Stephen P. MacMillan
Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer at Hologic
Thank you, Ryan and good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to discuss our financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2022. Our results continue to showcase the strength, durability and diversity of our business. Total revenue was just over $1 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share was $0.95, both numbers exceeded the midpoint of our guidance on the top and bottom lines. The result of both in during COVID revenue and also strong performances in our core Diagnostics and Surgical businesses.
In this dynamic and ever-changing world, we continue to live our purpose, passion and promise to enable healthier lives everywhere, everyday and the global champions for Women's Health. In doing so, our industry-leading products continue to reach even more patients around the world while our business deliver strong financial performance and value for our shareholders. To put it simply, the durability and diversity of our business enable Hologic to succeed in this challenging macro environment as we navigate a multitude of headwinds. Our confidence in our business remains steady and remains high.
Looking longer term, our message is also unchanged. We are confident despite the current turbulence that our previously announced 5% to 7% annual organic revenue growth rate through 2025 remains an achievable target provided the current chip headwind normalizes as we expect.
Ahead of turning the call over to Karleen to discuss our financial results in more detail, we'd like to highlight growth drivers and provide updates on each of our businesses, Diagnostics, Breast Health, and Surgical, and to close, we are excited to share our experience from the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in May and experience that reaffirms the importance of our place and our voice on the world stage advocating for women's health, especially now.
Before jumping into each division, it is important to revisit the impact of COVID on our business. The reality is that whether the demand for COVID testing is high or low, we are poised to succeed either way. We have a natural COVID hedge. As we have seen over the past two years, COVID prevalence affect each of our base businesses. As COVID cases rise, elective well-woman exams, screenings, and surgical procedures are often postponed. Conversely, as COVID declines, our base business strengthens.
As we responded with unprecedented speed to answer the world's needs for highly reliable molecular COVID testing, we also dramatically strengthened our company for the future. We also know that many of you are trying to gauge the longer-term impact and durability of our additional Panther placements as well as the impact of our various acquisitions over the last couple of years in Diagnostics and Surgical. The truth is the various surges in COVID cases around the world through many of the last quarters have often created wide variability in the comps as some quarters reflect times of significant non-COVID-related hospital and doctor visits slowdowns while others bounce back stronger in various varying geographies in any given quarter.
When we last reported in April, for example, our core Diagnostic and Surgical businesses posted year-over-year growth rates of 4% and 3.5% respectively, amidst to the COVID surge at the time. So for anyone questioning these admittedly lower growth rates, we want to highlight two numbers from this quarter. The first number, 22.4%, that was the growth in our global molecular Diagnostics business. And the second number, 9.7%, that was the growth in our Surgical business this quarter.
Now, we'd encourage two simple takeaways from these results. One, these businesses have strong underlying growth, and two, the true growth rate is somewhere in between last quarter's results and this quarter's, underscoring the need to view how our strength evolves over time and given the variability of COVID, that no single quarter result is going to match a linear model.
Now, shifting gears to the businesses. First, in Diagnostics, with COVID testing significantly down sequentially, our third quarter provided an opportunity for customers to validate and run more non-COVID assays on their Panther systems. As a result, our Diagnostics business grew 15% excluding COVID year-over-year worldwide, a truly phenomenal result and one that demonstrates the impact of women returning to their wellness exams and procedures.
Even more impressive, as mentioned earlier, our global molecular diagnostics business grew over 22% excluding COVID in the period, an early yet clear sign, that our expanded Panther install base is, A, being utilized, and B, will prevail as an instrument of choice as customers consolidate their molecular testing menu to high throughput, high automation platforms. For more color on the growth drivers within molecular diagnostics, performance was driven by a combination of both legacy and new assays, namely the BV, CV/TV vaginitis panel, M. gen, CT/NG, and our respiratory menu on the Panther Fusion, to name a few. Our vaginitis panel continues to outperform and deliver impressive growth on both the sequential and year-over-year basis. As we have previously stated, the vaginitis panel is well positioned to become a top three assay in our molecular diagnostic portfolio over time.
International diagnostics was also a bright spot in the quarter. The business grew 16.5% excluding COVID, driven primarily by our virology portfolio. As expected, Panther placements slowed 59 new systems placed in the quarter with nearly 70% of these placed internationally. While the decline from the 119 and 123 systems placed in our first two quarters, annualizing Q3's placement lands within our historic run rate of about 225 to 250 placements per year. As a reminder, Panther sales have minimal impact to the molecular diagnostics growth rate as assays are the primary driver of growth by far.
Further, placements at lower levels going forward is consistent with our expectations, given we have increased our Panther footprint by nearly 85% since the start of the pandemic. We now have roughly 3,200 Panthers installed worldwide. To close out the Diagnostics update, our Biotheranostics business was again a highlight for the quarter posting $18.9 million in sales, representing outstanding growth of 43%.
Moving onto Breast Health. First and foremost, as to chip supply, we reiterate our statement from last quarter. We believe the third and fourth quarters of our fiscal 2022 will prove to be the low watermark in terms of chip availability for our gantries. Working closely with our suppliers, we observed positive trends in Q3. These positive trends include stabilizing lead times, procurement through a combination of channels, and most importantly, narrowing the breadth and depth of tight supply. Although we remain optimistic these positive trends will maintain throughout the remainder of our fiscal year, the situation remains fluid.
As for gantries, demand remains strong. Our best-in-class technology, service, and customer satisfaction continues to differentiate and separate us from the competition. In addition, our sales force continues to place orders in line with quotas set prior to the chip headwind surfacing and there has been no meaningful change to the rate of canceled orders. On the chip supply chain recovery, while we are not providing fiscal 2023 guidance on this call, we do anticipate that chip supply, and thus, gantry availability will be recovering throughout fiscal 2023 and continue into 2024.
Next, in Surgical. The business returned to strong performance posting 9.7% revenue growth in the third quarter. This growth was driven primarily by the combination of MyoSure, our Fluent Fluid Management System, and Bolder. As a reminder, our MyoSure devices are used for fibroid and tissue removal and the Fluent System is complementary to MyoSure, assisting physicians with hysteroscopic procedures. The Fluent System simplifies and streamlines the historically complicated and cumbersome fluid management workflow used in these procedures.
While MyoSure and Fluent sales represent the lion's share of surgical growth in the quarter, we are also very excited by the growth from our laparoscopic portfolio. Both the Acessa procedure and Bolder devices that we acquired to add growth and diversify the franchise performed well. Specifically, we are excited by the incremental progress in sales of the Acessa procedure, smaller numbers but revenue growth of nearly 50% year-over-year, a meaningful step in increasing the utilization of this novel procedure.
Acessa's growth was driven primarily by two factors.
Factors. First, excellent efforts from our team to increase patient covered lives to 84% compared to 26% when we first acquired the business about 2 years ago. With this critical mass of covered lives, which is often considered table stakes by many physicians, more doors were opened. Second growth was also driven by more physician access to conduct monitored cases. Access was both in person and also via our innovative virtual case monitoring platform. This virtual system was implemented, specifically to address physician access challenges created by COVID. As the COVID pandemic moves gradually to an endemic state and physician access improves, we are confident that assessment will be a meaningful growth contributor going forward.
And finally, as many of you know, in May, we had the opportunity to participate at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland. At the Forum, we met with world leaders and change makers to further our mission and champion women's health. Our message was clear. Putting women's health at the forefront was long overdue. The time to elevate women's health with the help of science backed data to guide decisions and policy making is now. As we have said before, women's health is the cornerstone of families, communities, societies and economies around the world with insights from our Hologic Global Women's Health Index, project healthy quality and decades of leadership in women's health, we came to the form to make a difference.
We left the Forum knowing we had. We understand change does not move in a straight line and we are committed to supporting women every step of the way. Before we turn the call over to Karleen, to conclude, we want to repeat that our third quarter results give us even more confidence in the strength of our business. This confidence is rooted in our demonstrated ability to absorb and adapt to the pressures and the headwinds of this dynamic macro environment. As the current pressures and headwinds subside over time, we are in a strong position to continue our durable growth trajectory for quarters and years to come.
With that, let me turn the call over to Karleen.
