Akoya BioSciences, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Coil Biosciences second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. As a reminder, today's program may be recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Priyam Shah, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and thank you to everyone who's joining us today on this call. 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 second quarter and at June 30th, 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 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 the COIA's business, please refer to the risk factors 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, August 8, 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 UBS Genomics 2.0 and the Canaccord Growth Conference this week, and we hope to see many of you in person, either in DanaPoint or Boston. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Brian.

Thank you, Prem, and good afternoon to everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Akoya had a very strong first half of 2022, and the second quarter was highlighted by the continuation of the successful commercial launch of our new phenocycler fusion system. We reported record revenue of $17.9 million, representing a 37% growth compared to the second quarter of 2021. We achieved success globally across multiple categories with record revenue in products and services. We sold a total of 60 inert instruments in the second quarter, consisting of 16 phenocyclers and 44 phenol imagers, representing a 94% growth in placements from the prior year period. And we ended the quarter with an install base of over 800 instruments. This large install base is a confirmation of our strong success to date. And in addition, the rapidly accelerating publications featuring ACOIA's platform, now over 600 to date, nearly a doubling from a year ago, is a key indicator that this trend will continue. Our second quarter was further highlighted first with the announcement of our groundbreaking spatial companion diagnostic partnership with Acrovant Therapeutics. And second, At AZBT, we were the first spatial biology company to demonstrate true multi-omic capabilities, measuring both RNA and protein at HyPlex on the same slide. These two milestones and our strong Q2 performance clearly demonstrate that as a company solely focused on spatial biology, our diversified portfolio is seeing strong adoption and delivering meaningful value, discovery, translational, and now clinical markets. At the core, the speed and robustness of Akoya's industry-leading optics and cycling technologies are enabling whole-slide, single-cell spatial phenotyping to become the go-to method for unbiased tissue analysis. We are addressing key discovery and clinical questions in areas such as immunology, oncology, neurobiology, infectious disease, transplant medicine, and more. Our continued and growing success in the downstream translational and clinical markets is a byproduct of the expanded utilization of digital pathology and spatially-based biomarker strategies in oncology and the unique capabilities of our PhenoImager HD workflow to meet these requirements. As I noted earlier, we recently announced an exclusive partnership with Acrobon Therapeutics to co-develop a first-of-its-kind spatial signature companion diagnostic called the OncoSignature test. The OncoSignature companion diagnostic will be used to identify cancer patients most likely to respond to Acrobon's developmental agent ACR368, the targeted DNA damage response inhibitor, entering Phase II patient selection trials for platinum-resistant ovarian, endometrial, and bladder cancers. The OncoSignature test will leverage the spatial phenotyping capabilities of the phenol imager HT to localize and quantify the expression of clinically relevant protein biomarkers that signal response to Acrovan's drug. Once approved, OncoSignature will enable physicians to identify potential responders to ACR368 prior to prescribing the drug. Okoye and Akravan will advance the aqua signature test through development to commercialization. This partnership provides our other biopharma partners the confidence and evidence that Okoye has the internal expertise and capabilities to deliver on the necessary diligence and audits, development and validation work, and commercialization to deliver on a companion diagnostic program. Our advanced biopharma solutions CLIA lab out of Marlboro has become a valued resource for our biopharmaceutical partners, resulting in meaningful expansion of our pipeline and programs with industry-leading oncology companies. Since formally launching ABS and achieving this CLIA certification last year, we have scaled that organization to meet this growing demand and are optimistic for its continued and expanding contribution to our success in the translational and clinical markets. Now moving on to the discovery side of our portfolio. In addition to delivering on our commercial milestones, our focus in Q2 was to demonstrate our progress in expanding the capabilities of the phenocycler fusion to deliver ultra-high multiplexing in both RNA and protein applications with industry-leading speed and data quality. At AGBT in June, Akoya showcased the new data from the phenocyclic fusion where we demonstrated our new RNA chemistry in both a 100-plex RNA panel and a greater than 100-plex RNA and protein panel on the same tissue. This first-of-its-kind multi-omic dataset on the same tissue sample at single-cell resolution highlights two unique and powerful capabilities of our system. First, our phenocyclic precisely and rapidly delivers reagents to and from a microscope slide in situ. And second, the proprietary optics of the fusion deliver high-resolution imagery at speed. This AGBT data demonstration set followed a similar data showcase at AACR in April, where we demonstrated the ability of the fetal cycle diffusion to robustly run a 100-plex protein spatial phenotyping panel. The ability to perform whole slide spatial transcriptomics and proteomics with scale and speed at single cell resolution on the same tissue sample represents a major step forward in this field. Throughout this year and next, we will migrate our 100 plex and multi-omic capabilities from demonstration, early access to commercialization. And we are also on track to deliver additional advancements to our product portfolio providing our customers with ongoing improvements to the industry's most robust spatial phenotyping solution. These include the following. Later this year and through our partnership with Biotechni, we will launch the automation of the RNAscope chemistry on the phenocyclic 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 anticipate RNA scope will be used primarily for targeted applications and validation studies in the lower Plex range and will also provide Akoya with access to a new and motivated customer base. And in parallel to enabling RNA scope, we will deliver to our new and existing customers an upgrade to their phenocyclic fusion system that will double its throughput. This capacity increase is part of our ongoing effort to simplify and accelerate our workflow. For example, we included with Diffusion at launch earlier this year, a proprietary 30X file compression algorithm that converts our terabytes of image data into a gigabyte file, enabling real-time data analysis versus a serial, very data-intensive process. This solves a major data storage and management expense and affords Akoya and our customers the opportunity to focus on downstream interpretation. And at the end of this year, we will also launch our universal chemistry. This novel assay is a hybrid between our phenocycler and our HP chemistries. And when launched, it will enable rapid panel design and automation for high-volume translational studies and is ideal for validating biomarkers discovered using our HyFlex workflow. It will also leverage the quasi-antibodies and content, and both of these benefits will drive further pull-through on our phenoymmeters. So let me now summarize our aggregate workflow and application advancements on the phenocyclofusion to provide a clear understanding of the platform's full capabilities. So first, we're further advancing our leadership position and speed with diffusion upgrade later this year that doubles throughput. Second, we will deliver HyPlex multi-omic solutions that work on a single tissue, enabling more discovery power per sample. Finally, we will launch R&D scope in our new universal chemistry to enable our customers to rapidly validate the biomarkers discovered on the phenocycler fusion. It's worth reiterating a key point of competitive differentiation for Corey here that is of great benefit to our customers. This validation work can happen on the instrument that they already have, the fusion, not a separate box requiring a second capital purchase. That is, they perform discovery studies with HyPlex multiomics on the phenocycler fusion and then validate using the fusion as a standalone. This is one solution for both discovery and validation. So to summarize, our updates for the first half of 2022. We're pleased with our strong financial and commercial performance as we continue to expand our leadership position in the spatial biology market, diversify our revenue, and broaden our global reach. We remain focused on the following targeted initiatives for the balance of the year. First, drive the continued adoption of the phenocycler fusion as the best-in-class in situ imaging platform for the spatial discovery market. Second, drive further workflow and speed improvements, as well as launch additional protein panels, RNA capabilities, and our new universal chemistry. Lastly, continue to partner with leading biopharma, medical centers, CROs, and other industry leaders to drive the adoption of the PhenoImager HT in the translational and clinical markets and to deliver on our Akraban Companion Diagnostic Partnership. With that, I will now turn the call over to Joe to discuss our financial results. Joe?