Akoya BioSciences, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Q3 2021 Okoye Bayou Sciences Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask the question during this session, you will need to press star then 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Priyam Shah. You may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Priyam Shah, Head of Investor Relations at Akoya Biosciences. On the call today, we have Brian McKelligan, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Driscoll, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, Akoya released financial results for the third quarter and it's September 30th, 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 be making statements during this call that include forward-looking statements with the meaning of 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 the COIS business, please refer to the risk factors section of our form S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 15th, 2021. We urge you to consider these factors and you should be aware that these statements should be considered estimates only and are not a guarantee of future performance. This conference call contains time sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, November 8th, 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, Priyam, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We are excited to announce today's strong third quarter results and highlight solid execution in meeting ACOIA's financial goals, hiring objectives, and R&D milestones. Looking back, it's remarkable to think that just three to four years ago, the concept of spatial biology was largely novel. Since then, accelerating interest by customers and investors has elevated spatial biology to now be considered a fundamental pillar and central to the future of life sciences research and emerging diagnostics. We at Akoya believe spatial phenotyping will inevitably become the standard for analyzing any tissue sample, and the reason is quite simple. Current technologies like next-generation sequencing, flow cytometry, single-cell analysis provide meaningful information, but they unfortunately require the destruction of the tissue sample, sacrificing all information on the structure of the tumor microenvironment and the cellular and protein interactions driving tumorigenesis. Measuring and monitoring these spatial interactions is central, for example, to understanding our body's immune response to disease. Akoya's platforms keep the tissue sample intact while measuring all cells and key biomarkers in their spatial context. A complete snapshot of the underlying biological dynamics of the tumor microenvironment is fully captured. So it is expected that over time, FFPE or fresh frozen tissue samples, particularly in cancer, will be preferentially analyzed on platforms that provide the spatial phenotyping information. Here at Akoya, as a company 100% dedicated to spatial biology, we are empowering our discovery research customers. with the tools to make profound new discoveries in understanding cancer biology. Our biopharmaceutical partners are leveraging our spatial phenotyping solutions, for example, to understand and predict how patients will respond to immunotherapies. Now turning to this quarter's results, we are pleased to report impressive third quarter financial results and a record quarter for ACOIA. with total revenue of $13.5 million, representing a 35% growth compared to the third quarter of 2020. We continue to see adoption of both codex and phenoptics, with strong instrument sales and consumable pull-through. Okoye is now the proven leader in this spatial biology revolution, with the largest install base of any spatial biology platform in the industry. As of September 30th, ACOIA had 651 instruments installed. As a key leading indicator, the rapid growth in high-impact publications continues to fuel our optimism. There were 110 peer-reviewed publications on our platforms in 2020, a nearly four-fold increase over 2019. Now, as of September 30th, 2021, there are already 192 publications on ACOIA's platforms this year, approaching a doubling of last year. It was still another quarter to go. Codex, as a growing percentage of these publications, is the market's most affordable spatial biology platform, providing unprecedented single and subcellular resolution across entire tissue samples. Priced at under $100,000, we continue to see high adoption of Codex within the academic market, especially at the individual investigator level. With Codex's ability to integrate with our customers' existing microscopes, we're just beginning to penetrate the fully addressable market of nearly 20,000 microscopes already in the field. On the phenoptic side, we continue to see the growing deployment of this platform's use in early to latter stage clinical trials. This is also driving expansion of the revenue pipeline within our advanced biopharma solutions division, or AVS as we call it, where we're performing fee-for-service work on clinical trial samples with key biopharma partners. With AVS, we have an increasing number of biopharma engagements similar to our announced AstraZeneca partnership, where we're analyzing samples and assessing patients' response to therapy across a number of clinical trials. In addition to being a valued revenue stream, these partnerships further cement our phenoptics platform as the leading spatial biology solution for translational research and clinical trials. Another valuable contributor to the growth of our clinical trial partnerships was the MITRE study published this July in the Journal of Immunotherapy of Cancer. As a peer review publication, this has been an important tool to provide our biopharma partners the confidence that our Phenoptix platform has the analytical robustness and performance needed to be the central tool in their immuno-oncology clinical trial biomarker efforts. The pending CLIA certification of our ABS lab will also be an important driver of business growth going forward. On the organizational development side, As of September 30, 2021, we have approximately 305 employees worldwide, a significant increase from the 170 at the end of 2020. As part of our hiring this year, we have almost doubled the commercial headcount to about 150. A similar expansion has occurred within our R&D organization. With this, we are on track to deliver innovative products in 2022 that will further contribute to growth and catalyze Akoya's expanding commercial success. To support and guide us on this journey, we recently announced the appointment of Dr. Myla Lai-Goldman to our board of directors. Myla is a visionary and seasoned executive in the diagnostic industry. She brings over 30 years of leadership experience at innovative organizations, including 18 years at LabCorp, most recently serving as Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Officer. We also announced the appointment of Dr. Pascal Bamford, formerly with Exact Sciences, Genomic Health, Epic Sciences, and Ventana, as Executive Vice President of R&D. Pascal has deep scientific and operational experience leading teams in developing and implementing successful, innovative digital pathology products. On the partnership front, I would invite you to review our recent webinar series, highlighting the groundbreaking translational and clinical research being done on our Phenoptix platform by many of our key partners. Speakers from UCSF, Early Child Research Institute, and Yale discussed the predictive power of spatially derived biomarkers in immunotherapy and its impact on clinical trials, testing, and the standard of care. Last week, we also announced the founding members of the first-of-its-kind Imaging Innovators Network, or the I2 network. With I2, Okoye is collaborating with pioneering scientists from world-class research organizations with ambitions to advance the field of spatial biology while exploring novel approaches to using the Codex platform for single-cell spatial phenotyping. These investigators come from leading institutions such as the Broad Institute, the Sanger Institute, Beth Israel, and the University of Chicago. These innovators are applying spatial biology to cutting-edge work in research areas ranging from high-resolution microscopy to oncology, neuroscience, immunology, infectious disease, and developmental biology. As an inherently open spatial phenotyping platform, we will continue to leverage partnerships with inventive thought leaders like these to drive open innovation in the spatial biology market. Now let me take a minute to step back and look towards the future. In the life sciences tools market, when the vectors of resolution, affordability, and speed intersect, then real value is catalyzed because larger exploratory studies become practical and routine. Applications, market opportunities, instrument sales, reagent pull-through then accelerate. We most certainly saw this in next-generation sequencing, and the same will be true in spatial biology. At Akoya, we have listened closely to our customers' needs and recognize what improvements we need to make to fully leverage the power of spatial phenotyping to follow this same catalytic path. Our platform improvements and new product introductions in 2022 will focus on driving workflow simplicity, scale, and speed. As a result, our discovery and early translational customers will reap the benefits of new ACOIA spatial phenotyping solutions that are nearly an order of magnitude faster in throughput than current on-market platforms, while also providing single-cell and subcellular resolution across whole tissue samples. For our clinical researchers and biopharmaceutical customers who are currently leveraging the unparalleled throughput and resolution of phenoptics, ACOIA is actively advancing our workflow and partnerships to establish spatial phenotyping as the standard for clinical trials and translational research in immuno-oncology, paving the way to change the standard of care. These workflow improvements will drive further value to our customers and establish ACOIA as the go-to spatial biology solution from discovery to translational and clinical research. To share more of our successes and vision, we are pleased to announce that we will be hosting ACOIA's inaugural spatial day on December 15th of this year. Key agenda items will focus on presentations from our customers using our platforms in discovery, translational research, and clinical trials. They will share their vision for spatial biology, its current applications, and future possibilities. And as noted, ACOIA will also provide a preview of our 2022 product roadmap, key areas of focus, including new powerful spatial phenotyping solutions. The lineup of speakers is promising to be very educational and I would encourage everyone to join and details will be posted soon. In summary, we are pleased with our third quarter performance, achieving great progress across a range of important metrics. In the six months since our IPO, we have continued to make strategic investments to build on and maintain our leadership position in the spatial biology market. We look forward to continuing to execute on our financial and strategic plans as we move forward through 2021 and beyond. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Joe to discuss our financial results. Joe?