Revenues

12 Months Ended

Dec. 31, 2023

Revenues [Abstract]

Revenues

3. Revenues

During the years ended December 31, 2023, 2022 and 2021, our revenues were comprised of the following (in thousands):

	Year Ended December 31,
	2023		2022		2021
Revenue:
Commercial revenue:
SPINRAZA royalties	$	240,379	$	242,314	$	267,776
Other commercial revenue:
TEGSEDI and WAYLIVRA revenue, net		34,913		30,051		55,500
Licensing and other royalty revenue		33,299		30,993		19,119
Total other commercial revenue		68,212		61,044		74,619
Total commercial revenue		308,591		303,358		342,395
Research and development revenue:
Collaborative agreement revenue		352,657		207,222		468,061
WAINUA joint development revenue		126,399		76,787		—
Total research and development revenue		479,056		284,009		468,061
Total revenue	$	787,647	$	587,367	$	810,456

Revenue Sources 

The following are sources of revenue and when we typically recognize revenue.

Commercial Revenue: SPINRAZA royalties and Licensing and other royalty revenue

We earn commercial revenue primarily in the form of royalty payments on net sales of SPINRAZA. We earn royalty revenue on net sales of QALSODY which is included in Licensing and other royalty revenue.

Commercial Revenue: TEGSEDI and WAYLIVRA revenue, net

We earn commercial revenue from TEGSEDI and WAYLIVRA sales under our distribution agreements with Sobi. In addition, we receive royalties from PTC Therapeutics International Limited, or PTC, for TEGSEDI  and WAYLIVRA sales. Refer to Note 4, Collaborative Arrangements and Licensing Agreements, for details on our commercialization partnerships with Sobi and PTC.

Research and development revenue under collaboration agreements

We enter into collaboration agreements to license and sell our technology on an exclusive or non-exclusive basis. Our collaboration agreements typically contain multiple elements, or performance obligations, including technology licenses or options to obtain technology licenses, R&D services and manufacturing services.

Upfront payments: When we enter into a collaboration agreement and receive an upfront payment, we typically record the entire upfront payment as deferred revenue if our only performance obligation is for R&D services we will provide in the future. We amortize the upfront payment into revenue as we perform the R&D services.

Milestone payments: We include variable consideration in the transaction price when it is probable. We typically include milestone payments for R&D services in the transaction price when they are achieved. We include these milestone payments when they are achieved because typically there is considerable uncertainty in the research and development processes that trigger these payments. Similarly, we include approval milestone payments in the transaction price once the medicine is approved by the applicable regulatory agency. We will recognize sales-based milestone payments in the period in which we achieve the milestone under the sales-based royalty exception allowed under accounting rules.

We recognize milestone payments that relate to an ongoing performance obligation over our period of performance. For example, when we achieve a milestone payment from a partner for advancing a clinical study under a collaboration agreement, we add the milestone payment to the transaction price if the milestone relates to an ongoing R&D services performance obligation and recognize revenue related to the milestone payment over our estimated period of performance. If we have partially completed our performance obligation, then we record a cumulative-effect adjustment in the period we add the milestone payment to the transaction price.

Conversely, we recognize in full those milestone payments that we earn based on our partners’ activities when our partner achieves the milestone event and we do not have a performance obligation.

License fees: We recognize as revenue the total amount we determine to be the relative stand-alone selling price of a license when we deliver the license to our partner who has full use of the license and we do not have any additional performance obligations related to the license after delivery.

Sublicense fees: We recognize sublicense fee revenue in the period in which a party, who has already licensed our technology, further licenses the technology to another party because we do not have any performance obligations related to the sublicense.

WAINUA (Eplontersen) Collaboration with AstraZeneca

In December 2021, we entered into a joint development and commercialization agreement with AstraZeneca to develop and commercialize WAINUA for the treatment of transthyretin amyloidosis, or ATTR. We jointly developed and are preparing to commercialize WAINUA with AstraZeneca in the U.S. We initially granted AstraZeneca exclusive rights to commercialize WAINUA outside the U.S., except for certain Latin American countries. In July 2023, we expanded those rights to include Latin America. Under the terms of the agreement, we received a $200 million upfront payment in 2021.

We evaluated our WAINUA collaboration under ASC 808 and identified four material components: (i) the license we granted to AstraZeneca in 2021, (ii) the co-development activities that we and AstraZeneca are performing, (iii) the co-commercialization activities that we and AstraZeneca are performing and (iv) the co-medical affairs activities that we and AstraZeneca are performing.

We determined that we had a vendor-customer relationship within the scope of ASC 606 for the license we granted to AstraZeneca and as a result we had one performance obligation. For our sole performance obligation, we determined the transaction price was the $200 million upfront payment we received. We recognized the upfront payment in full in 2021 because we did not have any remaining performance obligations after we delivered the license to AstraZeneca.

We also concluded that the co-development activities, the co-commercialization activities and the co-medical affairs activities are within the scope of ASC 808 because we and AstraZeneca are active participants exposed to the risks and benefits of the activities under the collaboration and therefore do not have a vendor-customer relationship. AstraZeneca is currently responsible for 55 percent of the costs associated with the ongoing global Phase 3 development program. Because we are leading the Phase 3 development program, we made an accounting policy election to recognize as non-customer revenue the cost-share funding from AstraZeneca, net of our share of AstraZeneca’s development expenses, in the same period we incur the related development expenses. As AstraZeneca is responsible for the majority of the commercial and medical affairs costs in the U.S. and all costs associated with bringing WAINUA to market outside the U.S., we made an accounting policy election to recognize cost-share funding we receive from AstraZeneca related to commercial and medical affairs activities as reductions of our SG&A expense and R&D expense, respectively.