Akoya BioSciences, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Akoya Biosciences fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentations, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question at that time, please press star 11 on your phone. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your 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 fourth quarter ended December 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 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 COIS business, please refer to the risk factors section of our Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today, March 6, 2023. We urge you to consider these factors, and you should be aware that these statements are 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 6, 2023. 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. The audio portion of this call will be archived on the investor section of our website later today under the heading events. We would also like to inform listeners that Akoya will be participating in the Cal and Healthcare Conference tomorrow, March 7th. If you're not planning to attend in person, please see our investor relations page for webcast information for this and other recent or upcoming investor events. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Brian.

Thank you, Priyam. And good afternoon and evening to everyone. We appreciate you joining us on the call today. 2022 was an excellent year for Akoya. tapped off by a strong finish with yet another record-breaking quarter. As an organization, we delivered solid commercial execution and consistently strong revenue growth, install-based growth, and publication growth within the spatial biology market. We reported record revenue of $21.2 million in the fourth quarter and $74.9 million for the full year of 2022, a 36% growth over the prior year. We sold a total of 71 instruments in the fourth quarter and 237 instruments for the full year 2022, a 61% growth in placements from the prior year, and we ended the year with an install base of 934 instruments. Akoya has the largest install base of spatial instruments in the industry, and we are on track to reach 1,000 instruments by early this year, a major milestone for the company. Additionally, the rapidly accelerating publications volume featuring Akoya's platforms, now at 772 publications to date, is the largest amongst spatial biology providers. Our consistent execution, large and growing install base, and publication growth gives us increasing confidence in the momentum of our business and the spatial biology market in 2023 and beyond. Akoya's product portfolio is setting the industry standard for next-generation tissue analysis. The company was founded on the vision and fundamental assumption that the market requires rapid imaging-based in-situ technology for comprehensive tissue analysis, enabling the understanding of the molecular and cellular interactions at a single-cell level across whole tissue samples. In 2022, we solidified our instrument portfolio with the launch of the fusion. We expanded our footprint across all market segments and made significant progress on our long-term clinical goal of impacting patient care. ACOIA brings to the spatial biology market a full suite of end-to-end and purpose-built platforms across the discovery, translational, and clinical market segments. Our continuity of technology, reagents, and methods across our entire portfolio allows us to own the biomarker journey from discovery to the clinic. At our recent Spatial Day event in December, we previewed our 2023 priorities and product roadmap, and the summary is as follows. First, we are introducing platform and workflow improvements across our entire instrument line that will further advance our leadership position in spatial imaging and drive additional reach and pull-through across our nearly 1,000 instruments in the market. Second, we will build on our commercial and partnership success in the translational and clinical markets to further advance our goal of improving patient care. Third, we will focus on driving operational efficiencies, including more targeted investments in 2023. Now, let me address each one of these in more detail. Our platform improvements include further simplification and acceleration of our workflows on both the phenocycler fusion and the PhenoImager HT. To take full advantage of these improvements, we are introducing expanded reagent menus of ready-made panels for both the phenocycler fusion for HyPlex discovery and the PhenoImager HT for high-throughput translational studies. These new biomarker panels will be marketed under the brand name PhenoCode. PhenoCode discovery panels for the phenocycler fusion and a few new code signature panels for the HT. Our projected reagent pull-through increases will be driven by improved system capacity and throughput, ready-made panels to increase Plex and application breadth, and an ecosystem of software partners to reduce the time from data to answer. Beginning next quarter, the Fusion 2.0 release will be rolled out. It is the primary system improvement on the phenocycler fusion for 2023 and results in a significant increase in throughput and workflow simplification. This 2.0 release includes a multi-slide carrier for parallel processing of tissue samples and effectively doubles the system throughput up to 20 to 30 samples per week. This upgrade also supports the rollout of Biotechnes RNA scope on the phenocycler fusion. Now, to remind you, RNAscope is the industry's gold standard RNA in situ assay, with over 6,000 publications to date and broad adoption across the life sciences market. RNAscope is an ideal solution to complement protein-based spatial phenotyping in a targeted manner and to validate discoveries made with higher plex spatial transcriptomic approaches. And in parallel, in the second half of 2023, we will introduce Akoya's proprietary HyPlex spatial transcriptomic solution to support RNA and ultimately multiomic spatial studies. On the PhenoImager HT, we are continuing our efforts to simplify and streamline our informatic workflow and post-processing to a true clinical standard. In mid-2023, we will introduce further improvements to the HT that moves the post-processing tissue analysis steps directly onto the HT for on-instrument compute. The result will be a reduction in data post-processing from hours to minutes and an automated workflow for tissue and cellular annotation. This upgrade supports our translational and clinical customer demands for rapid and standardized analysis to drive throughput, consistency, and ultimately adoption. Now, to enable our customers to take full advantage of these system improvements on the phenocycler fusion and the phenol imager HT, we are introducing our new phenocode reagent offerings. These phenocode panels will deliver a suite of ready-to-use biomarker panels focused on answering key biological questions with greater efficiency, speed, and comprehensiveness. Our phenocode discovery panels are designed to run on the phenocycler fusion for discovery-based applications. The first product launch will be protein-based, with RNA solutions coming later in the year. These panels will be introduced throughout the year on a quarterly cadence. We will share more details at this year's AACR meeting in early April, but at a high level, the Phenocode Discovery Panels will be launched as modules of 10 to 20 biomarkers, enabling our customers to mix and match modules to quickly build a comprehensive HyFlex panel. They are focused on core biomarkers and are designed to address key biological questions in oncology, inflammatory disease, and neurobiology. At the AGBT conference last month, Akoya and our partners at Stanford each presented phenocode discovery panels with simultaneous detection of protein and RNA across large sample cohorts, demonstrating great science at speed and scale. Throughout this year and next, we will continue to build out these modules for protein, RNA, and multi-omic applications, enabling high-plex and high-throughput discovery across a broad range of applications and customers. For the translational and clinical markets, our phenocode signature panels are designed to run on the phenol imager HT. The initial five panels were created for the rapidly advancing immunooncology therapy landscape that includes nearly 6,000 ongoing clinical trials, which demand pre-designed validated antibody panels with detection reagents in a ready-to-use format. The phenocode signature panels enable fast and scalable spatial signature development and deployment and will deliver higher revenue per sample, accelerated and increased system utilization, reduced assay optimization time, and will result in a higher pull-through on the HT. And now to pivot to software and data analysis. But to remind you, ACOIA's platforms already leveraged on-instrument image processing and file compression that reduce file sizes by 30-fold from terabytes to gigabytes. This novel and proprietary technology enables ease of data transfer and analysis via our standardized file format called QPTIF. This standardized format also simplifies and accelerates the development of third-party software solutions. Rather than develop and deploy a singular monolithic solution, Akoya's strategy is to partner with the rapidly growing ecosystem of spatial biology software providers. Similar to the dynamics seen in other markets like microarrays and flow cytometry and NGS, rapidly adopted new technologies spur parallel development of supportive solutions. This is especially true of software and is certainly happening now in the spatial biology market. We already have a full range of software partners to support the unique customer needs across all of our platforms and market segments. We have both commercial and free open source partners. We have cloud-based solutions and others that rely on local compute. The growing list of partners include established industry leaders like VisioPharm, indica labs and path ai new and rapidly emerging providers like oracle bio and enable medicine and open source software and the open source software qpath in addition to this rich product roadmap we are progressing several initiatives in the downstream translational and clinical markets leveraging the phenol imager ht and our advanced biopharma solutions cleolab or abs out of Marlboro. We recently announced a partnership with Agilent to make possible a seamless end-to-end clinical workflow for multiplex assay use in clinical trials. ACOYA will leverage Agilent's expertise and their clinical-grade Omnis autostainer to support a full spectrum of multiplex assays for BioPharma. With Agilent's Omnis clinical antibodies, and CDX expertise, and ACOYA's HT platform, CLIA Lab, and technical leadership in clinical-grade multiplexing, we can together support clinical assay development, validation, and use in clinical trials, creating a one-stop shop for our shared biopharma partners. The combined strengths of Agilent and ACOYA, two leaders in our respective fields, accelerates multiplex companion diagnostic development programs, and provides a global channel for subsequent commercialization. Our agreement with Akraban Therapeutics to exclusively co-develop and commercialize a first-of-its-kind spatial signature companion diagnostic for their targeted oncology agent continues to advance with the clinical trial ongoing and is yet another important milestone in furthering our clinical menu offering. In parallel, ABS continues to see robust growth and expansion of existing and new pharma partners. We made significant progress in 2022 pursuing the large spatial biology clinical TAM with key partnerships and developments that will continue to gain traction in 2023. To summarize our fourth quarter and full year 2022, We are very pleased with our strong financial and commercial performance this year as we continue to expand our leadership position in the spatial biology market. As we outlined, we'll focus on the following initiatives in 2023. First, drive the continued adoption and improvements of the phenocycler fusion as a best-in-class, in-situ imaging platform for discovery spatial biology. continue to deliver new applications and drive further workflow and speed improvements across the full instrument portfolio to drive an increase in poultry. And third, we'll continue to partner with leading biopharma, medical centers, CROs, and diagnostic leaders to drive the adoption of the PhenoImager HT in translational research and clinical diagnostics. And lastly, who will drive operational efficiencies and more targeted personnel investments on our path to achieve profitability. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Joe to discuss our financial results. Joe?