Seer, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SEER, Inc. First Quarter 2022 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, Carrie Mendeville, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Earlier today, SEER released financial results for the quarter ending March 31, 2022. 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 investors at seer.bio. Joining me today from SEER is Omid Farraqzad, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Omid Osudan, President, 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 quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ending March 31st, 2022, and in its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, SEER just claims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forms of these 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 May 4th, 2022. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Omid.

Thanks, Kerry, and thanks, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. We had a strong start to the year as we further ramped our commercial efforts, expanded our installed base, and made tangible progress across all areas of our strategic plan. These efforts led us to close the first quarter with $3.3 million in revenue and continued growth in our installed base. I'm particularly excited by the growing body of customer data demonstrating in a concrete way the unique capabilities of the Proteograph product suite to provide proteomic insights at a depth and scale that was previously not possible. We've now seen presentations at conferences from the Broad Institute, Oregon Health and Science University, Sanford Burnham Previous Medical Discovery Institute, Protein Metrics, and Prognomic. To date, there have been more than 40 public presentations on Sears technology, with four more coming up in June at ASMS. And we expect an increasing number of abstract data and presentations as more customers not only adopt the technology, but scale their use of the platform. Given the growing demonstrations of customer use of the ProteoGraph, coupled with the forthcoming advances on our platform, I've never been more confident about our ability to become the definitive tool leader in proteomics. To reach this ambitious goal, we have a strong balance sheet and are well capitalized with more than $470 million of cash, which we believe will support us as we execute on our multi-year strategic plan. and enable us to build a durable organization that will drive meaningful impact on the trajectory of science and medicine. We're focused on five key objectives to drive growth in 2022 and to set us up for growth long-term. First, supporting customers with an industry-leading onboarding experience while helping them to systematically scale their use of the Protograph product suite for projects of increasing size and scope. Second, expanding our installed base of instruments. Third, continuing to build out our commercial capabilities, geographic footprint, and team. Fourth, driving our product roadmap and exploring more applications for our proprietary engineered nanoparticles in 2022 and beyond. And fifth, expanding our partnership efforts, focusing on extending our global reach making it even easier for customers to access our technology and serving an increasingly diverse customer base. Now, let me give an update on our progress across a few of these objectives. Most importantly, let's start with how our customers are using the Protograph and review some specific examples of the progress they're making. It has been incredible to get the Protograph product suite into the hands of customers. The customer experience with the Protograph product suite has been excellent across key metrics, including installation and validation, training and ease of use, reproducibility, quantification, and sensitivity. In addition, with our automated assay, customers have the ability to capture proteins across a vast dynamic range in different biosamples with peptide-level resolution deciphering various proteoforms. I'm also excited by customers' data and interest in exploring the capabilities of our system to go beyond human plasma, including model organisms such as mouse, pig, bovine, and other species. Importantly, this flexibility to analyze across specie type whose biosamples have species-specific protein structure demonstrates the inherent power of the Protograph product to be used with different applications without the need to develop a new specific panel of nanoparticles. In addition, customers are excited by the proteograph data on biosamples beyond plasma, including CSF and secreted proteins in cell culture. Finally, seeing customers integrate the proteograph with other downstream proteomics technologies, such as tandem mass tag, also called TMT, demonstrates the versatility of the Protograph to work with a variety of mass spec protocols. Now I'd like to move to two examples of the Protograph performance that customers are sharing in conferences. A recent adopter of the Protograph found that our product consistently and simultaneously achieves an unprecedented depth of coverage and throughput compared with methods that must trade off between depth of coverage or throughput. In their hands, the proteograph robustly identifies more than twice as many cytokines with high throughput via an automated workflow. And importantly, this is happening at a 1% false discovery rate. The ability to detect higher numbers of cytokines and other low abundance signaling molecule enables researchers to reproducibly and comprehensively probe molecular phenotypes such as the immune state of individuals. We expect this data to be presented at the upcoming ASMS conference in early June. At the American Association of Cancer Research, also called the AACR conference in April, Prognomic presented data from one of their ongoing oncology studies. In a cohort of 212 subjects utilizing the protograph, the researchers were able to identify more than 5,000 proteins and hundreds of glycosylated proteins in a single experiment. The simultaneous detection of native and glycosylated versions of the same peptides enabled the analysis of differential expression of protein versions to detect association with disease progression. This demonstrates the uniquely enabling resolution of the Protograph product suite and the types of studies at scale that it will open up across markets. While Prognomic and OHSU have been the fastest to move to at-scale studies, each with cohorts of a thousand or more samples, we're seeing the time to ramp vary across customer sites. Customers generally go through three steps as they ramp their studies. each of which can vary in terms of duration. First, as they onboard the technology, they increase their familiarity with the prototype and train their staff. Most of our limited release customers have completed this step and our initial broad release customers are beginning this process now. Next, they typically perform pilot studies to expand their hands-on use of the technology and to fine tune their study design to answer specific biological questions. And finally, they will take those learnings to ramp up the studies of unprecedented scale, designed to unlock new biological insights. While OHSU and Prognomic are examples of early adopters, There are also other customers who may be less familiar with that scale proteomics workflow, and for those customers, the velocity of scale-up may be more protracted. We're building this support model to support customers of all types across this scale-up curve. Now, let me turn to our growing installed base. There's a growing interest and a palpable excitement surrounding the Protograph product suite across a wide range of customer types and applications. During the first quarter, we began our broad release phase of commercialization and delivered the first of three systems to customers around the world. We now have customers up and running across North America, Europe, and Asia, including China, where we continue to work through COVID constraints. While these constraints did not have a material impact on us in first quarter of this year, as restrictions continue in China, they do introduce some temporal uncertainty for our customers, prospective customers, and partners in this region, and challenge our ability to access the country with our own personnel. We continue to be encouraged by both the quality and quantity of prospects in our growing pipeline of roughly equal mix of academic and commercial sites. We expect our pipeline to grow as we expand our hiring around the world and bring the Protograph product suite and its benefits to more customers. While interest is strong across customer types, we continue to expect our early adopters to be more heavily weighted towards commercial settings given their ability to move more quickly than academic institutions. As a first of its kind technology that is still in the early stages of commercialization, we continue to see third-party data is an important component of the sales process. While it takes time for this body of data to grow, customers are inclined to undertake proof of principle studies, which I'll refer to as POPs. These POPs are typically small in size, in the terms of sample size, but provide a volume and depth of data that customers are rarely in a position to access and analyze. While highly pleased with the data, prospective customers need time to interpret the data, leverage the insights, and imagine what is possible using the Protograph product suite. As the adoption curve grows and data from existing customers continue to increase via presentations and publications, we expect pop studies to become less important in the sales process in the future. As we continue to develop the market, exemplify the power of the technology, and to educate the customer base, we continue to be encouraged by our interactions with prospective customers. In addition, we're working to make it easier for them to adopt the Protograd product suite in the following ways. First, we're providing one-on-one education, making it simple for them to integrate the technology into their specific workflows. Second, we're connecting them with experienced users performing similar applications. We continue to leverage our early collaborators and limited release customers as important reference sites for this purpose. And finally, we're helping existing customers to produce data that serves as an independent third party validation of the technology. Now moving on to our commercial progress. As we ramp commercialization of the Protograph product suite, we continue to expand and strengthen our Wolf class team. Our team is the key to driving our business, and we have made large strides in attracting top performing, passionate people at SEER. As of the end of 2021, we had expanded our team across key functions such as sales, product marketing, field application scientists, field service engineers, and support. as well as building core processes and infrastructure to support a diverse and geographically distributed customer base. In a very competitive global talent market, we continue to prioritize recruiting the best talent, and we expect to significantly grow this team by year end. In mid-March, we welcome Scott Thomas as our Chief Commercial Officer, Scott has spent over two decades with increasing commercial responsibilities in life sciences industry, including 11 years at Illumina. He has run commercial organizations in North America, Europe, and Japan, building teams, launching products, and expanding geographies. We're thrilled to welcome Scott and expect his leadership and breadth of commercial experience to help us accelerate long-term commercial growth. build a globally differentiated customer experience, and nicely complement our talented executive team. Let's now move on to the scientific evidence confirming the breakthrough nature of our technology. In mid-March, we announced the publication of a seminal paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PMAS, that demonstrates our technology's ability to widen the aperture to the proteome and its vast molecular information. This paper was published by an interdisciplinary team of scientists from SEER, Oregon Health and Sciences University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard Medical School. The paper examines in detail the relationship between the unique physical chemical properties of the panel of proprietary engineered nanoparticles and the diverse pattern of protein sampling that is enabled by this panel. This protein sampling is driven by a unique tunable and reproducible nanobio interface that is created between a given nanoparticle surface and a given biological sample. The fear machine learning model describes in this paper can be used to enhance the molecular interactions that occur at the nanobio interface and to design future nanoparticles to differentially interrogate specific protein families. The technology platform simultaneously achieves an order of magnitude gain in median depth of protein coverage, twice as much higher precision, two and a half times protein identification, and significant improvement in throughput when compared to a traditional deep workflow such as depletion or fractionation. We're proud of the growing data and excited about what is to come this year at scientific conferences. We're looking forward to several presentations at the upcoming American Society of Mass Spectrometry conference in early June, including multiple customer presentations. We're at a pivotal time in proteomics field, As the experience of our customers with the Proteograph product suite expands, we look forward to more of the data and findings becoming public, expanding the third-party demonstration of the unique capabilities of the Proteograph product suite and the insights that can be gained by integrating the proteome deeply at scale and without limitations to prescribe targets. These data will redefine the proteomic methods enable first of its kind studies, and open up a new gateway to the proteome that will be accessible to labs of nearly any type around the world. With that, I will now turn it, call to David for a financial update.