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spk02: Thank you for standing by, and welcome to ACOIA Biosciences' fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. Should you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the call over to Priyam Shah, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk06: Thank you, operator, and thank you to everyone who is joining us today on this call. I'm Priyam Shah, Head of Investor Relations at Akoya Biosciences. On the call today, we have Brian McElligan, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Driscoll, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, Akoya released financial results for the fourth quarter ended December 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 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 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, March 14th, 2022. 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.
spk03: Thank you, Prem, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Okoye had an incredibly strong and eventful fourth quarter of 2021 as we announced powerful new spatial biology solutions, reached key clinical milestones, established groundbreaking partnerships, and appointed additional industry leaders to our management team. Our continued solid execution is reflected in our strong financial results for Q4 and the full year 2021, generating record revenue of $16.2 million for the fourth quarter, and $54.9 million for the full year, representing a 30% top-line annual growth. In Q4, we saw almost 70% annual growth in reagent revenue, which is fundamental to our business strategy of driving expansion of system utilizations and recurring consumable revenue. We finished the year with $113 million in cash, providing us with a strong balance sheet with ample runway and flexibility to continue to invest in the business. And as a company 100% dedicated to spatial biology, we at Akoya believe that spatial phenotyping will inevitably become the standard for analyzing any tissue sample. Our platforms are complete end-to-end solutions providing instruments, reagents, software, and services to address the spatial biology needs of our customers from discovery to translational research and ultimately for clinical use. We now have nearly 700 instruments installed worldwide and approximately 500 market leading high impact publications using our instruments. Our year over year growth in publications went from 109 in 2020 to nearly 280 in 2021 and represents one of the key leading indicators of the growing adoption of our platforms. This adoption and demand are driven out of the simple principle that the spatial data we provide is paramount to understanding the fundamentals of biology and the complexities of disease. Spatial analysis is one of the fastest growing segments in discovery and translational research with applications in areas such as oncology, inflammatory disease, neurology, transplant medicine, and more. Following our IPO, we immediately expanded our research and development efforts to accelerate the launch of new best-in-class spatial platforms and, in parallel, scaled our commercial team to drive adoption and utilization of our existing and new offerings. At our Spatial Day in December and at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January, we discussed our new product offerings, outlined our strategic priorities for 2022 and beyond, and those priorities and our key areas of focus are as follows. First, we will deliver new, robust spatial biology solutions to the market that have the speed and the flexibility and the multiplexing capacity that our customers now demand. Next, with this increased robustness, we will provide ongoing expansion of our ready-made content, including multi-omic capabilities with a range of solutions for RNA and spatial transcriptomics. Finally, we will continue to partner with leading industry and academic medical centers to expand on our successes in the translational and clinical trial market, advancing our goal to establish a COIUS platform as a robust clinical solution. Now, one brief reminder, to better align our product naming conventions with these priorities, we recently completed some product rebranding. The Codex platform has been renamed the Phenocycler. And aptly so because the platform provides unbiased high parameter capabilities as an in-situ reagent delivery device. It's cycling reagents on and off of the tissue. And it does so by physically integrating and pairing with our customers' existing microscopes to create one integrated solution. The Polaris platform has been rebranded as the PhenoImager HT as it provides robust high throughput imaging with the best optical technology in the market. And it was really purpose-built to serve the translational and clinical markets. Historically, even though the phenocycler, formerly the Codex, was designed to integrate with our customers' existing microscopes, the majority of customers were nonetheless buying a new third-party microscope to ensure that they had a dedicated system to run the Codex assay. And beginning in January, with the launch of the fusion system, Customers will now preferentially choose our fusion over a conventional third-party microscope. Capturing the microscope revenue with the phenocycler is an obvious and core driver for Akoya for this year. The fusion contains the same leading optical capabilities as the HT, formerly Polaris, but with a smaller footprint and was explicitly designed to integrate with the phenocycler. Because of the powerful optics, a key benefit of the phenocycler fusion combination is that our customers can now run high-plex codex experiments nearly an order of magnitude faster, enabling larger, more meaningful studies and a contracted time to result. This speed improvement accelerates time results, drives expanding pull-through revenue per instrument. There is an equally powerful secondary benefit to coupling the fusion with the phenocycler. Our customers can use the phenocycler with the fusion for high plex interrogation of tissues and then use the fusion as a standalone to run high throughput validation studies at lower plex with a throughput of 100 samples per week. This modular design and tunable workflow enables the flexibility of our customers to do biomarker discovery and biomarker validation on the same platform. It's effectively two solutions in one. We had limited shipments in Q4, and the full commercial launch of the phenocyclofusion system commenced on January 14th of this year. We're encouraged with the initial customer interest and immediate commercial success and look forward to providing updates on our successes throughout the course of the year. Now, with this increase in speed and throughput that the phenocyclofusion provides, we're also expanding both our content menu and our multiplexing scale. Throughout 2022 and going forward, you will see us launch expanded antibody content for fresh frozen, for FFTE, human mouse in areas such as cancer and inflammatory disease and neurobiology. Now with faster speed and more content, we're also expanding the multiplexing of the Codex assay from 50 markers to over 100. We'll share more details on this higher multiplexing level at the upcoming AACR conference in April. Our commitment to speed and throughput capacity improvements is ongoing. We will release additional workflow and hardware improvements that continue to accelerate our phenocycler fusion workflow, driving the throughput from 10 samples to 30 samples per week. We will also be introducing new assay methods to further accelerate biomarker discovery and validation. The centerpiece is the launching of our new universal chemistry at the end of the year. This new assay is a best of breed between our current HyPlex Codex assay and our high throughput OPO assay. This universal chemistry will not only simplify the workflow, but will also importantly enable cohesion and consistency of antibodies and assay methodologies from high-plex biomarker discovery studies to then more focused high-throughput translational and clinical research programs. So biomarkers discovered on the phenocycler fusion can then be validated on the fusion alone and then advanced clinically to the HT or Polaris with the benefit of one consistent workflow and solution suite from ACOIA. This platform uniformity enabling both high-flex discovery and high-throughput validation on a consistent and cohesive platform from ACOYA is an important driver of our commercial success. It allows us to own the biomarker journey from the discovery to the clinic. Now, one final update on the phenocycler fusion system and the reagents is our commitment to providing a suite of solutions for RNA analysis and spatial transcriptomics. Now recall that the Phenocycler, again, it's an independent in-situ reagent delivery system, moving reagents on and off the tissue. It physically pairs and integrates with both our fusion or a third-party microscope. This modularity provides ACOIA with a distinct competitive advantage. We can develop and launch multiple assays and RNA solutions without requiring a new instrument or a new instrument redesign. We don't have a monolithic instrument where the hardware and assays are inextricably tied and fixed. It allows us to offer a suite of spatial transcriptomic solutions to meet a range of customer needs. Our first product launch for RNA analysis comes out of our recently announced partnership with Biotechni to automate their RNA scope chemistry on a phenocycler fusion system. RNAscope is the industry's most widely adopted solution for spatial RNA, with over 4,500 publications and thousands of customers. We expect to launch this middle of the year. RNAscope on our system will be used primarily for targeted applications and validation studies in the lower plex range. But simultaneously, for upstream broad-scale RNA discovery applications, We're also working on our own proprietary spatial transcriptomics technologies, which will enable up to a thousand PlexCavac capability. We expect to launch this proprietary spatial RNA solution in 2023, and we'll provide updates at the now rescheduled AGVD conference in June. So to summarize our new product initiatives, we have a powerful new instrument in the fusion. that when paired with a phenocycler, delivers unprecedented speed, capacity, and application breadth. We will raise the multiplexing on the protein side to 100 plus. We'll add additional validated content and provide workflow cohesion across our portfolio with our universal chemistry and also offer a range of RNA solutions. Further, this new instrument solution, the phenocycloid diffusion, allows our customers to run the fusion as a standalone system for high-throughput biomarker validation, making the phenocycloid fusion the industry's fastest, most powerful single-cell spatial biology system. So now as we look downstream to expand our opportunities and revenue in the translational and clinical markets, we have continued to invest in the PhenoImager HT platform, formerly the Polaris. Invested to enable robust clinical-grade throughput and to meet the necessary ISO and quality system certification requirements. In November of last year, our Advanced Biopharma Solutions Lab, or ABS in Marlborough, is where we perform lab services on the HT system, became CLIA certified. Again, this was last November. This certification enables ACOIA to support clinical trial enrollment studies and will drive the continued acceleration of our clinical trial partnerships with Key Biopharma. While we don't yet report our ABS revenues separately, we are seeing a real expansion of our pipeline of opportunities and book projects and expect ABS to increasingly contribute to our top-line growth. It's highlighting the growing adoption of the PhenoImager HT in clinical trials with both existing and new biopharma customers. Partnerships are central to our success in the translational market and in the clinical markets. We continue to leverage and advance our partnerships with thought leaders at Johns Hopkins, at UCSF, AstraZeneca, and many more. In December, we announced a new partnership with PathAI to combine our advanced biopharma solution service offering with their best-in-class AI-powered pathology. The combination of ABS with PATH-AI's capabilities and expertise in digital pathology will help streamline biomarker discovery and validation in identifying patients with a high likelihood of responding to immunotherapies. We expect this partnership to be a further growth driver of our ABS service business. So to summarize, Akoya has delivered on our strategic and financial goals for 2021. Our new phenocyclic fusion system will be a core platform for our customers, enabling high-plex, high-throughput, multi-ohmic spatial analysis across whole tissues at high resolution. Our growing reagent menu, increased throughput speed, and expanding install base will drive pull-through and reagent revenues. With our CLIA-certified ABS lab and our clinical-grade PhenoImager HT, we will continue to accelerate clinical advancements with partnerships across leading academic centers and biopharmaceutical companies. We are pleased with our strong financial performance in the fourth quarter and full year 2021 and will continue to expand on our leadership position in the spatial biology market as we move forward through 2022 and beyond. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Joe to discuss our financial results. Joe?
spk07: Thanks, Brian. Hello, everyone. As Brian highlighted, total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2021 was $16.2 million as compared to $12.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, which represents 26% growth. Product revenue, which includes instruments, reagents, and software, was $12.9 million compared to 10.5 million in the prior year period. Services and other revenue totaled 3.2 million as compared to 2.4 million in the prior year period. Within product revenue, instrument revenue was 8.5 million compared to 7.3 million in the prior year period. Reagent revenue was 4 million versus 2.8 million in the prior year period which is a continuation of the growth we've experienced all year in reagents. We had another strong quarter with 46 total instruments sold, of which 21 were PhenoCycler and 25 were from the PhenoImager portfolio. We are including the new Fusion instrument in addition to the legacy instruments under the previously labeled Phenoptix brand in this PhenoImager portfolio category. The total installed base of instruments is now 697 as of December 31st, 2021, which includes 182 phenocyclers and 515 phenoimagers. Fourth quarter reagent revenue was on the higher end of our projected range, and the performance gives us confidence in our recurring revenue becoming a core driver of our top-line growth. Our annualized pull-through on a year-to-date basis exceeds $30,000 per instrument for both the PhenoCycler and the PhenoImager HT. We have a wide range of usage among customers, with our highest PhenoCycler users achieving annual pull-through of $175,000, whereas the high-volume PhenoImager HT users are consuming $200,000 per instrument. Gross profit was $10.2 million in the fourth quarter compared to $7.9 million in the prior year period. This resulted in gross profit margin of 63.3%, an increase from the 61.3% in the prior year period. Increasing gross margin percentage is a key goal for the company as we continue to drive growth in our reagent business. Total operating expenses were $27 million, as compared to $11.1 million in the prior year period. Approximately $3.8 million of the OPEX was for non-cash items, including depreciation, amortization, and other non-cash expenses. In line with our strategic plan, the increase in OPEX was part of our investment in the business following our IPO as we hired aggressively in all areas of the business, including our commercial and R&D teams, to continue to drive market share growth. In 2022, we plan on making more targeted investments, so we project that OpEx will not grow at the same rate it did in 2021. We ended the year with $113.1 million of cash and cash equivalents as of December 31st. This gives us several years of runway to continue to make key investments in the business. Common shares outstanding are $37.3 million as of December 31st, and fully diluted shares, including the impact of outstanding options and warrants, totals $40.5 million. To summarize, our full year 2021 revenue was $54.9 million, a 30% increase over 2020. Included in that number is almost 70% growth in reagent revenue, which is a critical metric for our business. In addition, we sold 147 instruments in 2021 versus 118 in 2020. We remain confident in our ability to deliver strong growth in 2022 and are providing a full year 2022 preliminary guidance range of 69 to 71 million. Our base business has hit a stride of continued growth, and furthermore, we expect contribution from multiple additional new revenue drivers we have highlighted on this call. Now, I'll turn it back over to Brian for closing remarks.
spk03: Thank you, Joe. In summary, we're pleased to report a strong fourth quarter and a strong first full fiscal year results as a publicly traded company. We're thankful for the hard work of our fellow dedicated Accoyans, as well as for the support of our customers and shareholders. Akoya remains very well positioned for growth, and we're excited about the opportunities that lie ahead as we deliver new spatial solutions from the discovery to the clinical markets. And at this point, we will open the call up for questions. Operator?
spk02: As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Kyle Mixon of Canaccord Genuity. Your question, please.
spk05: Thanks. Hey, guys, thanks for taking the questions. Congrats on the quarter. All right, so I want to start on the Fusion platform first. So Fusion, Females Likely to Fusion announced in mid-December. Can you talk about, like, the excitement or the demand so far from customers and maybe even, like, new prospects? And then given most of your placements probably occur at the end of the quarter historically, Could you just talk about if you think there was any risk of freezing the market there a bit late in 21 or early in 22? Thanks.
spk03: Yeah, so to take those maybe in reverse order, we didn't do a lot of forward announcements of the fusion. We were working on it behind the scenes. So I don't think there was any real kind of freezing the market. We did reveal some details to selected customers under NDA. So, no, I don't think there was any freezing impact. Now, in terms of qualitatively, obviously, we can't speak to the numbers yet, and we will at the end of Q1. The feedback and the demand on the fusion with Athena Cycler has really been strong, extremely strong. It has resulted in new prospects. While there is an opportunity for existing customers to upgrade, most of the activity has been really new demand from new customers. And I think what we're hearing, Kyle, is is the rationale behind our investments, behind what we are aiming for, leveraging the existing whole slide capability in an unbiased manner, now with speed. That's been a real driver. And as alluded to during the call, there is another driver beyond just speed and Plex. The modularity and the fact that this is our platform of future investment, I think, is giving our customers the confidence that the system is future-proof So it's not just the specifications that are driving interest. The modularity and the fact that this is our foundation for investment going forward, those are some of the key drivers. So it really has been a strong Q1 in terms of demand creation.
spk05: Okay. That was great. Thanks, Brian. Maybe just turning to the financials. So obviously the readiness revenue is really strong during the quarter and this year, obviously. So pull-through was great. Could you talk about ASP, though, on the instrument side? It just seems like it's kind of declining a bit. I mean, how should we think about that going forward in 22 and so forth, and also what happened in the fourth quarter, any kind of bundling, things like that? Just curious.
spk03: Yeah, I'll let Joe speak to the details on the ASPs. I don't think we saw any ASP contraction, but Joe can confirm. So, Joe?
spk07: Yeah, our ASPs have been consistent all year. It's really just a question of a mix of instruments sold. So there was a solid quarter of phenocycler sales, and that really drives your overall ASP if you're comparing it to prior quarters. But there's no inherent change in ASPs in any one of our instrument types.
spk05: Okay, got it. Thanks for the clarification. And then, Joe, on OPEX, obviously, pretty high during the quarter. And you parsed out the stock-based comp, I think, almost $4 million or so, so that makes sense. I guess a couple questions about that. First, what's a good way to think about OPEX going forward? And then there was an accounting adjustment during the quarter, a change in fair value of continued consideration. Could you just talk about what that was related to? Because it was a little bit higher than previously. It was like about three or four times what it was in the past quarter. Sure.
spk07: Yeah, so OpEx in Q1 is going to be lower than it was in Q4. Q4 had, you know, sort of these unusual items, a lot more non-cash expenses going through, like StarComp and this contingent consideration item. So it'll be lower in Q1, you know, probably $24 million or so in total OpEx, of which $3 million of that would be non-cash things like depreciation, amortization, and stock comp. So that's what I'm projecting for Q1. And then the contingent consideration item is an item that every year we have a revaluation done of a long-term liability we have to Perkin Elmer. So we owe them a royalty over a 15-year period. It's a long-term liability. It gets revalued at fair value every year by an outside firm. And so it's just a non-cash charge. You have to book it to the new fair value at the end of every year. So nothing really to worry about there.
spk05: Got it. Okay. Makes sense.
spk03: And just to add qualitatively and reiterate what Joe said during his section. So we were successful in second half of adding a lot of great key talent to R&D and into our commercial organizations. But as Joe noted during his section, as we get into 2022, it's going to be a lot more targeted in terms of our additional investments in OPEX.
spk05: Okay, got it. Sounds appropriate. Just a quick one for you, Brian. So the focus on spatial biology informatics among the constituents is obviously steadily increasing. Can you just take a moment to remind us of the benefits of Proxima and the ecosystem that could create and the enhancements you aim to make over time? And then, of course, that platform, what kind of competitive positioning versus other portals out there?
spk03: Yeah, what we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure that we have a recognition that there's a lot of great inventions and investments that third parties can and will continue to make in an analysis. So as part of our effort to migrate our existing desktop informatics solutions to the cloud and layer it on as a collaboration system within Proxima, we're also really actively working with third parties through our API to allow those to plug in. So just as we spoke about with PathAI, not directly in line with your question, As a partner to extract meaning, you know, we will invest to build out our informatic platforms so that our customers have a go-to solution, but really actively seek out partnerships where we can have, you know, real powerful third-party solutions that can plug in. Because, look, our aim is to get them to the answer as quickly as possible. So that is how we think about our informatic solutions and Proxima more generally.
spk05: All right. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for the questions, guys. Congrats again.
spk03: Thanks, Kyle.
spk02: Thanks. Thank you. Our next question comes from Teja Savant of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
spk04: Hey, guys. Good evening. So maybe, Brian, just to follow up on that earlier question on the fusion here, can you just give us your latest thoughts on how many of those you expect to sell as standalone versus in conjunction with a Codex and any sort of quantitative color on the order funnel here and how that split might evolve with time?
spk03: So, yeah, I will... refrain from anything quantitative at this point. What was the first part of your question, Tejas?
spk04: I was just curious as to how many were sold as standalone fusions versus in conjunction with a codex.
spk03: Yeah, so only, as we noted on the call, only a handful were shipped in Q4. And kind of what we're modeling going forward, you know, is an attachment rate, you know, maybe half the time or a little bit more. That is, when somebody buys a phenocycler, then about half the time they're going to buy a fusion. In some cases, labs have preferences of their third-party microscopes, and they standardize on them. And so that oftentimes makes it easier for us to integrate with a third party. And we'll see how that tracks over time, Tejas. It could be higher. We've decided to come out with a fairly conservative number. And as we looked back historically, as I alluded, the percent of time that a customer was buying a third-party microscope anyway prior to the fusion was probably around 60% to 70%. So we're leaving some room there given some potential institutional requirements for certain third-party microscope types.
spk04: Got it. That's helpful. And then as you think about sort of, you know, bookends for the pull-through year and the fusion, Brian, I mean, any early sort of like signs around how that might be trending here as, you know, customers start to ramp here in January and February?
spk03: There's no quantitative or real qualitative data yet. You know, we just launched January 13th, just starting to ship those, get those out, get those installed. So, you know, as of right now, we'll start to see that data as it comes through, given the increased speed, the increased plexing, you know, driving more samples per week. But with that increased plexing, you know, more dollars per sample. So it's too early to have anything quantitative because we're literally, Tejas, just shipping and installing at this point.
spk04: Got it. Fair enough. And then, Brian, as you progressed into March, I was curious in terms of just customer activity levels by type. So in the academic customer base, did you see any sort of like slow start to the quarter that's ramping here through February and March? And also on the biopharma side, any kind of like slower sample intake during the pandemic that's now sort of essentially back to normal? And for Joe, on a related note, are you essentially assuming full normalcy on a go-forward basis in your 22 outlook?
spk03: Yeah, so to take those into reverse order, right now we're seeing sort of business as usual. So no real hangover effects. You know, pockets here or there of some access or maybe an instrument or two, but nothing that's fundamental to our numbers in terms of access to the customer's ability to sell instruments. And there's nothing atypical about this Q1 versus other Q1s. You usually always have a bit of a walking start in January, regardless of broader health or geopolitical things. But our quarter is progressing as we had expected. But again, the second part of your question, we are not modeling in any impacts of COVID anymore on our business. We have the access now. and we think the customers have the access to our systems.
spk04: Got it.
spk03: Very helpful. Thank you. Thanks, J.J.
spk02: Thank you. Our next question comes from Julia Kin of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
spk01: Hi. Good afternoon. Just to follow up in terms of your guidance for the full year, Should we assume that you're expecting the same instrument mix between cycler and fusion and the rest of the imager portfolio as we saw in 4Q? And then in terms of fusion, since it's at a different ASP, could you remind us of the price point and how to think about the imager portfolio ASP trends going forward?
spk03: Yeah, let's take those in reverse order. The imaging portfolio going forward, You know, we are end of lifing, you know, two of those historical instruments within the phenoptics portfolio over time, the mantra and the vectra. So the imaging portfolio is going to be the fusion and the HT, formerly the Polaris. That is the imaging portfolio with the fusion, as noted, being able to integrate with the phenocycler. Excluding the fusion, Julia, and we can layer that in per Tejas' question on attachment. It's been fairly equivalent, you know, maybe one or two more here or there over the prior quarters in terms of the number of HTs and the number of phenocyclers we've sold. That's likely going to continue going forward. There's some ebbs and flows, as I noted. And then layering in the attachment of the fusion to those phenocyclers is added revenue on top of us selling, for example, more phenocyclers in the prior year. So those are the dynamics.
spk01: Gotcha, very helpful. And then in terms of consumable pull-through, it sounds like your current guidance has not embedded a lot of meaningful contribution from the RNA menu expansion and proprietary reagents yet. But as we think about the long-term potential, I think you previously set a path towards 50 to 60K pull-through on both platforms over time. Does that already embed the benefits from the fusion-launched RNA menu and proprietary reagents? or do those represent incremental upside?
spk03: So the projections of the growing pull-through do include RNA, new reagents, increased speed, increased plexing in dollars per sample. So our projections for driving pull-through on a per-instrument basis do include those assumptions.
spk01: Gotcha. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Julia.
spk03: Thank you.
spk02: Thank you. Again, to ask a question, please press star 1 on your touchtone telephone. Again, that's star 1 on your touchtone telephone to ask a question. Our next question comes from the line of David Westenberg of Piper Sandler. Your question, please.
spk08: Hi. Thanks for taking the question, and congrats on the good numbers here. So great color on the upper limit. customers of 200,000 an annual pull-through. Are you willing to give us a flavor of the customer types, you know, in terms of what they might look like, pharma, biotech, research, and in terms of where they're at and maybe the clinical research or any kind of profile that allows us to kind of think about, you know, is this possible with the rest of your customer base?
spk03: Yeah, so the upper limit customers, on the AHT side includes CROs and leading academic medical centers that have established ongoing programs. That's not surprising. So in the case of CRO, like we have through Advanced BioPharm Solutions Group, a number of established big pharma that are leveraging our platform. In the case of the AHT or Polaris and the leading academic medical center, These are groups that have established scale translational program with routine sample flow. So those sorts of dynamics are the dynamics that I think are growing, and our AVS growth is an indication of the former. On the higher numbers for the Codex, now the Phenocycler, there's a number of different types of groups. There's groups that are building Atlas-type programs where they're building out large reference datasets. There's groups that are servicing multiple other, as a core, multiple other groups internally. And as an aside, leveraging speed going forward is certainly going to help our ability to place our instruments in these core labs because more samples per unit time is how they run their business. And there's other groups that are really digging deep and leveraging our platform to understand the basics of the disease. For example, Bob Schreiber is... is one of those groups that's using, out of WashU, using our platform and mouse models to better understand response to immunotherapies. So it's the kinds of things, David, I think that you would expect, but hopefully that gives you a little bit more color.
spk08: No, it was very helpful, particularly on the Codex side. It's going to take me a little while to learn the rebranding, but I get it. All right, so I want to continue with one of Julia's questions about the pull-through and then the kind of long-term assumption. because you are launching a pretty good amount of content this year. And, you know, I, I, you know, between the universal chemistry, the, the RNA stuff. So, I mean, I, like I intuitively think about that, but I, I think, you know, you're also, um, you know, adding on the microscope should also, you know, add to what the customer can do. So can you talk about the pushes and pulls and, and, and that in the two year, three year trends and consumable pull through that maybe make us think that maybe it's not that, I mean, maybe there's a maturing or there's a, uh, you're getting more placements and, you know, there's a maturity cycle involved in those additional placements. Any caller could help us out here. Thank you.
spk03: Yeah, so I think when we talk about forthcoming RNA speed improvements, increased inflexing, additional content, that sort of flywheel of more samples per unit time and more dollars per sample, these are, as you noted, these are solutions that are just getting into the markets. So those capabilities are not currently embedded, maybe speaking first on the discovery side, in the existing phenocycler installs. So they will roll out over time. And so we have a maturation of the current customer base in the field to leverage these. But also, incrementally, as we add new phenocyclers with fusion over time, that will become a higher percentage of our install base. So you might have, and this may be an oversimplification, a bit of a bimodal user base between those who are on the standalone phenocycler versus those new customers that have it with the fusion. And so we might anticipate a higher pull-through with those early and first phenocycler fusion customers as compared to a standard phenocycler customer. So those are some of the key drivers on a pull-through per unit basis, but still an aggregate by the growing install base. Those new customers are going to contribute more and more over time in terms of growing our total reagent revenue.
spk08: Appreciate it. That's a great color. And then just a quick one, it's kind of an extension or the opposite of what Tay just asked, and that is, is there any standalone opportunity for the fusion microscope? And I'm just talking about maybe some of those previous placements that didn't have a microscope that they acquired a third party, and then they say, you know what, this functionality is a lot better with the fusion microscope. So any thoughts on standalone in that case? And I'm That wraps it up. Thank you.
spk03: That's a great question, and you're calling out something that we probably could spend more time on. The Fusion really is an incredibly powerful microscope. As we noted, it's got the same underlying image acquisition speed and capabilities as the Polaris, now the HT system, but it's just in a smaller, more affordable footprint. So a fusion standalone is really attractive to a segment of the translational and clinical research market segment that don't think they need the kind of scale and throughput that the HT system, the former Polaris, provides. So it has all of the same capabilities as the HT, as the Polaris, but, again, in a smaller footprint that's more affordable. So that is an obvious customer for the fusion standalone.
spk08: I appreciate it. Good job on the quarterback.
spk02: Thanks, David. Thanks. Thank you. And, ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you so much for participating. You may now disconnect.
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