On Tuesday, Veracyte (NASDAQ:VCYT) discussed first-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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Summary
Veracyte reported strong double-digit revenue and volume growth in Q1 2026, with $139.1 million in total revenue, marking a 21% year-over-year increase.
Key strategic initiatives include the upcoming launches of Prosigna LDT and True MRD, aimed at expanding the company’s addressable market and clinical offerings.
Veracyte’s Decipher platform showed robust performance, with 24% year-over-year volume growth, driven by its strong clinical evidence and guideline inclusion.
Affirma saw a 12% increase in test volume, supported by improved operational efficiency and the transition to the V2 transcriptome workflow.
Veracyte raised its full-year revenue guidance to $582-$592 million, reflecting anticipated testing revenue growth of 16-18%.
Management highlighted the company’s diversified platform and strategic execution as key factors in its long-term growth outlook.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Veracyte First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Webcast Call at this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After after the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising you. Your hand is raised to withdraw your question. Please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Kelly Gura, Director of Investor Relations.
Kelly Gura (Director of Investor Relations)
Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today to review Veracyte’s first quarter 2026 financial results. Joining me on the call are Mark Stapley, our Chief Executive Officer, and Rebecca Chambers, our Chief Financial Officer. Dr. John Light, our Chief Commercial Officer, will also be available for Q and A. Earlier this afternoon we issued a press release detailing our first quarter financial results and we posted an accompanying presentation in the Investors section of our website. Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that statements we make during this call will include forward looking statements as defined under applicable securities laws. Forward looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and the company can give no assurance they will prove to be correct. Additionally, we are not under any obligation to provide further updates on our business trends or our performance during the quarter to better understand the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. We refer you to the documents that Veracyte files with the securities and Exchange Commission, including the most recent forms 10Q and 10K. In addition, this call will include certain non GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in today’s earnings release accessible from the Investors section of Veracyte’s website. I’m also pleased to highlight Veracyte’s newly redesigned website which makes it easier to access information on our test portfolio, including a publication search tool to help navigate our extensive and growing clinical evidence base. I will now turn the call over to Mark Stapley, Veracyte’s CEO.
Mark Stapley (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you Kelly and thank you all for joining us today. We had an excellent start to 2026. In the first quarter we delivered strong double digit revenue and volume growth, exceeded our profitability expectations and continued advancing key catalysts that position us well for long term growth. This quarter highlights years of disciplined execution that have transformed Veracyte into a stronger, more focused scalable company. Five years ago we set out to make Decipher a commercial success, grow our core franchises, expand operations, enhance clinical evidence, and build a strong pipeline. We revitalized the Affirma, made Decipher the top prostate cancer gene expression test, increased lab capacity threefold, improved turnaround time in the no result rate, and surpassed a 25% adjusted EBITDA margin. Today, Veracyte is a diversified, profitable company with a unique platform, multiple growth drivers, expanding clinical evidence and strong clinician relationships, all achieved through consistent strategic execution. Now we believe we’re approaching an inflection point that will shape the next five years for Vericite. We’re on the cusp of our two most significant product launches since Affirma First ProSigna LDT supported by the Optima trial with a key presentation, ASCO in June, and second TruMrd, launching initially in muscle invasive bladder cancer. Together, these launches will expand our addressable market, extend our platform into new clinical settings, and position us for what we expect will be an even more transformative next five years for Verosight and the industry. I will spend time discussing both of these growth catalysts shortly, but first turning to our core business, starting with Decipher. Since our acquisition in early 2021, the business has delivered consistent growth of more than 20% quarter after quarter. That momentum continued in the first quarter as we delivered approximately 28,000 tests representing 24% year over year volume growth. This strong performance was driven by continued expansion in ordering providers and orders per physician, and it reflects Decipher’s differentiated position as the only gene expression test supported by high quality clinical evidence and inclusion in NCCN guidelines, advantages that continue to drive adoption across the full spectrum of prostate cancer risk. Over the last few quarters, we’ve seen particularly strong traction in advanced disease, where we believe there remains significant opportunity for Decipher. In the first quarter we delivered nearly 30% growth across high risk categories, including radical prostatectomy, biochemical recurrence and metastatic disease. As we see more evidence supporting the use of Decipher in patients with advanced disease, we expect to see continued growth over time. For example, we’re excited about upcoming results from the Enzymet Phase 3 trial, which will assess Decipher’s ability to identify metastatic patients who benefit from triplet therapy. Those data will be featured in an oral presentation at ASCO later this month. Enzymet is one part of a broader evidence pipeline that continues to advance. Four Phase three trials evaluating Decipher Prostate in Treatment, Intensification and DE Intensification have now completed enrollment, including the Guidance trial, which reached that milestone in the first quarter. Meaningfully ahead of schedule. Guidance includes more than 2,000 patients and is designed to evaluate how the Decipher score can function as an integral biomarker to guide treatment decisions for men with unfavorable intermediate risk. Prostate cancer. PredictRT has a similar goal in high risk disease. These studies move beyond prognostic validation to prospectively demonstrate real world clinical utility informing treatment choices. We believe they can support high level evidence standards for guideline and coverage, while advanced disease is a compelling growth factor. We also continue to see physicians leveraging Decipher in the low risk setting. Since launch, we’ve delivered results for more than 80,000 patients in this population, creating a substantial real world evidence database that continues to inform clinical utility. We believe there is a long Runway to expand Decipher’s role in active surveillance supported by a growing body of evidence. Recent data published in European Urology Oncology demonstrated Decipher’s ability to stratify risk among patients undergoing active surveillance and we were encouraged to see enrollment completed in G Major, a large prospective phase 3 randomized study evaluating how gene expression classifiers can inform active surveillance decisions. Taken together, these achievements and our robust pipeline of ongoing studies reflect more than a decade of sustained investment in evidence generation and position us for a steady cadence of high quality data readouts over the coming years. As our evidence base expands, we’re also enhancing our clinical offerings through evidence generated using our Decipher GRID Research Use Only database. We’re incorporating additional predictive biomarkers including PAM50, Portos and PTEN. Over time, we plan to add select biomarkers to the Decipher clinical report to further support informed decision making in high risk and advanced prostate disease. We are also advancing complementary initiatives in digital pathology and AI powered analysis, which we view as complementary to molecular profiling. As previously shared, we’ve been scanning our deciphered database and are close to digitizing all historical slides for US patients more than 350,000 images. We plan to leverage this extensive data set together with whole transcriptome data in collaborations with leading academic centers to better define where these technologies can add value in clinical practice. Across recent urology conferences, we have seen the field shifting toward biology driven treatment strategies for bladder cancer, with Decipher bladder emerging as a natural extension of our platform. This momentum will on display at the upcoming AUA annual meeting where six studies will be presented highlighting our Decipher bladder portfolio’s ability to advance personalized care in bladder cancer, including insights generated from our GRID Research Use Only database. These presentations build on the strong Decipher bladder data shared at Asco Gu and support the early but growing adoption we’re seeing in the field. Overall, we’re very pleased with Decipher’s start to the year. We believe the franchise is well positioned with unmatched scale, depth of evidence and commercial reach in urology. With only one in three men with prostate cancer in the US currently benefiting from the insights that Decipher offers against the spectrum of disease, we believe it can continue to be a durable long term growth engine and we see meaningful extensibility into bladder disease as an incremental growth driver in the coming years. Turning to iFirma, we delivered approximately 17,200 tests in the first quarter, representing 12% year over year volume growth. This reflects both solid demand across our customer base and strong execution on operational initiatives that improve patient access to actionable results. As we’ve discussed previously, we completed the full transition to our V2 transcriptome workflow in the fourth quarter, establishing a more scalable and cost effective platform. Importantly, this transition has also enhanced our ability to deliver definitive results for a broader set of patients, including historically challenging low input RNA samples. That Momentum continued in Q1 with our no result rate improving both sequentially and year over year. As a result, more patients and physicians received actionable afAffirmative results to guide clinical decision making, contributing approximately 400 basis points to our volume growth in the quarter. Encouragingly, we saw healthy new account wins, increased utilization and a high number of ordering providers in the quarter, reflecting strong engagement and the effectiveness of our strategy. We remain focused on expanding the already robust Clinical Evidence foundation supporting oAffirma through our OFIRMA GRID Research Use only database. We continue to generate a steady cadence of new data and incorporate additional molecular signatures into the latest version of grid. We believe this growing data set increasingly reinforces the Therma GRID as a critical research use only tool to advance the understanding of thyroid nodules and thyroid cancer. Importantly, our commitment to evidence backed research translates into real world clinical and economic impact. A recent independent study analyzing Medicare payment data from 2016 to 2023 found that increased adoption of AFIRMA was associated with a meaningful reduction in thyroid surgery rates among Medicare beneficiaries. These findings highlight how a firmer test results help physicians more confidently rule out surgery when it isn’t warranted, supporting better informed treatment decisions, reducing overall healthcare costs and helping patients avoid unnecessary surgery and its long term consequences. The study also reinforced the firmness position as the leading molecular test for indeterminate thyroid nodules. Taken together, afAffirma’s improving operational performance, expanding clinical evidence and demonstrated real world impact give us confidence in the franchise’s ability to sustain healthy growth in 2026 and beyond. We believe our AfAffirma test remains well positioned to deliver value for patients, physicians and payers while serving as a stable and durable growth engine within our portfolio. Building on the momentum across our core franchises, Prosigna LDT represents one of two major upcoming product launches that we believe marks an important next phase of growth. Prosigna is built on the well established and scientifically validated PAM50 signature and provides deeper insight into the biological classification of breast cancer by reporting the risk of recurrence using intrinsic subtype and proliferation scores to get the 10 year probability of distant recurrence. Prosigna is designed to inform treatment decisions at a critical point in a patient’s care journey. We see a significant opportunity in the US market where approximately 225,000 breast cancer patients are diagnosed annually with early stage hormone receptor positive disease and are eligible for Prosigma testing. This is a large, clinically meaningful population where improved biological insight has the potential to enhance outcomes and help avoid unnecessary treatment. Clinical evidence will be a key driver of adoption, as it always is. We look forward to the upcoming presentation of results from Optima, a large phase 3 randomized prospective trial enrolling approximately 4,500 patients. I’m pleased to share that this presentation has …
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