iSpecimen Inc.

Good day everyone and welcome to iSpecimens third quarter 2023 results conference call. At this time participants are in listen only mode. Question and answer session will follow management's remarks. This conference call is being recorded. A replay of today's call will be available on the investor relations section of iSpecimens website and will remain posted for the next 30 days. I will now hand the call over to Phil Carlson in investor relations for introductions. and the reading of the Safe Harbor Statement. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to iSpecimen's third quarter 2023 results conference call. With us on today's call is Tracy Curley, Chief Executive Officer, Benjamin Belak, Chief Information Officer, Eric Longlois, Chief Revenue Officer, and Carly Lanix, Vice President of Marketing. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's call contains certain forward-looking statements from our management made within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 as amended concerning future events. Words such as may, should, projects, expects, intends, plans, believes, anticipates, hopes, estimates, and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements are subjects To numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the company, including those set forth in the risks factor section of the company's form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, filed with the SEC. Copies of this document are available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this call, except as required by law. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce Tracy Curley, Chief Executive Officer. Tracy, please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our call today. I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss how our recent initiatives to right-size our business and enhance our operational structure and processes are paving the way for a new stage of future growth for iSpecNet. I will then turn the call over to Eric Langlois, our Chief Revenue Officer, Carly Lennox, our Vice President of Marketing, and Benjamin Belak, our Chief Information Officer. Each will detail activities related to their operational responsibilities within iSpectrum. Finally, I will review our financial performance for the three and nine months ended September 30th, 2023, and open the call for questions. Since the first of this year, our team has advanced several new initiatives to allow us to operate more efficiently and effectively. I can say with a high degree of certainty that iSpecimen is not the same company today than we were at the beginning of this year. Every facet of how the company is operating and engaging internally and externally with our customers and supplier organizations has been reviewed and where needed and proved upon. Throughout the year, and culminating with a reduction in force the first week of September, we have been driving towards right-sizing the company. On September 6th, we reduced our total workforce by approximately 20%. As a result of this initiative, including employee turnover during the year, the monthly expenses related to headcount are expected to decrease by approximately 29% for the remainder of the year, compared to the average monthly costs for the first nine months of the year. We also made additional expenditure reductions after streamlining operations and rationalizing resources to focus on key market opportunities. All other monthly operational costs are expected to decrease by approximately 52% for the remainder of the year compared to the average monthly cost for the first nine months of the year. We completed the implementation of our next day quote program in the third quarter of 2023. This solution has transformed the way we interact with our customers and supplier networks and has significantly reduced the time between opportunity to quote and, by extension, the time between issuing the quote and receiving the purchase order. After implementing this program, we recognized a conversion increase of 122% for the quotes to purchase orders for the third quarter of 2023 compared to the blended quarterly average of the prior four quarters demonstrating the positive impact of this program. Moving to the supplier side of our business, we have dedicated significant resources to expanding our global provider network in a more purposeful and strategic manner. We are especially focused on quality over quantity as it pertains to our supplier network with the goal of building and expanding our supplier relationships with our most active and reliable revenue generators. At the beginning of the third quarter, we announced the addition of 13 new suppliers to our provider network, which collectively expanded iSpecimen's ability to fulfill requests in high-demand specimens within cancer and hematology, cardiovascular, autoimmune, neurological, endocrine, metabolic, and infectious disease categories, among others. The expansion of our network also enables us to gain access to a new collection of biospecimens from diverse patient populations. We further expanded our provider network in the third quarter to help advance women's health research, increasing the availability of high-quality tissue and biofluid specimens for studies on cervical, uterine, and breast cancer, reproductive health, cardiovascular disease, and sexually transmitted infections. While our expansion efforts have increased the strength of our supplier network, we are working behind the scenes reviewing our existing supplier network. And in the fourth quarter of this year, we will be winding down relationships with certain suppliers that no longer meet our needs or the needs of our researchers. While this will sharply decrease our supplier network, we expect these efforts to meaningfully strengthen our specimen capabilities and drive both near and long-term revenue opportunities for our specimen and for our supplier partners. In the third quarter of 2023, we rolled out two revenue-enhancing projects, a sequencing procurement program and our embedded coordinator program. Eric will speak to both of these projects in more detail. First, I would like to highlight the tremendous potential of our sequencing procurement program, which we launched at the end of August. The launch of this program is extremely timely as we are seeing increased demand from cancer researchers for DNA, RNA, and biomarker sequence data. from donor mutation characterized FFPE blocks tumor tissue. iSpecimen has created what we believe is the industry's largest exclusive inventory of cancer sequence specimens to enable critical access to mutation characterized tissue and adjacent specimens needed to help advance cancer research. There's currently a shortage of mutation characterized FFPE tissue available for researchers And we believe iSpecimen is strongly positioned to play an integral role in serving this high-growth market, which is expected to reach $2.75 billion by 2031, according to transparency market research. I'd also like to touch briefly on the Embedded Coordinator Project. As we mentioned on our call last quarter, this project is intended to provide on-site dedicated resources to our best and most potentially impactful sites, thus enabling them to fulfill requests at a significantly higher level. And in the process, we expect this to result in additional revenue. Our original plan was to have 12 embedded coordinators in place at supplier sites by the end of the second quarter. However, as this project got underway, we learned a great deal about the unique needs of our supplier organizations. We made a conscious decision to slow the pace for embedding coordinators. creating a pilot program instead in order to take the time to ensure the success of this program. To date, four large supplier sites have been chosen. These supplier sites are working on fulfilling orders and other projects exclusively for iSpecimen. The program will be evaluated quarterly with plans to expand as we see expected revenue growth from these embedded coordinator sites. I will now like to turn the call over to Eric Langlois, Chief Revenue Officer. to provide an update on the key adjacent revenue opportunities introduced earlier this year. Eric?