SomaLogic, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SOMA Logics 4th Quarter 2021 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'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Marissa Sommers. Baish with Gilmore Group, please go ahead.

Thank you. Today, Somalogic released financial results for the year ended December 31, 2021. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make forward-looking statements during this call within the meaning of federal securities laws, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results, or performance are forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those relating to our market opportunity, growth margin, and future financial performance, protein content and database growth, customer base, diagnostic pipeline, hiring expectations, and growth in our organization are based upon our current estimates and various assumptions. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated or implied by these forward-looking statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these statements. For a list and description of the risks and uncertainties associated with our business, please refer to the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today March 29, 2022. SelmaLogic disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revive any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. And with that, I will turn the call over to Roy Snipes, Chief Executive Officer.

Roy Snipes Thank you, Marissa. Good afternoon. Welcome to our 2021 Earnings Call, summarizing an incredible fiscal year. We are tremendously proud of our progress this last year and look forward with a great deal of excitement to the rest of 2022. I'd like to start off by expressing my sincere gratitude for all who are contributing to our success here at Somalogic. We're working every day to relieve human suffering and prolong meaningful life by harnessing and applying the power of the proteome, and this unequivocally requires the efforts of many. Summologic's strong fourth quarter capped off a transformational 2021 for the company, which included, among many other accomplishments, a successful public listing on NASDAQ, several new product launches, and growth of our commercial team. Our continued execution is reflected in our strong financial results, generating revenue of $23 million for the first quarter and a record $81.6 million for the full year, representing 46% year-over-year growth. For those who are newer to Somalogic, I'll start out with a summary of the importance of proteomics, followed by our business and key differentiators. Until now, measuring and identifying a sufficient amount of the human proteome and leveraging that data to create useful clinical tools has been more challenging than the human genome. The evolutionary path of genomics, moving from measuring a few things to measuring many things, and finally to the measurement and identification of all things, And along the way, harvesting the information garnered from that ability to power applications with both financial and human value is now being repeated by proteomics. However, the evolution of proteomics will result in an objectively more powerful and much larger number of applications in a total addressable market currently valued at up to $90 billion, which in time will be larger than genomics as well. It is simply not debatable that Somalogic has traveled farther and faster down that evolutionary path than any other company, with a demonstrated and proven ability to measure more protein biomarkers of interest, to identify vastly more genome-proteome correlations, and to create first-in-class HyPlex protein pattern recognition diagnostic and prognostic tests. Rather than just products, we offer a meaningfully differentiated platform. consisting of a foundational technology with the ability to measure and identify 7,000 proteins, a database containing almost 1.5 million human samples, our bioinformatics team and the bespoke tools they've created over the course of more than a decade. Our flexible, synthetic foundational technology can be used in a number of protein measurement and identification contexts, as evidenced by our recent NGS collaboration with Illumina, and our reagents can be scaled and customized very quickly without the need to work in living systems. We are heavily scientifically validated, illustrated by the facilitation of the publication of more than 400 manuscripts, some of these collaborative landmark articles in human proteomics rather than just method citations. Knowledge, unlike raw data or information, implies the ability to create applications, and we have done so, Our database currently gives us access to 1.5 billion individual human protein measurements with approximately 15 million clinical data points. And by the end of 2022, we expect to have 30 first-in-class, very impactful protein pattern recognition soma signal diagnostic tests to move into clinical and commercial use. We are also heavily market validated and trusted. More than 400 customers have been on our platform, and some, such as Novartis, have entered into long-term agreements, and we are adding more customers rapidly as we grow our field team and our commercial footprint. In 2021, we achieved several milestones to augment our platform, capabilities, relationships, and balance sheet. In May, we announced our Proteomics for Precision Medicine initiative. We have since partnered with Emory Healthcare, Intermountain Healthcare, Common Spirit Health, University of Colorado Health, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center to facilitate market update as well as our regulatory and payment strategy for our unique diagnostics pipeline. In June, we announced new disease-specific and custom proteomics panel products, which demonstrate our continued dedication to cover the continuum of protein measurement identification needs of our customers and to facilitate their work on a single platform. We also announced new customer collaboration agreements with companies such as Novo Nordisk. In July, we announced the relationship and deployment of our assay capabilities to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and our general program for deployable SomaScan kits. In August, we announced a collaboration with Twist Biosciences to probe our database and other proteomics data for new therapeutic antibody targets. In September, We successfully completed our business combination with CM Life Sciences, which provided substantial capital, over $619 million in gross proceeds to our balance sheet in support of our ongoing growth objectives. As a result, we are uniquely well capitalized in our sector. As evidence for accelerating scientific interest in our platform, during 2021, we powered the publication of a record number of manuscripts, more than 100, in biomedical literature from customers and collaborators around the world, and in journals such as Science and Nature, spanning a broad gamut of areas of investigation from autism to Alzheimer's to COVID, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Our strong momentum has carried into 2022. For example, in the past several months, we have added several accomplished commercial, technical, and strategic leaders to our management team. including Stephen Mermelstein as our Senior Vice President of Mergers and Acquisitions, a role he previously held at Agilent, and Adam Taish as our Chief Business Development and Strategy Officer, following several important executive leadership roles at Thermo Fisher. We've also brought on board a new Senior Vice President of Licensing and IP Strategy, Ken Cascun from Qualcomm, a new lead executive for manufacturing, Sean Walsh, who most recently held a similar position at IDT, and a new vice president and engineering lead executive, Martin Rutgers from Asylum Research at Oxford Instruments. We're also pleased to share that we recently added a senior vice president of investor relations and strategic finance, Warren Glazer. He joins us from Assembly Biosciences and brings over a decade of experience in IR and related functions. Early in the new year, we announced a co-exclusive partnership with Illumina. effectively combining genomics and proteomics technology to empower and enable the future of multiomics research. The partnership combines the power and scale of Illumina's global commercial infrastructure and installed base with our unique proteomics platform to develop co-exclusive, co-branded, next-generation sequencing-based deployed proteomics kit products. And while this partnership accelerates our NGS-based capabilities over time, We plan to deploy a variety of protein measurement solutions on several different platforms, including NGS, arrays, and emerging chip-based approaches to best meet the needs of our customers and collaborators, regardless of their technology, cost, or throughput needs and preferences. Our comprehensive combination of a powerful enabling technology, flexible synthetic reagents, and an ability to leverage proteomics data to create powerful diagnostic applications offers us a substantial first-mover advantage and a large number of near- and longer-term opportunities to leverage these advantages, capabilities, and proprietary tools to both diversify our sources of top-line revenue and to substantially expand our share of the rapidly growing proteomics field. Notably, the realization of these opportunities does not require us to spend significant capital or time on new development. Many of the assets needed already exist and are part of one uniform platform we work within every day. One near-term opportunity is to continue deployment of site-of-service array-based SomaScan kits to complement our current service offering. Our early access program for academic institutions and research partners was successfully initiated during 2021, and we are planning an open access launch later this year. one that will give our customers the option to either access our robust in-house service business capabilities or run and benefit from the advantages of SomaScan in their own laboratories. A second major opportunity comes from our clinical diagnostic development capabilities and the diagnostic assets we have already created as a result. As proteomics technology scales and adoption increases, our capability to develop these HyPlex protein pattern recognition clinical applications will increasingly and rapidly differentiate our business. We have over 20 validated Summit Signal tests currently available and as many as 10 new tests scheduled to launch in 2022, as well as the capability and time to develop between 180 and 100 tests based on the current database. Given the number of test products already developed and those in our pipeline, we intend to accelerate time to market for these Summit Signal test products via licensing and business development and are now pursuing very active near-term opportunities for both of these approaches. Our existing and planned test product menu spans a variety of indications, with initial tests addressing liver disease, heart disease, and diabetes, to name just a few. Our unique reagents themselves also present a considerable opportunity for the creation of scientific and financial value. We are the inventors of aptamer technology and the world's most sophisticated developers of these tools. Aptamers can be used in many contexts where antibodies are currently employed, such as other proteomics platforms and a number of use cases in clinical and experimental pathology and all represent revenue-generating opportunities. We have created thousands of these proprietary modified reagents and are currently creating more of them at a pace of approximately 500 new constructs to go on to the SummaScan menu each and every quarter. To facilitate the development of our near-term test product opportunities, we have recently announced our engagement with the European Prospective Investigation for Cancer and Nutrition, or the EPIC Biobank, a cooperative project between Imperial College London, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the World Health Organization. We will begin to analyze what will be a total of 210 million protein measurements from 30,000 samples from this biobank, the world's largest oncologic proteomic study to date, and we'll both use this to develop a suite of planned cancer prediction soma signal tests, as well as share the data back with a consortia for its own scientific use. We will also be assaying the biobank specimens from the multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis, or MESA, a study sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in the NIH. The 105 million protein measurements we create in this process from 15,000 samples spanning 15 clinical years of clinical applications will represent the world's largest proteomic study of an ethnically diverse population. To support our ongoing commercial growth, we are actively recruiting and hiring with great success. We began 2021 with 10, and ended the year with 39 sales field team members, a 290% increase. We also continued to grow our marketing team in support of our commercial expansion. We began 2021 with two marketing team members and ended the year with 17, a 750% increase. We've also added additional members of our commercial team in customer support and product management and intend to end 2022 with a combined total commercial team of roughly 125 employees, as we align our commercial capabilities with a heft of our research and development assets. Great people who are motivated by purpose and want to work for great companies with an aspirational mission, no matter what is going on in the world. Our mission is to leverage the power of the proteome to relieve human suffering and extend meaningful life, and we are unequivocally doing this with great people working toward these ends. 2021 was a transformational year for some logic. We've only begun to fully realize the full commercial potential that comes with 20 years of tireless innovation. And with the people and resources in place, we are incredibly and uniquely well positioned to continue to do so. In that regard, 2022 should be even more remarkable. We will continue to grow our commercial team to support and facilitate the growth of our customer base, as we continue to add new customers to our platform and deepen our relationships with existing customers and collaborators. We will develop the capability to identify and measure 10,000 human proteins, up from the 7,000 we currently measure. We will pursue new partnerships in both life sciences tools and diagnostics, and the latter will include both licensing the existing proprietary soma signal tests and agreements to develop new ones for other customers. We will begin to collect, evaluate, and discuss early study results from our proteomics for precision medicine initiative. We will develop new impactful soma signal tests in several disease areas, but with a focus on tests that can actually predict your biologic risk of developing cancer before you have it, even before early detection technologies such as cell-free DNA can be effective. Our cash position provides an opportunity to evaluate inorganic opportunities which can add to, augment, or synergize with our current capabilities. And we will continue to execute on our current revenue growth plan. I'd like to now turn the call over to Sean to review our current and recent financial performance and our 2022 outlook. Sean?