Private insurers and Medicare regional carriers who decided to cover Uroplasty’s primary urinary incontinence product and other positive developments buoyed Uroplasty Inc.’s fiscal fourth-quarter sales numbers.
The Minnetonka, Minnesota company announced that in the quarter ended March 31, sales jumped 35 percent to $4.01 million from $2.98 million in the same quarter a year ago. Net loss increased to $1.3 million, or 6 cents per diluted share, compared with $576,642 or 4 cents per diluted share in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2010.
Loss widened because the company, which makes products to treat urinary incontinence, hired more sales people and due to higher marketing expense in the U.S. Yet, the loss of 6 cents per share beat analyst expectations by 2 cents. For the year, sales increased to $13.8 million, up from $11.9 million a year ago. Net loss widened to $4.7 million from $3.2 million in fiscal 2010. The company’s cash position jumped to $14.1 million from $5.8 million.
In a conference call to discuss results, CEO David Kaysen said the company will continue to hire more sales people and has already hired four new sales employees and a new regional sales director since the fourth quarter ended March 31. At the end of the quarter, the company had 31 sales employees.
U.S. sales growth was driven by a 43 percent increase in sales of the Urgent PC Neuromodulation System to $1.3 million compared with the same quarter in the prior fiscal year. The boost in U.S. sales came from private insurers like United Healthcare and Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, a regional insurer in upstate New York, that recently decided to cover posterior tibial nerve stimulation (PTNS) treatments. Ten of the 13 regional Medicare carriers cover those treatments and Kaysen said the company continues to communicate with medical directors of the other three that don’t.
The Urgent PC system won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for overactive bladder treatment in 2006, but later ran into sales and reimbursement problems. After the company did some new clinical studies, it obtained a unique reimbursement code, which went into effect Jan. 1. The system works by sending an electrical pulse into the spinal nerves that control bladder function. The treatment is billed as an alternative to drugs and requires 12 weekly sessions that last about 30 minutes each.
Kaysen said the company plans to seek FDA approval to use the Urgent PC system for fecal incontinence. The product has European approval to use it for that condition and Kaysen said the company is planning to design U.S. clinical trials to get approval for that indication domestically, too.
