NEW YORK – Personalis reported after the close of the market on Wednesday that its second quarter revenues were up 11 percent year over year, as significant growth from its larger customer base offset a dip in revenue from the Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program.
For the three months ended June 30, the cancer and population genomics company reported revenues of $21.7 million, up from $19.5 million a year earlier and beating the average Wall Street estimate of $21.2 million.
The company logged $13.5 million in revenues from the VA MVP, a 9 percent drop from $14.8 million in Q2 2020. Revenues from biopharmaceutical and other customers, meanwhile, were up 74 percent to about $8.2 million from $4.7 million in the prior-year quarter.
"I’m proud to say that we were able to report record revenue once again this quarter and that we achieved our 20th consecutive quarter of growth," Personalis CEO John West said in a statement, highlighting a seventh sequential quarter of growth for the firm's non-MVP revenue.
That said, MVP testing continues to make up the majority of the firm's earnings, with Personalis recently sequencing its 125,000th human genome for the program.
During a call discussing the firm's quarterly results, West said Personalis expects oncology revenue to become a larger part of its total mix of revenue going forward, highlighting the fact that new orders received during Q2 exceeded its quarterly revenue, with a similar pattern now emerging in Q3.
Encouragingly, he added, over half of the company's newest orders are for prospective clinical trials. "We see it as a great endorsement of our platform that our pharmaceutical customers are incorporating it in their clinical trial designs, right from the start. We also believe that the increasing value of our backlog bodes well for future revenue growth."
Development efforts for the company's oncology minimal residual disease product, NeXT Personal, "remain on track" for launch this year, he added.
"We have been processing customer-provided samples to ensure our product development meets customer requirements and we’re very encouraged by those initial results and by initial feedback from our customers," West said.
Personalis' net loss for Q2 rose to $15 million, or $.34 per share, from $9.3 million, or $.29 per share, in the same quarter of 2020. There were 44.0 million shares used to calculate the per share loss this quarter compared to 31.7 million in Q2 2020. Wall Street analysts, on average, had predicted a loss per share of $.39.
The company's Q2 R&D costs jumped 80 percent to $11.7 million from $6.5 million a year earlier, while its SG&A expenses rose about 48 percent to $11.4 from $7.7 million.
The firm ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $70.1 million and short-term investments of $258.8 million.