NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – OpGen reported after the close of the market on Tuesday that its third quarter revenues fell 2 percent year over year.
For the three months ended Sept. 30, the firm reported total revenues of $745,144, down from $759,663 in Q3 2016. Product sales fell to $729,742 from $730,325 in the year-ago quarter, while lab services revenues fell to $9,070 from $23,036, and collaboration revenues remained flat at $6,302.
"We continued to advance development of our first Acuitas AMR Gene Panel u5.47 test [for complicated urinary tract infections] and the Acuitas Lighthouse Knowledgebase and are planning to begin clinical validation studies during the fourth quarter of 2017," OpGen Chairman and CEO Evan Jones said in a statement. The company also noted that it expects to release the AMR Gene Panel u5.47 for research and investigational use in the first half of 2018.
"Our Acuitas Rapid Test for cUTI is on track to be evaluated at third-party clinical sites in the fourth quarter," Jones added. "This antimicrobial resistance test is expected to be the first of a series of OpGen tests that will help address the global antibiotic resistance crisis by identifying antibiotic resistant pathogens in less than three hours. Along with the Acuitas Lighthouse Knowledgebase, a dynamic cloud-based information store that is continuously updated for new resistance genes, results will help inform proper patient treatments."
Opgen's Q3 net loss narrowed to $3.3 million from $4.8 million a year earlier. Its net loss per share narrowed to $.07 on 47.1 million weighted average shares outstanding from $.23 on 20.9 million weighted average shares outstanding in Q3 2016.
The company's Q3 R&D expenses fell 32 percent to $1.5 million from $2.2 million in the year-ago period. Its SG&A costs fell 34 percent to $1.9 million from $2.9 million.
In a conference call with analysts following the release of the earnings, OpGen CFO Tim Dec attributed the overall drop in SG&A for the nine months ended Sept. 30 "to lower costs associated with the sales and marketing team, and the completion of the Intermountain Healthcare Retrospective Study in 2015."
OpGen ended the quarter with $4.9 million in cash and cash equivalents.
The company also said that it has continued development of genotype/phenotype predictive algorithms based on the testing of 7,400 clinical isolates from the Merck SMART surveillance network and clinical collaborators, which contributed to the 15,800 isolates contained in the Acuitas Lighthouse Knowledgebase.
The firm's shares fell more than 6 percent to $.29 in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq.