BioLife Solutions, Inc.

recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. Thank you. Troy Wichterman, Chief Financial Officer, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Shanto. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining this call. Joining me on today's call are Mike Rice, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Rod DeGrief, President and Chief Operating Officer. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing our financial results and operational highlights for the second quarter of 2022. 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 qualify as 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 recent 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, Chairman and CEO of BioLife Solutions.

Thanks, Troy, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our call. After my remarks, Troy will present our financials for Q2, then Arad will provide an update on key operational initiatives his team is focused on. After that, we'll be glad to take your questions. Turning to Q2 revenue and customer highlights, I'm very pleased with our team's performance in delivering another quarter of record revenue and in completing key operational initiatives that are driving meaningful improvements in our financial results. Total revenue was $40.5 million, up 30% from Q2 2021, with organic revenue growth of 44% and biopreservation media revenue growth of 46%. Our growth catalyst and business fundamentals remain intact, and with improved business visibility, we are tightening our full-year 2022 revenue guidance, which Troy will cover in a few minutes. I also want to express my confidence in our operations, quality, and engineering teams for their sustained commitment to optimizing our production processes, supply chains, and QC and QA functions, specifically for our sterling ULT freezer products. We again realized important sequential improvements in gross margin and adjusted EBITDA and remain confident that we will continue to do so for the rest of the year. I'd also like to echo the strong growth sentiments in the cell and gene therapy space that other life science tools companies have expressed on their recent earnings calls. Now we'll go right to the non-cash intangible asset write-down on the Sterling acquisition. Troy will provide additional color on this, but we're confident that we're now clearly on the upswing of recovery. It's important that we convey our strong belief in the innovation and disruptive potential of this acquired technology in both our current Sterling products and in our product roadmap for new Sterling engine-based smart freezers. To put a bow on it, this was a non-cash accounting adjustment. And it does not reduce our confidence in meeting both our guidance for 2022, nor our 2024 exiting aspirational financial goals, which include $250 million in revenue, 50 points of adjusted gross margin, and 30 points of adjusted EBITDA margin. In Q2, we sold and shipped products to 202 new unique customer sites across our three products and services platforms. And I'll remind you now what those buckets are. First, self-processing, which includes biopreservation media and Sexton self-processing products. Second is our freezers and thaw systems platform, comprised of cryogenic liquid nitrogen freezers and Sterling ULT mechanical freezers and automated thawing devices. And finally, storage and cold chain services, which includes our SciSafe storage services and our EVO cold chain management offering. New Q2 customer sites Our product line included 17 now using biopreservation media, 10 new Thostar users, 11 new Evo cold chain end users, 10 new cryogenic freezer and accessory customers, 110 new Sterling ULT freezer customers, 30 new biostorage customers, and 14 new self-processing customers now using Sexton products. For cell processing in Q2, we gained 31 new customers in total and received confirmation that our biopreservation media products will be used in at least 23 additional clinical trials for new cell gene therapies. Some notable confirmations were from Instil Bio, Community, Synthekine, Bonus Therapeutics, Alonis Therapeutics, Turnstone Biologics, Brexagen, Selencos, Celevolve, and Kiberna. We estimate that our biopreservation media products have been used in, or are planned to be used in, more than 550 customer clinical applications. For biopreservation media, we also remain confident that each customer clinical application, if approved, could generate annual revenue in a range of $500,000 to $2 million. To date, our biopreservation media is used in 10 approved therapies, and our sex and cell processing media and vials are used in three approved therapies. Our biopreservation media products are also embedded in at least 10 additional CGT applications for which BLA or other regulatory approval filings are expected to be submitted this year and next year. I'll conclude by saying that our biopreservation media clinical customer base includes most of the CAR T-cell developers, with our products embedded in a majority of the autologous and allogeneic platforms currently in development. We expect to be able to continue to take share from homebrew preservation cocktails as awareness grows of the critical role our engineered media formulations play in reducing risk for CGT companies. We also see the recent and pending approvals of CGT products for first and second line treatments and approvals for new indications and a new geography as three growth catalysts for our biopreservation media and other solutions. For the other part of our self-processing platform, our Sexton products, adoption and clinical customer applications include 67 using HPL media, 61 using cell seal vials, and 3 using automated fill machines. So you can see we're running our biopreservation media playbook to drive adoption of Sexton products. We estimate that annual revenue for Sexton reagents and consumables used in approved customer therapies ranges from $500K to $1 million for both cell seal vials and HPL media. Turning to our freezers and thaw systems platform. To reiterate, we shipped first-time orders to 130 new customer sites. Our hyper focus on the acquired Sterling platform has resulted in greatly improved quality and reduced shipping lead times, which Rod will speak to. Hats off to our sales team for hanging in there while we complete our field service updates to the acquired install base of ULT freezers. This has been a sales headwind and will be to some degree until we're finished with the field updates later this year. We're all very appreciative of our loyal customers who selected Sterling Freezers for the specific differentiated value they provide. A couple of notes on our indirect distribution partners for our freezers and thaw systems platform. First, on our last call, I mentioned that we added our cryogenic liquid nitrogen freezers to a key distribution agreement. This is with Avantor, VWR, and we're already seeing some sales pull through from this expanded relationship, specifically with U.S. government accounts. We're also in the process of adding our Thar Star CB cryo bag, automated Thar, to our distribution agreement with Stem Cell Technologies, who, as you know, is one of our most treasured customers and indirect sales partners. In our final of three revenue platforms, storage and cold chain services, which includes EVO cold chain rentals and SciSafe storage services, we either shipped first-use products or engaged for initial services with 41 new customer sites in Q2, 30 for storage services, and 11 for EVO. Our SciSafe storage services platform is growing rapidly, and we're on plan for the start of build-out for a nearly 60,000 square foot state-of-the-art biorepository in the U.S. to support demand for our storage services. With our EVO cold chain management platform, cell and gene therapy companies now have broad access to our class-defining offering through our expanded specialty courier partner network that now includes World Courier, Quick International, Pathion Thermal Fisher, Marken, and Biocare. We're very excited about our market opportunity to drive our EVO platform to become a meaningful revenue and profit contributor. Q2 EVO shipments were up 100% over the same quarter last year. Full year 2022 EVO shipments could exceed 8,000, double from 2021. We're collecting a huge amount of shipment information that is shaping our continued EVO IS cloud innovation to give our courier partners and end customers even more actionable data to reduce risk. Our Evo cold chain platform is currently used to store and transport two approved CAR T cell therapies, and we anticipate two additional global pharma companies will commence use of Evo for the storage and shipment of the remaining four approved CAR T cell therapies. This means by mid next year, we expect the Evo platform will be used for all of the currently approved CAR T cell therapies. This adoption validates our belief that the EVO platform will increasingly be selected as a class-defining, temperature-controlled shipping container and related cloud app by the leading CGT companies. I'll turn the call over to Troy to present our financials for Q2. Troy?