SomaLogic, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SomaLogic's first quarter 2022 earnings conference 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 will need to press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you require any further assistance, please press star then zero. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Marissa Beisch. Ma'am, please begin.

Thank you. Today, Somalogic released financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2022. 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 provisions 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, expectations for hiring, and growth in our organization are based upon 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 Florence MQ filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission excuse me, Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2022. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, May 12, 2022. Somalogic disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise 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 Smyth, Chief Executive Officer.

Good afternoon and welcome everyone to our 2022 First Quarter Earnings Call. I'd like to start off by expressing my sincere gratitude for all who are contributing to our success here at Somalogic as we work every day to relieve human suffering and prolong meaningful life by harnessing and applying the power of the human premium. We're extremely pleased with the progress we've made in the first quarter of this year as we have advanced several meaningful scientific and customer-facing initiatives. We drove record first quarter revenue for the company of $23 million, reflecting 21.8% year-over-year growth as we continue to serve a growing list of customers across basic research and biopharma. This is a year of focused execution at Semologic to drive growth across all aspects of our business. and we have great momentum. This first quarter kicks off what will be another truly transformational year for our company as we leverage our capital position to systematically put the building blocks in place to continue to differentiate ourselves and substantially grow our ability to generate both human and financial value. As a reminder, we have a healthy balance sheet with over $645 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. This is especially important in the current market environment, allowing our team to stay focused as we continue growing and scaling our core operations and investing in areas of our business that should result in high returns. To be absolutely clear, Somalogic approach, platform, and business model are different. Our platform includes our unique proprietary proteomics technology we market as Somascan, our database, and our bespoke bioinformatics capabilities. Our foundational technology, Somascan, leverages proprietary flexible synthetic nucleic acid reagents to currently identify and measure approximately 7,000 proteins, which is two times what any other platform can measure at commercial scale. Our world's largest commercial proteomics database contains more than 2.5 billion protein measurements and over 15 million clinical data points. and our bioinformatics platform includes bespoke tools and capabilities built over a decade. This platform powers our life sciences tools business and our ability to develop applications from data only our platform can produce, including first-in-class HyPlex proteomics soma signal diagnostic tests across a large spectrum of use cases. In all respects, we have traveled further and faster down the evolutionary path of proteomics than any other enterprise. the largest protein measurement identification offering, and the most sophisticated and impactful diagnostics products and pipelines. These distinct advantages, capabilities, and proprietary tools offer us a substantial first mover advantage and a large number of near and longer term opportunities which we expect to significantly contribute diversifying and growing our sources of top line revenue. and to substantially expand our share of the rapidly growing proteomics total addressable market, estimated to grow as much as 10 times over the next several years. Our team's efforts to realize the full potential of our technology and platform has led to several exciting developments in the first quarter of 2022. To start the year, we announced a co-exclusive partnership with Illumina, effectively combining genomics and proteomics to empower and enable the future of multiomics research. The partnership combines the power and scale of Illumina's global commercial infrastructure and install base with our proteomics platform to develop a co-exclusive, co-branded, next-generation sequencing-based deployed proteomics kit product. While this partnership accelerates our next-generation sequencing-based capabilities, over time we will develop a variety of protein measurement solutions on several different platforms. including next-generation sequencing, but also arrays and emerging chip-based approaches to best meet the needs of all customers and collaborators, regardless of their technology costs or throughput needs and preferences. Later in the quarter, in support of our ongoing efforts to build our database and harness the power of the proteome to create and validate impeccable diagnostics, we announced partnerships with two large biobanks, In February, as a part of the multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis, or MESA, a study sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, we will create 105 million protein measurements from 15,000 samples spanning 15 years of clinical interactions representing the largest proteomic study of an ethnically diverse population, an important contribution as we work to help solve the problem of global health inequity. More recently, we announced our engagement with the European Prospective Investigation for Cancer and Nutrition, or EPIC Biobank, a cooperative project between the Imperial College London, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the World Health Organization. We've begun to analyze what will be a total of 210 million protein measurements from 30,000 samples from this biobank, and this will be the world's largest oncologic proteomic study to date. We'll use this to both develop a suite of planned cancer prediction tests, tests that identify your biological risk of developing cancer before it actually occurs, as well as share the data back with a consortia for its own scientific use. These investments are emblematic of Somalogic's commitment to leveraging protein information to power new products, solutions, and services for our customers, such as impactful diagnostic applications. This is something we have remained firmly committed to, and our repeated track record of investment followed by innovative, successful development clearly validates that. In mid-April, we published a landmark study in the Journal of Science in Translational Medicine describing the development and validation of our unprecedented clinical residual cardiovascular risk test. Using the SomaScan platform, Our team created a 27-protein clinical test derived from more than 30,000 clinical annotated human samples. This product accurately predicts the four-year likelihood of significant clinical events such as myocardial infarction or heart attack in patients at risk for cardiovascular disease. As it actually outperforms current clinical approaches and was reliably sensitive to longitudinal changes in risks from multiple mechanisms, including lifestyle changes in various classes of drug, This is paradigm changing. The ability to accurately predict these events and sensitivity to change means key requirements for a surrogate endpoint for clinical trials use, as the editorial comments from Science Translational Medicine, the company of the paper, suggested. No single known cardiovascular biomarker can currently predict heart disease in this manner. This SOMA signal test is now available for clinical use under a laboratory-developed test designation, or LDT, and is in the hands of our proteomics for precision medicine partners around the country. Stay tuned for preliminary findings from this initiative later this year. Looking ahead, we continue to invest in our technology to further expand our life sciences tools business. We currently offer many of over 7,000 proteins to our core SomaScan product with the intention to reach 10,000 available protein identification and measurement aptamer reagents by the end of 2022. As a reminder, we are the inventors of this technology and the world's most sophisticated developers of these aptamer tools. We have created thousands of these proprietary modified reagents and are constantly creating more of them at a current pace of approximately 500 new aptamer constructs each quarter to go on to the SomaScan menu. Beyond growing the number of proteins we can measure and identify with SomaScan, our team continues to find other innovative ways to better serve our life sciences customers and collaborators. We have long known that differences in collection, handling, and storage of samples prior to SomaScan assay or any other way of measuring and identifying proteins can affect customer results. As part of our commitment to ongoing innovation and leveraging our machine learning capabilities, we will soon launch a new product to accompany SomaScan results that identifies pre-analytical variation in proteomics samples, and therefore will improve the accuracy and reliability of customer insights. As we have discussed, as a complement to our core assay services, we've also developed kitted, deployed side-of-service products, which are currently in early access with selected customers. We intend to move to open access later this year, which in addition to our deal with Illumina, continues to effectively expand the modalities by which our customers may access our extensive menu. Over the past 10 years, we have invested approximately $70 million to develop our diagnostic test development capabilities, and this has allowed us to create and internally validate more than 20 SonaSignal tests. Many of these tests are currently in the hands of clinicians around the country and world for their use and evaluation, and there are many more to come. We are growing our pipeline and expect to end this year with as many as 10 additional impactful protein pattern recognition tests as a result of our internal development program. Our current database has the potential to produce approximately 80 to 100 of these tests over time. In an effort to reach the market sooner, however, and build a substantial moat for our clinical products, we intend to accelerate our clinical diagnostics business by both licensing and new test development agreements. For licensing agreements, we will leverage the many existing diagnostic assets we have already developed, and for development customers, we will work to either leverage our database or samples and data they provide to us to develop new products of interest. While our current tests are LDT CLIA approved, we will bring some of these tests through regulatory processes for broader dissemination. For the world's most extensive background in identifying and measuring proteins, as well as analyzing and interpreting the data acquired from doing so, we are scientific leaders in the proteomics space. We have powered the publication of more than 500 proteomics research manuscripts to date, And this is accelerating, with more than 40 published in the last quarter alone. Many of these, such as our recent publication in Science and Translation Medicine, are landmark studies in human proteomics, rather than just method citations. I could not be more proud of these contributions, because these are contributions that will extend well beyond our own efforts. And finally, we continue to successfully grow our commercial team to reach new customers and support the adoption of existing customers. As a reminder, we ended the year with roughly 60 commercial team members with the intention of more than doubling this group size by year-end 2022. We've supported over 400 customers on our platform and continue to grow and diversify our revenue base. In conclusion, we are clearly making measurable progress against our organizational goals and effectively balancing near-term growth drivers with longer-term significant opportunities to continue to differentiate our business on a number of levels. I'd now like to turn the call over to Sean to review our reach and financial performance in our 2022 outlook. Sean?