Diagnostics company LipoScience (Nasdaq: LPDX) has stumbled in placing its cardiovascular disease test into the market, contributing to a first quarter decline in revenue and prompting a pledge from management to reverse course.

The Raleigh company reported just $13.6 million in first quarter revenue, a 1.2 percent decline compared to a year ago.

CEO Richard Brajer attributed the sales decline to four factors:

  • The inability to get the number of needed sales representatives up and running
  • The company’s direct business is converting lab partners at a faster rate than prior years
  • Managed care headwinds
  • Vantera system placement delays

Vantera is the new product that allows laboratory facilities to run LipoScience’s NMR LipoProfile test at their sites. Before Vantera, labs needed to send blood samples to LipoScience’s Raleigh headquarters to complete the testing.

LipoScience has developed and commercialized a blood test for cardiovascular disease. The test uses nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, to measure the density of lipoproteins in a sample. The company says NMR offers a better test for cardiovascular disease than standard cholesterol tests, which the company aims to displace. Although LipoScience has other diagnostics in development, the NMR LipoProfile is the company’s only Food and Drug Administration-cleared diagnostic.

LipoScience reported a first quarter net loss of $2.8 million. Last year, the company recorded $1.3 million in first quarter net income.

The 2013  financial performance so far led Brajer to revise the company’s 2013 revenue guidance to between $54 million and $56 million. Full-year 2012 revenue was $54.8 million.

“Unfortunately, these issues cannot be fixed overnight,” he said in a statement. “But I can assure you that we fully understand what the issues are, and we are assertively implementing our responses as we continue to drive toward becoming a clinical standard of care.”

When LipoScience went public in January, the company reported a total of 50 sales reps. That total was was expected to increase to 60 by the late second quarter.