MaxCyte, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the MaxSight Third 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 1-1 on your telephone keypad. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Sean Menages, Director of Investor Relations. Sir, please begin.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sean Menargas, and I'm the Director of Investor Relations here at MaxSight. Thank you all for participating in today's conference call. On the call for MaxSight, we have Doug Dorfler, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ron Holtz, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, MaxSight released financial results for the third quarter, and it's September 30, 2022. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I need to read the following statements. 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.

Well, thank you, Sean, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining MaxLight's third quarter earnings call. I will begin with a discussion of our business and operational highlights during the quarter, followed by a detailed financial review from Ron. We will then open the call for questions. I am very pleased with our third quarter result. As our team continues to deliver on the company's financial and strategic objectives, MaxSight's platform continues to be the premier cell engineering technology for the industry, enabling the development of a growing set of advanced cell-based therapeutics. Throughout this year, we have invested in our people and capabilities as we seek to take advantage of the growing end markets and support our customers' and partners' growth. Interest and investment in the cell and gene therapy market remain significant. In the third quarter for cell and gene therapy, we saw an increase in dealmaking in our industry, both financing and partnerships compared to the previous quarter. More specifically in our markets, we are seeing exciting private investments and new company formation focused on novel sell types and complex next generation approaches. Ron will provide more details later in the call, but I want to highlight that we generated very strong third quarter 22 results in our core business with those revenues up 22% year over year. As a reminder, when we refer to our core business, we are including sales and leases of instruments and sales of disposables to sell therapy and drug discovery customers. The year-over-year increase in core business revenue was led by an increase of 27% in revenue from cell therapy customers, while revenue from drug discovery customers increased 4%. Our global customer base has expanded across all stages of development, and we are particularly encouraged by our traction with cell therapy customers at early development stages, including leading academic clinical translational centers. Our robust strategic platform license pipeline continues to strengthen and expand with potential partners at various stages of development across a wide variety of cell types, approaches, and indications. Outside of our core businesses, we recognize $800,000 of SBL program-related revenue during the third quarter, which puts us at $2.8 million of milestone revenue through the end of Q3 and gives us confidence in our full-year milestone revenue guidance of $4 million. Our partners' clinical programs continue to make exciting progress. Although I note that, due to the confidentiality of our partnership agreements, we are not able to answer specific questions related to SBL partners, their clinical progress, for their respective development programs. In the third quarter, we announced a SPL partnership with Vertex Pharmaceutical, a global biotechnology company that invests in scientific innovation to create transformative medicines for patients with serious diseases. You should note that this agreement does not support programs new to MaxSight because it is a transfer to Vertex of programs previously under the CRISPR-Casabia partnership. That SPL, originally signed in 2017, included the right to use MaxSight's technology to support gene-edited cell therapy Exacell, formerly known as CTX001, for hemoglobinopathies. All key elements of the CRISPR-Caseby agreement transferred to Vertex, including the financial arrangements. Our total number of strategic platform partnerships now stands at 17. We are optimistic regarding the potential to add additional SBL partnerships this year at a comparable economics to prior partnerships. Given the strength of our SBL partnership pipeline discussed earlier, we are confident in our ability to continue to add new partners as we look forward to 2023 and beyond. MaxSight's expert platform is a core enabling technology in our partner's therapeutic development strategies. Our partners are well-funded and leaders in the cell therapy industry. developing a wide-ranging set of innovative gene editing and cell engineering approaches. A key element of our strategy in 2022 has been the ongoing investments we are making to support our customers' and partners' success, as well as MaxSight's future success and financial growth. These investments include growing our commercial teams, expanding in-house manufacturing, enhancing our process development capabilities, as well as ongoing product development and reinforcing our business infrastructure. Additionally, we continue to make investments in our application laboratories and teams to support our success in the rapidly growing next-generation cell therapies market as the field expands across broader indications and into novel cell types. In September, we officially completed our move into our new headquarter facilities in Rockville, Maryland. Our new facility is a major milestone in our growth. Critically, this facility dramatically increases our instrument and PA manufacturing capacity to support our customers as they move from research and clinical scale to commercial therapeutic scale. In September, we formally launched our expert VLX large-scale transfection system at the Bioprocess International Conference in Boston. The VLX system expands the MaxSight Expert electroporation platform to offer greater scale for development and manufacture across a broad range of applications, such as transient protein manufacturing. The VLX offers key benefits, including shortened development timelines, broad compatibility, workflow integration and flexibility to support the bioprocessing market's needs during preclinical development and clinical trials. The VLX system opens up a new market opportunity for MaxSight, which supports our confidence in our long-term revenue growth. Participants in a bioprocessing market often take a conservative approach to new process adoption, and as a result, we are initially focused on early access customers, many of whom are existing customers of our current smaller-scale platform as we work to build the capabilities and reputation in this market that have allowed us to capture the value of our technology in other markets. The investments we're making in 2022 will advance our ability to support new and expanding markets, engage successfully with emerging therapeutic development programs and companies, and support our partners as they move through the clinic toward commercial launch of therapeutic products. We remain confident in the value of these investments to our existing and potential partners and customers. As Ron will describe in more detail, we finished the third quarter well-funded and continue to have a strong balance sheet to support our expected growth. In summary, we are pleased with our third quarter 2022 results and remain excited about the future, especially in the cell therapy market as we continue to execute on our financial and strategic goals and make investments to drive growth across the business in the long term. I will now turn the call over to Ron to discuss our financial results. Ron?