IsoPlexis Corporation

Good day, and welcome to the ISOPLEX's fourth quarter 2021 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, and instruction will be given at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the call, please press star then zero to reach an operator. As a reminder, this call may be recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Carrie Mendeville, Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you. Earlier today, ISO Plexus released financial results for the quarter and year ended December 31st, 2021. If you have not received this news release, or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investors at isoplexus.com. Joining me today from ISO Plexus are Sean McKay, Chief Executive Officer, and John Straley, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call. that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled forward-looking statements in the press release isoplexis issued today. For a more complete list and description, please see the risk factors section of the company's quarterly report in Form 10-Q filed on November 12, 2021, and the company's other filings in the Securities and Exchange Commission. Isoplexis intends to file its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, next week. Except as required by law, Isoplexis disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call contains time sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast, March 2nd, 2022. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Sean.

Thanks, Carrie. Good morning and thank you everyone for joining us. I'm pleased to welcome you to our fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. On today's call, I will provide an update on our commercial execution and discuss our investments to drive future growth. Then I will turn the call over to John for a review of our financial results and outlook for 2022. 2021 was an exciting year for IsoPlexus. We have made significant progress across multiple fronts as we drove commercial adoption of our single-cell proteomics instruments and consumables and finished the year with $17.3 million in revenue, 66% year-over-year growth over 2020. At IsoPlexus, we have developed a proprietary technology platform based on the unique intersection of proteomics, single-cell biology, and functional multiomics as we work to enable a greater understanding of amoeba biology. There is a clear need for understanding functional proteomics that is not able to be captured in the genome and to analyze single cells for early signals of response to disease that cannot be detected at the bulk level. We look at single-cell indicators to understand the earliest sources of therapeutic response and disease activity to drive novel and advanced curative medicines for our customers. We are creating a unique position within the proteomics market. Today, we have launched our IsoLite and IsoSpark instruments and are seeing adoption across many different areas, including the high-growth segments of cell therapies, immunology, immuno-oncology, and inflammation research. As the pioneer of single-cell proteomics, we have recently unveiled our superhuman cell library, an industry-first mapping of the proteomically-driven cells that determine how the human body responds to complex disease. In addition, longer term, we are developing our single-cell multi-omic duomic platform, which will expand the multi-omics market with a uniquely clinically relevant solution, For the first time, researchers will be able to sequence the supercharged proteomic cells we uniquely detect, which will enable them to model and predict much deeper layers of clinical immune biology. Our strategy is focused around a set of key themes that will drive our growth and lay the foundation for long-term success. These areas include scaling customer adoption by expanding our installed base of instruments, as well as driving increased utilization within each customer account, significantly expanding our test menu through the expansion of our superhuman cell library, increasing the number of high-impact, clinically relevant publications, demonstrating differentiated utility of our technology in large end markets, executing on our innovative product roadmap, including the breakthrough genomics system, targeting uniquely clinically relevant multiomics, And finally, demonstrating operational excellence and supply chain management. We have demonstrated tangible progress in each of these strategic areas throughout 2021 and will continue to drive further progress throughout the course of this year. Starting with customer adoption, we sold 98 new instruments in 2021, bringing our total instruments in the field to 209. We experienced a strong fourth quarter of shipments with instrument demand driven by the differentiation of our proteomic single cell platform, particularly around the large areas of cancer immunology and cell and gene therapy. To drive lasting growth, we are continuing to execute on our land and expand strategy that we laid out on our last earnings call. First, we focus on landing key accounts across top pharma companies and comprehensive cancer centers. in which we have demonstrated meaningful progress throughout 2021. Starting with the top pharma, as of your end, we passed an important milestone with 100% of the top 15 pharma companies now using isoplexis for functional cell analysis. We have already begun expanding into these key accounts as several top pharma companies now have multiple isoplexis instruments. In fact, we have now placed our seventh system into one of the top five biopharma companies Demonstrating the value our instruments are bringing to these customers. This is the core of our customer adoption strategy. We are laser focused on getting a high degree of champions within these companies, which is a critical part of the first few months of utilization. Once these customers are generating data and establishing normal usage, our Salesforce starts promoting the value of our technology across different application areas. We are heavily investing in this expansion strategy, which allows us to create a robust pipeline within a wide number of large accounts. Ultimately, this strategy demonstrates the utility of our systems as we're able to leverage our customer success across multiple sites, as well as across numerous groups and applications. On the academic side, We are making great strides on our key account strategy as well, with 67% of U.S. comprehensive cancer centers now using isoplexis technology. We have now placed our fourth system at one of these major centers with additional orders coming in. This is a great proof point that although the first system can be the most challenging to place, we are able to gather momentum with subsequent systems. This brings confidence in our sales strategy and our performance for the coming year. This is just the beginning as we are laying the foundation to continue to proliferate our systems. We are well positioned to continue growing our install base to meet the increasing demand for our tools. Importantly, although our focus remains on placing instruments, our consumer business is also growing and we are pleased with the positive utilization trends we are seeing with customers so far. Moving on to our superhuman cell library. A big focus over the last year has been to move beyond T-cell profiling to characterizing the various proteomically-driven cell types that affect human health. We have significantly expanded the number of cell types customers can analyze, which has expanded our test venue. Our system can now profile a wide variety of critical immune cells in the adaptive and innate areas, as well as structurally important cells to blood flow and tissue formation. We have categorized these cell types into our superhuman cell library, which we unveiled in January as the industry-first mapping of proteomically-driven cells. We are leveraging our growing expertise in single-cell proteomics to define what a superhero cell looks like and then developing a massive cell library based on our customers' findings across the cell types in the human body. This expansive platform allows our technology to be more broadly applicable across research for customers to continue to add on to the characterization of these uniquely predictive cells to advance human health. Turning to publications, there are now 100 publications demonstrating the necessity of our unique single-cell proteomic platform to drive the earliest signals of response in key high-growth markets such as cell therapy, cancer immunology, and infectious disease. There are a wide range of use cases for our unique single-cell proteomic analysis in superhuman cell biology that are exemplified through an increasing velocity of ultra-high-impact clinically relevant journals. We believe the growing collection of peer-reviewed publications highlighting the value of the IsoPlexus platform is a leading indicator of traction in TM markets. We have previously highlighted various nature medicine publications, that demonstrated our expanded cell therapy offerings and showed that our superhuman proteomic cells are indicating the earliest sources of long-term response. Today, I would like to highlight two recent publications that go beyond cell and gene therapy to underscore how we are advancing the pipeline into immune health and immune monitoring for cancer immunology, as well as COVID and other infectious diseases. Immune health and immune monitoring for cancer immunology represents a larger end market than cell and gene therapy for predictive response. Publications have shown our polyfunctional superhuman cell metric to be a key element in the ability for the immune system to orchestrate a long-term response in cancer patients. This indicator is valuable as we demonstrate the utility of our technology to customers. In the last six months, multiple studies have been published that indicate that changes in polyfunctional superhero cells predict cancer immunology therapeutic response against cancer in a durable fashion. Studies in Journal of Clinical Oncology, Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer, and Blood Advances conducted at Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson, and more highlight the role of these predictive polyfunctional supercells. The second area I want to highlight is advancing the pipeline more deeply into immune health and immune monitoring. for COVID-19 and inflammatory disease. We recently announced a publication in Cell, where researchers used our single-cell functional proteomics technology to identify factors that may indicate patient inflammation after COVID-19 infection, also known as post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, PASC, or long COVID. In this study, our technology was used to profile the inflammatory immune response of COVID patients, which may be key to the development of preventative measures and treatments. These high-impact publications are a leading indicator of strength in larger markets like cancer immunology and also in new markets as we demonstrate a broader ability to access the superhuman cell library as it is applicable to infectious and autoimmune disease, transplant biology, and any areas where patients have a hyperactive autoimmune response. Turning to our product pipeline, we are making significant advancements in our four core product families, which include the single-cell secretome, intracellular signaling, our multi-omic duomic platform, as well as our bulk proteomic platform, CodePlex. Keep in mind, all of these four platforms run on our installed basis systems, meaning that the channels we built provide us the opportunity to deliver these new chip platforms to a high-growth existing end market. First, we are advancing our single-cell secretome test menu with the comprehensiveness of the superhuman cell library. Second, we've made advancements in our single-cell signaling platform, a single-cell alternative to the traditional bulk proteomic Western blot. We've added pipeline assets for immune signaling to complement tumor signaling, both of which represent a need for deeper proteomic pathway single-cell resolution. Third, our new single-cell multi-omic platform, Duomic, has demonstrated advancements at a rapid pace. The need for novel, high-utility single-cell multi-omic solutions began in earnest as the method was highlighted as Nature's Method of the Year recently in 2019. We are excited about expanding the single-cell multi-omics market with a uniquely clinically relevant solution. For the first time, customers can connect our unique functional proteomic data from single cells with the genetic drivers of these highly sought-after proteins for pharma and clinical research applications. In November, at the annual meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer, or CITC, we demonstrated that Duomic now has the ability to capture concurrent T-cell gene expression and functional proteomic information simultaneously for the in-cell profiling in particular CAR-T profiling. Effectively, we demonstrated proof of concept in sequencing a variety of our proteomic supercells for the first time, which lays the groundwork for key discovery and development applications at the intersection of immunology and cancer. We are focused on three large end-market multi-omic applications, which include immune expression in proteomics, tumor expression in proteomics, and T-cell receptor expression in proteomics. As a reminder, we will be offering our Duomic platform via early access in the service in the second half of 2022 with a full product launch in mid-23. We are very excited for what's ahead with our pipeline and look forward to providing updates in the near future. Lastly, we are investing in our operational infrastructure to support our rapid growth. Over the second half of 2021, our operational team expanded our supplier relationship substantially reduced supply chain risk, and ensured our ability to meet increasing instrument demand in 2022. We continued to build raw material inventory in the fourth quarter of 2021 where necessary to mitigate lead times on critical and single supplier components, further ensuring our ability to execute upon our revenue plan in 2022. We are committed to operational excellence and will continue to iterate on our processes to support future growth. This has been a momentous year at IsoPlexus. I'm very proud of our growing team for all their work throughout the year as we transition to a public company. We are looking forward to continuing to provide our customers high utility, highly differentiated data that accelerates their work in critical areas of human health. We will focus on growing our install base for commercial excellence. And finally, we will also continue to provide updates on exciting advancements in our differentiated product roadmap all built upon our leadership in leveraging superhuman cell biology. I will now turn the call over to John for more detail on our financials.