BioLife Solutions, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the second quarter of 2021 BioLife Solutions Incorporated Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a 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 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and if you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, the Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Roderick Degree. Please, go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Delphin. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. Earlier this afternoon, we issued a press release which detailed our financial results and operational highlights for the three and six months and the June 30th, 2021. As a reminder, during this call, we may make certain projections and other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company or its acquisitions. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For a detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that affect the company's business and that qualifies forward-looking statements, I refer you to our periodic and other public filings filed with the SEC. Company projections and forward-looking statements are based on factors that are subject to change, and therefore, these statements speak only as of the date they are given. The company assumes no obligation to update any projections or forward-looking statements except as required by law. During this call, we will speak to non-GAAP or adjusted results. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP or adjusted financial metrics are included in the press release we issued this afternoon. These non-GAAP or adjusted financial metrics should not be viewed as an alternative to GAAP. However, in light of our M&A activity, we believe that the use of non-GAAP or adjusted metrics provides investors with a clearer view of our current financial results when compared to prior periods. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Mike Rice, BioLife's Chairman and CEO.

Thanks, Rod, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our call. Joining Rod and I today is Dusty Tenney, President and Chief Operating Officer. After my remarks, Dusty will provide an update on key initiatives he is managing targeting integration and revenue and cost synergies. Then Rod will present our financials for Q2 in the first half of 2021 and speak to another guidance increase we are making for 2021 based on our recently announced acquisition of Sexton Biotechnologies. After that, we'll be glad to take your questions. Okay, so turning to our Q2 highlights. We sustained our strong momentum from Q1 with top line revenue of $31 million. This was up 215% versus Q2 last year and 85% above Q1 this year. It's important to note that organic revenue was up 49% versus Q1 last year, and specifically, our biopreservation media franchise grew 45% year over year. In Q2, we gained nearly 200 new customers across our three product and services platforms, including media, freezers and thaw systems, and storage and cold chain services. This compares to 80 new customers in Q1 and 213 in 2020. So I'm very pleased with the team's execution to quickly capture more customers in the high-growth cell and gene therapy, or CGT, market. Now I'll make some qualitative comments about our three revenue platforms and let Rod speak to the financial metrics for each. In Q2, we gained 22 new media customers, including Anson Biopharma, Axolotl Biologics, BioNTech, Celgorhythmics, Axalertin, Iconovir, Monotherapeutics, Quell Therapeutics, and Woojin. We also received confirmation that our media products will be used in an additional 13 clinical trials for new cell and gene therapies, and one additional BLA filing from customers, including Bluebird Bio, Celencos, Devera Therapeutics, Fujifilm, Iovance, Myeloid Therapeutics, Neoprogen, Novartis, Sigilon Therapeutics, Lion TCR, and WooGen. We estimate that our biopreservation media products have been incorporated into more than 500 customer clinical applications. Of these, our media is used in six approved therapies, Yaskarta and Tocardus from Kite, Rayonzi and Abecma from BMS, Anzin Teglo, and Skysona from Bluebird. Quarastor is also used in three new therapies that could get approved in the next few quarters. These include Omidubacel from Comedacel, Sintlacel from Janssen, and Elacel from Bluebird. We continue to believe that our media franchise of sticky, marquee customers is the engine that we can leverage to market our biopreservation tools and services portfolio to. Our freezers and thaw systems platform perform well in Q2, despite having to work through some supplier issues. This platform includes CBS liquid nitrogen freezers, Sterling ultra-cold mechanical freezers, and our ThawStar line of automated water-free thawing systems. We gained 155 new customers for this platform, including 129 now using Sterling freezers, 16 now using CBS freezers or accessories, and 10 now using ThawStar systems. Notable new freezer customers include A2 Biotherapeutics, Ludworks Northwest, Catalan, Neurona Therapeutics, Roche Tissue Diagnostics, and Sarepta. New Thaw customers include Alloy Therapeutics, Capsida Biotherapeutics, KSQ Therapeutics, and Trilink Biotechnologies. In our final of three revenue platforms, Storage and Cold Chain Services, which includes EVO, Cold Chain Rentals, and SciSafe Storage Services, we gained 26 new customers in the platform and expect demand for all platform solutions to remain strong for the rest of 2021. For our storage services platform, we continue to make good progress to build out and validate two new facilities, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, with both expected to come online before the end of the year. With our EVO cold chain management platform, I'm very pleased to report that in Q2, we processed nearly 1,000 shipments of critical starting material and or manufactured cell and gene therapies for about 140 new end customers. The EVO DV10 Smart Shipper and EVO IS Cloud App were both also used in more than 100 shipments of an approved CAR T cell therapy for the notable customer we've been referencing for some time now. These were all in one geography and we expect additional countries to come online over the next few months. We're all very pleased to have the opportunity to partner with this pharma company to enhance the transportation of a life-saving cell therapy. This customer also uses our biopreservation media in several clinical trials of new cell therapies. Finally, We recently received an order for nearly 200 Evo Smart Shipper systems from a new courier customer and partner. This customer is a top three specialty logistics courier serving the cell and gene therapy space. We're working through the execution of final documents and training to support this courier's sales, marketing, and support activities. Deployment is expected to be completed over the next three to four quarters. I'd now like to spend a few minutes speaking about our just announced acquisition of Sexton Biotechnologies. Recall that following its spin-off from Cook Pre-Gentech in September 2019, BioLife and Kasdan Capital made seed investments in Sexton to fund the company's growth plans. We've noted the progress that Sean Warner and the entire team have made in increasing awareness in the CGT space for Sexton's solutions and driving product adoption. It's clear that Sexton is at an inflection point. With their products embedded in more than 50 cell and gene therapy clinical trials, strong momentum, and a great opportunity for high growth. Since their products are so synergistic with our biopreservation media platform, we decided to acquire the company now to leverage all of BioLife's resources and relationships to accelerate growth. At a high level, Sexton's portfolio can be divided into three platforms. First, differentiated cell culture media in the form of human platelet lysate products, or HPL, which are increasingly being used as a non-protein-based replacement for animal, or human-derived serum media. Second, automated fill and finish machines, which automate several steps in the manufacturing process. And third, cell seal vials, a proprietary primary package solution for manufactured cell and gene therapies. Sexton has about 150 active customers using at least one solution, with some notable customers being Athercys, Bristol-Myers Squibb, who uses the cell seal vial to package their approved Boreanzi CAR T-cell therapy. Cartesian Therapeutics, Orbison, and TC BioPharm. With the acquisition of Sexton, we welcome 20 dedicated and very capable new team members to the BioLife family, including four additional scientific sellers. At our upcoming worldwide sales meeting later this month, we will train our now 35-person strong global sales team on all of our platforms to further generate cross-selling opportunities. From this point forward, We will report Sexton revenue in our self-processing platform that also includes biopreservation media. In summary, Sexton is a great example of how our accelerated investment partnership with Cash and Capital worked to bring in another high-value asset to the BioLife enterprise. I'll turn the call over to Dusty to give you an update on integration and some of the identified revenue and cost synergy initiatives he is leading. Dusty?