Akoya BioSciences, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Akoya Biosciences first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, David Deichler, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for participating in today's conference call. On the call from ACOIA, we have Brian McGilligan, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Driscoll, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, ACOIA released financial results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2021. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results, or performance are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. For a list and description of the risks and uncertainties associated with ACOIA's business, please refer to the risk factors section of our Form S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 15, 2021. We urge you to consider these factors. You should be aware that the statements should be considered estimates only and not a guarantee of future performance. The conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, May 18, 2021. ACOIA disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. And with that, I will turn the call over to Brian.

Thank you, David. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining ACOIA's first quarter earnings call. Joe and I will start with prepared remarks, and then we'll be happy to take some questions. So I'd like to start by saying that we're very excited to be speaking with you on our first quarter following our recent IPO on April 16th, where we listed on NASDAQ and raised $151 million in gross proceeds. And on behalf of ACOIA, I'd like to thank everyone who was involved in the IPO. We are now better positioned to execute on our mission of delivering a revolutionary class of spatially derived biomarkers to empower life sciences researchers to better understand disease and predict response to therapy. While we had the chance to tell our story to many of you through our IPO process, we will integrate within today's call and my remarks or a review of ACOIA's spatial biology platforms. We're pleased to be able to report that we had a strong first quarter with reported total revenue of 12.2 million coming in at the high end of our previously reported range of 12 to 12.2 million. As noted, this performance was achieved prior to the benefit of the additional capital investment from our recent public offering. And with our demonstrated momentum and the benefit of the additional capital, we are confident that we are on track to execute our strategic plan for 2021. Some additional first quarter highlights with more detail to follow shortly include we sold 37 instruments in the first quarter. This is higher than any quarterly total achieved in 2020. We saw continued and meaningful acceleration of our peer-reviewed publications. And with the IPO funds in hand, we began aggressive expansion of our commercial and R&D teams to accelerate our strong momentum as a leader in spatial biology. For background and review, spatial biology refers to a rapidly evolving technology that enables researchers in academia and biopharma to detect and map distribution of cell types and biomarkers across whole tissue samples at single cell resolution. ACOIA offers solutions to perform this tissue analysis and spatial phenotyping to scientists across the full continuum, from discovery through translational and clinical research. By way of comparison, current genomic and proteomic methods such as Next-Gen sequencing, single-cell analysis, flow cytometry, mass spectrometry. They do provide meaningful data, but require the destruction of the tissue sample for analysis. While these approaches are clearly valuable and broadly adopted, they do not provide the fundamental information about tissue architecture, cellular interactions, and localized measurements of key biomarkers. This spatial context is central. ACOIA has developed and deployed our Codex and Phenoptix platform to address the profound opportunities and scientific discoveries enabled by spatial biology. We provide end-to-end solutions that enable researchers to quantitatively interrogate a large number of biomarkers and cell types across an intact tissue section at single-cell resolution. The result is a detailed and computable map of the tissue sample that thoroughly captures the underlying tissue dynamics and the interactions between key cell types and biomarkers. Akoya's platforms are designed to serve the unique needs of our customers in the discovery, translational, and clinical research markets. Both Codex and Phenoptix offer seamless and integrated workflow solutions for our customers, including important benefits such as proprietary reagents to analyze a variety of tissue types, automated sample processing, scalability, comprehensive data analysis and software solutions, and dedicated field and application support. With these platforms, our customers are performing spatial phenotyping and developing a deeper understanding of complex diseases such as cancer, neurological and autoimmune disorders, and many other therapeutic areas. Our first platform, Codex, is an ultra-high parameter and cost-effective platform which is ideally suited for discovery research and provides the capability to identify more than 40 biomarkers in a tissue sample. Codex was originally developed in the lab of Dr. Gary Nolan at Stanford University and was launched in 2019. In the first quarter of 2021, we sold 20 Codex instruments compared to a total of 46 in all of 2020. The install base for Codex was 132 instruments as of March 31st of this year. And while we saw a real impact from COVID in 2020, we are extremely excited about the momentum we are seeing for Codex in 2021. Our second platform, Phenoptix, is a high-throughput spatial biology platform with the automation and robustness needed for translational and clinical applications. This workhorse platform enables researchers to visualize and analyze and quantify and phenotype cells in situ across the entire slide at subcellular resolution. Our proprietary multispectral imaging technologies enables whole-slide scanning and 10 to 15 minutes providing our customers in the translational and clinical research with the required and necessary automation and throughput and robustness. The Phenoptix product line is currently comprised of three scanners, the Mantra, the Vectra, and the Polaris, with the Polaris being our signature platform and the most popular solution. In the first quarter, we sold 17 Phenoptix instruments, growing the install base to 455 Phenoptix instruments. Across both Codex and Phenoptix, our total instrument install base grew 28% year over year, despite substantial impact from COVID. Reagent revenue was $2.5 million in the first quarter of 2021. And as discussed through IPO, this is an important area of investment for Akoya, and we anticipate strong growth here in 2021 and beyond. Reagents are a key revenue contributor to our business and have a positive impact on our gross margins. The quality and the value of our solutions is demonstrated by our broad customer base, our relationship with key thought leaders, and an extensive and accelerating publication list. As noted earlier, the rate of publications utilizing our technology continues to accelerate. There were 109 peer review publications in 2020. That's a near fourfold increase over 2019. We have already seen over 60 new peer review publications in the first quarter of 2021. That is also a nearly fourfold increase over the same period last year. A key driver of these publications and our commercial success is the growing body of evidence that spatial biology solutions deliver significant value to our customers and are increasingly becoming a preferred modality for biomarker analysis. One recent publication highlight comes from the team at the Providence Cancer Institute and was just recently published in the journal Breast Cancer Research. They used our Phenoptix platform to measure tumor infiltrating lymphocytes, PD-L1 expression, and other immune variables to enable, and I quote, a comprehensive characterization of activity of novel immunotherapy agents, close quote. The paper highlighted both the required concordance with current clinical assays, and importantly, the enhanced precision and predictive power enabled with Phenoptix, and I'd invite you to look at that publication. As with the team at Providence, we are grateful to have relationships with leading biopharma companies, top research institutions and medical centers, such as Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Johns Hopkins University, UCSF, and MD Anderson, and many others. These collaborations and partnerships help demonstrate the utility of our solutions across a broad array of applications including immuno-oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and developmental biology. Specifically, our partnerships in the field of immuno-oncology are delivering real advancements in translational and clinical research. For example, ACOIA's spatial biology platforms were featured in several talks at this year's AACR meeting, and here are three highlights. First, in line with our March 2nd announcement of our partnership with Johns Hopkins, Dr. Janice Taub highlighted best practices of their validation efforts on our platform as part of a session on future directions for immunotherapy diagnostics. Second, Dr. Laura Esserman from UCSF and principal investigator on the I-SPY trials outlined her work to leverage the Phenoptix platform to identify spatial biomarker signatures in breast cancer. Third, Dr. Gary Nolan of Stanford University, ACOIA founder and Codex inventor, gave a plenary talk detailing his advanced work on Codex to understand patient outcomes in colorectal cancer and cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Consistent with the theme of partnering with thought leaders, Akoya made two recent announcements further supporting the goal of driving accelerated adoption of and innovation on the Codex platform. First, we announced our Imaging Innovators Network, it's termed I2, which is a collaborative network of leading scientists specifically aimed at supporting open innovation on Codex for rapid application expansion. And I invite you to go to our website to read our most recent press release on the I2 network. Second, yesterday we announced our co-marketing agreement with ZEISS, one of the world's leading microscopy vendors, to further enhance the integration of our platforms for the benefit of our customers. Following our successful IPO, Akoya remains focused on driving revenue growth by investing in the business with an immediate focus on expanding our commercial team and accelerating our research into development. In the first quarter, we added 21 people to the organization, bringing our headcount up to 190. We also recently added the newest member of our executive team, Dr. Frederick Pla, who joined Akoya in March as our Chief Operating Officer. Fred most recently served as Chief Operating Officer at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and previously served as COO of Genomic Health prior to its acquisition and through its acquisition by Exact Sciences in 2019. He also has an impressive history at Life Technologies and GE. Fred's operational, scientific, and market expertise are valuable additions to our organization. In summary, we are pleased with our first quarter performance, achieving great progress across a range of important metrics, and we look forward to executing our financial and strategic plans as we move forward through 2021. I will now turn over the call to Joe Driscoll to discuss our financial results. Joe?