Growth accelerated in Q4 2019, with preliminary record total revenue of $7.4 million and record product sales of $6.6 million, driven by a 30% increase in direct sales.
MONMOUTH JUNCTION, N.J., Jan. 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- CytoSorbents, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTSO), a critical care immunotherapy leader commercializing its CytoSorb® blood purification technology to treat deadly inflammation in critically-ill and cardiac surgery patients around the world, issues a stockholder letter from Dr. Phillip Chan, Chief Executive Officer of CytoSorbents, and pre-announces preliminary unaudited fourth quarter 2019 and full-year 2019 results ahead of filing its Form 10-K. ![]() Preliminary 2019 Financial Highlights: The Company expects to announce the following:
Dear Stockholders and Friends, First, let me thank all of you for your patience and support in 2019, which was a challenging year. It was technically our best year ever, but clearly did not meet our collective expectations. We disappointed you, and as a stockholder myself, I understand and share your disappointment. That said, as we say goodbye to 2019, and warmly welcome the new decade, we ended the year on a strong note, with a 21% resurgence in growth and achievement of preliminary, unaudited record Q4 2019 total revenue and product sales of $7.4 million and $6.6 million, respectively. And despite the growing pains, 2019 was still a year of progress.
For 2020, our focus will be to drive our U.S. and E.U. clinical programs and maximize sales. I have personally taken over the role of interim Chief Medical Officer for the time being, acknowledging with utmost importance the priority and urgency of our clinical programs. This is being done in parallel to an aggressive search for a new CMO. As we work to resume the REFRESH 2-AKI trial, we believe the anti-thrombotic removal application for cardiac surgery represents a potentially rapid, relatively inexpensive pathway for U.S. FDA approval and are aggressively pursuing this strategy. Meanwhile the U.S. and E.U. clinical teams are working together to advance the U.K. TISORB study and initiate new company-sponsored critical care and cardiac surgery studies in the E.U. From a commercialization standpoint, the company is much stronger than it was a year ago, with more people and expertise than we have ever had. For example, we have substantially expanded our sales and marketing resources in Europe and elsewhere, such that for the first time, the commercialization team is now approximately the size of our U.S. operations. Importantly, we have more than doubled the number of customer facing sales representatives and specialists in Germany - our core market that accounts for 60-65% of our product sales. This increase in headcount is intended to allow our sales people to be more efficient, to better serve our customers, to communicate the value proposition of CytoSorb more effectively, and to harvest sales. In addition, we have added significant resources to better optimize our sales processes, take advantage of new clinical applications, and strengthen our marketing messaging. Meanwhile, distributor and partner sales are expected to increase as well, aided by recent clinical successes, new clinical data and applications, select reimbursement, and multiple expected registration approvals in Latin America. This also includes Mexico registration that is anticipated to accelerate our partnership with Fresenius Medical Care. We believe our business has never been as exciting as it is today. Unlike products that address a single problem, CytoSorb is riding the wave of multiple macro trends in healthcare. The aging baby boomer generation is driving the incidence of serious infections and sepsis, trauma, the use of blood thinners to prevent strokes and heart attacks, sudden cardiac arrest, and cardiac surgery for both coronary artery disease and structural heart disease. The chronic liver disease pandemic that afflicts 1 in 11 people worldwide, results in millions of people being admitted to hospitals for acute exacerbations of their disease each year, where CytoSorb is viewed by some as the next generation liver support therapy. The advent of cancer immunotherapy has significantly increased the risk of associated adverse events such as cytokine release syndrome and infection that CytoSorb was designed to treat. The opiate crisis and use of dirty needles has resulted in a devastating burden of critically-ill patients with infective endocarditis, sepsis and acute heart failure, where CytoSorb is being used to stabilize patients both intraoperatively and postoperatively. And last, but not least, critical care is a crushing economic burden on hospitals and healthcare systems due to the lack of effective therapies to treat patients. CytoSorb represents a paradigm shift in the treatment of critically-ill patients and may dramatically improve the economics of ICU care. But what makes it all worthwhile is knowing that CytoSorb is being used to help save lives around the world. Whether it was the real-world case of a young pregnant woman who held her baby in her arms just hours after surviving complicated emergency surgeries to deliver her unborn baby by cesarean section and then repair her rupturing aorta under the protectiion of CytoSorb. Or the grandfather who will be there for his grandchildren after being rescued from massive organ failure and septic shock with CytoSorb following surgery for colon cancer. Or the young man who collapsed to the ground in cardiac arrest, underwent nearly 2 hours of CPR in the field, followed by extracorporeal CPR and CytoSorb, and walked out of the hospital 2 weeks later, doing well without significant brain damage. These are real-life examples of how physicians are using our CytoSorb therapy to make a positive difference in the lives of patients and their families. We start the New Year confident that we have the right product, the right strategy, and most importantly the right people to make this company successful. We would like to thank all of you in the extended CytoSorbents family who have given your time, energy, hard work, expertise, trust, and support to help establish CytoSorb as a key therapeutic option for those in greatest need. Without you, none of this would be possible. To the patients and their families, physicians, nurses, healthcare workers, hospital leadership and administrators, scientific and clinical researchers, distributors, strategic partners, service providers, shareholders and especially our employees and their families..…On behalf of the Board of Directors and the management team, we are grateful to all of you for helping to make this a reality and for continuing to share this journey with us! Our best wishes to you and your loved ones for a healthy, happy, and successful New Year! Dr. Phillip Chan, MD, PhD About CytoSorbents Corporation (NASDAQ: CTSO) CytoSorbents Corporation is a leader in critical care immunotherapy, specializing in blood purification. Its flagship product, CytoSorb® is approved in the European Union with distribution in 58 countries around the world, as an extracorporeal cytokine adsorber designed to reduce the "cytokine storm" or "cytokine release syndrome" that could otherwise cause massive inflammation, organ failure and death in common critical illnesses. These are conditions where the risk of death is extremely high, yet no effective treatments exist. CytoSorb® is also being used during and after cardiac surgery to remove inflammatory mediators that can lead to post-operative complications, including multiple organ failure. CytoSorbents is conducting its pivotal REFRESH 2-AKI trial – a multi-center, randomized controlled, clinical trial intended to support U.S. regulatory approval of CytoSorb for use in a heart-lung machine during complex cardiac surgery to reduce organ injury. The Company has also initiated the company-sponsored U.K. TISORB trial evaluating the removal of ticagrelor in emergency cardiac surgery patients. CytoSorb® has been used in more than 80,000 human treatments to date. CytoSorbents' purification technologies are based on biocompatible, highly porous polymer beads that can actively remove toxic substances from blood and other bodily fluids by pore capture and surface adsorption. Its technologies have received non-dilutive grant, contract, and other funding of approximately $29 million from DARPA, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others. The Company has numerous products under development based upon this unique blood purification technology protected by many issued U.S. and international patents and multiple applications pending, including CytoSorb-XL™, HemoDefend™, VetResQ™, K+ontrol™, ContrastSorb, DrugSorb, and others. For more information, please visit the Company's websites at www.cytosorbents.com and www.cytosorb.com or follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements about our plans, objectives, representations and contentions and are not historical facts and typically are identified by use of terms such as "may," "should," "could," "expect," "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "potential," "continue" and similar words, although some forward-looking statements are expressed differently. You should be aware that the forward-looking statements in this press release represent management's current judgment and expectations, but our actual results, events and performance could differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors which could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, the risks discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K, filed with the SEC on March 7, 2019, as updated by the risks reported in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, and in the press releases and other communications to shareholders issued by us from time to time which attempt to advise interested parties of the risks and factors which may affect our business. We caution you not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, other than as required under the Federal securities laws. Please Click to Follow Us on Facebook and Twitter
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Company Codes: NASDAQ-SMALL:CTSO |