Nautilus Biotechnology, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and thank you for standing by, and welcome to Nautilus' third quarter 2024 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 participate, you will need to press star-one-one on your telephone. You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, simply press star-one-one again. please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. Now we'll pass the call over to Gianni with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Earlier today, Nautilus released financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2024. If you haven't received this news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investorrelations at nautilus.bio. Joining me today from Nautilus are Sujal Patel, co-founder and CEO, Parag Malik, co-founder and chief scientist, and Anna Mowry, chief financial officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking within the meaning of the 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 Nautilus issued today. Except as required by law, Nautilus disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial or product pipeline projections or other 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 October 29, 2024. With that, I will turn the call over to Sujal.

Thanks, Gian, and welcome to everyone joining our Q3 2024 earnings call. It is an exciting time to be innovating in the proteomics space. From the recent Nobel Prize announcements to advances in the relationship between proteomics and artificial intelligence, we are seeing an increasing recognition of the role that proteomic analysis will play in shaping the future of biomedical research in human health. Our team, energized by both that external momentum and the opportunity to impact one of the last great frontiers in biology, is performing at a very high level. I have been very pleased to see the team's execution quality and output expand in an environment where all of Nautilus' resources are being managed very tightly. That ability to do more with less is a testament to the scrappiness and grit of our entire team, and I want to thank them for their efforts and for the significant progress we made in Q3. I'm excited about the expanding opportunity I see for proteomics, and I'm generally pleased with the progress we're making as a business. We continue to envision powerful research uses for our platform and consistently receive positive feedback from those researchers around the world with whom we've engaged. They tell us their desire to explore the proteome more deeply and more broadly and of the significant limitations of what's currently available. It's becoming ever more apparent that they understand how important single-molecule intact protein analysis will be to their explorations of the proteome. To help educate the market and bring potential buyers along as part of the proteomics revolution, I'm excited to welcome Ken Suzuki to Nautilus as our first chief marketing officer. Ken joins us after a 25-year career at Agilent Technologies, most recently serving as vice president and general manager of Agilent's mass spectrometry division. Ken is a well-known and highly respected member of the mass spec community and is intimately familiar with the people and organizations we view as target customers. His insight into these audiences will be instrumental in shaping our product and the go-to-market plan that creates high-value selling opportunities and drives the revenue. We have a number of important updates for you this morning. But before we dive in, I want to take just a minute to provide a bit of context. We'll be discussing the status of our overall platform development initiatives and share detail on our progress against each of the platform's modalities, broad-scale discovery, which aims to comprehensively quantify the proteome, and targeted quantification, which is currently focused on proteoform detection. While both modalities share the same core platform, each has its own development path that we'll be updating you on today. To start, I'm pleased to report that our core platform development and readiness efforts continue to proceed well. In the first half of 2024, we demonstrated, one, a scalable and reliable process for building flow cells and chips, consistent single-molecule protein library preparation that can begin with as little as 150 nanograms of input material, and robust single-molecule deposition. Two, we also demonstrated an instrumented assay capable of iteratively cycling affinity reagents over many cycles and observing affinity deviation binding events at the single molecule level. And three, we demonstrated software capable of processing instrument data and algorithmically turning that into biological insight. Direct evidence of our platform readiness is the new and very exciting proteoform data that Parag will present shortly. Its creation demonstrates that all aspects of the assay and platform have been integrated and are functioning as intended. While some work remains to optimize those proteoform-related platform components ahead of any commercial availability, we remain confident in the progress we're making across these development activities. When you're at the frontier of scientific innovation and building an incredibly complex product, such as what Nautilus has undertaken, the path is windy and always different than what you initially imagined. As pleased as we are on the proteoform front and with the core platform overall, We're behind on our internal milestones with respect to our next major broad-scale goal, to be able to quantify a significant number of proteins, 500,000, 2,000, from a complex sample like salicylate, on the road to measuring the comprehensive proteome. This is the last piece of the platform puzzle. You'll recall that our unique method of identifying proteins, protein identification by short epitope mapping, or PRISM for short, involves the development and integration of hundreds of proprietary multi-affinity probes which interrogate single protein molecules. Over the last three years, we've spent substantial time and energy building and optimizing our affinity reagent pipeline and building thousands of probe candidates. In parallel, we've been doing the hard development work to optimize and increase the robustness of the fluorescent labels used within our platform and the chemistry used to attach probes to these labels. Internally, we defined metrics for transitioning probe candidates to platform-ready probes. We additionally examined how diverse label types and labeling approaches impacted these metrics on a probe by probe basis. As we entered 2024, many of these probe candidates did not meet the performance targets desired of platform-ready probes. Armed with that information, In Q2 and Q3, we embarked upon an initiative to examine these probe candidates in a very detailed way. We used multiple techniques, including biolayer inferometry, ELISA, Western blots, peptide arrays, and single-molecule kinetic analysis to fully understand the binding properties of these probes. Through that very detailed analysis, we can confidently say that our affinity reagent pipeline does indeed produce probes with the characteristics necessary to implement PRISM. We have always expected that there will be some fallout between probe candidate and platform-ready probe, but currently that fallout rate is too high. Through Q3 and over the next few months, we'll continue to focus on a number of development workstreams that we're confident will enable approximately a third of our probe candidates to become platform-ready. From there, we're working on a number of enhancements that have the potential to further improve that yield. While we're disappointed that we're behind on delivering our next major broad-scale milestone of being able to decode proteins from a complex sample, we are tremendously encouraged by the fact that the probes that we've been developing do successfully bind to short epitopes and are capable of successfully implementing PRISM to comprehensively unlock the proteome. We're fresh off significant participation in the World Hoopoe Congress in Dresden, Germany, concluded just last week. As you'll hear from Parag in just a few moments, we continue to educate and build trust with the proteomics community, shared some new and very exciting proteoform data, and heard a number of high-value use cases from researchers that have fueled our imaginations even further as to what may be possible when we reach our commercial rollout next year. For a more detailed update on HUPO and our R&D efforts in general, let me now turn the call over to Parag. Parag?