Akoya BioSciences, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the COIA Biosciences fourth quarter 2023 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 the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference has been recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, 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 McCalligan, Chief Executive Officer, and Johnny Eck, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, Akoya released financial results for the fourth quarter ended December 31st, 2023. A copy of the press release is available on the company's websites. 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 risks identified in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including in the risk factors annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2023, to be filed today, March 4th, 2024. 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 4th, 2024. 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 after the heading events. I'll now turn the call over to Brian.

Thank you, Priyam, and good afternoon or evening to everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. During today's conference call, I will begin by giving a broad overview of our performance in the fourth quarter and full year 2023. I will review our business advancements and provide insights into the latest developments in our product offerings. Following that, Johnny will go deeper into our financials, key trends, and provide an outlook for the future of the business. As preannounced at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January, Akoya had a strong fourth quarter in 2023 with record-breaking revenue of $26.5 million and full-year 2023 revenue of $96.6 million, representing a 29% annual growth from prior year. we exited the year with gross margin of 62.7% in the fourth quarter. In parallel to a strong top line growth and margin expansion throughout the year, we made efforts to leverage our cost structure, limiting our 2023 operating expenses to only a 4% growth from prior year, enabling a more substantial portion of revenue growth to fall to our bottom line. Within our 2024 forecast, We expect both strong top line growth and margin expansion while we continue to manage our costs. And we are projecting operating cash flow break even by the end of this year. Johnny will touch upon this in greater detail later in the call. Our cumulative install base now stands at nearly 1,200 instruments, the largest in the field, and covers the entire spectrum of spatial biology markets from discovery translational and ultimately the clinical throughout 2023 we invested in key strategic areas including reagent menu expansion throughput and workflow simplification and improved software capabilities collectively contributing to meaningful reagent revenue expansion and increases in the pull through across our platforms in the fourth quarter we saw continued signs of the return on these investments as reagent revenue grew and 52% from the prior year period. We are pleased to report that we now have over 1,160 peer-reviewed publications citing Akoya's technologies as of year-end 2023, a 50% growth from the prior year period, demonstrating the widening adoption and utility of Akoya solutions by our customers. Akoya has achieved important milestones in a short period of time, that has solidified our market leadership position and will continue to pay dividends. As noted, Akoya has the largest and an actively publishing customer base that will continue to highlight and scientifically promote the current and future capabilities of our offerings. Next, we provide complete end-to-end solutions with high throughput workflows that deliver high quality spatial phenotyping at any level of multiplexing. And finally, our solutions span the entire continuum from discovery to clinical applications. The result, as noted, is a clear path to operating cash flow breakeven by year's end. Our R&D and operational efforts have been optimized to deliver enhancements in workflow efficiencies and drive an expanding menu of high-value applications. Let me briefly review our key recent product line of improvements, and two additional high-value partnerships. First, the recent rollout of the Phoenix AquaFusion 2.0 represents a noteworthy milestone, setting a new industry standard in capacity, multiplexing, and data quality. Customers can now process twice as many samples per week compared to previous capabilities. establishing the Phenocycler Fusion 2.0 as the highest throughput spatial discovery platform available in the market, providing multiplexing across a broad range, from just a few proteins to up to 100. In parallel, we released our PhenoImager HT 2.0 upgrade for our translational and clinical research customers. Like the Fusion 2.0, this upgrade similarly represents a transformative enhancement resulting in a five-fold increase in workflow speed. More than half of our customers have received a 2.0 fuel upgrade across both platforms as of year-end 2023. These upgrades and the ongoing expansion of Koya's Phenocode content menu were the main drivers of the increases in consumable revenue in the fourth quarter. We also recently announced two groundbreaking partnerships. First, we announced our partnership with Thermo Fisher to deliver advanced spatial multi-omic workflows by combining the Thermo Fisher View RNA technology with Akoya's spatial biology solutions. Second, along with our partners at Enable Medicine, we announced the release of MaxFuse, an AI and reinforced learning-driven multimodal data integration algorithm on the Enable Medicine cloud platform. This next-generation analytical methodology allows our customers to directly integrate into one analysis, Akoya's spatial proteomic data with single-cell RNA data. As the result, our customers' single-cell RNA-seq data, which is not spatial, is mapped to Akoya's spatial proteomic data, creating an informatically-derived spatial multiomic data set. This transformative solution allows customers using Akoya's platforms and single-cell RNA-seq platforms to leverage and integrate these independent data sets from different platforms to drive profound new multi-anomic discoveries. This is likely the first of many such AI-based analytical approaches to come. Our platform improvements and partnerships further strengthen our position to lead the market in offering powerful new spatial phenotyping solutions, and we remain committed to continuing to lead the market, providing the industry's best end-to-end solutions across multiple market segments. While these new solutions certainly expand our discovery horizons, downstream, we are also witnessing a continued expansion and acceleration of the clinical utility of spatial technologies. Spatial phenotyping is becoming central to emerging clinical biomarker efforts in immuno-oncology and the rapidly growing antibody drug conjugate market. Our 78% growth in our services revenue compared to the prior year is a clear indication of this as we secure additional late-stage clinical trial partnerships. Our demonstrated organizational clinical expertise, the capabilities of the PhenoImager HD platform, Our co-marketing partnership with Agilent and our companion diagnostic partnership with Akravan are all key drivers of the expansion of this part of our business. Now, importantly, Akravan also received breakthrough device designation on the ACR368 OncoSignature assay run on our HD platform through our CLIA lab and fast-track designation for their therapeutic ACR368, and we look forward to their Phase II clinical trial interim results in the near future. We continue to expand our qualified service provider network that includes the industry's top contract research organizations. ACOIA qualifies these partners and provides ongoing white-glove support to help ensure their success in offering lab services on ACOIA's plant. The network serves as a valuable commercial amplifier and helps advance the adoption of our platforms in translational studies and clinical trials. We are humbled and appreciative that these successes and ongoing efforts have attracted preeminent global thought leaders in immunobiology to join our newly established scientific advisory board. Dr. Gary Nolan, ACOIA's founder and the inventor of the PenaCycler and co-inventor of Maxxuse, has transitioned from his role on the board of directors to serve as the new chair of the Scientific Advisory Board. Accompanying him will be Dr. James Allison, 2018 Nobel Laureate and the father of the immuno-oncology revolution, as well as Dr. Padme Sharma, visionary physician scientists in the field of immuno-oncology and immunotherapy, both currently at MD Anderson. These three initial members of ACOIA's Scientific Advisory Board will inform ACOIA's strategic direction and provide expertise in translational, clinical, and diagnostic applications of ACOIA's spatial biology solutions. Lastly, like others in the industry, we observe some ongoing macro pressures impacting capital equipment purchases, prolonged instrument sales cycles, and continued underperformance in our business in China. We anticipate these challenges to persist at least through the first quarter of 2024. In summary, our focus for 2024 revolves around three key initiatives. Expand applications and implement continued workflow efficiency improvements on the Phenocyclofusion and the PhenoImager-HT to drive the continued high growth of our reagent revenue resulting in increases in system pull-through. Second, achieve operating cash flow break-even by year-end 2024 by focusing on improving efficiencies, cost effectiveness, and gross margin expansion. continue to drive our clinical partnerships to achieve our goal of delivering a menu of high-value companion diagnostics to advance patient care. With that, I will now turn the call over to Johnny to discuss our financial results. Johnny?