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spk05: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Quantum SI second quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Juan Avendano, Head of Investor Relations for Quantum SI. Juan, please go ahead.
spk09: Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us.
spk02: Today, after market close, QuantumSight released financial results for the second quarter ending June 30th, 2022. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Joining me today are Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, Interim Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Schneider, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Claudia Freighton, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will be making certain 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 this risk and uncertainties appears in the section entitled forward-looking statements of our press release. For a more complete list and description of risk factors, please see the company's filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This conference call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, August 8, 2022. Except as required by law, the company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. During this call, We will also be referring to certain financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP, including adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is included in the press release filed earlier today. With that, I will turn the call over to Dr. Jonathan Rockford.
spk13: Thank you, Juan. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. In today's call, we'll provide a business update and present our second quarter financial performance and outlook for 2022. We will then open the line for questions. I would like to start by thanking our entire team for the dedication and hard work, putting us in a unique cash-rich position in an otherwise difficult market environment. QuantumSI remains well capitalized with approximately 401 million in cash on our balance sheet. The team is focused on execution and based on the ongoing progress across all areas of the business, we are on track to become the first company to bring revolutionary next generation single molecule protein sequencing to the world. As a reminder, Proteins are the machinery of life. Proteins and their modifications are real-time indicators of health and disease, making them ideal markers for disease, drug response, and health. And their understanding gives us an unprecedented insight into biology. While other proteomics technologies, primarily affinity-based protein or aptamer arrays, only look to confirm the presence of a predetermined set of proteins. QuantumSI's next generation protein sequencing decodes the sequence of amino acids and interrogates post-translational modifications to help identify proteins and elucidate the role of protein variations in biology and disease. The goal of QuantumSI is to do what we did when my team gave the world their first next-generation DNA sequencing technology, providing researchers with a transformational and convenient tool to expand our understanding of biology, create new diagnostics, and develop novel life-saving drugs. A tool like next-generation DNA sequencing that will have a profound impact on all aspects of life sciences, and make contributions that will improve and save the lives of people we love. We are excited to share our progress in this call today. During the second quarter, we presented an update on the company's technology advancement at the VIB Next Generation Protein Analysis and Detection Conference. Thanks to our proprietary technology and investments in protein engineering, and directed evolution approaches, we have accelerated the development of amino acid recognizers and increased the proportion of the proteome that we can detect, identify, and understand modifications of. To date, we have now demonstrated the successful recognition of 15 out of 20 amino acids. These 15 amino acids represent a path to enable over 70% coverage of the human proteome and the identification of up to 90% of the 20,000 proteins in the human body, and the millions of variations as a result of post-translational modifications. Based on this technology progress, we believe that QuantumSI is well ahead of the competition and well positioned to be the first company to launch a system that enables digital next-generation protein sequencing at amino acid resolution and a general tool for elucidating their modifications, sometimes down to the level of single atoms. We continue to expand our intellectual property with the addition of 20 new patents issued last quarter, bringing our intellectual property portfolio to more than 1,000 issues and 10 new patents and applications. Our work interviewing for a full-time CEO is ongoing. As interim CEO, I continue to be impressed by the team's commitment, and I'm even more confident in their ability to launch our platinum protein sequencing platform this year. I will now turn the call over to Patrick, our president and chief operating officer, to discuss additional progress.
spk08: Thank you, Jonathan. We are encouraged by strong momentum across all areas of our business. On the commercialization front, we're on track for launch this year. We continue to support our early access partners as they move from simple demonstration of performance and reproducing the same robust, high-quality data that we generate in our own laboratories to beginning to conduct their own research projects. Working with these sites have been invaluable for gathering voice of customer feedback and has given us the ability to not only test new hardware upgrades to the Platinum instrument, but also develop and release improved sequencing protocols and workflows. Our commercialization team is actively engaging with external collaborators and industry partners on exciting applications to demonstrate the power of our technology in numerous areas of proteomics, impacting all aspects of life science research, diagnostics, and drug development. As part of our marketing development activities, we shared our second application note demonstrating the ability of QuantumSI's technology to interrogate post-translational modifications, which is an important indicator of protein function. By way of background, there are 20,000 protein encoding genes in the human genome, but proteins undergo modifications resulting in over 1 million protein variants or proteoforms. QuantumSI's proprietary semiconductor-enabled time domain sequencing method increases the resolution, scope, and convenience at which we can understand the proteome by measuring specific changes at the amino acid level to detect protein variants, including pro-translational modifications, or PTMs, that are not coded in the human genome or detected in the RNA. In contrast, affinity-based protein and aptamer arrays only look to confirm the presence of a subset of the proteins coded by our genes. They're not scalable for post-translational modifications as they cannot have a million different reagents. Given this, quantum SI's technology can play a unique role in helping researchers study these critical molecular on-off switches that make up the proteoforms. Once again, bringing the protein world from a hard to understand and difficult to use analog method to a new digital frontier. It is these protein variants that can tell us where someone is in the progression of a disease or whether or not a drug is going to work. Protein variants represent key untapped biomarkers that can transform the future of how we detect disease and develop novel therapies, and our technology can help unlock this potential. This new application note builds on other recently released quantum SI application and tech notes. along with our foundational white paper, which can be found on the resource page of the company website. We're excited to continue to demonstrate the power of platinum protein sequencing through additional application notes over the next few months. The advantages that the platinum protein sequencing platform provides over competitors in the field of proteomics includes single molecule detection powered by time domain sequencing, Our platform is built to allow ultimate access to interrogate the human proteome for labs all sizes with a low upfront investment and ease of use that can complement existing lab workflows or supplant legacy technologies as a full end-to-end proteomics solution. In addition, we continue to refine and ramp up our business development activities We are targeting several industry conferences later this year, including American Society for Human Genetics, Society for Neuroscience, and the Human Proteome Organization World Congress. On an operations front, we're executing well on our supply chain initiatives to support the launch this year. Continue to build up inventory of platinum instruments through our contract manufacturer. The scale up of our chip assembly and packaging capacity is underway at our Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania facility. And while our initial commercial launch will take place on a semiconductor chip with 2 million wells, we continue to advance our product roadmap with the power of Moore's law behind it. Lastly, we continue to work closely with our vendors to scale up our reagent and finished kit supply. I'd now like to turn the call over to Claudia to review our financial results.
spk07: Thank you, Patrick. Hello, everyone. Let's discuss the details of our Q2 2022 financial performance. Research and development expenses second quarter of 2022 were $18.5 million compared to $13.1 million in the second quarter of 2021. The increase in R&D expenses was primarily driven by the increased number of employees, including stock-based compensation expenses and product development activities. Selling general and administrative expenses in the second quarter of 2022 were 11.7 million compared to 19.1 million in the second quarter of 2021. The decrease in SG&A expenses was primarily driven by one-time transaction costs incurred in 2021 to complete our SPAC business combination, offset by an increase in headcount, scale-up costs, and costs related to being a public company. In aggregate, total operating expenses in the second quarter of 2022 were $30.2 million, compared to 32.2 million in the second quarter of 2021. Net loss for the quarter was 32.4 million compared to 35.7 million in the second quarter of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of 25.8 million compared to a loss of 15 million in the second quarter of 2021.
spk06: A reconciliation table of adjusted EBITDA to gap net loss
spk07: is provided in our press release filed earlier today. As of June 30th, 2022, we had $400.7 million in cash, cash equivalent, and marketable security, providing us with a cash runway through the year 2024. That being said, in recognition of the current macroeconomic environment, we have increased our efforts to manage costs and improve efficiencies. As a result, we now expect operating expenses to grow 40% to 50% year over year in 2022, down from a prior expectation of 70% to 80%. Our entire team understands that this is the time to get more out of our expenditures for our investors. I would now like to turn the call back over to Jonathan for closing remarks.
spk11: Thank you, Claudia.
spk13: We are excited about what lies ahead for Quantum SI. We are grateful to the team, our business partners, and investors for joining us on our mission to advance proteomics research, diagnostics, and drug development. We continue to make good progress and look forward to updating you along the way as we push forward towards commercialization of our platform and beyond. Operator, please open the lines for questions.
spk05: Thank you. At this time, to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your phone. Once again, that's star 1-1. One moment for questions.
spk09: Our first question comes from the line of Alex from Canaccord.
spk05: Your line is open.
spk04: Hi, everyone. This is Alex C. Kaysen, on the line for Kyle Mixon. Thank you for all those great updates. I just had a few questions. I wanted to elaborate a few things you just discussed. I guess a good place to start would be on product development. You kind of rehashed some of the points you made at the NextGen Protein Analysis and Detection Conference about the ability to potentially detect up to 15 of the roughly 20 amino acids I was just wondering if you could elaborate at all on this. And additionally, I was wondering if there's been any sort of updated target, specific target number of amino acids that you wish to reach prior to launch now, given all these great technological updates. Thank you.
spk13: This is Jonathan. I can take the question. We've made tremendous progress in directly recognizing 15 out of 20 amino acids. So that means we can actually directly recognize 70% of that linear sequence, but indirectly recognize up to 90%. If you look at the history of mass spec, in the entire cumulative history of mass spec, We've only recognized about 70% of the proteins that are expressed. And when they sequence a protein, they only cover 70%. So, we're on track to give people a tool that in a day or two in their laboratory, they can do as well as people have done in the last few decades of mass spec. We're quite confident that we have a general tool that in a massively parallel way, you can interrogate samples. In terms of the complexity of the samples, we're on a semiconductor chip. We're leveraging Moore's law. And we'll start by able to look at panels of five to 50 proteins over three to four orders of magnitude concentration. This, again, is completely analogous to DNA sequencing, where most of the work is on amplicons, where you have five to 50 genes of interest, and you want to interrogate them. So, we're launching on Moore's Law with a technology that directly can potentially interrogate 70% of the proteome, indirectly interrogate 90% of the protein, and do it in a convenient way. where you can see single atom or up to single atom changes in those proteoforms, which represent over a million variations of those 20,000 proteins. And again, this is true next generation protein sequencing, massively parallel, leveraging Moore's law, and convenient for any laboratory.
spk04: Thank you very much for that very in-depth response. So, just to kind of switch gears a little bit here. So, you briefly touched on the search for a full-time CEO having been put in place in February. I was just curious in terms of how is that going with any more color I guess number two, is there kind of like a timeline in terms of like a certain time period in which you plan on kind of hiring a new CEO or is this still very open-ended at this point? And then I have one more after that if that's okay.
spk13: That's a great question. With the addition of Patrick, we have the opportunity to take some time in our search and make sure we find the right person. The last six months really speak to themselves. We've been able to make tremendous advances in our technology, as shown in our submitted publication.
spk12: We've been able to make tremendous progress with real samples, as shown in our tech notes.
spk13: And Patrick has put us in a great position with our products ready to launch. in the last quarter of this year. So this has given us the flexibility with Patrick serving as chief operating officer and president to make sure we bring in a CEO that can not only allow us to be the people that invented and launched the first next generation protein sequencing, but own this fork in history. So the pressure is off. We're executing well. We've raised the bar. And when we have a candidate that can give great impact to the market and inspire our team and make sure your investment does it even better, we'll bring them on board.
spk09: Excellent. Thank you very much. That is very helpful as well.
spk04: And then just one last one. So in 2022, some of the goals for this year have been primarily providing more white papers and peer-reviewed publications. So you highlighted one new application and new publication in your press release. I was just curious if you could kind of highlight any more broad takeaways from it, as well as are there any plans for any to kind of highlight anything
spk13: more applications in the second half of 22 if there's any other kind of areas you're looking at that'd be helpful as well for investors thank you great question any new technology is only successful if you fit into existing workflows we've been able to take over 500 incoming inquiries talk to a tremendous amount of people doing proteomics and understand the workflow what are people doing now what do they want to do faster and what are they doing the most of so we're focusing on our white papers to make sure we give examples of each of those major workflows and those workflows can be around immunoprecipitations can be around gel purified proteins can be about understanding of biomarkers and co-immunoprecipitation and drug pathways. So we're targeting white papers to show we work the way that our customers do. So one of the great things about having Patrick is it really understands the voice of those customers and really understands how to launch a product to make sure we don't just get those early adopters, but those early adopters that by the first 25 or 50 systems set the example for the next 2,000. We were lucky enough that my team launched first next-generation DNA sequencing, and we were able to identify major uses. And at Ion Torrent, when we launched the first semiconductor DNA sequencing, we made sure those placements We're in laboratories that would publish and bring the next, as I said, 2,000 customers. So our strategy is pretty focused. Our white papers are made to fit into existing work plans. We've done this multiple times before, and we really have an opportunity to change the world and how they do protein research. No longer waiting six weeks for your mass specs results to come back from a facility. Patrick, feel free to chime in.
spk08: Thanks, Jonathan. Yeah, that's exactly right. As we think about the workflows, as we're discussing with potential customers, we're really identifying those areas that have significant relevance to their work. And you know, it's interesting, the level of diversity that customers have in terms of their experimentation. They very much center around a couple of themes, which is in protein identification and protein characterization. And what does that mean from a proteoform perspective? It means that customers are really interested in post-translational modifications. And then, of course, there are many different post-translational modifications, and we're showcasing our technology around a lot of those different post-translational modifications. And we'll see more of that as we launch and publish more of our app notes. So you'll start to see a good sense of the customers and how we're targeting for those high impact customers relating to their current workflows and their experimental designs and their experimental workflows.
spk09: Got it. Thank you very much, and that's all the questions I have.
spk04: Thank you, everyone. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
spk05: I'm not showing any further questions in the queue. I'd like to turn the call back over to Juan Avendano for any closing remarks.
spk02: Thank you all for your participation today. We look forward to updating you on our progress in the next quarterly earnings call. Have a good evening.
spk05: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Quantum SI second quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Juan Avendano, Head of Investor Relations for Quantum SI. Juan, please go ahead.
spk09: Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us.
spk02: Today, after market close, QuantumSight released financial results for the second quarter ending June 30th, 2022. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Joining me today are Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, Interim Chief Executive Officer Patrick Schneider, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Claudia Freighton, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will be making certain forward-looking statements within the meeting 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 this risk and uncertainties appears in the section entitled forward-looking statements of our press release. For a more complete list and description of risk factors, please see the company's filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This conference call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, August 8, 2022. As required by law, the company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. During this call, we will also be referring to certain financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP, including adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is included in the press release filed earlier today. With that, I will turn the call over to Dr. Jonathan Rockford.
spk13: Thank you, Juan. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. In today's call, we'll provide a business update and present our second quarter financial performance and outlook for 2022. We will then open the line for questions. I would like to start by thanking our entire team for the dedication and hard work. putting us in a unique cash rich position in an otherwise difficult market environment. Quantum SI remains well capitalized with approximately 401 million in cash on our balance sheet. The team is focused on execution and based on the ongoing progress across all areas of the business, we are on track to become the first company to bring revolutionary next generation single-molecule protein sequencing to the world. As a reminder, proteins are the machinery of life. Proteins and their modifications are real-time indicators of health and disease, making them ideal markers for disease, drug response, and health. And their understanding gives us an unprecedented insight into biology. While other proteomics technologies primarily affinity-based protein or aptamer arrays, only look to confirm the presence of a predetermined set of proteins. QuantumSI's next-generation protein sequencing decodes the sequence of amino acids and interrogates post-translational modifications to help identify proteins and elucidate the role of protein variations in biology and disease. The goal of QuantumSI is to do what we did when my team gave the world their first next-generation DNA sequencing technology, providing researchers with a transformational and convenient tool to expand our understanding of biology, create new diagnostics, and develop novel life-saving drugs. A tool like next-generation DNA sequencing that will have a profound impact on all aspects of life sciences and make contributions that will improve and save the lives of people we love. We are excited to share our progress in this call today. During the second quarter, we presented an update on the company's technology advancement at the VIB Next Generation Protein Analysis and Detection Conference. Thanks to our proprietary technology and investments in protein engineering and directed evolution approaches, we have accelerated the development of amino acid recognizers and increased the proportion of the proteome that we can detect, identify, and understand modifications of. To date, we have now demonstrated the successful recognition of 15 out of 20 amino acids. These 15 amino acids represent a path to enable over 70% coverage of the human proteome and the identification of up to 90% of the 20,000 proteins in the human body and the millions of variations as a result of post-translational modifications. Based on this technology progress, we believe that QuantumSI is well ahead of the competition and well positioned to be the first company to launch a system that enables digital next generation protein sequencing at amino acid resolution and a general tool for elucidating their modifications, sometimes down to the level of single atoms. We continue to expand our intellectual property with the addition of 20 new patents issued last quarter. bringing our intellectual property portfolio to more than 1,000 issues and pending patents and applications. Our work interviewing for a full-time CEO is ongoing. As interim CEO, I continue to be impressed by the team's commitment, and I'm even more confident in their ability to launch our platinum protein sequencing platform this year. I will now turn the call over to Patrick, our President and Chief Operating Officer, to discuss additional progress.
spk08: Thank you, Jonathan. We are encouraged by strong momentum across all areas of our business. On the commercialization front, we're on track for launch this year. We continue to support our early access partners as they move from simple demonstration of performance and reproducing the same robust, high-quality data that we generate in our own laboratories to beginning to conduct their own research projects. Working with these sites have been invaluable for gathering voice of customer feedback and has given us the ability to not only test new hardware upgrades to the Platinum instrument, but also develop and release improved sequencing protocols and workflows. Our commercialization team is actively engaging with external collaborators and industry partners on exciting applications to demonstrate the power of our technology in numerous areas of proteomics, impacting all aspects of life science research, diagnostics, and drug development. As part of our marketing development activities, we shared our second application note demonstrating the ability of quantum SI's technology to interrogate post-translational modifications, which is an important indicator of protein function. By way of background, there are 20,000 protein encoding genes in the human genome, but proteins undergo modifications resulting in over 1 million protein variants or proteoforms. Quantum SI's proprietary semiconductor-enabled time-domain sequencing method increases the resolution, scope, and convenience at which we can understand the proteome by measuring specific changes at the amino acid level to detect protein variants, including post-translational modifications or PTMs that are not coded in the human genome or detected in the RNA. In contrast, affinity-based protein and aptamer arrays only look to confirm the presence of a subset of the proteins coded by our genes. They're not scalable for post-translational modifications, as they cannot have a million different reagents. Given this, quantum SI's technology can play a unique role in helping researchers study these critical molecular on-off switches that make up the proteoforms. Once again, bringing the protein world from a hard to understand and difficult to use analog method to a new digital frontier. It is these protein variants that can tell us where someone is in the progression of a disease or whether or not a drug is going to work. Protein variants represent key untapped biomarkers that can transform the future of how we detect disease and develop novel therapies And our technology can help unlock this potential. This new application note builds on other recently released QuantumSI application and tech notes, along with our foundational white paper, which can be found on the resource page of the company website. We're excited to continue to demonstrate the power of platinum protein sequencing through additional application notes over the next few months. The advantages that the platinum protein sequencing platform provides over competitors in the field of proteomics includes single molecule detection powered by time domain sequencing. Our platform is built to allow ultimate access to interrogate the human proteome for labs all sizes with a low upfront investment and ease of use that can complement existing lab workflows or supplant legacy technologies as a full end-to-end proteomics solution. In addition, we continue to refine and ramp up our business development activities. We are targeting several industry conferences later this year, including American Society for Human Genetics, Society for Neuroscience, and the Human Proteome Organization World Congress. On an operations front, we're executing well on our supply chain initiatives to support the launch this year. continue to build up inventory of platinum instruments through our contract manufacturer. The scale up of our chip assembly and packaging capacity is underway at our Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania facility. And while our initial commercial launch will take place on a semiconductor chip with 2 million wells, we continue to advance our product roadmap with the power of Moore's law behind Lastly, we continue to work closely with our vendors to scale up our reagent and finished kit supply. I'd now like to turn the call over to Claudia to review our financial results.
spk07: Thank you, Patrick. Hello, everyone. Let's discuss the details of our Q2 2022 financial performance. Research and development expenses second quarter of 2022 were $18.5 million, compared to 13.1 million in the second quarter of 2021. The increase in R&D expenses was primarily driven by the increased number of employees, including stock-based compensation expenses and product development activities. Selling general and administrative expenses in the second quarter of 2022 were 11.7 million compared to 19.1 million in the second quarter of 2021. The decrease in SG&A expenses was primarily driven by one-time transaction costs incurred in 2021 to complete our SPAC business combination, offset by an increase in headcount, scale-up costs, and costs related to being a public company. In aggregate, total operating expenses in the second quarter of 2022 were $30.2 million, compared to 32.2 million in the second quarter of 2021. Net loss for the quarter was 32.4 million, compared to 35.7 million in the second quarter of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of 25.8 million, compared to a loss of 15 million in the second quarter of 2021.
spk06: A reconciliation table of adjusted EBITDA to gap net loss
spk07: is provided in our press release filed earlier today. As of June 30th, 2022, we had $400.7 million in cash, cash equivalent, and marketable security, providing us with a cash runway through the year 2024. That being said, in recognition of the current macroeconomic environment, we have increased our efforts to manage costs and improve efficiencies. As a result, we now expect operating expenses to grow 40% to 50% year over year in 2022, down from a prior expectation of 70% to 80%. Our entire team understands that this is the time to get more out of our expenditures for our investors. I would now like to turn the call back over to Jonathan for closing remarks.
spk11: Thank you, Claudia.
spk13: We are excited about what lies ahead for Quantum SI. We are grateful to the team, our business partners, and investors for joining us on our mission to advance proteomics research, diagnostics, and drug development. We continue to make good progress and look forward to updating you along the way as we push forward towards commercialization of our platform and beyond. Operator, please open the lines for questions.
spk05: Thank you. At this time, to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your phone. Once again, that's star 1-1. One moment for questions.
spk09: Our first question will come from the line of Alex Vukasen from Canaccord.
spk05: Your line is open. Thank you.
spk04: Hi, everyone. This is Alex C. Kaysen, on the line for Kyle Mixon. Thank you for all the great updates. I just had a few questions. I wanted to elaborate a few things you just discussed. I guess a good place to start would be on product development. You kind of rehashed some of the points you made at the NextGen Protein Analysis and Detection Conference about the ability to potentially detect up to 15 of the roughly 20 amino acids I was just wondering if you could elaborate at all on this. And additionally, I was wondering if there's been any sort of updated target, specific target number of amino acids that you wish to reach prior to launch now, given all these great technological updates. Thank you.
spk13: This is Jonathan. I can take the question. We've made tremendous progress in directly recognizing 15 out of 20 amino acids. So that means we can actually directly recognize 70% of that linear sequence, but indirectly recognize up to 90%. If you look at the history of mass spec, in the entire cumulative history of mass spec, We've only recognized about 70% of the proteins that are expressed. And when they sequence a protein, they only cover 70%. So, we're on track to give people a tool that in a day or two in their laboratory, they can do as well as people have done in the last few decades of mass spec. We're quite confident that we have a general tool that in a massively parallel way, you can interrogate samples. In terms of the complexity of the samples, we're on a semiconductor chip. We're leveraging Moore's law. And we'll start by able to look at panels of five to 50 proteins over three to four orders of magnitude concentration. This, again, is completely analogous to DNA sequencing, where most of the work is on amplicons, where you have five to 50 genes of interest and you want to interrogate them. So, we're launching on Moore's Law with a technology that directly can potentially interrogate 70% of the proteome, indirectly interrogate 90% of the protein, and do it in a convenient way. where you can see single atom or up to single atom changes in those proteoforms, which represent over a million variations of those 20,000 proteins. And again, this is true next generation protein sequencing, massively parallel, leveraging Moore's law, and convenient for any laboratory.
spk09: Thank you very much for that very in-depth response.
spk04: So, just to kind of switch gears a little bit here. So, you briefly touched on the search for a full-time CEO, having been put in place in February. I was just curious in terms of how is that going with more color and I guess number two, is there kind of like a timeline in terms of like a certain time period in which you plan on kind of hiring a CEO or is this still very open-ended at this point? And then I have one more after that if that's okay.
spk13: That's a great question. With the addition of Patrick, we have the opportunity to take some time in our search and make sure we find the right person. The last six months really speak to themselves. We've been able to make tremendous advances in our technology, as shown in our submitted publication.
spk12: We've been able to make tremendous progress with real samples, as shown in our tech notes.
spk13: And Patrick has put us in a great position with our products ready to launch. in the last quarter of this year. So this has given us the flexibility with Patrick serving as chief operating officer and president to make sure we bring in a CEO that can not only allow us to be the people that invented and launched the first next generation protein sequencing, but own this fork in history. So the pressure is off. We're executing well. We've raised the bar. And when we have a candidate that can give great impact to the market and inspire our team and make sure your investment does it even better, we'll bring them on board.
spk09: Excellent. Thank you very much.
spk04: That is very helpful as well. And then just one last one. So in 2022, some of the goals for this year have been primarily providing more white papers and peer-reviewed publications. So you highlighted one new application and new publication in your press release. I was just curious if you could kind of highlight any more broad takeaways from it, as well as are there any plans to kind of highlight any
spk13: more applications in the second half of 22 if there's any other kind of areas you're looking at that'd be helpful as well for investors thank you great question any new technology is only successful if you fit into existing workflows we've been able to take over 500 incoming inquiries talk to a tremendous amount of people doing proteomics and understand the workflow. What are people doing now? What do they want to do faster? And what are they doing the most of? So we're focusing on our white papers to make sure we give examples of each of those major workflows. And those workflows can be around immunoprecipitations, can be around gel-purified proteins, can be about understanding biomarkers, and co-immunoprecipitation and drug pathways. So we're targeting white papers to show we work the way that our customers do. So one of the great things about having Patrick is it really understands the voice of those customers and really understands how to launch a product to make sure we don't just get those early adopters, but those early adopters that by the first 25 or 50 systems set the example for the next 2,000. We were lucky enough that my team launched first next-generation DNA sequencing, and we were able to identify major uses. And at Ion Torrent, when we launched the first semiconductor DNA sequencing, we made sure those placements We're in laboratories that would publish and bring the next, as I said, 2,000 customers. So our strategy is pretty focused. Our white papers are made to fit into existing work plans. We've done this multiple times before, and we really have an opportunity to change the world and how they do protein research. No longer waiting six weeks for your mass specs results to come back from a facility. Patrick, feel free to chime in.
spk08: Thanks, Jonathan. Yeah, that's exactly right. As we think about the workflows, as we're discussing with potential customers, we're really identifying those areas that have significant relevance to their work. And you know, it's interesting, the level of diversity that customers have in terms of their experimentation. They very much center around a couple of themes, which is in protein identification and protein characterization. And what does that mean from a proteoform perspective? It means that customers are really interested in post-translational modifications. And then, of course, there are many different post-translational modifications, and we're showcasing our technology around a lot of those different post-translational modifications, and we'll see more of that as we launch and publish more of our app notes. So you'll start to see a good sense of the customers and how we're targeting for those high-impact customers relating to their current workflows and their experimental designs and their experimental workflows.
spk09: Got it. Thank you very much, and that's all the questions I have. Thank you, everyone.
spk04: I really appreciate it. Thank you.
spk05: I'm not showing any further questions in the queue. I'd like to turn the call back over to Juan Avendano for any closing remarks.
spk02: Thank you all for your participation today. We look forward to updating you on our progress in the next quarterly earnings call. Have a good evening.
spk05: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day.
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