Seer, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the SEER second quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are on 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 need to press star 1-1. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Carrie Mendeville. You may begin.

Thank you. Earlier today, SEER released financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. If you've 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 Farraqzad, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, David Horn, Chief Financial Officer, and Omido Sedan, President, will join for Q&A. 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 ended June 30, 2022, and its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, see or disclose 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 only accurate as of the live broadcast, August 9, 2022. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Omid.

Thanks, Carrie, and thanks, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. We continue to make strong progress across all areas of our business, as we ramp our commercial footprint, expand our installed base of the ProteoGraph product suite, and work closely with customers and key thought leaders. As the body of data expands to show the power of unbiased plasma proteomics at scale, we're driving our research and development roadmap to further advance the capabilities of our technology. We ended the second quarter with $3.6 million in revenue and more than $456 million of cash on our balance sheet, continuing to drive momentum in our business while remaining well-positioned to execute on our multi-year strategic plan. Now, more than 18 months since we started our phased commercialization and six months following broad commercial release, we're seeing accumulation of evidence that our technology addresses significant unmet needs. Across a wide range of research applications, our customers are seeing promising early results that they believe are unlocking biological insights never seen before. We expected that our customers' work would span discovery, translational, and clinical research applications. And we are pleased to see an expanding number of customers undertaking projects in translational or clinical research relatively soon after acquiring a technology. To date, the majority of samples run by our customers are in clinical research and involve clinically relevant biomarkers. These projects span a wide range of complex diseases in studies across early cancer detection, biomarker discovery, aging and cell rejuvenation, and the impact of environment on human health, among other applications. Now, with that larger context, I would now like to share some updates on our execution against our five key objectives to drive growth in 2022 and beyond. As a reminder, these objectives are, first, supporting customers with an industry-leading experience while helping them to systematically scale their use of the Protograph product suite for projects of increasing size and scope. expanding our global customer network and install base of instruments. Third, continuing to build out our team, commercial capabilities, and geographic footprint. Fourth, driving a product roadmap to enable more applications for proprietary engineered nanoparticles. And fifth, expanding our partnership efforts to make it even easier for customers around the world and across markets to adopt our technology. Now to the updates. Let's start with how our customers are using the protograph and review some specific examples of the progress they're making. In the first quarter of 2022, we saw 11 posters and presentations at scientific conferences. Since then, with the busy spring conference season, our customers, as well as senior scientists, have presented 28 posters at nine additional industry events across the United States, Europe, and Asia. These events spent the genomics and proteomics space and included conferences such as AACR, AGBT, ESHG, and ASMS. Importantly, about a third of these presentations were from our customers. Now, this is pretty remarkable when you consider that most of our customers have had the Proteograph in their labs for a relatively short period of time. For example, at the American Society of Mass Spectrometry, or ASMS, conference in early June, there were multiple presentations and posters featuring the Proteograph product suite, including several by our customers. At a high level, the most common themes were, first, the Proteograph product suite is enabling an entirely new approach to interrogating the proteome at a depth and scale not previously possible. Second, this capability is allowing researchers to see more of the proteome, especially low abundance proteins, than they had previously been able to see across similar cohorts. And third, this is enabling researchers to access peptide and amino acid level protein variant information, which is necessary to perform high-resolution proteogenomics and only possible through large-scale deep and unbiased proteomics. To illustrate this, I'd like to share some specific highlights from customers' posters. Starting with Prognomic, they found novel biological signatures for pancreatic cancer with multiple statistically significant differences in protein abundance among 92 cancer and 104 healthy subjects in a case-control multi-omic study. This result was very exciting because despite the moderate size of the sample cohort, they achieved a high predictive power driven by their biomarker signatures compared to other pancreatic cancer studies published to date. Prognomic observed that the strong detection of changes in biological signals and the breadth of the signals greatly enable identification of novel biological markers in clinical studies of practical size. This is in part due to the low technical noise relative to biological signal that the proteograph enables across thousands of proteins in the proteome. You can hear more from Prognomic on this study also at the upcoming AACR Pancreatic Cancer Conference in mid-September. Moving to Evotech. a Sears Center of Excellence, and one of the global leaders in providing drug discovery solutions on a standalone basis or through holistic, fully integrated drug discovery solutions. They presented a poster revealing that on average, more than 5,000 proteins were detected using the single shot data independent acquisition or DIA analysis across 105 patient samples, with more than 3,000 proteins in individual samples. The poster also highlighted an unprecedented depth of detection for low abundance proteins such as cytokines, a class of protein known to be increasingly important in development of certain therapeutics that were previously not accessible in the unbiased workflows at scale. And finally, in a collaboration between SEER, Weill Cornell, and SpaceX, The proteograph was used for deep proteome interrogation of the four civilian astronauts from the Inspiration4 crew, looking at time points before and after space flight. The poster showed 50 differentially abundant proteins, primarily indicative of oxidative stress and metabolic pathways. They're excited by these findings, which address the open-ended question of what happens to human physiology at the molecular level as a consequence of space travel. Importantly, the protograph provides information as to what protein variants may be affected by how much and how this correlates with other omic changes of interest. These posters highlight the unique value proposition of the Protograph product suite to enable access to the vast depth of the proteome, which was previously very limited. In a paper published in 2017 titled Revisiting Biomarker Discovery by Plasma Proteomic by Professor Matthias Mann, one of the leaders in proteomics, evidence was presented that the majority of the 117 FDA-approved protein biomarkers that were known at the time of their publications were biased toward the most abundant 300 plasma proteins. This is because historically, These were the proteins that could be readily interrogated at scale using shallow proteomic workflows without the complex immunodepletion and fractionation protocols. The authors proposed that if the proteome could be interrogated to an arbitrary depth of 1500 proteins efficiently and at scale, an additional 280 protein biomarkers could be discovered and validated. Here is why SEER is uniquely positioned to enable this. The proteograph enables efficient and rapid access to the plasma proteome with peptide and amino acid level resolution at depth and scale never before possible. And the proteograph provides a high level of reproducibility, enabling discovery power from tractable cohort sizes. making it possible to identify even small changes or more complex biomarker signature comprising groups of protein variants across populations. The combination of this depth and scale impedence matches would have been made possible in genomics to allow at scale functionalization of genomic variants and the discovery of novel protein content. Customer data on deep plasma proteomics and the putative biomarkers that are seen appears to support Professor Mann's hypothesis. Larger cohorts are likely to reveal even more novel biomarkers, finding statistically significant differences in proteins and protein variants. We're in the very early days of this expansion in novel content discovery, and I expect to see a massive deepening of our understanding of the proteome and thus biology in the years ahead. As more third-party data enters the public domain over the coming months and years, we expect it will have a network effect in accelerating adoption. We also expect adoption will accelerate across multiple markets in parallel as we see growing interest in the proteograph across a broad range of applications, including biomarker discovery, target identification, and drug development, and early disease detection. This interest spans a broad range of disease families, including neurodegenerative diseases, oncology, cardiovascular disease, and other complex diseases, reproductive health, aging, and veterinary medicine. It is clear there's a strong need for deep unbiased proteomics, and it's exciting to see the emergence of our customer data and the traction we are progressively gaining. Now turning to our growing install base. We continue to see strong interest across geographies with our pipeline of qualified leads roughly equal between academic and commercial customers. As we have previously stated, the sales cycle for our commercial prospect is shorter relative to academic prospects, driven by how each segment received funding for their projects. Over time, We do expect that the percentage of academic customers in our installed base to increase as more and more grants are submitted and approved for projects leveraging the Protograph product suite. Despite the ongoing risk of COVID and the uncertainty around supply chain, we were able to increase our installed base across North America, Europe, and Asia in the second quarter, expanding global access to the Protograph product suite. As an example, BERTIS, an innovative South Korean proteomic-based precision medicine company, which recently established a U.S. presence, has added the proteograph product suite to complement and accelerate the discovery and translational mass spec-based clinical test development capabilities by scaling the scope and increasing the resolution of future studies. We are proud of the growing body of customer data and expect to see a number of them submit manuscripts before the year end. Customer-driven proof points are essential in developing the market for any first-of-its-kind product. We believe that as more third-party data enters the public domain over the coming months and years, the differentiated value proposition of the PERTIGRAPH product suite to provide novel insight into the PERTIOM and to enable the next generation of multi-omic studies will become more established. And finally, we made important progress with our partnership, namely the Proteogenomic Consortium, which, as a reminder, is a first-of-its-kind partnership that we established with Discovery Life Sciences and SCIACS. This is a multiyear collaboration with three phases for expansion where Discovery will set up, expand, and offer deep unbiased proteomic capabilities to their existing and new genomic services customers with a plan to ramp up to an annual capacity of over 100,000 samples. Discovery recently received the proteograph and Cyax Xenotrof 7600 instruments at their facility in the Boston area as in the process of installation and validation using 500 internal samples for proteogenomics study. We expect that they will begin running initial customer projects as early as the fourth quarter of this year. We believe the Proteogenomics Consortium will accelerate proteogenomics projects at the protein variant level with the type of scaled, streamlined expert operations to match nearly any customer's needs. As we expand our footprint globally, With what is already a disruptive product, we're also pushing on the next set of innovations to further extend the capabilities of the proteograph product suite. These innovations span a broad range of capabilities, including workflows, assays, and importantly, software and informatics. With a recent release of the next version of the proteograph analysis suite, POS 2.0, We're enabling the first of its kind proteogenomic workflow that maps proteomic peptide-level data to genomic data to identify sample-specific variant peptides not captured in canonical reference databases. Customers can move easily off genomic endpoints and access meaningful data to enable peptide-level disease association. further functionalizing our understanding of genetic variation and moving closer to phenotype. POS 2.0 empowers high resolution proteogenomics, something that is uniquely enabled by our technology and is not possible with targeted methods. We're continuing to expand our software feature, streamline data management across our workflows, and leverage the power of our proprietary engineered nanoparticles to lay a roadmap into the future. We're also expanding what can be done with the proteograph with exemplification of proprietary engineered nanoparticle-based approach across sample types and model organism, including cell culture and cell lysate, mouse and pig, as well as standardizing workflows across mass spec platform. This flexibility and accessibility will enable the proteograph to elucidate novel insight for biomarker discovery and proteogenomics at scale across more customer groups. As we work to expand this flexibility, we expect to see an acceleration of the work of the scientific community to unlock immense biological insight. As we work closely with our customers, focus on our goals and drive execution against them, we are committed to providing a continuous stream of product enhancement and improvement to customers that will expand access to novel biological content and set a pace for innovation in proteomics. With that, I will now turn the call over to David.