Omid Farokhzad
Analyst · Dan Brennan of Cowen. Your line is open
Thanks, Carrie, and thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. Let me start by thanking our team for the huge strides we made in 2022 and for their ongoing commitment focus on hard work to support our growing customer base. I will begin our call today with a review of our accomplishments and performance over the past year, and then I’ll share our core focus areas to drive growth in 2023 and beyond. Then I will turn the call over to David to provide more details on our financial results and revenue outlook for 2023. This was the foundational year for Seer as we pushed the boundaries of what is possible to provide access to large scale deep unbiased proteomics. We made important strides during our first year of broad commercial release at a Proteograph Product Suite. We shipped 22 instruments and more than doubled the number of instruments compared to 2021, bringing our cumulative instrument shipped to 39 as of December 31, 2022. We established our Centers of Excellence program to accelerate the adoption of unbiased deep proteomic at scale by enabling access to the Proteograph Product Suite through providers across North America, Europe, and Asia. We continued to broaden our intellectual property portfolio and ended the year with more than 125 patents issued and pending, representing approximately 7,500 claims. This culminated in $15.5 million of revenue in 2022 more than doubling our 2021 revenue of $6.6 million with a growth rate of 134%. And importantly, we remain well capitalized with approximately $426 million on our balance sheet and no debt outstanding. I’m confident our balance sheet will fuel our growth to become the definitive tools leader in proteomics, while we operate the lean and efficient organization over the coming years. Seer has the most differentiated technology to change the trajectory of proteomics. I have never been more bullish about our opportunities than I am today. In 2023, we will continue to execute across our four core focus areas. One, enabling breakthrough discoveries with the Proteograph Product Suite; two, demonstrating the power of our technology; three, catalyzing new applications and markets; and four, expanding our industry-leading team. Starting with our first objective on enabling breakthrough science with the Proteograph Product Suite. We’re excited to see our more established customers ramping their use of our technology with an increasing interest in larger studies ranging from hundreds to thousands of samples and achieving an unprecedented depth of coverage at a scale that was impossible just two years ago. In fact, in January, one of our multi-omic liquid biopsy customers, PrognomiQ announced early results from what they believe to be the largest deep multi-omic study to date. This study demonstrated the power of diverse molecular biomarkers to improve the sensitivity and specificity in the early detection of cancers across 1,031 subjects comprised of 371 cancer and 670 non-cancer samples. It combined deep unbiased proteomics data generating using the Proteograph Product Suite with metabolomics, lipidomics, fragmentomics, methylation and transcriptomics to drive a first of its kind large-scale multi-omic study. They’re expecting to present their data at upcoming conferences in the first half of the year. The success of this study in identifying multi-omics markers that differentiate between cancer and controls catalyzed the launch of a 15,000 subject perspective clinical program, which has already enrolled its first patient. Prior to the launch of the Proteograph Product Suite, the largest deep unbiased plasma proteomic study was just 48 samples. Now, we know of multiple studies of thousand or more samples that have been run using the Proteograph. This progress shows how far we have come in just two short years of commercial availability of this product. We believe the existing completed thousand plus subject studies and PrognomiQ’s planned 15,000 subject study has major implications on the field representing a series of step function change in deep unbiased proteomics and what has become possible for the future of deep multi-omic studies. Another example of novel biological insights drive from the Proteograph comes from Dr. Jon Brudvig, an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of South Dakota; Stanford School of Medicine, and a member of the Pediatrics and Rare Disease Group at Stanford Research, Dr. Brudvig is working to develop a better understanding of Batten disease and develop novel therapeutic strategies. Batten disease is a family of rare lysosomal disorders caused by mutations in one of at least 13 genes, which encode a diverse set of lysosomal and extralysosomal proteins. There are a variety of gene mutations, signs and symptoms that range in severity and progress, including progressive vision loss, leading to blindness, seizure, moving disorders and dementia. Despite decades of research, the development of effective therapies has remained intractable. For some slow processing disease like CLN3, Batten, small animal models, fully recapitulate patient phenotypes required the focus on large animal models. Unfortunately, immunodepletion is simply not feasible for plasma samples, creating a substantial barrier through the interrogation into proteomics for biomarker discovery.
,: We believe that deep unbiased proteomic at scale enabled by the Proteograph Product Suite is necessary to sufficiently access and catalog the proteome, which is vastly more complex than the genome. As this content is cataloged and functionally characterized relative to the genome, novel insights will be generated. These novel insights will fuel clinical applications and create new clinical utility for both genomics and proteomics biomarkers. Customer driven exemplification and data are essential in developing the market. We believe that as more third-party data enters the public domain, the differentiated value proposition of the Proteograph and the novel insights it provides will become more established, accelerating the next-generation of multi-omic studies. We have seen a growing validation of our technology with 19 poster presentations from customers to date. There’s also a steady stream of scientific content coming from Seer including over 100 presentations, posters at conferences and events, and three published high impact papers with a fourth paper accepted and impressed demonstrating the unique performance of our proprietary engineered nanoparticles. We’re seeing increasing interest from genomics researchers who want to access proteogenomic content and are excited about having unbiased access to the proteome so that they can discover novel protein variants and deepen their multi-omic insights to get closer to the phenotype. We’re aware of multiple manuscripts that have been submitted or in the process of being submitted in early 2023 for peer review. I’m excited to be able to share more in the coming months as these submissions run through the peer review process, which of course takes time. In the interim, we will continue to collaborate with our customers to take advantage of opportunities for them to share preliminary data conferences and events as they move from study to analysis and author their manuscripts. Now, turning our attention to our second objective. We’re demonstrating the power of the Proteograph Product Suite as we drive towards the next set of innovations to further extend the capabilities of the technology. In 2022, we published two seminal papers demonstrating the power of nano-bio interactions for deep unbiased access to the proteome that is enabled by our proprietary engineered nanoparticles. These papers demonstrated superior performance of our technology for deep unbiased precise, and scalable proteomics. Our disruptive technologies also being recognized across our industry. Last year, the Proteograph Product Suite was ranked among the Top 10 Innovation for 2022 by The Scientist, and we received the Science and Technology Award from the Human Proteome Organization. We are executing against our product roadmap building on what is already a disruptive product that includes innovations in nanoparticles workflow and analysis. Last August, we released the Proteograph Analysis Suite, PAS 2.0, a proteogenomic workflow that allows for streamlined data analysis of protein variants to genomic variants and paves the way for more genomic labs to leverage unbiased deep proteomics at scale. We have been receiving extremely positive feedback from customers on their ability to easily connect genomic data to proteomic data and assess peptide level disease association. We plan to continue to expand our software and later roadmap for population scale deep proteomic studies. We will introduce multiple tools, feature sets, and workflow for larger study and data sets into our Proteograph Analysis Suite releases in 2023. We also place our next product in the hands of early access customers in late 2022, and we expect to make it broadly available later this year. We have completed testing with multiple sites and are getting positive feedback on the workflow and its new features. The proteome is highly complex with millions of protein variants. This is underscored by a 454,000 subject study published by UK Biobank in Nature, describing over 9 million potential protein variants of which more than 6 million are potentially deleterious across their cohort. On an individual basis, each participant had an average of 9,500 protein variants of which 2,900 what potentially deleterious. Importantly, this does not account for protein variants that are generated because of post-translational modifications or RNA processing to produce protein splice forms. If you add these in, then it significantly increases the number of protein variants, and this is exactly why our technology is important. In a paper accepted and currently in press for publications, we highlight the importance of generating data at the peptide level using the Proteograph Product Suite to allow for the identification of splice form arising from the same gene locus. Our study found that the four known isoform of BMP1 exhibit differential abundance in cases of lung cancer and controls. The single short splice form of BMP1 is more abundant in cancer cases while the three lung splice form of BMP1 are more abundant in controls. It is important to note that affinity based approaches inherently cannot differentiate between splice forms. This peer review manuscript will be published over the coming weeks and the preprint is available currently on bio-archive. Turning to our third objective, catalyzing new applications and markets. We’re continuing to drive progress with our partnerships and expand the applications that can be performed with the Proteograph such as model organisms, animal health, and different bio fluids. At the beginning of 2022, we form the Proteogenomic Consortium with our partners at Discovery Life Sciences and SCIEX, empowering genomics researchers to add deep unbiased proteomic analysis to the large skilled discovery translational and clinical studies at an unprecedented resolution. Discovery Life Sciences has now launched the world-class proteomic services division with a new facility in the Boston area, creating a leading provider for large scale population studies biobank characterization and multi-omic biomarker analysis to support drug and diagnostic development. They’re up and running with multiple Proteograph and mass specs and are ready to receive customer samples. We look forward to continuing to partner with them to co-promote the Proteograph and expand access to new customers as they scaled their business in 2023. Market development is a key part of our focus as we demonstrate the differentiated value of deep unbiased proteomic at scale spanning from discovery to clinical utility enabled by the Proteograph Product Suite. Affinity-based approaches are effective when a known target and a specific epitope measurement is desired and best utilized in low-plex configuration for specific applications, but cannot cover the vast complex here to proteome. Their analogous to microarrays in genomics we’re a specific DNA fragment is used in a targeted or biased manner to confirm the presence of a specific mutation or a single nucleotide polymorphism. The huge gap in the market remains access to the content that reaches the depth and complexity of the proteomics. This content will expand existing end markets and create entirely new end markets and is uniquely enabled by unbiased approaches at scale. We saw a similar end market expansion play out in the genomic space as well with the growing genomics content over the past 15 years. Through our market development efforts, we’re gaining traction with key opinion leaders and expanding our Scientific Advisory Board. We’ve also opened an in-house application lab that is purely focused on expanding the methods and sample types that can be used with the Proteograph. For example, one of the first projects for this lab in 2022 was to assess lower volume sample inputs to enable smaller organism work. We found that starting sample volumes less than 250 microliter still allows higher coverage of low abundant proteins compared to the direct digest workflows. We explored volumes as low as 10 microliter of starting sample while still delivering 68% of the protein coverage with our standard volume, and importantly, we get this coverage across the entire dynamic range. This provides a superior performance method to those looking to study model organisms on smaller size such as mouse. The Proteograph has also been demonstrated in a wide variety of organisms, including plants feline, bovine, canine, and baboon to name a few. The Proteograph is the only commercially available system that can be utilized across species in a decentralized manner. As we mentioned on our last earning call, we recently hosted a joint webinar with Evotec to discuss their data with different human bio fluids using our technology. This webinar highlighted how the Proteograph Product Suite was able to uncover thousands of previously undetectable proteins. During the presentation, Evotec highlighted how the Proteograph enabled unique insight into different sample types including human serum, plasma, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, and cell secret home. This webinar was well attended and generated significant interest. The recording is available on our website. Our technology is inherently extensible. It is species agnostic and is able to analyze biofluids beyond plasma and serum. As we gain momentum in the market, expand the use cases for our technology and pave the way for more adoption of the Proteograph our customer base is growing to spend academic research, translational, commercial, pharma, CROs and even applied markets. Interestingly, we are seeing these customers working across a broad range of applications from cataloging protein variants to proteogenomics, from target identification to multi-omics for complex disease and from biomarker discovery to early disease detection. We are very much at the onset of this journey and I’m excited to see what our customers do next. And finally, we continue to build an industry-leading team as we recruit top talent and expand our global capabilities to support our growing install base. We ended the year with more than 160 employees with most additions in the last year to the commercial organization. Looking ahead, we will continue to drive execution against our core focus areas, enabling breakthrough discoveries with the Proteograph Product Suite demonstrating its power, catalyzing new applications and markets, and continuing to build an industry-leading team. While much work remains, we’re excited and inspired by the opportunity in front of us. I truly believe that we have the technology, the team, and the strategy to bring the next phase in omics to the labs globally. With that, I will now turn the call over to David.