Seer, Inc.

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to this year's fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference 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 during this session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 1-1 again. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Carrie Mandeville, Investor Relations.

Thank you. Earlier today, SEER released financial results for the quarter and year ended December 31st, 2023. 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 Fariqzad, Chief Executive Officer and Chair, and David Horn, Chief Financial Officer and President. 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 materially different 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 more complete list and description, please see the risk factors section of the company's quarterly report on form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2023 and in 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 February 29th, 2024. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Omid.

Thanks, Carrie, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. I will begin our call today by providing updates on our recent progress, including some exciting customer data. Looking ahead, we're laser focused on converting these incredible biological insights into accelerated commercial adoption, and I will share the actions we're taking to make this happen. I will then turn the call over to David to provide more detail on our financial results for 2023 and revenue outlook for 2024. In 2023, we grew revenue 8% to $16.7 million and ended the year with over $373 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments. As the body of biological insights and data grows, I expect adoption and revenue will become more aligned with our expectations. Our mission at SEER is to bring the power of unbiased proteomics to researchers around the globe. To achieve this, we need to open up a new gateway to the proteome to enable the next frontier in biology to be explored. Changing the status quo in this way is an enormous undertaking. When we first introduced the ProteoGraph product suite for unbiased deep proteomics at scale, there was a huge mountain to climb in terms of market development and education. Over the course of this past year, we made important progress in climbing this mountain. I'm deeply proud of our team's work, and yet there's still much work to be done to translate the incredible performance we're seeing from the proteograph into widespread commercial adoption. Our customers have started to demonstrate the powerful biological insights from the proteograph, and this data is nothing short of incredible. Most recently, we saw our first customer study published in Nature Communications. Given the unique insights that ProteoGraph is enabling relative to other proteomics platforms, we expect several more publications in high impact journals throughout the year. This will be critical for us to reach an inflection point for widespread adoption and revenue growth. We remain laser focused on developing and enhancing our technology removing barriers to adoption, and expanding our commercial reach. Over the past year, we made a number of important advancements to our technology. In June, we launched our Proteograph XT Assay Kit, and the feedback has been fantastic. Since its launch, we have upgraded over half of our customer base to run the new assay kit. XT improves the throughput of our initial assay and reduces the mass spec time for sample by two and a half fold without sacrificing depth. The efficiency allows a single technician to handle hundreds of samples per week and approximately 10,000 samples annually with just one proteograph XT and a leading mass spec instrument. We also made important improvement to our Proteograph Analysis Suite, or PASS, to provide biologists access to an understanding of deep, unbiased proteomics readily and easily for any application they choose, including proteogenomics analysis. We made significant updates on the quality and quantity of protein and peptide identifications you can get from PASS and reengineered our mass spec analysis workflow to leverage cutting-edge analysis advancements at scale. And finally, last month, We made our protein discovery catalog available to our customers, prospective customers, and interested parties. With over 10,000 proteins in plasma across 1,900 pathways that can be detected and interrogated using the proteograph. This provides our first published index of the unprecedented depth of empirically observed proteins captured by our nanoparticle technology to date. includes proteins linked to over 150,000 peptides that can serve as data points for potential biomarkers, including proteins not yet associated with diseases, making it a rich source of biological insight. We look forward to expanding this library over time as more samples are interrogated by the ProteoGraph platform and more mass spec-based proteomic data becomes available. We also made important strides removing barriers to improve access. We launched the SEER Technology Access Center, or STAC, which allows the proteograph user to run samples in their own lab and have SEER run them mass-back or alternatively provide end-to-end study services from study to sample. We have seen strong demand for STAC with 48 organizations using this service as of year end, including large pharmaceutical companies. Revenue from STAC grew significantly quarter over quarter. In the fourth quarter, STAC revenue was the vast majority of services revenue. We also introduced the Strategic Instrument Placement Program, or SIP, to allow researchers to begin using the prototype right away by utilizing available operating budgets. This not only removes another barrier to access, but also facilitates data generation that will help secure the necessary funding and samples for more extensive and impactful studies in the future. And finally, last November, we expanded our Centers of Excellence programs with the addition of Panome Bio, a world-class metabolomics service provider with expertise in mass spec. By combining deep proteomic insights at the peptide level with the proprietary metabolomics workflow, PanOnBio will enable unique studies with robust pathways analysis to significantly advance research in biomarker discovery and drug development. As we have said, the combination of our novel technology, the paucity of peer-reviewed publication, as well as conservative budgeting continues to drive in elongated cell cycles for the proteograph. That said, we're seeing great interest in STAC with a robust pipeline of opportunities, indicating this was an important step in enabling access to the proteograph technology. STAC has helped us secure a foothold with several large pharma companies. We're starting to see momentum in usage of these large pharma customers with strong ordering and some outsourcing additional work due to internal demand. These customers have the funding, samples, and motivation to adopt our technology and advance their biological discovery. We expect this program to continue to be an important driver for adoption from these types of customers. As we continue to educate the market on the value of the prototype, we have started to see potential customers previously on the sidelines turning to strong advocates once they have seen the data and the insights that the photograph can provide. I remain convinced that once our technology becomes increasingly accessible to the broader research community, our market development efforts will pay off and we will see an inflection point in adoption, the size of studies, and ultimately revenue. Throughout the year, we made great progress validating our technology and expanding our commercial reach. We onboarded four new distributors and partners in Australia, Eastern Europe, Israel, and Japan. We obtained ISO 27001 certification, increasing our information security and cybersecurity standards, making us more effective with stack in our labs and collaborations, and forming a bridge for general data protection regulation, or GDPR, compliance for our European customers. We also received ISO 13,485 certification, establishing the processes, people, and systems for quality management and laying the groundwork for the creation of the highest quality, reliable solutions and enabling the utilization of our products in FDA submissions. We have also seen a growing validation of our technology, both from SEER and customer publication. Since the beginning of 2022, we have published several high-impact peer-reviewed papers on our differentiated proprietary engineered nanoparticle technology. These publications demonstrate how our ProteoGraph product suite workflow has superior performance in terms of precision, depth, and throughput compared to conventional workflows and can identify undiscovered links between health and disease apt peptide level resolution that can illuminate the role of protein variants. We've consistently said that one of the most important drivers of adoption would be the validation of our technology with third-party data. In addition to our publications, we're aware of 180 public presentations to date and 48 posters and presentations by customers. To date, we have eight preprints four peer-reviewed SEER publications, and one peer-reviewed customer publication, showcasing the value of SEER technology. We expect to see the number of peer-reviewed publications grow throughout the year. In January, Prognomic demonstrated the largest deep multi-omic study completed to date in their pre-print article in MedArchive. This study involved 2,513 individuals including patients with all stages of lung cancer, comorbid controls, and healthy subjects. Utilizing the proteograph for the proteomic portion of this study, they were able to measure over 8,300 proteins, which were then combined with over 200,000 RNA transcripts and 1,000 metabolite measurements to drive a multi-omics classifier. This classifier represents a potentially best-in-class performance by achieving a sensitivity of 80% for stage 1 and 89% for all stages of lung cancer at 89% specificity. Also in January, a second manuscript was made available on bioRxiv and will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication. This study was a collaboration between Alzheimer's disease luminaries from MGH and MassGen Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases and investigators at SEER. This study looked at 1,800 plasma samples comprising both controls and individuals diagnosed with cognitive decline, including Alzheimer's disease. The researchers identified 138 proteins that were up or down regulated in AD individuals, and of these, 138 proteins, only 44 have been previously associated with AD. The remaining 94 represent putative biomarkers of AD, potentially unlocking new biological insights. Interestingly, 55% of these 138 proteins are not present on a commercially available HyPlex affinity-based panel, meaning researchers would not be able to see these proteins using that panel. The MGH investigators used this clinical information to identify the point of significant cognitive decline and determine which of the 138 proteins separated the population into fast and slow cognitive decliners. We identified eight such significant proteins and are now investigating how these results may be advanced to develop a clinical score indicating the likelihood of cognitive decline in a particular timeframe. While this study could not have been done using HyPLAX affinity-based approaches, it also could not have been done without the proteograph since there is no other practical way to do a deep unbiased proteomics study of 1,800 plasma samples other than leveraging the proteograph product suite. This represents the largest deep unbiased AD proteomic study completed to date with a highly differentiated and novel biological insight. With regards to the nature communication paper that I mentioned earlier, I'm very excited to share that this study was led by Professor Karsten Suri at Weill Cornell Medicine and demonstrated the identification of protein altering variants for population scale PQTL studies. The proteograph workflow was used upstream to a mass spec to analyze over 18,000 peptides from 3,000 proteins in more than 320 blood samples to detect and quantify blood circulating proteins in the presence of protein-altering variants. When affinity-based approaches are used for PQTL analysis, these ligands bind to a specific epitope of the protein, and variants of these proteins can alter the ligand binding. This altered binding is often falsely interpreted as a PQTL, which can result in incorrect biological insight. However, with the proteograph, Protein abundance is quantified at the peptide level resolution, accurately identifying PQTLs and allowing a better understanding of disease mechanism and more successful drug discovery efforts. This study illustrates the effectiveness of SEER's approach in unraveling intricate connections between genetic variations and proteins, which are vital for developing innovative therapeutic approaches for various diseases and we believe will have an enormous impact on human health. In addition, another paper from Professor Chris Mason's lab at Weill Cornell Medical demonstrating the value of the proteograph has been accepted in Nature Communications, and I look forward to sharing more information once this paper has been published. We have seen incredible interest in the field of proteomics and the value it provides over the last five years and the velocity has significantly picked up in the last 12 months. This is exemplified by several high-impact publications and an increase in both private and public funding for proteomic research, including a recent grant from the NIH of $50 million for over five years to establish a new consortium for multi-omics research on human health. With the ability to analyze larger and more complex datasets using emerging technologies, the goal of the consortium is to develop scalable and generalizable multiomic research strategies to advance our understanding of disease onset and progression. We look forward to seeing more funding for these types of projects as researchers continue to advance their studies and enable novel biological insights. Genomic researchers are increasingly finding that proteomics data and subsequently multiomics data has greater power than genomic data alone. As I alluded earlier, the value of this is now shown by the largest, deepest multiomics study completed today by Prognomic, resulting in the best publicly available data for early detection of lung cancer. Beyond the value of proteomics in the research setting, We're also seeing the groundwork being laid to incorporate more protein markers for clinical use. Recently, Palmetto's Moldex proposed billing and coding guidelines to write coverage decisions for clinical proteomic diagnostic assays, where policy was previously only written for tests where DNA or RNA were the primary analytics. This unlocks a substantial clinical opportunity by increasing the chances the proteomics diagnostic assays has utility when launched into the market and is an important pathway to reimbursement for proteomics assays. Looking ahead in 2024, we will continue to execute against our core strategies of powering evidence and publications with the ProteoGraph product suite, continuing to enhance access, innovate with our products, and expand our applications. While much work remains, we're excited and inspired by the opportunity that lays in front of us. With that, I will now turn the call over to David.