Christopher Hall
Analyst · Morgan Stanley
Thank you, Aaron. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm very proud of our team at Personalis as we continue to fight cancer with our noble technologies. For those of you joining one of our calls for the first time, welcome. Personalis is one of the leaders in the fast-growing MRD testing market. MRD stands for minimal residual disease. With our first-of-its-kind ultrasensitive MRD test, we're able to spot cancer when it's only one fragment of tumor DNA circulating in 1 million DNA fragments in the blood. Our technologies are used by many of the world's top biopharma companies to improve clinical trial results by new ways to personalize treatment and power a new generation of more effective therapies. Last quarter, we laid out a strategy to drive Personalis to $100 million in revenue in 2025. This aspirational milestone with 3 underlying growth engine is our large star as we are accelerating Personalis into a higher growth mode. In the first quarter, we achieved revenue of $19.5 million, exceeding the upper end of our guidance of $18 million to $19 million. Our biopharma business grew 55% compared to the first quarter of 2023, driven by strong demand for our core ImmunoID platform to support the individualized neoantigen therapy market as well as increasing demand for our MRD product mix personal. With this increased demand, we have the confidence to increase our full year revenue guidance to $76 million to $78 million from $73 million to $75 million. I'll now review progress this quarter on the 3 growth engines driving us towards our $100 million in 2025 goal and our progress on each. The first growth engine is the most important as we focus on turning Personalis into a clinical diagnostic powerhouse. In order to do that, we're executing on our win and MRD strategy. The MRD market involves using liquid biopsy to find evidence of minimal residual disease or cancer recurrence and subsequently monitoring therapy effectiveness. It's estimated that this market will mature into a $20 billion opportunity over the coming years, and we are establishing Personalis as a leader in the space. Our win and MRD strategy has 4 pillars. First, to focus and launch our tests in cancer types where an ultrasensitive liquid biopsy test and unlock significant value for patients, payers and partners; second, to drive reimbursement by developing robust clinical evidence and partnering with the top global collaborators; third, leverage our deep relationships to accelerate adoption by biopharma partners empower our revenue growth by the use of next personal and clinical trials. And lastly, to commercialize next personal with a partner-centric model. To delve into the first pillar, we previously explained how we're developing evidence to support NeXT Personal's clinical usage and reimbursement in early-stage lung cancer, breast cancer and immunotherapy monitoring. We believe our ultrasensitive technology allows us to see cancer earlier, which may provide the information to deescalate patients from unnecessary to necessary therapies and procedures potentially sparing patients from toxicity and saving health care dollars. This is importantly, we believe we can identify and get recurrent patients to treatment earlier with potentially better outcomes. Our focus on these indications is intentional, and our data has demonstrated that NeXT Personal can win in these markets. To elaborate a bit on our approach, early-stage lung cancer and breast cancer shed very little DNA into the blood, which are difficult to detect without an ultrasensitive approach. Early detection is critical in these indications. For patients on I/O therapy, we believe the potential decision to switch treatment requires the insights for monitoring that are provided by ultrasensitive tests. Now, you might recall that last October, we launched our MRD test NeXT Personal. And today, we are enrolling physicians in an early access program, or EAP. We are the first ultrasensitive MRD test to commercially enter the market. And with that launch, we now have 2 laboratory developed tests for LDTs on the market, the other being our Medicare reimbursed test NeXT Dx, which is used by physicians to put a patient on targeted therapy. The adoption of these tests has been ramping and is exceeding our initial target. We delivered 338 clinical tests in the first quarter, a solid uptick from the 126 results delivered in the fourth quarter of last year. We're pleased with this traction as the number of physicians that were ordering in Q1 remain fixed to 10 through the quarter. There are 2 key metrics that I want to talk about and dive into. First, all 10 of our early access positions are ordering an uptick has been strong across the entire cohort. The second metric involves the actionability of our next personal MRD test for the clinic. If you remember, we report circulating tumor DNA in the blood down to 1 part per million, which means if there is just one fragment of tumor DNA circulated and 1 million DNA fragments in the blood, we expect to see and quantify it. This is a lead forward for the field. The extra sensitivity we report on with our NeXT Personal assay, which are values between 10 and 100 parts per million, a mask a region that has previously been hard to see consistently. We call that region the ultrasensitive MRD range. Inter NeXT Personal clinicians could not routinely detect cancer recurrence at that level and today, they can. About 40% of the ctDNA positive samples thus far in our clinical testing have been in this ultrasensitive range. That's a significant jump in the performance of MRD testing and means that physicians can see cancer recurrence earlier, have more discrimination in monitoring therapy and have more confidence that ctDNA patients that are negative are likely cancer free. Indeed, we've had many antidotes relayed from our 10 early access doctors that the ultrasensitive range is allowing them to see cancer earlier with their patients and intervening to get them the management they need. We believe it is the ultrasensitive range that allows the doctor to see cancer sooner, and seeing it sooner is the cornerstone of our win in MRD strategy. Now, moving to the second pillar. We're focused on building and publishing clinical evidence to gain reimbursement and are working with many of the top thought leaders in the world. In previous calls, we've talked about the importance of our work with Royal Marsden in breast cancer and BHIO and immunotherapy monitoring. Both of these collaborators have provided access to studies that are broad and comprehensive. In the case of Royal Marsden, one of the leading global institutions in breast cancer, we're focusing on patients with early-stage disease for several subtypes, including ER positive, HER2 positive and triple-negative breast cancer. For BHIO, the work is pan-cancer across many cancer types and stages. These studies are anchor studies and that they will be the backbone of our efforts to gain Medicare reimbursement. Royal Marsden for early-stage breast cancer and BHIO for immunotherapy monitoring. We're excited that at the upcoming ASCO conference, the work with both of these collaborators will be featured as oral podium presentations. We also have 3 other studies featured at ASCO, one with Dana Pharma on HER2-positive patients and other with Duke immunotherapy monitoring for gastric patients and lastly, 1 in colorectal cancer patients. Having this brands of data should underscore our commitment of Personalis to developing rich data to support the use of NeXT Personal in the clinic and to gain reimbursement quickly. At the AACR conference in April, some compelling data was presented. Our collaborators from the U.K. gave an oral podium presentation on late-stage melanoma patients where they use NeXT Personal to monitor and detect immunotherapy response, highlighting the importance of detection of ctDNA in the ultrasensitive range. In addition, our work in collaboration with AstraZeneca on the Matrix study was presented. The Matrix abstract show NeXT Personal achieved very strong sensitivity and specificity on blinded test samples provided by AZ down to the lowest levels at 2 parts per million. Subsequently, we were selected as a partner by AstraZeneca for MRD testing in their upcoming trials. We've also presented data from collaborators with a personalized cancer vaccine company and our analytical validation data for NeXT Personal that was recently published was also at the AACR conference. The third pillar of our next personal strategy is to leverage our biopharma relationships to drive the use of NeXT Personal and clinical trials. We're engaged with most of the world's top biopharma companies and have continued to generate excitement around our NeXT Personal test, most recently from discussions at AACR. Customers want and need an ultrasensitive approach to ensure that the most appropriate patients enter into a clinical trial. For example, we believe that our ultrasensitive assay means that patients testing negative are much less likely to have a recurrence. Our biopharma customers can then expect that these patients are less likely to benefit from a therapeutic intervention, holding out the promise that NeXT Personal could be an excellent approach to optimize biopharma trials. Indeed, here in the first quarter, we booked record new orders for NeXT Personal. The product helped to drive our strong Q1 financial performance, and we believe it will be a driver of revenue moving forward an important way for us to deepen the clinical utility of NeXT Personal. Now, I'll move on to the fourth and final pillar, commercializing NeXT Personal using a partner-centric model. In December, we announced our key partnership with Tempus to commercialize NeXT Personal Dx, the NeXT Personal in the clinic with oncologists. To quickly review, we expect to leverage Tempus at activities up to approximately 200-person sales channel to co-commercialize NeXT Personal and accelerate growth. Personalis will be responsible for processing samples in our lab, obtaining reimbursement and invoicing health insurance payers and patients under the arrangement while paying Tempus fair market value for the commercial services they provide to us. Overall, the deal is worth approximately $30 million for Personalis should all the milestone payments be triggered and at Tempus fully exercised their warrants. We expect this to allow us to ramp up commercial efforts quickly with minimal additional cash investments. We plan to launch with Tempus this quarter by expanding our early access program to include some of Tempus' clients. The goal is to learn how to work together as partners, integrating our business systems, refining our message to oncologists, so we're set to drive accelerated growth together on the backside of reimbursement approval. Now, while we've made strides with our first growth engine, our win and MRD strategy to establish NeXT Personal as a leading MRD test. We also made progress with our second growth engine, leveraging our ImmunoID NeXT platform to deepen relationships with biopharma customers who use the offering to pioneer new therapies. Our biopharma segment grew 55% year-over-year, and we had solid performance across our product portfolio. Customers primarily use our ImmunoID next platform in 2 ways. First, they use our platforms to power translational research and find new biomarkers and new insights that can power their drug discovery efforts. Second, companies in the personalized cancer vaccine market use our platform to create a molecular fingerprint of a patient's tumor to power personalized therapy. We previously told you about our partnership with Moderna in which Moderna is utilizing our platform and their mRNA cancer program. Moderna and its partner, Merck, are enrolling patients and our collaboration with Morderna's important driver of revenue for us in 2024 and 2025. We have several other partners that work in this space as well. Third engine of our growth strategy is growing our personality and side approach as we service enterprise customers. In these relationships, partners adopt our platforms and technologies to power their solutions to provide new insights to their customers. Our work with Natera involves leveraging our sequencing platform to analyze the exome as a part of their MRD product. We believe our relationship is strong and mutually beneficial and are optimistic that it will extend into 2025. The second important enterprise relationship with the VA. The VA utilizes our whole genome sequencing capabilities to power the million better program, a national research program looking at how gene to lifestyle affect the health of veterans. We've helped power this program with the VA for years. Most of these relationships are examples, how our platforms drive value for partners and importantly, provide sequencing scale for personals. Now, before I turn it over to Aaron to go deeper on the financials, I have a few exciting corporate updates. First, we continue to innovate and deepen our strong intellectual property position. We had 2 new patterns recently issued by the U.S. PTO. In fact, one just yesterday relating to the use of 2 of our core technologies, tumor-informed personalized assays in the first pattern and boosted exome panels in the second pattern, each to inform cancer vaccine treatments. This latest pattern is the fourth U.S. pattern to issue in 2024, and today, our number of issued U.S. patterns is over 30. We believe we have a deep set of IP protecting our pioneering work on both MRD and PCV. We are engaged in litigation with Foresight Diagnostics to enforce and protect some of our IP relating to MRD. As often the case, there'll be ups and downs along the way in that journey. However, we are confident we're set up for long-term success to establish an industry-leading position around the use of whole genome sequencing for MRD and are optimistic about the path forward. And second, we crossed 2 milestones this quarter. We processed our 400,000 samples since our company's inception. And importantly, we completed our 175,000 whole genome sequencing sample. Whole genome is the foundation of our NeXT Personal MRD test and these milestones underline both our sequencing scale and unique operational capabilities. With that, I will now turn it over to Aaron to review our financial results.