T2 Biosystems 3Q
November 4, 2020
On September 4, 2020, we announced that the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services extended the New Technology Add-on Payment, or NTAP, for our T2Bacteria Panel for an additional year, through fiscal year 2021. With this extension, U.S. hospitals treating Medicare inpatients with sepsis can continue to receive an additional reimbursement of up to $97.50 for the T2Bacteria Panel for eligible patients. We believe this reimbursement decision will potentially be a catalyst for the adoption of our T2Bacteria Panel in the upcoming year.
Moving to our second priority – improving our operations, by prioritizing cost of goods and expense reductions.
During the first half of 2020, we made significant progress in reducing our cost structure. We reduced headcount by 20%, consolidated our facilities and reduced our real estate footprint by 22%, and aligned investments with our corporate priorities. We implemented a number of initiatives to reduce the manufacturing cost of our products, primarily focused on our sepsis test panels. We are now beginning to see the benefit of these improvements in our financials — in the form of reduced SG&A expenses and reduced cost of product revenue, compared to prior year periods. In addition, the increased sales volume associated with the new T2SARS-CoV-2 Panel is improving overhead absorption, and allowing us to leverage our supply chain and implement additional improvements.
During the third quarter, we rapidly increased production output of our T2Dx Instruments and our test panels to meet the demand from U.S. hospitals. Our goal is to deliver at least sixty T2Dx Instruments in the U.S. in the second half of 2020, which represents a greater than seven-fold increase over the prior year period. In addition, during the third quarter of 2020, we manufactured approximately 70,000 tests, also a greater than seven-fold increase over the prior year period. We plan to further increase our test manufacturing capacity to approximately 300,000 tests per quarter by early 2021. To support these expansion plans, we are hiring manufacturing, quality control, and quality assurance personnel, and taking all necessary measures to secure our supply chain.
As a reminder, each T2Dx Instrument has the capacity to consume up to sixty T2SARS-CoV-2 Panels per day, depending on workflow. That, coupled with our customer standing order process, enables us to accurately calculate and forecast the test demand based on our instrument installed base, and plan manufacturing schedules accordingly.
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