Accelerate Diagnostics, Inc.

As a quick reminder, there are three principal drivers for us joining forces with BD. First, to significantly improve our commercial reach, both in the U.S. and abroad. Second, to improve our selling effectiveness by combining our offerings with the BD portfolio to close more accounts. And lastly, to collaborate on future innovations. We are pleased with our improved commercial reach within the first several months of the partnership being launched in the U.S., as well as with the early days in EMEA. We are tracking commercial reach closely and are seeing big improvements with the volume of sales calls, as well as those calls turning into new FINO opportunities. In the U.S. alone during the first quarter, we added nearly as many new FINO opportunities to the funnel as we did throughout all of 2022. Turning to selling effectiveness, we are measuring effectiveness through sales funnel progression, funnel velocity, and ultimately account capture. We are seeing meaningful funnel stage progression, which has led to a significant increase in quotes and contracts being developed and presented compared to the prior year. In quarter two and beyond, we are expecting to deliver a significant increase in placements not seen since prior to the pandemic. This is exactly why we entered into a long-term partnership with Beck & Dickinson. In EMEA, we launched the Global Bloodstream Infection Campaign along with BD at the largest microbiology congress, ECMID, in Copenhagen last month. By showcasing Accelerate's ARC and Pheno with the breadth of BD's microbiology portfolio, customer enthusiasm was clear for end-to-end workflow complete solutions. Many current and prospective customers were eager to discuss implementing the BSI solution. This has led to a simplified contract offering for the combined BSI portfolio, which will include contracting and ordering to improve customer ease and speed of adoption. Turning more specifically to ARC, a customer from Italy will be presenting a poster on ARC workflow at the ASM Microbe coming up in June. The author also intends to publish a full study readout in a peer-reviewed European journal. We will leverage this customer's good work as part of our selling efforts in EMEA in the future. Bringing ARC to the U.S. market remains a priority as there are clear demands for an automated, cost-effective sample preparation solution for positive blood cultures. As discussed on our prior calls, we continue to pursue ARC as a Class II 510 device with the FDA and remain in active dialogue. We will not have a forecasted launch date in the U.S. until we begin clinical trials. Lastly, with our BD partnership, collaboration on future product development efforts remains a focus and early progress is being made on a number of fronts. Now turning my comments to our third strategic priority, delivering innovation with our next generation platform WAVE. We continue to make very good progress with our WAVE development program. As discussed previously, we have taken delivery of over 20 alpha instruments which are up and running in our core lab. Early instrument reliability is very good and the data being produced is quite promising. This is very exciting and has significantly sped up our development efforts. As a reminder, the WAVE platform will be able to provide rapid susceptibility test results for both positive blood culture and isolated colony samples and other sample types on a single system with significantly improved platform economics over Pheno. The WAVE system has complete random access and is capable of running 20 samples in a single shift from a single module. The system is fully scalable, which allows easy adoption by small and medium labs, while larger labs can integrate multiple modules into one system to manage all necessary volume and workflow needs. Our customers have confirmed a consolidated susceptibility approach will have a superior advantage over traditional isolated-based platforms on the market today. For Accelerate, WAVE significantly expands our revenue and wallet share per customer. while restating our platform economics. Our target is to deliver a pre-clinical data readout by the end of the year and start our clinical trials shortly thereafter. In summary, Q1 results were in line with our expectations, and we are very optimistic about the remainder of 2023 and beyond. By restructuring our debt and securing additional new capital, we can solely focus on driving our core business priorities. Our partnership with BD is off to a good start and will continue to gain momentum. Our R&D, regulatory, and manufacturing organizations are laser focused on wave development and achieving key milestones. And of course, we will continue to focus on organizational talent, infrastructure, and processes to scale up our business and support future growth. I would now be happy to answer questions from our analysts Should others on the call have questions not addressed today, we would welcome you to send these questions or request for a follow-up meeting to investors at axdx.com. Thank you.

We'll now begin the question and answer session. The first question comes from Andrew Brackman with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. Jack, you talked about the momentum that you're seeing here with BD on the commercialization front. Maybe peel back the onion there a little bit and tell us exactly where you're starting to see that momentum, anything in terms of specific customer types where you're starting to see some increased interest there. Thanks.