SAN FRANCISCO—In an early look at its annual earnings report, Guardant Health posted revenue gains of 31%—with the $737 million total topping not only Wall Street estimates, but its own financial forecast.
The company’s fourth-quarter numbers also covered the first full quarter following the launch of Guardant’s Shield blood test for colorectal cancer screening, following its approval by the FDA last summer and receiving Medicare pricing at $920 a pop. With about 6,400 tests performed, it brought in about $4 million in sales alone.
Guardant announced the preliminary peek at the start of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, where it also plans to make a presentation to investors later today. Its fully audited financial results for 2024 are scheduled to be disclosed in February.
During the company’s previous quarterly earnings report last November, Guardant’s guidance had pegged full-year revenues between $720 million and $725 million, while Wall Street had expected about the same.
Today, the company said it sold about 206,700 cancer tests last year, not including Shield, and performed about 40,500 tests for biopharma companies conducting clinical studies—for increases of 20% and 35%, respectively.
“2024 was an outstanding year for Guardant. We delivered key milestones across the portfolio and completed the upgrade of Guardant360 LDT onto our Smart Liquid Biopsy platform,” Helmy Eltoukhy, Guardant’s co-founder and co-CEO, said in a statement. “Looking ahead, we believe we are well positioned to continue to drive growth in our oncology business.”
Meanwhile, for the fourth quarter, oncology and biopharma test volumes increased 24% and 16% to reach about 57,300 and 11,050. That resulted in about $200 million in revenue, for a year-over-year gain of 29%.
The Shield tumor DNA blood test launched last year to help funnel people ages 45 and up with an average risk for colorectal cancer towards receiving a colonoscopy or more intense screening.
The company has estimated that about 50 million people in the U.S. are not up-to-date with recommended screening exams—including about 25 million Medicare beneficiaries—and that if Shield becomes a test that people take once every three years, the company could one day be processing more than 16 million samples annually.
“We are extremely pleased with the strong traction and support we saw in the first full quarter of commercial launch of Shield. Given this success, we are focused on rapidly growing our commercial infrastructure to capture the massive opportunity ahead,” said co-founder and co-CEO AmirAli Talasaz.