Michael W. Hunkapiller
Analyst · Maxim group
Thanks, Trevin. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased with the second quarter 2014 results and the progress we are making in driving our overall business. Highlights of our second quarter financial results are as follows: We delivered 8 systems during the quarter, and with over 100 systems in our installed base now, we are becoming a well-established player in the sequencing space. Instrument revenue for the second quarter was $4.7 million, up 73% from the prior Q2 estimate revenue of $2.7 million. Consumable revenue for the second quarter was $3.0 million, up 62% from the prior year Q2 consumable revenue of $1.9 million. This is being driven by strong utilization growth on an increasing installed base. We're now averaging over $120,000 in consumable revenue per year per installed system. Total revenue for the second quarter was $11.4 million, up 89% from $6 million in Q2 2013. Year-to-date, our revenues for the first half of 2014 are up 98% from our first half 2013 revenue. On that note, it is clear from a revenue trend that PacBio is continuing to gain commercial traction. Our bookings in Q2 of 5 units were lower than the number in the previous quarter due to some customer logistical and tender delays that can cause our quarterly orders to fluctuate, but our pipeline continues to grow. With our installed base growing and system utilization increasing, our business has never been in better shape. We continue to forecast 70% growth in our revenue this year compared to 2013. Now I would like to provide some highlights from industry conferences we attended since our previous earnings call. At this year's American Society of Microbiology meeting in Boston, there was a very interesting presentation by Dr. Julie Segre from the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH, on hospital-acquired infections. Dr. Segre described a study of patients from the NIH clinical center that were infected by an antibiotic-resistant bacterium called Klebsiella, which she referred to as "the nightmare bug." A total of 18 patients in the hospital were infected by the bacterium in 2011, but it was not clear at the time whether these patients had infected each other or had acquired an infection independently. With this study, Dr. Segre and her team decided that whole genome sequencing could help them build a phylogeny to recreate the history of these Klebsiella cases and determine how transmission was occurring. The project was completed using the PacBio platform because they needed to have high-quality genomic and plasma sequences for the best view of the microbes, which can get their drug resistance from a variety of Plasmids. The team studied samples taken from various patients and used epidemiology skills to build a transition map of the outbreak. Based on genome sequence and Plasmid diversity, the team determined that there were 2 separate infection events. Some transmission cases from the first patient and an independent infection from another patient. They also found horizontal gene transfer from patient to environment, highlighting a path that could explain transmission within the hospital. In her talk, Dr. Segre noted that once sequencing technologies such as PacBio are ready for clinical use, it will be very useful in stopping this kind of outbreak because they can identify clinical infection elements much faster than existing technologies. In June, we attended the 28th Annual European Immunogenetics and Histocompatibility Conference in Stockholm. The European Federation of Immunogenetics, or EFI, hosts this meeting each year, bringing together delegates from around the world to discuss basic and clinical science topics in the area of immunogenetics. At this is year's conference, attended by over 1,100 delegates, HistoGenetics and Anthony Nolan, who are both world leaders in HLA typing, presented their planned approaches for using SMRT sequencing to improve the quality of their HLA typing services. As a reminder, HistoGenetics and Anthony Nolan have both recently purchased multiple PacBio RS II systems, and they are in the process of integrating them into their mainstream service businesses. Dr. Nezih Cereb, CEO and Cofounder of HistoGenetics, described how they have evolved in their use of sequencing technologies for registry typing. HistoGenetics was the first HLA typing service to adopt Sanger sequencing. And until recently, it was the primary method of producing sequence-based typing information. Last year, they incorporated sequence data from aluminum MiSeq systems, and now they're adding PacBio to the workflow to improve the accuracy of their results. This presentation of Dr. Cereb gave examples of how tandem repeat structures in HLA regions were misaligned with MiSeq data. With the full-length sequences from PacBio, these same regions were aligned correctly. For HLA typing, it is critical to find accurate matches for transplant candidates, and therefore, obtaining the highest-quality information for HLA alleles in the registries is paramount. Neema Mayor, from Anthony Nolan Research Institute presented results of one of the experiments performed to validate the use of PacBio for their registry database. This experiment's 7 samples from the U.K., containing commonly seen HLA Class I alleles were sequenced. A total of 42 alleles were identified in these 7 samples, 37 of which were previously characterized and accurately matched the database sequences. The 38th allele first appeared to be an error when compared to the reference but was later validated as correct by cloning a Sanger sequencing, leading to a correction in the registry database. The other 4 discrepant alleles were also validated by cloning and Sanger sequencing and added to the latest build of the IMGT HLA database as new allelic variants by virtue of valid differences in the intronic regions of these genes. This experiment has led Anthony Nolan to conclude that SMRT DNA sequencing enables definitive HLA allele typing to single-sequencing reaction, and allows for simultaneous genotyping as well as new allele discovery. They believe this will ultimately have a considerable impact on matching potential donors and recipients. This past quarter, we also had 2 user group meetings, one in Asia and another on the East Coast U.S. We held our Asian group meeting on the heels of the Plant and Animal Genome, or PAG, Asia Conference in Singapore. At the PAG conference in our user group meeting, a research team at Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory in Singapore presented very impressive data on their sequence of the sea bass genome. As background, the Asian sea bass is an important fish for aquaculture, and therefore, there is great interest in better understanding its genome. The sea bass genome has approximately 700 million bases, or roughly 1/4 of the size of a human genome. Previously, the group at Temasek tried to sequence the sea bass genome with the Illumina HiSeq, augmented with some Sanger sequencing, but the results were not satisfactory to them. So they decided to sequence the genome with PacBio and obtained the following results: the total assembly size was 671 million bases compared to 622 million bases for the Illumina assembly. This suggests that at least roughly 7% of the genome was missing from the Illumina assembly. The number of contigs or pieces after assembly was 5,000 with PacBio compared to 122,000 with Illumina. This is a 24x improvement. The contig N50, which is the proxy for the average length of each contig, was 1.1 million base pairs for the PacBio assembly compared to just 32,000 for the Illumina assembly, which translates to a 33x improvement. The Temasek team is delighted with the high-quality results obtained using PacBio, and they are continuing to refine their assembly. Our East Coast user group meeting is an annual event that has been growing significantly. This year's meeting was held at the University of Maryland, and attendance was up 25% over last year with over 100 participants from various customer sites. There were 9 customer presentations with applications topics ranging from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, expanding reference databases in microbial area, the structural variant analysis and whole genome assembly in the human space. In addition, there were multiple presentations on software tools being developed for speeding up the assembly of large genomes. We also hosted full day bioinformatics training sessions for users interested in taking full advantage of the latest tools available. These training sessions are very popular among our user base with a total of 66 people attending the bioinformatics sessions. Providing efficient, easy-to-use software tools is a significant priority for us to drive further adoption of SMRT sequencing. In a recap of our user group meeting, the trade channel Bio-IT World reported on their observations of PacBio's commercial progress, concluding that, "The ability to sequence genomes and fragments thousands of base periods long has opened up projects that would be monumentally difficult and thought impossible with standard next generation sequencing." Shifting now to publications, we are continuing to see a growing number of customer publications citing SMRT sequencing at a pace that's making it difficult to keep count. One publication appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and worth highlighting came from Dr. Michael Snyder's group at Stanford, entitled Defining a Personal, Allele-specific, and Single-molecule Long-read Transcriptome. As background for the study, the authors described how RNA sequencing with short-read technology is fairly common, but there are significant drawbacks. They go on to say, "Recent work has shown that reconstruction and qualification of transcript isoforms from short-read resequencing is insufficiently accurate." In order to attain what the authors described as a personal transcriptome in which all of the individual's genetic variants and transcript isoforms are defined and quantified for full-length transcripts, they sequenced the transcriptomes of 3 family members -- a child and both parents -- by using a PacBio long-read approach complemented with Illumina's short reads. The PacBio data enabled the researchers to characterize previously unidentified isoforms and to connect variants to RNA haplotypes. By assigning full-length RNA molecules to their transcribed allele, they could determine from which parent the molecule was inherited. Overall, the authors state that, "These results described, to our knowledge, the first large-scale and full-length personal transcriptome." Isoform sequencing with PacBio is still in its infancy, but we're very optimistic about the value it brings as evidenced by the results described in this and other publications. In summary, we are excited to see continuing momentum in several areas. Microbial area is growing in excitement around the study of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This is driving more interest and growth in SMRT sequencing from government agencies, such as the NIH and the CDC. The plant and animal area, we're seeing more de novo sequencing projects as researches have taken note of the success that early customers have had in creating high-quality reference genomes for plants such as spinach and melon. These are projects that have historically been taken on using Sanger sequencing because short-read sequencing technologies have been less effective in creating useful references for these large, complex genomes. With our advances and throughput over the past 2 years, researchers are finding that it is now more economical to approach these projects with PacBio. Many of our core lab and service provider customers have taken on large projects, such as sequencing the rice and cotton genomes. In the human sequencing space, there's growing interest in sequencing clinically relevant genes containing structural variation that is too delicate to sequence with short-read technology. In addition, there is significant momentum building around our solution to HLA typing. Last month, we announced a co-marketing arrangement with GenDx, who provides solutions for amplifying highly polymorphic HLA genes so they can sequence with the PacBio RS II. This is a great solution for customers who do not have their own assays for generating HLA samples. Overall, we are seeing great interest across multiple applications, which is driving growth in our consumables business and building a pipeline for new system sales. Lastly, I would like to note that our collaboration with Roche is going very well. We're expecting to complete our first project milestone with them later this year. This is consistent with the schedule we have set out with Roche when we entered into our agreement in September of last year. That concludes my remarks, and I'll now turn the call over to Susan.