Brandon Perthuis
Analyst · Credit Suisse. Your line is now open
Thanks, Ming. Before I dive into the updates on our go-to-market strategy, I'd like to take a minute to briefly introduce myself to those of you who I may not have met. I joined Fulgent in mid-2017 after spending 10 years at Baylor College of Medicine, and Baylor Genetics in Houston, Texas, and I've been overseeing the commercial activities and sales organization at Fulgent for the last two and a half years. During my time at Fulgent, I've come to understand how our technology and approach truly set us apart from other laboratories in the market. Specifically, the Fulgent Laboratory Information Management System, or FLIMS for short, serves as the engine that drives many of our efficiencies. These include proprietary pipelines and alignment tools to tackle the difficult areas of a genome, such as pseudo gene. FLIMS reduces labor time for curation and sign-out using computer learning and suppression algorithms to help our scientists get to the answer faster, with less need for confirmatory studies. Our technology platform also allows us to be the only lab that enables our physician clients to customize genetic tests in real-time. We also recently became the first lab to routinely use next-generation sequencing for parental studies, which we have shown to be critically important in detecting clinically relevant germline mosaicism; this was recently published in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. Finally, our technology platform serves as the engine for rapid product development in R&D, which allowed Fulgent to maintain one of the largest test menus in the industry. On the go-to-market front, we've been focused on expanding our test menu, improving reports with robust clinical content, improving turnaround times, securing in-network status with the payers, and expanding our global sales organization to capture share in markets where we see opportunity for growth. Specifically, we have made key international hires to better support existing clients and penetrate those markets. At the time of our IPO in 2016, Fulgent was a rare disease company; today, we are comprehensive lab offering testing that spans all areas of genetic health, including prenatal, preimplantation, reproductive carrier screening, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease, and both, hereditary and somatic cancer. We are excited to see the new opportunities are expanded to you as created. And finally, we've talked a lot about partnerships in the past with organizations such as the Parkinson's Foundation and Columbia University; these types of partnerships remain a key part of our growth strategy going forward and we intend to continue to build deep relationships with clients around our technology and services. These types of relationships include biopharma laboratories and contract research organizations. I am excited to take on the opportunities that come with my new role as Chief Commercial Officer, and I look forward to continuing to contributing to the future growth of our business. I'll now turn the call over to Paul to provide the details on our financial performance in the fourth quarter. He'll also introduce our financial outlook for the full year 2020. Paul?