beyond will be years that we return to growth. Okay, so, I'd like to thank you for your time and attention, and we'll shift over to Q&A. All right?
All right.
Thank you. Yeah.
Frank, thank you for the presentation. I am genuinely impressed for you being in the job for a week. You've come up to speed pretty fast on the key drivers of the business. So it's very impressive. So the first question is just kind of starting off, you know, when you were talking about what brought you to this role. Could you expand a little bit more about when you were doing your due diligence, you know, what were you looking for in your next role?
Yeah. You know, I've had the good fortune to be a part of so many great teams, doing amazing work for patients. That's always been very important to me. Back in my early days... I'm a chemical engineer by training, originally. And back in the early days, I had an opportunity to go work for a petrochemical company. And when I stood there at that plant, I thought, "You know, there's got to be a greater purpose than boiling oil." So no offense to our petrochemical colleagues, I studied chemical engineering for you, but it didn't resonate for me. Then a company called Eli Lilly came to town, literally next day. And back in those days, you actually had to sign up for the interviews.
Mm.
So I signed up for the interviews, and when they talked about, "Hey, we make medicines that help patients," that resonated for me. So I've never looked back. And with each job, I've had the real pleasure, the opportunity to work on these amazing, amazing drugs with great teams. Here at Genentech, I don't have to go through the list with you, I hope. If you think about oncology and what we did there, if you think about immunology, ophthalmology, I had the great fortune to be with those teams in growing those businesses and bringing that to patients, right? And along the way, we had to solve some really hard puzzles, not problems, puzzles, for our patients and our stakeholders, and we did in creative ways, and that was terrific.
So when I looked at Pacira, and I heard about the journey that Pacira has been on to help with this opioid crisis, to provide new options, and the breadth of patients that we're impacting, you know. I mean, as I said, it took me back a little bit. This year alone, we're gonna touch 2 million patients with EXPAREL. And so this opportunity, in my last gig here, coming out of semi-retirement, I felt like this was something that we're gonna be able to make a broad impact on patients.
Mm.
So that, that's what compelled me, number one. And number two, when I met the team, it's such a passionate team of folks. And then when I, third, you know, looked underneath the hood a little bit more, I said, "Hey, there's a real opportunity here, to make some, some good things happen," because the company is in a great position to do that. We just have to go out and do it.
Okay, great. So you looked underneath the hood. With external perspective, what did you see as Pacira's competitive advantages? And on the other side, where do you think that, you know, Pacira can make some further headway?
Yeah. Well, look at one of the things I heard as a critique to the company is hit your numbers, okay? When we provide guidance, we should meet that, and that's important to shareholders. It's important for our credibility. So we gotta get better at that. That's gotta change. And so that'll be reflected in our upcoming guidance and how we get close with investors. And, I'm spending a lot of time in the coming months looking and listening, and, a big part of the reason I'm here on day five, is to make sure that I understand, the investor perspective and hear from you. So if you see me in the hallway, stop me. I'd love to chat with you further. We've had a number of meetings.
We've got a lot more, coming up today, but I wanna hear from you, because we gotta get better at that, okay? So, what was your other question you asked me?
No, no, no. It was, it was really just, you know, what is the competitive advantages that Pacira has, and-
Yeah, competitive advantage, look at... I see EXPAREL as being differentiated. Try to find another product with the kind of data that EXPAREL has. So these are differentiated products. I can go on and on. And I'm gonna come back to, this is the leader in the space. When it comes to relationships in the space, knowledge of the space, I would say the ability to influence the space, as indicated by NOPAIN , that's a huge competitive advantage.
Okay, good. So you were coming from CEO of Forma, and, you know, when you kind of think about what your past experience is, how do you leverage that into kind of further developing, you know, Pacira's pipeline and overall kind of business development priorities and all that stuff?
You know, one of the things that is very important, and don't take this as the wrong way, a lot of investors here in the room, I often find investors can't pay attention to more than one thing at a time. And so, I want you to pay attention to EXPAREL, and I want you to pay attention to NOPAIN , because it's important. And I'm gonna talk to you a lot about why it's important. We're gonna open up opportunities to have you get close to the folks who were instrumental, that is, folks internal and importantly, external to the company. So you can see what it means for you, and really believe in it like we do, right? And so, that, that's important. That's important.
You know, along the way, we're gonna share now our progress in ways that are, I think, meaningful for investors, and so, you know, that's what to expect going forward.
Got it.
Yeah.
And at Forma, you were able to lead it through its IPO, a sale to Novo Nordisk in 2022. So what do you think in terms of... What are your key learnings in terms of what makes a company well-positioned, and then how does that kind of form your views on business development here?
Yeah. You know, over time, we'll figure out what is the kind of company we wanna be over the long term, and some might look at Forma or at Pacira and say, "Hey, what kind of company are you?" when I look at the portfolio. So that's a question that we'll have to answer over time. We're not gonna be able to answer it right now, but that's a very important question. Because if I think about now, fast-forward, we do the things we need to do now, we grow the business, how are we gonna use now the proceeds? I n terms of investments going forward? Is it in our own internal pipeline? If so, why? Are there other things outside, and if so, what? But fundamentally, we've gotta be able to answer: what do we wanna be in five years?
And specifically, as we make investments, keep the hurdle very high, and be able to simply answer the question: where do we play, and, and how do we win? And if we can't answer those kinds of questions well, then we haven't done our job. And, and a lot of that means making the trade-offs that are super hard inside the company. As you know, many people, when they work on something for a while... You know, I'm the same way. I, you know, I love that thing. But we have to be able to reallocate and allocate resources to those things that get us to five years from now.
Okay, great. And then, so now, you talked about, you think EXPAREL is very differentiated, a great data set. When you put on your commercial hat from your Genentech days, how do you view the in-market portfolio, Pacira's in-market portfolio, from a commercial perspective?
Yeah. So look, it's pretty amazing, I have to tell you, if you go back in time, how rapidly EXPAREL is growing. Then we all know about what happened in 2020, and all the trials and tribulations that our stakeholders had, and still have. And despite that, the company was still able to maintain its position. It's a reasonably large product now, okay? So we have a good platform to jump off from. What I'd say is that, just based on my past experience in commercialization, what happens over time is the world gets more and more complex. You know, for those of you that were around a long time ago, you'll know that there were simpler days when you could run the trial and put some material together and go sell it, and that's great.
You know, these days, it's very, very complicated. It's an alphabet soup of stakeholders, and reimbursement, value proposition, et cetera, super, super important. So, in the days that I spent here in the Bay Area, with Genentech, we had to solve a lot of those things, and the important thing is to work back from the customer. Do they need more support in access and reimbursement? If yes, then that's what we did. Do we need a different way of distributing our products? If yes, then that's what we did. Do we need to activate patients at some point and tell patients that, "You know what? You gotta stand up and ask for it," okay? That's what we did. And so I can go through example after example after example.
But what I see here is, we've gotta meet that level of sophistication that our customers deserve. Right now, my sense is most physicians are very aware that EXPAREL is a great product, and by and large, they wanna use it, but they don't wanna go through nine steps to use it.
Mm-hmm.
So we gotta, we gotta solve that puzzle, okay? That's number one. And you know, outside of access and reimbursement now, this addition to the procedures that are covered under EXPAREL, it makes it super easy now for physicians to think about that. And over time, I would tell you that with 2 million-plus patients that are touched, we have to engage the patient at some point at the right time, because it's important.
You know, I have to tell you that I wish I'd known about EXPAREL when my mom had her total knee replacement surgery, because she's one of those people who said, "Look, I'm not taking those pain pills." And for those of you who know what happens after knee surgery, you know those few days after are super important to get her on her feet, to go through the PT, and she didn't do that well, because she didn't wanna take these pain medicines, okay, and get hooked on it. And so she still doesn't walk like she should. And by the way, her other knee needs to be worked on, too, but she's absolutely adamant: "I'm not going through that again." All right? So I'm gonna have to tell her a little bit about some of the things that we have.
Yeah. Great, great.
Yeah.
So already mentioned, very impressive how quickly you've come up to speed. When you go back to the office on day six, what are the things that you're focusing on right now? What are the things that you're still getting up to speed on?
You know, for me, it's very important, and I've been spending a lot of great time meeting our employees, listening, because I'm of the mind that we have just some amazing people in our company. So I'm gonna spend a lot of time listening, that's important, in the coming months, not only to our internal employees, but I'm gonna spend a lot of time with our external customers and stakeholders. Because whatever we do going forward, I wanna, I wanna make sure we're very thoughtful about that. And so that's important. So in the coming months, a lot of getting around to internal folk, external stakeholders, and looking and listening. At the right time, we'll share the new vision, if you will, for the future, which will, I think, in very much inform how we think about our investments going forward.
Okay. Under David Stack's leadership, EXPAREL became a mainstay in the surgical setting. They were able to kind of execute on some BD. Under your stewardship, what's kind of the next evolution of Pacira?
... Well, we'll see. We'll see. I don't wanna be too premature in talking about what could be and everything else. We're gonna be very thoughtful-
Mm-hmm
... about that. One thing I do know is that, as the slide says, we're gonna be sharply focused on growth. So not that margins don't matter and lots of other things don't matter, but we have to grow. We will grow because of this big catalyst that we have ahead of us, and it's in sight, and we're treating it like a new product launch. And so for those of you, like I said, who've been a part of new product launches, typically, you get to launch a product once. And so we need to do what we need to do this year to get that right.
So when, you know, usually when there's a new leadership, they have these one-month, three-months, six-months kind of goals or checklists. What are some of your most, like, near-term, you know. On your agenda, what do you want to accomplish?
It's quite simple for me. Every new job I've taken, I just brush off the same 30, 60, 90-day plan, which has served me super well. One is, the first 30 days is about meeting folks internally. The next 30 days, going externally. The next 30 days, coming back and saying, "Hey, we should, we should compare notes. Am I seeing the right kind of things? If so, great. If not, then let's talk about that some more to clarify." So that oftentimes provides a great jumping-off point, where we're all jumping off from the same place. And so that means zigzagging the country and doing a lot of things, but I find it energizing. You know, I find it energizing to meet new people.
There's so many good ideas out there, and so I'm looking forward to the next. Let's see. I've got a 90-day plan. I'm in—what am I in? Day five.
Day five.
Yeah, day five.
Mm-hmm.
I got 85 days left for you. Okay?
Great. Great.
Yeah.
You started off, you talking about the mission of Pacira-
Yeah
to kind of reduce opioid use, right? And obviously, opioid use has gone down significantly, but it's still in use, especially in some, you know, lower-income communities, even despite 340 B. What do you think Pacira needs to do, and what do you think kind of the broader medical field still has to do to move away from opioids?
Well, well, first, there are patients who that's the right option-
Mm-hmm
... under controlled circumstances, so I wanna recognize that first. Whatever we do will be in concert with the healthcare community, just like we have for NOPAIN, right? So that's important. As you know, for 340B, we only just recently, in you know, recent months, have gone down that path. And so for disproportionate share institutions, 340B, that's an important thing because as many of you know, the spirit of that was to make sure we recognize that those institutions are taking in many patients where, in other places, they're not welcome, okay? And so this margin, if you will, that they take and gain, helps to fund that in some ways, right? So that's important.
So, I don't know what the future will hold, but certainly what we're doing around 340 B, what we're doing around GPOs, is an important piece of the formula, and it recognizes that our customers, our patients, are under a lot of financial pressure, you know? At the same time, by opening up access, we believe volume will grow, unit volume.
Okay. So on the NOPAIN Act, definitely the next big kind of catalyst for Pacira. Can you talk to me a little bit more about what you see as the incremental opportunity for Pacira? You know, what... Or just how you're thinking about the opportunity in general.
Sure. And by the way, I'm gonna put in a plug here. So Susan, who's right up front here, you'll be hearing from her. She's our head of investor relations. In our one-on-ones that we've had so far, there's been a lot of interest around NOPAIN, especially when I quiz people—like I did, saying, "Do you know about NOPAIN? And you know what? You should. You should raise your hand next time I ask you the question." So she's gonna help you. We're gonna have a number of opportunities where you can hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, from all sorts of folks who were involved in making that happen, both inside and outside the company, and you'll be, you'll be better educated about NOPAIN.
But in short, as I mentioned briefly earlier, right now, a large proportion of procedures are in the hospital outpatient department, HOPD. Right now, it's bundled. So, we're gonna pull that out with CMS patients, and it's gonna be reimbursed at ASP plus 6. So 3.5 million patients is what we estimate, just for the HOPD CMS patients. And to the extent that they're a part of 340 B and/or GPOs, they have a favorable acquisition price, which I think makes it easier, financially easier, for our customers to think about utilizing EXPAREL.
Have you seen any kind of almost like a, you know, have you heard any comments about, like, warehousing or something, like patient warehousing, where, you know, people are waiting, essentially, for this, this drug to kind of... Sorry, this act to kind of come into effect? It doesn't start till 2025. Are people highly anticipating and then kind of warehousing certain surgeries, or?
I'm not aware of that.
Mm-hmm.
But certainly, there's seasonality to surgeries-
Mm-hmm
As you know, as there are medical benefits, as you might imagine, reach certain thresholds, where after that, then they're out of pocket isn't as impacted, right? So you definitely see seasonality, and we expect that to continue, but I haven't heard of warehousing as of yet. Certainly, the first step is making sure folks know what the heck NOPAIN is.
Mm-hmm.
Then they'll know what to do around that. But I think that's our first step around NOPAIN. And what I'm hopeful for is that once we demonstrate the value that NOPAIN can have for patients in that setting, that commercial payers will feel compelled to follow suit.
Mm-hmm.
As you know, oftentimes that's the case, but it's not a given, and we're gonna have to share the impact that we're making on patients. So, again, if we do that, then we're up to about 6 million patients in just the HOPD setting alone, so it's pretty substantial.
Mm-hmm.
Like I say, in order to really make that happen, we've gotta do all the things that you normally do around product launches right now and through the course of this year. That's what I'm looking forward to, to sharing with you as a, as the year goes on.
And you.. Earlier, you talked about kind of setting expectations with The Street, right? In terms of guidance on... Do you have any philosophical kind of changes or kind of adjustments of how you think you're gonna kind of guide The Street going forward?
So, first off, we have guidance coming up. I'm looking at Charlie, our CFO here, the 29th of February. So that's consistent with what we've done year after year. So look forward to that. Please mark it on your calendars, okay? So that's number one. Number two is that, you know, again, the critique has been, perhaps not about the absolute, but did you.. Relative to guidance, did you, did you hit it? And so look, I think it's gonna be very important to make sure that we deliver on guidance, let me just say that, going forward.
And once we do that, and I'm not, I'm not promising anything right now, but, you know, we're gonna have that as a focus, then my sense is most folks will start to pay a little bit more attention to what's ahead of us. But if we're not meeting the quarter, then, oftentimes, folks can't see beyond the quarter. And so what I'd love to have you see is what's in 2025, 2026, and 2027, because that's important. But in reality, if we're not hitting the quarters, then it's hard to see that way, right?
Mm-hmm.
So that's my hope.
Great, great. I think we're almost out of time here, so just... Do you have any closing remarks that you wanna leave us with?
Yeah, so like I said, I'm very excited. This opportunity got me off the bench, so to speak, after Forma. You can only play so much golf, is what I found. And there's a threshold that, you know, around my index. So look, and I'm super excited. In many ways, I feel like a lot of the things I've done in the past have brought me here. And this is an important mission for me personally, I have to tell you. And I feel like we're well-poised, well-poised, for growth in 2025 and beyond. And when we do that, it's gonna be super exciting about what we do with the proceeds, 'cause not only are we financially strong now, we're gonna be stronger in the future, right?
And so 2025 will be the year that we get ready, and I really appreciate your interest. It's great to see so many bodies in the room, and certainly a lot of folks online as well. Please stay engaged. It's important. It's important not only for your business, but it's important for patients. So thank you.