Seer, Inc.

Hello, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the SEER fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during that session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star and zero. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker today, Carrie Mandeville with Investor Relations.

Earlier today, SEER released financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ending December 31st, 2020. If you have not received this news release, or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investor at seer.bio. Joining me today from SEER is Omid Farraqsad, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and Founder. Omid Ostedan, President and Chief Operating Officer, and David Horn, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are 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 these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled Forward-Looking Statements in the press release to your issue today. For a more complete list and description, please see the Risk Factors section of the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ending December 31, 2020, and its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, SEER disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or 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 March 29, 2021. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Amin.

Thanks, Kerry. Today marks our first earning call at the public company. This is a seminal milestone for our company and a particularly gratifying one for me as the founder of SEER. We will begin today's call with an overview of our opportunity and our strategy. We will then transition our comments to provide a review of our progress in 2020 and a preview of our objectives for 2021. SEER has gone from setting our initial vision of enabling broad-scale access to deep unbiased proteomics to shipping products to our customers in just three short years. We have built a world-class team that is second to none in the proteomic space, and we have a product solution that is well-positioned to enable the kind of proteomic studies that were just not possible before SEER. To our incredible team, I would like to take a moment and express my sincere thanks to each and every one of you for your passion, dedication, and hard work. My special thanks to your families for their support and patience as we navigated a very difficult year to deliver exceptional outcomes. To our longstanding investors, thank you for your continued support. And to our new investors, welcome and thank you for your trust and partnership in building SEER. We are grateful that you all share our vision of making unbiased deep and large-scale proteomics broadly accessible. And in doing so, help our customers drive novel biological insights, create and expand new end markets, and ultimately improve human health. We look forward to developing meaningful long-term relationships with each and every one of you as we grow the company and push the boundaries of our technology in pursuit of realizing our vision. Our understanding of biology has come a long way in the last 15 years. Just imagine if we had to face this pandemic today without broad-scale access to genomic technologies that have driven testing and vaccine development at a pace and scale the world had never seen before. Now, as profound of an impact genomics has had on health and management of diseases, I fully expect that broad scale access to proteomics will have even a deeper and a more profound impact in making the world a better place. Proteins are the drivers of all cellular functions and large scale access to unbiased and deep proteomics would likely lead to insights, applications, and therapeutics otherwise not possible. I'm excited and humbled to be leading the company that is committed to making this happen. At SEER, we're developing innovative solutions to empower the scientific community to arrive at exceptional proteomics outcomes. To deliver against this objective, we have a four-pronged strategy. First, we want to set the pace for innovation in the proteomics space. We will deliver a continuous stream of disruptive products to enable novel approaches for interrogating the proteomes. Second, we will leverage the unique capabilities of our differentiated solutions. We will pave the way to catalyze large-scale proteogenomics studies that will accelerate functionalization of the genome and meaningfully advance our understanding of biology. Third, we will couple exceptional customer experience with transformative products. We will work with our customers to enhance their ability to create new applications and new end uses that will expand the markets for proteomics and proteogenomics. And fourth, we will form strategic relationships with key customers and partners. We will create a rich ecosystem of solutions around the Protograph product suite that extend utility, expand reach, and drive adoption of our platform to labs of all types. We have developed the Proteograph product suite, a solution that leverages our proprietary engineered nanoparticles to replace the current depletion and fractionation methods used to perform unbiased proteomics today. These depletion and fractionation methods are necessary for deep proteomics studies because the proteome in any biological samples can span a wide dynamic range from the most abundant to the least abundant proteins. In plasma, for example, the dynamic range of the protein can expand over 10 orders of magnitude, with fewer than 20 proteins accounting for greater than 99% of the total protein by mass in a typical plasma sample. Now, in order to access the broad range of proteins, and especially those that are of low abundance, researchers are forced to follow laborious, expensive depletion and fractionation methods to methodically separate proteins before detection. These methods simply do not scale well, are accessible to few labs, and are cumbersome to perform. Our ProteoGraph product suite replaces these methods with a streamlined automated workflow that can fit in front of nearly any detector, delivering unmatched access to proteomics information. With the ProteoGraph product suite, we have reimagined the entire approach to unbiased proteomics, delivering a solution that can enable nearly any lab to adopt large-scale proteomics, a notion that was previously inconceivable. Now, our ProteoGraph product suite is detector agnostic, providing a solution that makes access to large-scale deep unbiased proteomics tangible, and importantly, not just for a select group of thought leaders in proteomics, but for really any lab wanting to do unbiased proteomics studies. Today, the proteomics community's detector of choice is a mass spec with an install base of 15,000 that are focused on proteomic analysis. Our ProteoGraph product suite can sit upstream to any mass spec addressing a long-standing unmet need for efficient deep unbiased proteomics at scale. Similar to the way next-generation sequencing brought about a sea change in our approach to genomics, transcriptomics, and biology, we believe SEERS technology has the potential to affect a similar, if not a more profound, change. As we have previously shared with you, We began commercialization of a portfolio product suite in late 2020. Our commercialization strategy comprises three stages, starting with a collaboration phase, followed by limited release, and culminating with broad release. This measured approach to commercialization is ideal for introducing highly disruptive products and is one that has been established and proven to be successful in other sectors. Our commercialization approach allows us to demonstrate the power of the PortoGraph product suite for key applications at leading KOL sites, develop strong reference sites, and accelerate adoption by creating clear blueprints for other customers to follow. While existing proteomic labs using MassFacts provide an incredible opportunity for us, we believe that our opportunity is far larger and includes customers who want to add unbiased proteomics information and scale but have not had a technology that allows them to do so. This includes some of the key labs and researchers who are performing large-scale genomic studies but are unable to impedance match these studies with equally large deep unbiased proteomic studies. These are the customers who will advance the field of proteogenomics. which is predicated on the ability to connect genomics information to protein variant information at the amino acid level. It's important to note SEER is the only available at-scale technology to deliver peptide and amino acid level resolution, which is necessary to match the nucleotide level genomic information and enable proteogenomics. Existing unbiased proteomic approaches do not scale, and existing scalable targeted proteomic approaches are unable to see proteins at the amino acid and peptide level. Therefore, you can't see the complexity of the proteome with these technologies, including the million-plus protein variants that exist in the body, variants that are critically important in understanding the dynamic spectrum of health and disease. Unbiased proteomic is also where the lion's share of the opportunity in proteomics and proteogenomics resides, and where we believe the majority of market expansion will occur over time. SEER will enable population-scale proteogenomics studies to be performed, empowering the scientific community to identify tens of thousands of protein variants in plasma and hundreds of thousands of protein variants in other tissue. This will enrich biological data sets and enhance the number of biomarkers and drug targets. The overall impact on human health will be enormous. By combining population scale unbiased proteomics and genomics, we believe scientists will gain a richer understanding of biology, drive novel insights, accelerate functionalization of genomic variants, and ultimately advance human health in a much faster and broader way. With the launch of the Proteograph product suite, we have started down the path of making our vision of empowering the scientific community to access deep unbiased proteomics at scalar reality. I could not be more excited and more proud about what we're doing at SEER. 2020 was a defining year for us on so many levels, and despite a challenging environment, we reached a number of important milestones. We published results demonstrating the robustness of our platform for rapid, deep, precise, unbiased proteomics in nature communications, and exemplified its utility for early detection of lung cancer. By our assessment of prior literature, This publication marked the largest unbiased deep plasma proteomics study published at the time. We spun out Prognomic, a company focused on coupling deep unbiased proteomics at scale with other omics approaches for early detection and diagnosis of diseases in oncology and other therapeutic areas. SIA retained a 19% ownership in Prognomic. We scaled the organization and added seasoned leaders to our management team and board of directors, assembling a uniquely qualified team to deliver on our vision. We commercialized our ProteoGraph products. We shipped and installed our product at the first of our collaboration customers and signed on additional customers. And this all culminated with the completion of our initial public offering and concurrent private placement in December, which raised approximately 314 million in net proceeds. Now, since we last updated you at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in early January, we have continued to make incredible progress across all dimensions of our business. We made great strides at our first three collaboration sites, Oregon Health Sciences University, Knight Cancer Institute, the Broad Institute, and Discovery Life Sciences. All three sites are progressing at or ahead of our expectations. We're also extremely excited and privileged to announce the addition of Salt Institute as our fourth collaboration customer. With our collaboration customers on board, we're now turning our attention to the limited release phase of our commercialization approach. Omid will walk you through more details on the overall commercialization progress shortly. And we announced today, and you may have seen, that we've signed a non-exclusive commercial agreement with SIACS to provide complete end-to-end solution for unbiased deep rapid and large-scale proteomics. This builds on the existing commercial agreement with Thermo Fisher and Brooker that we announced earlier this year. In 2021, we've already presented at several scientific conferences sharing exciting results from studies that we did in collaboration with our customers and partners, demonstrating the unique capabilities of our platform. And finally, we further strengthened our balance sheet by raising an additional $103 million in net proceeds from our follow-on offering in February. We are very much at the onset of this journey, and while much work remains, we're excited and inspired by the opportunity that lays in front of us. Since our IPO, we've seen an acceleration in enthusiasm, energy, and investment in the proteomics space. We're building the technology, the team, and the commercial path to lead the way in this new era of opportunity. People and culture are core to innovation, and we have continued to attract a world-class pool of talent and made significant additions to our management team over the past few months. We welcome Marissa Dixon as our new Chief People Officer. Marissa brings over 20 years of experience across technology and healthcare industries to help build our culture and teams. We've also welcomed Elona Kogan to SEER as General Counsel. Elona brings broad global experience in publicly traded companies across biotech and pharma. Seraphim Batzuklo joined us as VP and Chief of Computation. Seraphim is a globally recognized expert in data science and machine learning. He was previously at Illumina and before that a professor of data science at Stanford for over 15 years. Shashanka Bhupaneni has joined as VP Corporate Development with an extensive background in corporate strategy, business development, and M&A, most recently at Illumina. And finally, Karen, Pasamado as VP Corporate Marketing and Communications, and Karen has spent 25 years in commercial and corporate leadership roles at industry-leading high-growth life science companies, including Illumina, Kaizen, and Invitrogen. We also announced earlier this quarter that Deep Nishar, Senior Managing Partner at SoftBank, and Dr. Mustafa Ronaghi, former Chief Technology Officer at Illumina, have joined our Board of Directors. Their unique and complementary perspective as technology expansion, healthcare innovation, and ecosystem creation will be invaluable to SEER as we accelerate and expand our markets. From existing proteomics researchers to genomic researchers, and from multiomics core labs to commercial entities, biopharma and clinical accounts, we see unbiased, deep, and rapid proteomics at scale, offering tremendous value to our markets and customers. The proteome is truly the next frontier in furthering our understanding of human health and disease. As the only available method positioned to unlock and expand biological insight in this way, SEER is ready to deliver this value. Now with that, I will turn the call over to Omid for more details on our commercial progress. Omid?