MaxCyte, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the MaxSci First Quarter 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. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Sean Menargas. Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sean Menarges, and I'm the Director of Investor Relations here at MaxSight. Thank you all for participating in today's conference call. On the call from MaxSight, we have Doug Dorfer, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ron Holtz, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, MaxSight released financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I need to read the following statement. Statements or comments made during this call may be forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results, or performance are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors which are discussed in detail in our SEC filings. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Doug.

Thank you, Sean, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining Backsite's first quarter earning call. I'll begin with a discussion of our business and operational headlines during the quarter and follow that detailed financial review from Ron. We will then open the call for questions. We are very pleased with the start to 2022 as our team continued to deliver on all financial and strategic objectives in our plan. MaxSight's expert platform continues to be the premier cell engineering technology, enabling the development of a growing set of advanced cell-based therapeutics. With our additional resources at hand, we continue to invest in our people and capabilities at a measured but healthy rate as we seek to ensure the success of our partners. Ron will provide more details later in the call, but I note that we generated very strong first quarter 2022 results as preannounced last month and outlined in the press release published today. These results are anchored in robust performance in our core industry cell engineering business, which was up 48% year-over-year. We generated significant SPL program-related revenue in the quarter, with revenue timing running a little sooner than our internal plan had forecasted, yielding strong year-over-year growth in the quarter. As you know, we have very limited visibility into the timing of our partners' clinical progress, and as such, it's a challenge for us to provide precise information regarding program-related revenue beyond general expectations for the year. First quarter revenue was a record $11.6 million, up 78% over the first quarter of 2021, with a very strong growth in the core business. Growth in revenue to cell therapy customers was 57% year-over-year, and to drug discovery customers was 23% year-over-year. Cell therapy growth was primarily driven by both instrument and PA sales. We are seeing expansion of our global customer base across all stages of development and encouraged by our traction with civil therapy customers at early development stage, which continues to strengthen our robust SPL pipeline. During the quarter, we recognized $2 million in clinical milestone revenues. As we have previously indicated, our partnership agreements are strictly confidential, and so we will not be answering any specific questions relating to to our SPL partners, their clinical progress or their respective development programs. However, we remain excited about the progress our partners have been making in the clinic. We continue to sign new SPL partners and see additional SPL programs enter trials. Further, we have seen our existing clinical SPL portfolio progress into later stage, including pivotal clinical studies suggesting we may see a partner's first commercial product as early as 2023. Overall, our core business revenue growth and recognition of the SPL program-related revenues are signed above strong execution by our growing commercial team and robust customer demand. This strength seen in new sales and leases of instruments as well as strong PA sales. The timing of customer PA purchases and leased instruments as they prepare for pivotal trials and commercialization can be hard to predict, and we would expect them to remain lumpy until our SPL portfolio and clinical progress of those partners is broad enough to smooth out that lumpiness from individual programs. Given our strong performance, we wanted to highlight that we have not seen any weakness in the demand for our products and associated support from our customers. We have strong relationships with our partners and customers and believe MaxSight's expert platform is a core aspect of their therapeutic development strategy. We continue to meet and exceed our customers' expectations for supply and scientific support, and we continue to have a growing new business development pipeline. Our SPL pipeline remains strong, and we continue to expect additional SPL partnership announcements this year at comparable economics to prior partnerships. In the first quarter, we signed an agreement with Intima Bioscience, which we highlighted on our last call. We now have 16 SPL partners covering more than 95 development programs in the aggregate. of which more than 15% have entered the clinic. In the near term, we are optimistic about the potential for our SPL partners to generate meaningful and growing revenue from both their preclinical research and clinical progress, as well as hopefully commercialization of partner therapeutics over the next 12 to 24 months and beyond. We are making important investments to support our future revenue growth, including investing in our commercial teams, developing and expanding in-house manufacturing and in our in-house bioprocessing and cell therapy applications and process development labs. These investments will advance our ability to take advantage of expanding markets, the emergence of new therapeutic development programs and companies, and support our partners as they move toward and into commercial launch of therapeutic products. This investment will come with continued growth and headcount across most areas of the organization. particularly in R&D and sales and marketing, including alliance management. These kinds of investments have delivered strong growth to date as we support our partners' potential success, and we continue to be upbeat about the value of these investments we're making in 2022 and beyond. In closing, we have had an excellent first quarter for 2022 as we continue to execute on our financial and strategic goals. We're very excited about our opportunity going forward, particularly in the self-therapy market, and are making the right investments to drive growth across the business. I will now turn the call over to Ron to discuss our financial results. Ron?