IsoPlexis Corporation

The conference will begin shortly. To raise your hand during Q&A, you can dial star one one. Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ISO Plexus third quarter 2022 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 one one on your telephone. You will then hear a message that your hand is raised. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Carrie Mandeville with investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Earlier today, ISO Plexus released financial results for the quarter ended September 30th, 2022. If you've 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 isoplexis.com. Joining me today from IsoPlexus is Sean McKay, Chief Executive Officer, and John Straley, Chief Financial Officer. Before I 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 ISO Plexus issued today. For a more complete list and description, please see the risk factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K, filed on March 30, 2022, and in our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, ISO Plexus 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, November 10, 2022. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Sean.

Thanks, Carrie. Good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for our third quarter 2022 earnings call. On today's call, I will provide an update on some of the operational, commercial, and development progress we've made to lay the foundation to lead the single-cell and blood-based bulk proteomic space with a focus on achieving profitable, sustainable growth. Then I will turn the call over to John for a closer look at our financial results and outlook for the remainder of 2022. Revenue in the third quarter was four and a half million, up 7% from the prior year. We reduced operating expenses down 37% from the first quarter of this year, given our commitment to conserving cash. While difficult, our team proved resilient and responsive to increasing customer demand despite the challenging macro environment, specifically around difficult access in China and inflationary pressures in Europe. At the same time, IsoPlexus' IsoCode has established itself as a recognized authority in assessing proteomic cytokine signatures from single cells. Voice of customer and existing early access users are getting increasingly excited that IsoSpark will be able to offer both single cell IsoCode and the dynamic bulk serum Codeplex Q chips on the same system. Together, these solutions create critical value to our lab customers in an affordable lab system that saves the customer time, labor, and provides differentiated full-signature immune data. The two-in-one solution provides a dynamic duo unmatched on any other protein analysis system. We'll start today with expense control and cash conservation, since that's been a critical focus. While John will cover in greater depth, the team found a way to deliver growth At the same time as we reduced operating expenditure by 37% in the total workforce by 40% from Q1. This is testament to the resilience and hard work of the team and continued commitment to collaborating with our customers to find solutions. We appreciate all our team has done to make this happen. The shift also demonstrates our commitment to a path to generating positive EBITDA over the coming quarters. We still have further expenses to reduce to align with the realities in the capital markets environment, which will enable us to conserve cash at this critical time. Looking more closely at our customers during the third quarter, we sold 23 instruments, bringing our total units sold to 277 instruments, providing increased base for our recurring revenue consumable pull-through, as well as the service contracts associated with our systems, from which we saw an uptick in Q3. 35% of the units sold in Q3 and 25% of the total instrument purchases to date are from customers who have bought multiple instruments. We also now have instruments placed in 79% of comprehensive cancer centers in the United States. In our IsoCode products and in the early stages, our CodePlex products are building momentum and playing a key role in the translational medicine ecosystem. For the large swath of immunology researchers fighting cancer, Our ISO code helps eliminate a critical bias on the illicit and flow intracellular cytokine systems, namely the fact that they can only search for a limited or popular number of well-known cytokines, which may not be the critical one for quality immune response. This critical limitation has set back researchers for years, not only in finding potent cell therapies and antibody drugs, but also in creating potent vaccines against difficult targets. Isocode solves for this bias by providing the full cytokine signature for immune cell, detecting critical and unique aspects of what is termed in the field a quality immune response for the first time. Here we highlight some of our hardworking customers who are leveraging our full signature quality immune response with recent customer publications. Washington University in St. Louis highlights the importance of enhancing what is the long-term goal of every cell therapy, persistence, through the addition of a novel genetically engineered interleukin-7. In the journal Nature Communications, Isocode provided a quote-unquote quantitative marker of CAR-T functionality to confirm that the modified IL-7 induces robust cell expansion without compromising functional potency. The full signature on isocode uniquely reveals these critical aspects of cell therapy response. On the other end of the development spectrum, Lonza, leading contract manufacturer who press released a collaboration with IsoPlexus in 2021, highlights the impact of large immune signature polyfunctional T cells in functional cell behavior detected on our platform as a vital functional characteristic for allogeneic product development. and for manufacturing. This is published in Frontiers in Medical Technology. While our ISO code is recognized in the fast-growing cell therapy world as a critical solution, we view the translational cancer immunology market as key to our growth. We have placed multiple units in many of the top pharma focused on cancer immunology and have been featured in a variety of leading and large studies for checkpoint inhibitor therapeutics. yet our pharma customers have pointed to our increase in cell throughput and surface markers per cell is critical for further expansion. That product offering will be available in 2023, and our customers believe it to be an unlocking event for the next generation of isopode expansion in multi-cell type analysis of quote-unquote full signature quality immune response. This is critical to us proliferating with many units serving translational medicine at each of these pharmas. Our product development team is still on track to release CodePlex Q in Q1 of 2023, which will be a game changer for the value proposition for ISO Spark customers. We tested and verified the early access CodePlex with our customers, and the core value proposition of the product alone is strong. Fully walk-away, yet sensitive and quantitative, large signature bulk readouts are unique to isoplexis and necessary to the reality labs face today more than ever. Our customers tend to ask two core questions with their proteomic systems. How are the immune cells performing? High quality, aberrant or not? And what are the quantitative proteins circulating in the blood indicating on the overall response? High concentration, low concentration, and quantitated? In revealing the large immune signature, what isocode is for cells, CodePlex Q is for blood. The same large signature is necessary in the blood to avoid the bias of focusing on too few proteins, and yet customers have a critical challenge facing them. Any quantitative proteomic technology that leverages gold standard ELISA for large signature multiplexing, i.e. not an NGS-based solution, has a really expert-oriented, difficult-to-use workflow that takes full days of hands-on time. We couldn't predict that the pandemic would change labor as we know it, but it has. And labs are finding it difficult to retain trained talent. CodePlex Q is for those labs. Much like as our ISO code detects quality immune response, in our CodePlex Q, Q starts with quality, quantitative, and quick. Both products have a fundamental commitment to quality to our customers. CodePlex Q is high throughput and completely walk-away. Labs can pipette and go with no training required. Our co-founders came up with the original signature for our proteomic barcoding system, which leveraged many protein analytes directly from a small amount of blood, able to be leveraged by any clinical lab. CodePlex Q is the productization of that vision. Furthermore, we conducted a 302-person survey of mostly existing blood bulk protein users and flow cytometry users. 46% of the survey takers found the CodePlex solution very compelling. They all also pointed to what we see as obvious. They would pay much more for a system that delivered both the ISO code and CodePlex Q in one system than they would pay for a system that offered either one or the other. We are very excited for our users to leverage both products in one ISO Spark instrument to equip their labs, top quality data covering large signature single cell and bulk protein solutions at a reasonable cost. Users like the Shanghai Institute of Hematology, which demonstrated with our code flag system that the cytokine IL-7 enhanced persistent anti-tumor immune response in cell therapies as published in scientific reports. The answer to similar questions, now from the angle of the blood that the WashU team highlighted for single cell solution, While Duomic is slated for release in late 2023 and is operated by a very small team at this point, we have made critical progress on increasing the matched barcode throughput to enable a greater number of cells that have both gene expression and the proteome readout. Customers still send us many requests for this product, and we're still aiming for a 2023 offering at the end of the year. And Duomic will also be running the ISO Spark, providing further value to our customers on one system. Finally, I want to welcome Homi Shamir as a member of our board of directors. Homi most recently served as the chair and chief executive officer of Luminex Corporation from 2014 through its sale to Diasorin in 2021. We believe his insights into scaling large businesses in the life science, diagnostic, and device fields will be invaluable as we take the next stage of our journey. I will now turn the call over to John for more detail on our financials.

Thanks, Sean. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2022 was 4.5 million, up 7% from 4.2 million in the prior year period. We are encouraged by the progress we have made following our reorganization and have started to see the impact of these changes. Product revenue was 3.6 million, an 8% decrease compared to 3.9 million in the prior year quarter. Our commercial team sold 23 instruments, bringing the total number of instruments sold to 277. Notably, this was our highest quarter of consumable revenue, and we are encouraged by the continual usage we are seeing from our customers. Service revenue for the third quarter was $851,000 compared to $303,000 for the prior year quarter, driven by two items, an increase in our sample as a service business and a significant increase in the number of service contracts sold to customers, which is another recurring revenue stream. We recently partnered with MedEmergent and the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders. We have started processing samples and generating revenue, and we are actively working on this contract throughout Q4 and into 2023. Regarding service contracts, as our existing installed base matures, we are focused on continuing to increase our take rate of contracts, that is, the percentage of the installed instrument base paying for service contracts. Gross profit for the third quarter of 2022 was $2.3 million compared to $2 million in the same period of 2021. Gross margin was 50% in the third quarter compared to 47% during the third quarter of 2021. As we expand and leverage our installed base of instruments with consumables contributing an increasingly higher percentage of our total revenue, we continue to expect total gross margin to reach the mid-60% range in the near term and eventually settling into the mid 70% range. We also expect the launch of CodePlex Q to be a positive contributor to gross margin in the second half of 2023. Total operating expenses were 19.2 million for the third quarter, representing a 12% decrease over the prior year and a 27% reduction from the second quarter of 2022. This includes restructuring expenses of 574,000 in the third quarter of 2022, and 3.7 million in the second quarter. In line with what we discussed in the second quarter about our reorganization, we have reduced our operating expenses by 11.5 million, resulting in a 37% reduction in OpEx from the first quarter of the year. As we have previously discussed, we expect our quarterly operating expenses to be about 17 million by the end of this year, bringing our full year 2022 operating expenses, excluding restructuring charges, to be in the $90 million range. This includes approximately $9 million of non-cash expense for depreciation and stock-based compensation. Our net loss was 18.5 million for the third quarter of 2022, compared to 20.2 million in the third quarter of 2021. We ended the quarter with 53 million in cash on the balance sheet. We believe that the cash we have on hand now, coupled with our continuing strategic initiatives, provides us with cash runway into mid-2024. Turning to our revenue outlook for the full year 2022, given our performance year to date, along with the current macro environment, we now expect annual revenue growth for 2022 to be in the range of 11% to 15%, translating to approximately $19.5 million of revenue at the midpoint. We are still seeing strong customer demand in the U.S. for our differentiated technologies, and I will reiterate what Sean mentioned, We are very optimistic on our long-term outlook based on what we hear from customers. At this point, I'd like to turn the call back to Sean for closing comments.

Thanks, Sean. Overall, I am thankful to our team for working hard to drive growth while we've been significantly reducing costs and resources throughout the organization. None of the exciting solutions for our customers would be possible without the team. We believe our ISO code and CodePlex Q solution is delivered on the same ISO Spark system are going to really change your customer's life for the better, ease of workflow for a changing lab environment, large immune signatures to avoid the pitfalls of the bias inherent in typical low-plex analysis, in delivering quality and detection of the immune response. We look forward to continuing to create value for the translational medicine ecosystem as we move ahead. And with that, we will now open it up to questions.

Thank you. And as a reminder, to ask a question, simply press star 11 on your telephone. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. One moment for our first question, and it comes from BJ Kumar with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. This is Jordan. Thanks for taking my question. You were talking about strong customer demand in the United States. I was wondering if you could maybe talk about what you're seeing in other parts of the world, like China and Europe, kind of just what you're seeing from demand and any potential headlines going into next year. Thanks.

Hey, Jordan. It's Sean. So I think... What you're asking is how is the – how are we seeing demand distributed across the various regions? So, yes, we did see strong demand in the U.S. That's the vast majority of what you saw in the growth from this quarter. You know, for us, a lot of that comes from, you know, essentially the differentiation of our immune signature. I know you guys heard the numbers. a lot of our existing customers repurchasing or purchasing more instruments. So I think that's exciting from a validation perspective. Europe was difficult for us. I think there's a number of reasons for that, but it's just, I think as John alluded to, there's just some financial pressures which I think across the board have made purchasing high technology equipment less of a priority. just price-wise. And, you know, for us, APAC, I think, you know, look, our APAC team is working really hard. We're excited about – there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel in terms of demand. There's obviously been, you know, more opportunity, I think, in Q4 for people to sort of travel around, get to customers, and to – our instruments, frankly, right? And I think from our perspective, as well as what we're seeing now is just a bit more ability to leverage the consumables in APAC just based on having a more devoted FAS team out there. So I hope that helps in sort of illustrating just distribution-wise what we're seeing across the world.

Definitely, I appreciate it. And maybe one more. You talk about the dynamic, kind of what you're hearing from your customers between Duomec and CodePlex. Last earnings call, you spoke about difficult market timing and competition with the Duomec launch. So just kind of wanted to see where you guys are at as far as the Duomec launch timeline. and also what your margin assumptions are for CodePlex and when you're expecting to see an overall impact on the company margins.

Okay. Sorry, I missed. Maybe it's our connection. I think I heard most of it, so I'm going to try to answer most of it. We'll start with CodePlex, right? So if you just think about why CodePlex and the CodePlex queue, as we're terming it, is a focus for the organization so maybe a couple things i highlighted you know the it became obvious to us that there was a really important need in the proteomics market for something we're turning to be a large signature readout right multiplexed at that i think in the field they call it mid multiplex but let's call it that large signature readout 20 30 plex things like this but with a fully, really effortlessly automated workflow. And we had a lot of our own team who was, as they developed single-cell assays over the years, was essentially leveraging existing bead-based multiplex systems out there like Luminax or other systems to essentially validate or understand how to do stimulations and basic things like this before we ran the ISO code. And it was just, it's just difficult, right? It's just difficult for them to do the workflow. There's all these sort of, you know, let's call it collateral damage when it's like difficult to do workflow and there's heavy training involved. And, you know, we started just using our barcoding system, the original barcoding system we brought in from these universities. And they were just like, wow, this is like super easy to use when put on our existing systems, the Spark and the Isolite. And we just kept using it more internally. And we're not that different from our own customers, right? Like, we just recognized there's a huge opportunity, right? And it was worthwhile to create its own product line for it. And, you know, what we did was we validated it tremendously, right, over the, you know, let's call it the couple years. We had an early access version. The difference between the early access version and the full-fledged version is you can do about 30 wells and 30 samples. in singlicate, and now with our CodePlex Q, you're going to be able to do per run 80 wells or 80 samples in triplicate, first product, right? And soon thereafter, you're going to be able to do 120 wells per run in triplicate. That's going to be probably the middle of next year. And that's super exciting for not only us, not only us to be able to do these optimization assays, but all of our customers who run supernatant and who run CRM and things like this. It's a, it's a big market for that type of technology. If you just think about the state of affairs right now, it's, it's just think about it from the customer perspective. It's, it's hard to retain trained labor. And if something's super difficult to use, it just takes a full day of hands on time. You can free that up to something that's pipette and go and still get quality data out of that. That's super exciting proposition. And we're the only company period. You can look at the landscape. that offers the large signature multiplexing and the fully automated ease of use, and that's just a totally big value prop. I think the second thing that we share with our 302-person survey, it's kind of obvious when you think about we're in more of a value world right now, but people said they'd pay much more for a system, and it's much easier to justify the purchase if you have the CodePlex Q and the, if you have the CodePlex platform and the Isocode platform in one. And that's what we're delivering on the Spark, right? So why are we excited about the launch? I think we're excited about the launch because we've used it forever, right? For a long time internally. We love the data. Customers love the data, right? It's sensitive. As we termed it, quality, quantitative, and quick. And it's two in one, right? It just helps. Honestly, even customers knowing that this is coming is helpful for Spark purchases because people realize they're going to get a lot more value out of it. So that's the deal on CodePlex Q and how we see that progressing. So you touched on Duomic, and look, we've taken that Duomic team now down to a very small, we call it a skeleton crew for developing Duomic, right? And we still get a lot of customer calls on it. you know, we always want to reiterate when that data comes out, people work hard on the data. We presented at three conferences. It's really cool. It's the first time it's ever been seen, right? There's nothing out there that's been able to look at the protein cytokine signatures from cells and then tell us why is that happening from the genes from the same single cells. I mean, cells are very plastic. They're very different. People want this type of data to connect the dots that have never been connected.

It was just,

Honestly, we didn't, when we had to do our riff, we had to, as we talked about, we took down 37% of our OpEx. It, you know, we couldn't build a whole arm commercially to do the sequencing sales required here and compete in that market, even if we had an awesome differentiated product. So we're still going to release it. The product release plan for later 2023 is exactly what we're talking about with CodePlex. ISO Spark does the ISO code system. That system is becoming a mainstay, which we talked about during the earnings call. We have CodePlex Q on top of that. Super exciting, right, to offer in one system. Duomix is also going to come out on the ISO Spark. And based on some progress we made in this match bar coding, which basically is the underlying way to increase cell throughput, we feel it's going to be an exciting product and it's going to meet the sort of I guess some of the hype that came out during these conferences previously. So that's how we're thinking about it. We're just trying to like deliver customer demand with the financial resources that we have. So I, you know, I hope that helps. I think Jordan, that's Jordan on the line, right?

Yeah. Thank you. That was helpful.

Thank you. One moment for our next question, please. And it comes from the line of Max Masucci with Cowen.

Hey, this is Joe on for Max. Can you just speak to the incremental headwinds you're seeing this quarter versus last that led to the latest revenue guide and what's giving you the confidence to stack revenue up in Q4 implied?

Yeah, I mean, we went over this last quarter a bit, I think, to your question. And what our core response was is we continue to see our customers purchasing, of course. I think just to reiterate, we grew revenue by 7% with OPEX sort of down 37%, right? So obviously that's being driven by the customer because we're still reducing operating expenditure just to come into the realities of what the capital markets are. And That's also in the face of, let's say, a strong U.S. and some difficulties for emerging companies in Europe especially, but in APAC just because you don't have the full benefits of what's called a larger force and a larger distribution network of some of these larger companies. And, you know, I think we've always, and you can look back across our Q4s, We've always seen what we see in the pipeline now is biotech and biopharma who have budget who are considering purchasing. Typically, you get a lot of repeat users during Q4. That helps. I think we've already started to see a slew of purchase orders from the academic world. Some of that's just pipeline building in Q3 that carried over to Q4. I think Frankly, like one initiative that our finance team and our sales operations team really started in earnest at the end of Q2 as we turned over a new leaf was getting more and more and more customers to pay for service contracts. So you're starting to see that. That's in the service contract annuity. You're starting to see that play out in that service line. So I think all in, you know, that sort of set of factors is why we feel confident and the numbers we just put out, if that's kind of the core question. Is that John on the line?

Uh, Joe, but yeah, for sure. Hey, that's gone. Um, and then just maybe your latest thoughts around the 40% consumables growth in 2022 that you talked about last quarter.

So what I'll say for consumables growth is like, this is our best consumable quarter ever. I think I'm reiterating what John said on the call. A lot of what we're seeing is maybe a few things, right? So there's a concentration where we have, on an annualized basis, customers that are spending, you know, over a couple hundred K on pull-through, right? And we see kind of 50% of our year-on-year consumable use concentrating in, you know, maybe less than a quarter of our installed base. So like there's, there's a lot of concentration. It ends up, as you can guess, being, you know, between pharma and biotech, where we feel like we're, we're pretty good at driving, you know, throughput, at least in the United States. Um, maybe, you know, a couple of things we think about. We have not been, as we've expanded throughout the world and there's been more and more customer interest in our systems, just from a coverage perspective and a resources perspective, um, this year. Obviously, as you guys have seen, like we've been able to hit, you know, in previous years, like 38, 39K pull-through. We've had trouble keeping up with that install base just coverage-wise, right? And that's just a function of resources. It's not a function of the heavy demand we're seeing in the concentrated set of users in the United States. So, you know, what we're thinking about is, one, you know, always trying to get out there and tell customers our stories and all the, a high velocity of publications and all the key killer applications we have on our system. I think, too, we're going to really, especially internationally but just around the world, continue to really think thoughtfully about partnering distribution-wise to increase our coverage, right, to touch the customers and really hear the customers on a more regular basis. But what I'd say is that Our team is working real hard with who we have to make that happen. We're also going to continue to invest in sales and FAS headcount. That's somewhere where we're going to, you know, continue to invest because obviously it pays dividends. So I think that's kind of, at least that indicates where our heads are and where our customers' heads are on consumables.

Great. And then just lastly on the RIP, there was some really nice expense reduction in the quarter. Are you feeling good about where the organization stands today in terms of numbers? And do you think there's a level that you guys can start really, uh, humming and progressing at going forward?

I I'd say this one, uh, so the, the team worked hard, right. Taking those optics and head count 37% down 40% down. So that's, that's, that to, to basically digest that is, is not an easy thing. And then to be able to like, progress CodePlex Q to progress some of these throughput tools on Isocode to grow revenue. That's not easy stuff. We feel, look, I mean, there's two things. We feel great about the team we have, right? We feel, honestly, just there's some confidence level going into pipeline building on the commercial side. Yet at the same time, our finance team is working on any way to reduce revenue basically ongoing OpEx while trying to preserve headcount as much as possible. Maybe what I can do is pass to John just a little bit on, you know, ways that we're thinking about. We've already actually implemented some of these operating expenditure reductions that you can't see in Q3, you know, right away. But we are taking our base down so that we can further reduce that OpEx and frankly, like, you know, focus on cash, reduce cash OPEX, because some of what you see in our OPEX is obviously a large amount of DNA coming from our previous IP acquisition and some of these other things. So, John, you want to just sort of highlight some of the things we're thinking about? Sure.

And, Joe, maybe to segue from, you know, what our OPEX was for Q3 into our, you know, our expectation for the $17 million run rate by the end of this year, and it's largely non-payroll OPEX. So, Sean talked about a couple things. If you go back to that we continue to execute on it. If you go back to April when we talked about the reorg and the reduction in force, software licenses, things like that, we've continued to renegotiate, renew at lower rates, and we'll start to see the benefit of some of that in Q4. D&O is one I'll throw out there. We just went through renewal, so we have a substantial savings there, so we'll start to see that in the fourth quarter. And the other thing I'll mention is just the continued transition from more of a reliance on third-party service providers to actually providing those services internally. And John talked about the talented team we have, fulfilling those services internally. So all of that creates a more productive and lean and efficient organization.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions.

Michelle?

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And it comes from the line of Pruneet Sudha with SBB Securities. Please go ahead.

Hi, you have Michael on for Pruneet. Thank you for taking my question. My first question has to do with the gross margin. I'm just kind of wondering what the driver was for the sequential step down. I know you mentioned strength and consumables, and obviously we'd expect that to help lift margins. I'm just wondering if there's any sort of other dynamic that we should keep in mind.

Yeah, it's actually not, you know, it's actually not COGS in this case. I mean, like, I think we, John highlighted really the strength in us keeping down that COGS. Obviously, it's at the cost of building inventory, but we look at that inventory as an asset. You know, I think part of that was just a slight drop in ASP in Q3. I mean, So if you think about where that came from, a couple of those units were really exciting partnerships that we're doing with people for more collaborative partnerships, which I would call testing the ISO Spark and our systems in various new places and with new applications that are, I think, just exciting. And I can't say much about it because it's confidential, but I think the other side was, you know, customers that are buying multiple systems, right? For, you know, someone will buy a system. It'll be for various sites and various labs. But, you know, we saw one enterprise order where there was a discount to the ASP across, I believe it was four units in purchase orders from the same customer. And I think that's a sign of strength while at the same time, of course, there's a negotiation and there's some slight hits to the ASP, but if you think of even small hits to the ASP does drive that reduction in GM. And so we view that as just the nature of sort of the number of the ends that we sell across our install base. John, do you want to add anything to that?

Yeah, just maybe just to quantify a little bit, I mean, that ASP differential in Q3 accounted for about 200 basis points in margin. So just if you think about that, you know, that's really accounting for that sequential decrease. And just, you know, as we go forward, so talking about ASP, really maintaining a focus, you know, internally and in our daily sales activity and across the commercial team and maintaining our targeted ASP. We've talked quite a bit about, you know, a reduction in COGS, which we'll start to see incremental improvement next year from our consumable business. And the last thing I'll say is we mentioned the service contracts. You know, we've increased our run rate going forward on those contracts and highly profitable and, you know, gives us confidence about our gross margin expansion plan going forward.

Okay, great. Thanks. And then I was wondering if you could offer any color about what you're thinking about growth next year. So obviously this year is kind of a base reset. Any early thoughts on what 2023 might look?

You know, think about it this way. Like you said, this year has been kind of a an eventful year for all of us for various reasons. But as we got leaner and as we got more conviction about our CodePlex Q product, we feel good about the early feedback on how selling the ISO Spark systems with ISO code and CodePlex Q really plays to our existing customers, but also to a range of new customers who have been waiting for solutions like this We're not providing necessarily any guidance for 2023. It's just not kind of, I know you guys want to adjust your models and things, but it's not what we're doing on this call. I think there's still more to learn. We're having lots of voice of customer around the product improvements that we have on ISO code, as well as the ISO Spark enhancement by now being able to sell CodePlex Q and ISO code in the same system. So just more to learn from that. And also just more to think about as we, I think as we mentioned, you know, especially internationally, continue to think through these distribution partnerships and what does that mean for us? And I think from the OpEx perspective, that's sort of the revenue side. We're excited about the year. We just don't want to give a number at this point. You know, I think from the OpEx perspective, we're really focused on, I think as John mentioned, you know, proving out throughout the year that we're on a path to EBITDA positives. That's just what we're thinking about, right? So how do we do that? It's the various levers we talked about. It's getting super efficient and productive with our commercial team. It's not, you know, being very prudent about how we use expenditures, as John said, for software licenses. And there's just a lot around the edges that we spend money on. And really just, again, being efficient in development and in our operations as well to improve those gross margins while we, at the same time as we're improving productivity. And we have a tremendous amount of initiatives to increase automation, improve automation, and the like around our consumables. So that's how we look at it. It's like we're not prepared. There's going to be, we think there's going to be some excitement around duomic at the end of the year. But again, that benefits the spark, right? And that benefits something we kind of already know and already trust and the customers already trust. So that's the way we're looking at it right now.

Great. And if I could just squeeze one more about the service revenue. I was wondering if you have any, I guess, analyses on if service can be sort of a leading indicator to eventual instrument install adoption by customers, you know, as you do, you know, work for them in your own lab, they eventually bring it to their lab. I'm not sure if you have any comments there.

Service has always been, you know, our service team and our applications team, which combine into the sort of service offering, has just always been an amazing funnel for us to produce instruments out there in the field. Even in Q4, it's been the same thing, right? And we expect that to continue. What we've also seen historically is one reason we're choosing to emphasize service business is when a pharma, right, sort of invests in a service contract, in which we had many with pharmas, a lot of times that cross-pollinates, right, with other aspects of the pharma that aren't as virtual in nature, that do run their own labs, right, and that do want instrumentation that's relatively easy to use, but also delivers this differentiated, you know, large signature immune data from single cells and not from bulk. So, yeah, we're always going to use that as as a driver to help drive instrumentation purchases.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And it comes from the line of Tejas Savant with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Hey, good morning, guys. This is Edmund on Tejas. Thank you for the question. Hey, good morning. I just wanted to circle back on your strong consumable performance in the quarter. Some of the peers in the space have noted inventory stocking and destocking trends at their customer sites as supply chain pressures start easing slightly. I was wondering if you're starting to see that trend and whether or not you have good visibility there with the connectivity on your instruments.

Yeah, so it's a little bit, you know, probably just based on you know, area of use, translational medicine versus, like, bioprocessing and things like this. This is just, you know, I'm not the world's expert on bioprocessing businesses, but, you know, for translational medicine, the customers are really, I would term them more buy-and-use, if that makes sense, Edmund, and, you know, what that produces is basically, and it's how we drive our consumable strategy, more visibility, and when people have, let's say, a blanket order, they're using real-time, We leverage our FAS team to understand whether that usage or not has occurred. And we know when, let's say, a full blanket order is going to be fulfilled. We have a lot of those going into Q4. Or whether or not it may not be if, for example, there is no usage. So I would say it's a little bit of a different model for us as far as consumable usage. And that helps us get visibility you know, though we do understand the sort of destocking issue or stocking-destocking issue that may or may not be happening in sort of, you know, other areas.

Got it. And then just to circle back on your 22 guidance and how you're thinking about 23, understanding that you guys don't want to give numbers just yet, but previously you guys had said that you expect 22, sorry, 23 growth to be substantially higher than growth rates. The 20% implied this year. And the street took that as about a 60% year-over-year growth in 23. So how should we juxtapose these two comments, given the new guidance for 22?

I missed a little bit of that. There was some background noise. I'm sorry.

Yeah, the phone. So your previous comment of substantially higher growth rates in 23 versus the 20% implied this year, which was your last guidance – I think the street took that as about a 60% year over year growth in 23. So now that in light of your new guidance, how should we juxtapose these two things?

Yeah, no, I, it's a good question, right? I think if you think about where we go in 2023, a lot of it comes down to frankly, the understanding of the voice of customer, the conviction on this is the first time we're offering just a home run product, a second home run product on the ice of spark. with the ISO code. So a lot of it based into just, you know, we think it's the perfect timing to release something like this. We're not the, the phased and focused approach is we already know a bunch of customers that have Isospark systems that with the robustness, with the vast improvement in throughput and all these things, they're just like, we have a set universe in Q1 where we know they're going to want to use CodePlex Q. Um, and I think. The phase of push for us is as we work with them, as we demo our CodePlex queue, as they use that system, we're going to be focused on people that honestly like large signature data, but they don't have any ease of use automated pipette and go system, and that's hurting their sort of lab operations. And we're going to be focused on those guys in Q2 and Q3, which are largely starting with ISO code first, then CodePlex. But as Q3 progresses, it's people that are CodePlex first, They like the idea of getting isocode in the spark, right? So it's the same immune monitoring type customer base, but it's a slightly different viewpoint from the customer. And we think that's going to drive a lot of growth, right? And we think that also, if you think about what happened this year, you guys knew about this, it was difficult to digest basically a large reduction in force and on the commercial team especially, and then be able to turn it around and drive growth in the same year, which we largely have done so far. So, you know, I think, look, I think next year we're just going to be in a better position. We're ready to sort of increase the value that we deliver on the ISO Spark system. The ISO Spark is robust and ready to go, right? I mean, we use it all the time. It's obviously becoming the flagship instrument for us. So I'd say we feel pretty good. But I just can't comment on the exact 2023 numbers. I think as a juxtaposition, you talked about it, you know, the potential slight decrease in the end of year number relative to where we see it launch. We don't see the, because we're not launching CodePlex Q at the end of this year. And we're obviously not launching Duomic at the end of this year. Like we don't see those, we don't see those two confounding each other. I, you know, I hope I'm being sort of helpful.

No, I get it. Thank you. And then I was wondering if you guys could provide some more detail on your partnership with MediMergent and the CCBD. It sounds like some of the sample processing here will go into the service line. And in that situation, how should we be thinking about the growth of the service line going forward?

I think we try to be conservative on the growth of the service line. I think, you know, it's while this This work together has been great, right, with the contract you just mentioned and the team over at MediMersion or the team over at various collaborators involved. You know, we have a pipeline of service contracts. It has not historically been the number one focus of our sales team. It actually became more of a focus of our sales team, as you can imagine, right, in Q3. And so we compensate based on service sales now. So we're seeing really an increase in the pipeline in Q4. Again, you know, I always want to help, but I can't comment on the growth rate of the service line for 2023. I just think what I've told you, some qualitative things that, you know, that we've focused on and we recognize if we can compensate, you know, in a fair way to our sales team that we can see some real growth. serves its impact in the future.

Got it. Super helpful. Thank you for the time today.

Thank you. And with that, I will conclude the Q&A session and program for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Good day.