Akoya BioSciences, Inc.

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Akoya Biosciences first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question at that time, please press star then 1 on your touch-tone telephone. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I would like to introduce our host, Mr. Priyam Shah, head of investor relations. Please go ahead, sir.

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 first quarter ended March 31st, 2022. 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 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 the list and description of the risks and uncertainties associated with ACOIA's business, please refer to the risk factor section of our Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 15, 2022. 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, May 5, 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. Lastly, ACOIA will be participating in the upcoming Bank of America, UBS, and HC Wainwright investor conferences throughout May, and we hope to see many of you in person while we're on the road. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Brian.

Thank you, Priyam, and good afternoon or evening to everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Akoya had a very strong start to 2022, highlighted by the full commercial launch of our new phenocycler fusion system, the industry's fastest and most powerful spatial biology solution on the market. The first quarter was another record revenue quarter of $16.9 million, representing 38% growth over the prior year. During the quarter, we sold 51 instruments consisting of 14 phenocyclers and 37 phenon imagers. When you combine the four pre-release fusion instruments shipped at the end of Q4, as of March 31st, we have sold 28 of the new fusion instruments, resulting in an install base of 23 combined units of the phenocycler fusion system and five standalone fusion installations. We believe the strong initial adoption by new and existing customers of COIA, further demonstrates the confidence in our platforms. Our Q1 performance represents a signature quarter for Sequoia as it is the direct byproduct of the post-IPO commitments and investments made to scale our commercial organization and product development efforts. The launch of Fusion, our expanded commercial team, and strong execution were key drivers behind our solid performance. We expect this theme to continue through the remainder of the year as we launch new spatial biology solutions and gain additional momentum in the market. Here at Akoya, our sole focus is spatial biology. We have catalyzed the rapid growth of the industry over the past few years. The speed and robustness of our industry-leading optics and our cycling technologies are enabling whole slide, single-cell spatial phenotyping to become the go-to method for tissue analysis. Our platforms meet the needs of discovery, translational, and clinical customers across research verticals such as immunology, oncology, neurobiology, and more. We have installed nearly 750 instruments globally, which have been referenced in over 530 high impact publications. 530 publications more than doubles the number of publications we had at this time last year. The large install base is a confirmation of our success to date. and the rapidly accelerating publications is a key leading indicator that this trend will continue. In our continuing efforts to drive adoption of our spatial biology platforms, we embarked on a world tour starting in March of this year. Our team is holding seminars across 29 cities globally for hands-on demonstrations of the phenocycler fusion and to discuss our customers' spatial biology needs. We have been pleased with the overwhelming positive feedback received on the tour, and this, coupled to other high impact sales and marketing efforts, has enabled us to build a robust and growing pipeline of opportunities to support our commercial objectives in 2022. Our aim in the development of the phenocycler fusion was to improve customer workflow by providing the combination of speed, plex, and throughput that discovery and translational researchers desire. Additionally, by delivering the platform as a modular system, our customers can perform HyPlex discovery studies on the phenocycler fusion and then use the fusion as a standalone system to perform high-throughput validation studies. We are essentially providing two workflow solutions in one platform. Enabling both HyPlex and high-throughput across whole tissue samples enables our customers to do spatial biology at a scale never before possible. To support this accelerated workflow, the phenocyclic fusion platform also has a proprietary file compression algorithm that can reduce file sizes from terabytes to gigabytes, making data analysis, sharing, and storage a much simpler task. At the AACR meeting in New Orleans last month, we were excited to share the full data set of our HyPlex antibody modules with over 100 Plex markers for deep spatial phenotyping using the phenocyclic fusions. This expanded capability demonstrates the breadth of unique cellular interactions that we can capture, giving researchers unprecedented insights into tumor immune biology. Throughout 2022, ACOYA will continue to expand both our antibody content menu and multiplexing capability as we move to commercialize these higher plex modules. Our commitment to increasing speed and throughput is ongoing, and we plan to release workflow improvements that drive discovery throughput from 10 samples to 30 samples per week on the phenocyclic fusion. The fusion standalone for biomarker validation already enables throughput of over 100 samples per week. Also previewed at AACRO was our new universal protein chemistry that will further accelerate biomarker discovery and validation. This new assay combines the core components of our CODEX assay with the high sensitivity of our OPAL assay. The combination into a single method will simplify our phenol imager workflow and bring more value to our customers, simplifying panel design, automation, and will drive higher platform utilization and reagent revenue. The universal chemistry technology will allow us to own the biomarker journey from discovery to clinical research. Biomarkers discovered on the phenocycler fusion will be validated on the fusion. and then will advance to larger-scale studies on the phenohemiger HT. Commercial rollout of the universal chemistry will commence at the end of this year. Okoye also remains committed to providing a true multi-omic platform. We will be delivering a suite of whole-slide spatial transcriptomic solutions on the phenocycler fusion. Our first product launch for RNA analysis comes out of our partnership with Biotechnique. which is designed to automate their RNAscope chemistry on our phenocycler fusion system. As many of you know, 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 RNAscope on our platform later this year and anticipate it will be used primarily for targeted applications and validation studies in the lower Plex range. Simultaneously, for upstream and broad-scale RNA discovery applications, we are working on our own proprietary spatial transcriptomics technologies, which will enable us to offer up to 1,000 flex capability. We expect to launch this proprietary spatial transcriptomics solution in 2023, and we'll provide an update at the AGBT conference next month in Orlando. In the late translational and clinical markets, partnerships are central to our success. Our Advanced Biopharma Solutions Group, or AVS, out of Marlboro is fundamental to this effort. We continue to see rapid expansion of our pipeline of translational and clinical trial studies run through AVS. And as with our total revenue instrument placements, Q1 was a record quarter for our AVS business. ABS is central to ACOIA's aim to extend our spatial platforms, workflows, and reagents into higher-value clinical applications, supporting clinical trial enrollment and diagnostic assay development. The CLIA certification of our ABS lab, our network of KOL partners, and the robustness of the PhenoImager-HT workflow are key drivers of our ongoing success in the translational and clinical research markets. To guide us on our clinical journey, we recently announced the appointment of Dr. Ehab El-Gabri as Chief Medical Officer. Ehab brings over 20 years of leadership in pathology and IVD development, critical knowledge that will help drive Akoya's vision of advancing spatial phenotyping in precision medicine and cancer care. To summarize our first quarter update, we are pleased with our strong financial and commercial performance, We continue to expand our leadership position in the spatial biology market and remain focused on the following initiatives for the balance of the year. First, continued adoption of our newly launched fusion instrument standalone or paired with the phenocycler. Second, drive further workflow and speed improvements on the phenocycler fusion and launch additional protein panels, RNA capabilities, and our new universal chemistry. And third, continue to partner with leading biopharma and industry KOLs to drive the adoption of our platform in translational and clinical research. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Joe to discuss our financial results. Joe?