Journey Medical at Emerging Growth Conference 85: Strategic Insights on Imrozi

On Wednesday, 20 August 2025, Journey Medical Corporation (NASDAQ:DERM) presented at the Emerging Growth Conference 85. CEO Claude Morawi outlined the company’s strategic direction, focusing on the promising launch of their rosacea treatment, Imrozi. While the company boasts a robust portfolio and financial health, it faces challenges in expanding market penetration and achieving profitability.

Key Takeaways

• Journey Medical launched Imrozi, a new rosacea treatment, in April 2025.
• The company reported a strong balance sheet with $20 million in cash as of June 30, 2025.
• Imrozi prescriptions grew significantly from 1,200 in April to over 5,200 in July 2025.
• Journey Medical is aiming for EBITDA positivity by the end of 2025.
• The company is expanding payer access, currently covering over 100 million lives.

Financial Results

• Net Revenue: $55 million in 2024, excluding contributions from Imrozi.
• Cash Position: Over $20 million as of June 30, 2025.
• Q2 Revenue: Approximately $15 million, projecting an annual run rate of $60 million.
• Out-Licensing: A $20 million non-dilutive capital influx from a QBREXZA deal with Maruho.
• EBITDA Outlook: Expected to turn positive later in 2025, driven by Imrozi’s market performance.

Operational Updates

• Imrozi Launch: Initiated in April 2025, with prescriptions growing from 1,200 to over 5,200 by July.
• Prescriber Expansion: Increased from 600 to over 1,800 dermatologists, PAs, and NPs.
• Payer Access: Secured coverage for over 100 million lives.
• Sales Force: Comprises 35 territories, covering 80% of the top 50 MSAs in the U.S.

Future Outlook

• Imrozi Focus: Aiming to establish it as the standard of care for rosacea.
• Payer Expansion: Continued efforts to increase coverage.
• Business Development: Exploring out-licensing and potential in-licensing or acquisitions.
• Profitability Goals: Targeting EBITDA and cash flow positivity in 2025.
• Organic Growth: Emphasizing sales growth of key products like Imrozi, QBREXZA, and Accutane.

Q&A Highlights

• Dermatologist Feedback: Positive responses regarding Imrozi’s efficacy and safety.
• Investor Focus: Monitoring prescription growth, new prescriptions, refills, and unique prescribers.
• Financial Strategy: Expecting revenue growth, primarily from Imrozi, to drive profitability.
• Out-Licensing Opportunities: Continuing to seek non-dilutive capital through strategic deals.
• Long-Term Strategy: Focused on executing the Imrozi launch, growing existing products, and exploring acquisitions.

For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - Emerging Growth Conference 85:

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: Welcome back, everyone. Next, we have Journey Medical Corporation. They trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol DERM. It’s a commercial stage pharmaceutical company that primarily focuses on the selling and marketing of FDA approved prescription pharmaceutical products for the treatment of dermatological conditions through its efficient sales and marketing model. Happy to welcome Founder, President, CEO and Director, Claude Valraoui.

Nice to have you on the conference today. Claude, welcome.

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Thank you, Anna. Pleasure to be here at Emerging Growth Conference. Thank you.

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: All right. The floor is yours. Call me back when you’re ready for questions.

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Okay. I’ve got a good slide deck here. I’m going to walk you through here, get you to really understand what Journey Medical is all about and just exciting times here. So to start off, of course, my name is Claude Morawi. I’m the CEO, President and Co Founder of the company.

We’re about ten years old. We went public back in twenty twenty one November. And let me kick things off. Obviously, you know forward looking statements. So our NASDAQ symbol is DERM, D E R M.

We have an average daily volume of about 150,000 shares. Outstanding shares are about 23,000,000 plus. So just some key investment highlights for you. We are a commercial stage pharmaceutical company. We are focused in the field of dermatology.

And personally myself, I’ve been in dermatology all my professional life. So about thirty two years in dermatology, and I love it, and I have a serious passion for it. When you look at our products, we are competing in a marketplace that’s worth almost $6,000,000,000 We focus on primarily three disease states, rosacea, hyperhidrosis, and acne. Our key growth driver importantly to us is called Imrozi. It’s the first product that we developed and put through the FDA regulatory process.

We did our phase three clinical trials and got the product approved in November 2024. We recently just launched it in April 2025. Our core business without Amrose in 2024 did approximately $55,000,000 in net revenue. We have a strong portfolio that has great patents, great IP and we’re able to also out license a number of these products and we’ve have some history in doing that extremely successfully. Our balance sheet is strong.

We have approximately 20,000,000 plus ending June 30 and we really are using minimal cash in the 2025. Recently, we were just added to the Russell 2,003 indexes, and that was at the June. And we’ve got multiple catalysts that really drive our value, and it’s it’s really an inflection point here at Journey Medical. So what’s really exciting is Amroci as a major contributor for us. Let me introduce you to our executive leadership team here.

As you look at all of us, you can see the second row from the bottom. We have a lot of history legacy with Medisys. I worked there myself personally for twenty two years. I brought a lot of the team members together. We know their I know their talent, their skill set, their passion, and they’re available twenty four seven.

And, this is the team that makes a lot of the important decisions as we move forward. So as you look at our sales organization, again, we really are proud of it and have done incredibly well in this niche space of dermatology. We average about 10 of experience in dermatology, and there’s many accolades and trophies and awards that the sales organization has won. So we really have the creme the to the creme of of top salespeople in the industry. We have 35 sales territories across The United States.

We cover approximately 80 of the top 50 MSAs in The United States as well. It gives us access to about 70% of all the dermatology prescriptions in those disease states that we focus in on. Primarily, the four products that you see, QBREXZA, AMZEEQ, Accutane, and ZILXI have been our core business until the addition of Imroci. Those four products really accounted for about 90% of our sales, and now we get the benefit of adding Imroci to the strong base. QBREXZA is for hyperhidrosis, primary axillary hyperhidrosis, So really excessive underarm sweating.

And there’s an excess full market of about ten million patients in The United States for that. We have Amzeek and Zilksy, their sister products. One is a topical foam. It’s unique. It’s patented, and it is in the acne space.

Zilksy is in the topical space for rosacea and acutene. We brought that back into the market just a few years ago. Obviously, it’s a well known brand name, and it’s done extremely well for us. So those are the four products with now the addition of Amrozi. Amrozi is our primary product, followed by QBREXZA, Accutane, and the sister products of Amzeeq and Zilksy.

So we are all about leveraging our commercial footprint, and we want to really push Amrozi moving forward. So let’s get into that. Let me give you a little profile of what emROSI is all about. This has the potential of becoming the best in class treatment for rosacea, and we’re well on our way for doing it. EmROSI’s indication, treatment of inflammatory lesions, papules, pustules of rosacea in adults.

It is the lowest strength available of minocycline in the marketplace at forty milligrams. It’s a very convenient dose of once a day. Our phase three clinical trials were done with sixteen weeks, and that formulation really is ten milligrams of immediate release and thirty milligrams of extended release minocycline beads. It is an excellent, proprietary formulation. We did something different.

This is a small molecule. To get FDA approval, we just had to go up against placebo. Instead, we took the only other, product out there indicated for this orally is called Oratia. So we went head to head against Oratia, which was a bold move on our part, as well as placebo. And we have demonstrated incredible efficacy surpassing that of Oratia, and I’ll get into those details momentarily.

Our safety profile is very similar to placebo. The most recent phase three clinical trials were just published in in the most prestigious JAMA Dermatology back in March 2025. The National Rosacea Society just added us to their treatment algorithms again in March 2025, and we have three orange book listed patents that take us out to 02/1939. So we have a long runway and it’s very sustainable for us to continue to add and build to our growth that we are just starting to experience in this launch with Mrosi. It’s a large market for us.

It’s well over a billion dollars in 2024 and who we went head to head with against Oratia, they have over $300,000,000 in prescription sales in 2024. So let’s talk about how strong the efficacy is with Amrozi. So what you’re seeing here are the two primary endpoints. So this is what our basis of approval is with the FDA. One, we have IgA treatment success and the second one is inflammatory lesion change.

And what we’re demonstrating here is superiority, not equivalent superiority. IgA success investigator global assessment, we have approximately over 60% greater IgA success over a ratio and well over a 120% success over placebo. So this product really is demonstrating how well it works. When you look at just inflammatory lesion change, once again we’re demonstrating almost thirty percent lesion reduction better than Eurasia and well over sixty five percent lesion reduction versus, placebo. So there were no safety issues that were significant in these trials as well, which puts us in a very good position for early adoption with physicians, dermatologists, NPs, and PAs.

These are two also very interesting points. You know, we we we actually were successful in our two primary endpoints as well as all of our secondary endpoints. And one of those was inflammatory lesion percent change. And we’re demonstrating again here that we’re about twenty five percent greater lesion reduction with Mrosi over Eurasia and then about sixty five percent lesion reduction with emrossi over placebo. Interestingly enough, on the right side here, I’m not sure if you can see my mouse, we also looked at an exploratory point.

And with erythema, which is the redness, we’re showing very demonstrate we demonstrated about a hundred and twenty two percent greater erythema success over placebo. And that’s the redness associated with rosacea patients that many of them will show. So, one last point I want to talk about the efficacy is how fast this is working. And dermatologists did not have any point reference in the past. In our study here, we are demonstrating that in IgA success, you can see that, Amrosi is in the blue, Oracea is in the orange, and, the black is placebo.

At every interval, we are showing much greater success in IgA success as well as inflammatory lesion change. So in as little as two weeks, we’re seeing demonstrated efficacy and patients that have seen really good effects with this. And the trial went through sixteen weeks. I also take notice here of inflammatory lesions, the nine point six week four. We we were able to to demonstrate that over the first interval and then you can see that it continued throughout the entire time.

Now let’s show you some pictures to demonstrate how well this works. I’ve got two two photos of two patients that were in the trials. Baseline, you’re talking about IgA success and the number of lesions they had. This is at the end of week sixteen. IgA success has to get down to zero or one to show success, and we did that and you could see the lesion count dropped all the way down to eight.

Really tremendous. You can even see some of that redness reduced as well. And and doctors like seeing this in these trials. They like to see the photos and we’re able to show them. Here’s another picture of a real patient that was in our trials again and the effects are superb.

Let’s talk about safety. You need efficacy to have a successful launch. Superior efficacy is fantastic to have, and that’s what we do have as well as safety. And we’ve demonstrated here again, you’re seeing you’re seeing here, emrosi, and this second bar is, oratia and finally placebo. You can see all of these, adverse events that they’re showing, headaches, diarrhea, dyspepsia, and so forth.

Very minimal for all three products, which shows great tolerability and placebo like side effects. That catches, dermatologists and PAs attention when we are going in there with our reps and giving the proposition value. So let’s talk about the market. Just a touch here. Again, when you look in the middle here, that large pie of The United States, there’s about five percent.

About seventeen million people suffer from rosacea annually in The United States. On the smaller pie chart here, you could see Oratia, who we went head to head with, has about 300,000,000 plus in prescription sales. The gray section of that same pie chart, you are seeing the rest is in topical treatments for rosacea. And our focus is in this oral space. Once we capture and become the leader in that, then we can focus in on topical.

So it’s a huge market for Journey Medical. This also gives us a great exclusivity. We have the full rights outside of the BRIC countries, but we can out license Emrosi into other parts of the world. On this slide here, you can see that our sales force really covers the majority of oral rosacea prescriptions in dermatology. So 94% of the oral rosacea prescriptions are written in dermatology.

So we’re a dermatology company, and we’re in the right space. Then when you take a look at the dermatology prescribed prescriptions out there, you’re almost at 700,000. We call on the 550,000 approximately, so 83%. And then the orange little slice we’re able to get to using e sampling programs, digital programs to reach those others there. So we have a great position into really making an impact in this marketplace quickly.

So let’s talk about what we’ve been able to do since we launched this prod this product, Amroci, and really how important it is to us becoming profitable because we’re at almost breakeven now with our existing product line. With Amrocy, we’ll be able to leverage it and and go right to the bottom line. We launched in April on the right side. We did about 1,200 prescriptions. We went to about 2,300 in May.

In June, we’ve gone up to 3,800, and now we’re well over 5,200 prescriptions in the month of July. So I like the trajectory. We’re executing flawlessly on that. You’re seeing nice increases from month to month. It’s important to note we just launched in April.

Altogether, we’ve got already 12,000 prescriptions that that we can account for, and we are growing from month to month on this. Also importantly, about three months ago, I you know, we announced that we had 600 plus unique prescribers. Now we can tell you that we have over 1,800 prescribers. They’re they’re all dermatologists, PAs, and NPs in the field of dermatology, and that number is only growing. We’re really focused on approximately 3,200 dermatologists that we wanna get to, and we’re well on our way there, and that again is continuing to increase.

Very importantly, in the world of prescriptions, getting a payer access is paramount in having a successful launch. We’ve done a tremendous job. Our market access team has, and we’re right now sitting at approximately over a 100,000,000 lives that can have access to, Mroci. That’s really fast since if you think about it, we just launched in April. And that number should go up as the year continues.

So in terms of our publication and communication plan, we’ve got a very sound strategy here. I’m not going to read all these bullet points, but as you can tell, we are impacting and getting the word out, not just face to face with our commercial team and our marketing team messages, but also in publications and posters and being at all the right industry meetings where we can have impact and discuss Imroci plus all of our other products. So some key takeaways. We believe that we will be the best in class oral therapy for rosacea patients, and we will become the new standard of care. Our head to head superiority over Eurasia is eye catching, and it makes dermatologists stop.

And Eurasia has been out for twenty years. We’re the first competitor to it. So they do have an ingrained habit. As you can tell by the progress with prescriptions, we’ve made significant headway, and it’s only gonna accelerate and increase. We’re showing phenomenal treatment results in as little as two weeks.

Our placebo like safety profile, again, is very important for adoption with Amrozi, and we’re really looking at a potential with this product worldwide sales of potentially over $300,000,000 at peak. And this we’re just going to really have great earnings potential and we’re continuing to move and increasing our revenues and getting to that EBITDA positive later this year. Once we hit, we believe it’ll be sustainable with this portfolio and the inclusion of Amrocy there. Just to give you an idea of on our business development strategy, we like what we have. You can see at the bottom of this triangle, we’ve got about eight commercial dermatology assets.

We’re focused on four to five of them. One being in the first position is Amrosi, the second one being QBREXZA, and the third one being Accutane. So we like the position we’re in. We believe we can grow those sales organically lead led by Amroci, of course. We have grown over the years and we continue to add to our pipeline.

We’re probably about every 18 months, you could say on average, we’re adding one additional product. So in licensing or acquisition of products that are already FDA approved and with Amrozi, we just are really demonstrating another core competency of taking late stage assets and putting them through the FDA regulatory process. So we’ve got a lot of various discussions underway, and we’ll see what that brings up. Importantly, we also have the ability to out license. With our strong IP and our strong patent lives, we did that just less than two years ago.

We had a tremendous deal with QBREXZA. We out licensed it to a company called Maruho, and we had non dilutive capital come in of approximately $20,000,000. So we expect to do some additional out licensing here as we continue to move forward and having great discussions. So a number of ways in terms of growth for the company. So our our corporate priorities and objectives in 2025, really focusing on the launch of Amrozi, try to do that as flawlessly as possible, continue to build the prescription base and everything that comes along in terms of that driving to EBITDA positive and cash flow positive.

We wanna continue making headway with the payers, continue to ramp that up, increase the number of lives with Imroci. And then, of course, I mentioned the EBITDA positive and profitability. Continue to be out there in the front of dermatologists and continue to give the message, have the right frequency and reach to all the right targets. And then hopefully, can continue to add on without licensing and potential, in licensing or acquisitions of other products. Our main inflection point here is what we do with Imroci over the next twelve months to twenty four months, and we feel good about, what we just showed you here in the first four months of launch.

One last look here is our current portfolio. And again, this is what we, are focused on with our Salesforce, our marketing team, and this is our promotion here in front of you with Amrosi being sent in fronter in in front and center. And we think it’s a great time if you’re interested in investing to think about Journey Medical. Again, our ticker is derm, d e r m. We’re all about skin.

Anna, I don’t know if I stuck to our time frame, but

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: great job, Ron. Yes. Wonderful. We have a little bit of time. Great.

Thank you so much for that. Can you offer some insights into your specialists of Imroci from dermatology prescribers in the field?

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Sure. Yeah. So we’ve done a number of ad boards before launch and after launch of the Imroci. The feedback has been really, really consistent. They like the proposition value.

They like the fact that we are showing and demonstrating superior efficacy to erasure and that has really gotten them to try this firsthand. And what I’m glad to really tell you in the audience is the feedback clinically from these offices has been tremendous. I am getting actual photos from dermatologists showing me the befores and afters. It’s very consistent with what I showed you in a couple of those patient slides on the deck, and they like the fact that it’s got a real safe profile right now. So so far so good.

We have to try to break the habits that they’re so ingrained with, with almost twenty years with our competitor. So that takes a little bit of time, but we’re showing we’re making great progress.

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: Wonderful. And so what should investors focus on with regard to your progress going forward?

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Oh, I would tell investors really to focus in. It’s public information. It comes out a little bit delayed, but focusing on our prescription growth. We continue to have prescription growth week over week, month over month. As long as that continues, we are going to be right on track to what we want to see.

Additionally, I think another important factor is our NRXs, those are new prescriptions, and then the refills. We did a sixteen week trial so patients could be on this for four months or it’s really up to dermatologists but we are seeing that patients are going back for refills multiple times over the first four months, we almost have a one to one ratio with refills. And I think that’s real important. Unique prescribers, we went from 600 to 1,800, look for that number to grow, another metric I think they should be focused on. And then we believe that later this year, will turn EBITDA positive because of the contributions of Amrocy.

So those are the three, four factors And that we’ll look

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: talk a little bit more about the financials based on your last quarterly report. The business is at a run rate of about $60,000,000 annually, breaking even almost. So how do you see the company’s financial picture taking shape over the next several quarters?

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Yes. So if you look at Q2, did approximately $15,000,000 So that’s about that $60,000,000 roughly that you just mentioned there. So we’re well on our way. We’re real excited about what we’ve done with the launch so far. We expect it to continue and it’s going to take our growth and revenue much higher and closer to that profitability point again in 2025.

So we expect breakeven to happen and ROCE is going to continue to add sales and revenue and we expect those contributions to be sustainable once we get there. And I would also tell you that our infrastructure with our current team of 35 territories across the country, those are fixed costs. So everything that we really bring in is expected and it’s really going to drive Amorosi sales and earnings leverage and cash flow as the product grows.

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: Wonderful. And can you also talk about some other out licensing deals you’ve done and what the business development strategy is going forward?

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Yeah, sure. So in terms of out licensing, a lot of our products like for example with Imroci, we have patents out to 2,039 with QBREXO, we’re well out to over 2,030. Amzeeq is 2,031 and so forth. So we can use those and out license to other areas of the world outside of The US. Again, Maruho is a company, a Japanese company.

They were able to get license our product QBREXZA and we were able to bring in non dilutive capital which helped the company tremendously and with another Chinese company with one of our products, Amzeek, we were able to get additional milestone payments and also royalties will be coming in from these deals that we’re doing as well. So we like that position without licensing.

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: Perfect. And can you talk about the health plan coverage for Ambrosi? Do you expect that the recent announcements regarding payer coverage will support sales increases?

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Yeah, absolutely. More than happy to talk about that. The success has been there. Know, we went from you know, zero since we got our approval. Now we have access up to approximately over a 100,000,000 lives.

And as we get more payer acceptance, ROCE’s launch will get more reimbursement and more the of the the It takes a little bit of time for them to implement. So as the benefits claims come in over time, we expect that to grow, but it could take three, four months for all of this to come around. So we do want to mark that as one of the considerations. But we have a great sound market access team that’s doing a tremendous job for us. That 100,000,000 plus should move up throughout the year.

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: Wonderful. And I’ll let you close with this Claude talking a little bit about the longer term strategy for the company.

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Yes, I think in terms of longer strategy for the company, we need to execute on Merosi like we’re doing and really focusing on that. And then we want to continue with growth products, leverage Amrozi, QBREXZA and really continue to build those organically within our sales organization. And at the same time, look for out licensing deals like you and I just mentioned right now, bringing more dilutive capital into the market and continue to build our name in dermatology. I think we bring a great portfolio there and we’ve got great programs for dermatologists to really think about using our products versus the competition.

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: Perfect. Well, you, Claude, for your time and presentation. We certainly learned a lot and look forward to following along with your journey. So please join us again in the near future.

Claude Morawi, CEO, President and Co Founder, Journey Medical Corporation: Thank you, Anna. Was a pleasure.

Anna, Host, Emerging Growth Conference: All right, everyone. Thank you for watching. Stay with us. We’ll be right

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