Nautilus Biotechnology, Inc. Q4 FY2022 Earnings Call

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Nautilus Biotechnology Q4 and Full Year 2022 earnings conference call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. And it is now my pleasure to introduce your first speaker today, Alex Conn, Investor Relations of Nautilus Biotechnology. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Earlier today, Nautilus released financial results for the quarter and full year ended December 31, 2022. If you haven't received this news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an e-mail to investorrelations@nautilus.bio. Joining me today from Nautilus are Sujal Patel, Co-Founder and CEO; and Anna Mowry, Chief Financial Officer. Nautilus Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Parag Mallick, will be joining us for Q&A. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled Forward-Looking Statements in the press release of Nautilus issued today. Except as required by law, Nautilus disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial or pipeline projections or other forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events or otherwise. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast, February 23, 2023. With that, I'll turn the call over to Sujal.

Thanks, Alex. Good morning, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. On this call, we'll share our results for the fourth quarter and full year 2022 and provide an update on a range of recent activities. The progress I'll be sharing with you today is due to the extraordinary work of our growing teams in the Bay Area and Seattle and now in San Diego, where we've opened an office in the University Town Center, one of the largest and most talent-rich biotechnology and pharmaceutical hubs in the country. The new office will initially have a focus on instrument engineering, reagent development, software engineering and bioinformatics positions. Eventually, we anticipate some percentage of our commercial team being based there as well. This expansion of the Nautilus geographic footprint reflects our continued progress and focus on short-term development milestones and longer-term commercialization goals. Through these and other efforts, we remain ever motivated by our goal to revolutionize Proteomics in the name of improving the lives and health of millions of people around the world. Our entire team is motivated by this goal and is fully aligned and committed to doing what it takes to make this goal a reality. When I reflect on 2022, I see it as a year of accomplishment and foundational progress. Progress that will bear fruit as we move through 2023 and towards our plan to launch our proteome analysis platform, instruments and reagents in mid-2024. Here are a few examples. We made solid progress against our core scientific goals in 2022. Our major focus last year was on development activities such as increasing the scale and robustness of our consumables, both reagents and blood cells. This progress goes hand-in-hand with advancing the quality and customer readiness of our offering. Critical to those advances were our efforts to strengthen the core of our R&D leadership team in 2022 with the addition of Sherry Wilcox as VP of Affinity Reagent Development and Ken Kun as VP of Reagent and Platform Development. Ken and Sherry have helped us build out a world-class development team, which will continue to pay dividends in 2023 as we move towards commercialization. 2022 also saw continued focus on advancing our commercial instrument. The process of taking an instrument from concept to build to commercial use involves a number of important phases that are closely orchestrated collaborations between diverse teams. I'm pleased with the progress I saw last year in this regard. Throughout the entire R&D organization, we continue to successfully transition to a manufacturing posture across all elements of the platform as we build towards commercial availability. That work continues and will accelerate in 2023. Early in 2022, we sought to augment our internal probe development efforts with external partnerships. When it became clear that some of those partnerships were underperforming compared to the volume and quality of probes we were seeing from our own internal efforts, we made the decision to put our resources where they would yield results in the most capital-efficient manner. Our internal affinity reagent development pipeline continues to proceed well. Data we shared at conferences throughout last year demonstrated that our internal teams are able to generate probes that are extremely strong binders across a range of short epitope targets. These wide-ranging transitions and improvements, coupled with advances in our on-platform workflow, have allowed us to radically increase our experimental scale. Our internal target for 2022 was to be able to execute on experiments up to 75 cycles. We've not only demonstrated experiments of this scale, but we are now routinely performing experiments at this scale. The progress achieved throughout 2022 enabled us to present six posters at the HUPO World Congress in early December, covering all aspects of our platform, ranging from affinity reagent development to our single molecule deposition approach. One of these posters demonstrated decoding of a model protein from an experiment of 24 multi-affinity probes across 70 cycles. This data demonstrated the full end-to-end integration of our experimental and computational workflows. These were exciting results that continue to expand confidence in our science, and we look forward to building on these results in 2023. Also in 2022, we nearly doubled our patent portfolio to over 40 pending patent families filed in the U.S. and abroad with a total of 11 granted U.S. patents thus far. In 2023 and going forward, our IP strategy will remain global in reach as we seek protection in the U.S. and in foreign markets where we expect to commercialize our platform. These and many other accomplishments in 2022 make me excited for our future. While we recognize that much work remains to be done, I'm firm in my belief that these and other foundational efforts will continue to pay off in 2023 and beyond. An important part of revolutionizing Proteomics is inspiring others to join us on this journey. And it was with that goal in mind that we announced in Q4, what we're calling the Nautilus First Access Challenge, a contest designed to enable researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines to uncover new biological insights and explore new areas of the proteome at massive scale. The response from researchers across the globe has been incredibly rewarding. It has unlocked the type of creativity we hope to see when we offered them the chance to explore their samples, unbounded by the inherent limitations of both traditional methods and of emerging affinity-based and peptide sequencing methods. We're very excited to review the proposals we've received. The deadline for submissions has passed, and we will announce the winners at the U.S. HUPO 2023 Conference in early March. Stay tuned in the very near future for more on the first access challenge and how it has revealed pent-up demand for comprehensive proteome coverage. Our existing collaborations with Genentech, Amgen and MD Anderson also represent partners who are joining us on our journey to revolutionize proteomics. Recently, we announced a new partnership with the Translational Genomics Research Institute to explore the utility of the Nautilus platform by studying specific protein targets in diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, DIPG, a rare and often fatal childhood cancer. The goal of this partnership is to better understand the epigenetic mechanisms at work in DIPG by interrogating the proteoform landscape of specific proteins at a single molecule level. Proteoform is not possible to detect by peptide-based protein analysis methods. Work should kick off early this year, and the expectation is that the team will publish its findings when completed. I'm very excited about the work we'll be doing with TGen and I'm especially excited by the broad set of use cases our collaborators are deploying our platform against. From childhood cancer to neurodegenerative diseases, we are seeing interest from researchers across a wide spectrum of applications and use cases. Our team heard many such use case ideas when we participated as a primary sponsor of the Human Proteome Organizations World Congress in early December. Aside from engaging conversations during our six poster presentations, our booth was buzzing with researchers and principal investigators discussing how our platform could enable them to ask and investigate fundamentally different questions than ever before possible. It was exciting to hear proteomic researchers, many with deep, long-standing ties to mass spectrometry, enthusiastically see the potential of our platform to serve as a valuable complement to their traditional analysis methods. Conversations at HUPO and many others throughout the year, the strong submissions to our first access challenge, and the enthusiastic response of our research partners all serve to strengthen my belief that Nautilus will bring to the market a highly differentiated platform with a wide competitive moat, a platform that delivers an unmatched value proposition to researchers seeking to unlock the extraordinary potential of the proteome. These researchers have expressed over and over again a desire for a single molecule solution, one that overcomes the inherent limitations of both traditional methods and emerging affinity-based and peptide sequencing methods in terms of sensitivity, scale and reproducibility. I'm excited to get our platform into the hands of researchers and assist them as they drive forward their innovative, impactful biological research. As we previously discussed, my management team and I continue to proactively adapt to the gravity of the current financial and economic climate. We are tightly managing our resources to maximize our runway well into 2025 and balancing that with investments that will enable us to drive our scientific progress forward. For more on that, let me hand the call over to Anna for a look at our Q4 and full year 2022 financials. Anna?

Thanks, Sujal. Total operating expenses for the fourth quarter of 2022 were $16.3 million, which was $500,000 less than the fourth quarter of last year. This result is a testament to our diligent focus on controlling our spend. This past year, we continued investing in the business, growing our headcount and making significant progress internally while decreasing our expenses overall. Research and development expenses in the fourth quarter of 2022 were $9.6 million compared to $9.9 million in the prior year. General and administrative expenses were $6.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to $6.9 million in the prior year. Overall, net loss for the fourth quarter of 2022 was $13.4 million compared to $16.7 million in the fourth quarter of last year. Our bottom line was helped by our prudent cash investments in debt securities, resulting in net other income of $2.9 million versus $127,000 in the fourth quarter of last year. We continue to take full advantage of the opportunities created by having a strong cash balance, and generating earnings from our investments is another source of funding we are maximizing. For fiscal year 2022, operating expenses were $63.6 million compared to $50.5 million in 2021. That increase of 26% was driven by growth in personnel costs, along with an increase in expenses tied to our first full year of operating as a public company. Net loss for the full year was $57.9 million compared to $50.3 million in fiscal year 2021, an increase of 15% year-over-year. The net loss includes $5.7 million in net other income compared to $183,000 in fiscal year 2021. Finally, turning to our 2023 guidance. As we have consistently said, we expect to continue to grow our spend but in a conservative, intentional manner. This year, we expect our overall operating expenses to grow by approximately 40% from 2022 levels. However, you can be sure that we will manage our growth in spending tightly to ensure we preserve our ability to invest in the commercial expansion leading up to our platform launch in mid-2024. Our timeline for product launch is unchanged. As we've said previously, we anticipate meaningful early access engagement and associated revenues to begin at the start of 2024. Revenue tied to the platform launch is expected to begin in mid-2024. We ended the year with approximately $314 million in cash, cash equivalents and investments, which represents a trailing 12-month cash burn of approximately $48.5 million. While that cash burn will certainly increase going forward, we continue to anticipate our cash runway extending well into 2025. With that, I'll turn it back to Sujal.

Thanks, Anna. Anna's report clearly demonstrates our unwavering commitment to responsible financial stewardship of this business and using our resources prudently and to our advantage during these challenging times. We're excited about what lies ahead for Nautilus and the difference our platform can make in biological science. Our mission to positively impact the health and lives of people around the world remains our guiding light and the standard to which we hold ourselves. I'm grateful to our team, our investors, our strategic partners and our research collaborators for joining us on this journey to revolutionize proteomics and empower the scientific community in ways never before thought possible. We made good progress in 2022 and look forward to building on those successes as we move through 2023 on our way to a commercial launch and beyond. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator.

Our first question comes from Max Masucci with Cowen and Company.

First one, you exited the year with over $300 million in cash, low cash burn. So with the valuation re-rating in the public and private area to a degree, and with a few small M&A deals recently in the specialty tools space, has your appetite for M&A changed at all recently? And if the answer is yes, what types of assets could potentially advance your development and commercial timelines?

Max, it's Sujal. I'll address your question. You're correct that the M&A environment in the Dx and tools sector, as well as the broader biotech field, has gained momentum. We believe that the product we are developing has a compelling value proposition for our customer base, and we maintain a significant competitive advantage compared to traditional methods and new players in proteomics. However, while I wouldn’t completely rule out M&A, we do not foresee any immediate opportunities in that area, including smaller strategic acquisitions. Our primary focus right now is on utilizing our balance sheet to further develop our platform and enhance our commercial organization. We're always open to technologies that could complement our work, but I don't anticipate any opportunities that would require cash in the near future.

Great. Makes sense. And then just in this market environment, we have increased scrutiny on near-term catalysts and milestones that can be used to track progress. So I guess, bigger picture question, what would you consider the biggest advancement for the company during Q4 or maybe even in the second half of the year? And what should we be keeping on our radar for catalysts and updates in the first half of '23?

Yes, Max, this is Sujal. I'll address the first part of your question and then turn it over to Parag for more details on the biggest highlight from the quarter. If you review Nautilus' scientific conference schedule for 2022, you'll notice that at each conference, we either discussed a manuscript, provided archived content, or delivered a poster presentation or talk. Throughout the year, we progressively shared more data about our platform and conducted increasingly sophisticated experiments. As I mentioned in our prepared remarks, this culminated in a particularly noteworthy experiment in Q4, which I believe stands out as the greatest highlight. We presented this at the World HUPO Congress in December, and now I'll let Parag briefly explain what the poster was about and provide additional insights.

Yes. Please continue.

I would like to begin by saying that 2022 was a remarkable year for our organization. We significantly expanded our development efforts and engaged the scientific community by reaching various milestones, as mentioned by Sujal, and presenting at multiple conferences. The most significant milestone for me was our ability to scale our processes, showing that we can consistently run 70 to 80 cycles regularly with numerous multi-affinity probes created through our in-house pipelines. This achievement highlighted the full end-to-end sample preparation, from instrument analysis to data analysis, demonstrating the capabilities of our platform. To achieve this, we had to enhance the scale of our reagents, ensure the quality of all our consumables, and upgrade our instruments to support operations at that scale. We anticipate that this scale will continue to improve over the coming year, along with the quality of our reagents as we work towards our commercial launch. Sujal?

Thanks, Parag. Max, just to answer the last part of your question regarding what to expect in 2023. Nautilus has had in 2022 and will continue to have in '23, a strategy of bringing the scientific community and our potential partners, collaborators and customers along on the journey as we complete the development of our platform. And so as we move through conferences on the scientific side through 2023, starting with the U.S. HUPO conference in early March, you should expect us to continue to add talks and continue to have poster presentations and manuscripts that continue to show our progress on the scientific front. And I think that that progress will indicate our progression towards that goal of a mid-2024 launch of our instruments, reagents and our system.

Yes. And of course, congrats on the poster at HUPO and the 70-cycle run on a platform. I would be curious to hear any feedback you received at the Annual Congress? I guess, generally, throughout 2022, as you rolled out new manuscripts and posters, how the feedback has sort of evolved among the scientific community?

Yes, that's a great question. We've seen tremendous enthusiasm for the platform. At HUPO, we engaged with a large number of key opinion leaders, discussing their anticipated needs and excitement about the platform, its sensitivity, and scale. This was clearly reflected in the first access challenge, showcasing incredibly creative applications from around the world. Overall, we observed strong engagement at our seminar, with great questions and standing room only, which is indicative of the interest. There were many people sitting along the walls, and it was fantastic to share our journey with the scientific community and receive that kind of feedback.

Our next question comes from Matt Sykes with Goldman Sachs.

Maybe I just want to start on that last question and be a little bit more specific on some of that feedback. Sujal, you mentioned you spoke to a lot of mass spec users. And I'm just curious, as you spoke to them and gathered feedback, what are some of the things that they're excited about on Nautilus relative to what they're doing on mass spec? Is it throughput? Is it depth of analysis? What types of specific feedback you're getting from them that can kind of give you comfort that there is a competitive advantage relative to the mass spec being worked done in proteomics that's going on today?

Matt, this is Sujal. The comments you heard earlier were from Parag, but why don't I start here? And then I'm going to pass it to Parag to give you some more specific feedback from what he heard in December. From a broad perspective, the way that we ensure that our product is going to hit the market correctly is by a constant and wide range of activities that engage with our potential customers. That is one-on-one conversations, voice of the customer studies, pricing studies, engagement at scientific conferences and spending time understanding what applications scientists are interested in and how our technology applies. The first access challenge, of course, underscores that as well because that was an opportunity for them to tell us how our platform would apply to their research. What we hear time and time again is that traditional methods, meaning generally mass spectrometry and then emerging affinity-based and peptide sequencing methods, have challenges in terms of sensitivity, scale and reproducibility. To give you an example, on the sensitivity front, being able to analyze intact protein molecules without having to digest them into peptides gives you a two-log sensitivity advantage right off the top and is critical for this next phase of proteomics that's coming over the course of the next 5 to 10 years. Scale is another significant aspect that customers are focused on. Our platform is being designed with a chip that can mobilize up to 10 billion proteome molecules, leading to the ability to quantify across an extremely wide dynamic range, which is critical when you're in applications like pharmaceutical development, where you are looking at samples. Those would be 100 to 1,000 cells, typical in each of those wells. You need a chip that can analyze those with the greatest step. There are no platforms within many orders of magnitude that are existing today or conceived. Those aspects are what researchers are captivated by. In conversations, customers readily see how our specifications and what we're building would be impactful and differentiated for their biological research. Parag, why don't you provide some specific commentary from the HUPO event?

Thanks, Sujal. I think one of the key aspects as we look at this field is that we find even current mass spec users recognize the need for complementary tools, so that they're really asking the right questions using the right tool. They recognize the key aspects of our platform: comprehensive analysis, sensitivity, dynamic range, reproducibility, runtime, and ease of use are really important factors when they're thinking about their study design. One of the aspects that we've done as well is a series of deep interviews in 2022 with 40 or more key opinion leaders, most of whom are mass spec users. Those design criteria for the platform, the ability to get to a single molecule incredibly sensitively, the ability to look at proteoforms and not having to digest proteins, which allows potential multiple modifications on the same protein molecule, will unlock novel biology.

Great. And then, Anna, just on OpEx, you mentioned the 40% growth in '23. Two things. One, should we think about the R&D versus G&A splits as being kind of similar to what you did in '21 and '22, which was sort of that 60-40-ish split between R&D and G&A? And then secondly, how should we think about the San Diego facility costs coming through assuming that's a lease, just either as a percentage of or just kind of characterize as those costs come through in '23, what that might represent of that growth in OpEx?

Matt, I can definitely speak to that. As you suggest, as you mentioned, the majority of our spending is still definitely going to R&D in 2022. That was at approximately 60%. Given that we're still very much focused on development, I would expect that to continue for most of 2023. Then dollars would shift more towards SG&A as we come closer to that commercial launch. We are very excited about our San Diego facility. It's a fairly small facility, so I don't think it will contribute any meaningful expenses to those OpEx numbers. Overall, we've done a really fantastic job of linking new facilities without a significant cash outlay for adding structural spend to our ending forecast.

Our next question comes from Brandon Couillard with Jefferies.

Sujal, on the TGI partnership, I'm curious why they were the next logical collaboration partner? Why focus on such a rare disease like DIPG and how many additional partners would you like to add in '23 on top of the current five?

Yes. Let me take a couple of aspects of your question, and then I'll pass it to Parag to talk specifically about DIPG and why this was an interesting application. When you look at our existing set of collaborations: Genentech, Amgen, MD Anderson, and now TGen. What we've tried to do is focus on proteoform use cases that are within the capabilities of the platform today so that we can do analysis and deliver biological insights that customers cannot get from elsewhere. The criteria is to have all of these early collaborators continue with us on this journey as we move towards platform launch and be great potential early access partners, data sites and ultimately customers. The other important consideration for us is having researchers who are focused on significant research and are known well and willing to publish with us, so we can build this body of evidence around our platform and demonstrate data coming off on our system. With TGen, it was able to meet all those marks. Now that being said, as we start to move deeper into 2023, our intention will switch to our early access program, where the customer may take 24 or 48 samples, run them on our platform once we are capable of broad scale proteomic analysis. We would then return the data to them. We might have a small fee for that engagement. Those early access partnerships are about data generation and showing the scientific community what we can do, as well as being important for pipeline generation and starting to drive towards pre-orders of the instrumentation. Parag, do you want to talk about the particular application for TGen and why it's interesting in our portfolio of applications?

Absolutely. Thank you, Sujal. So I think DIPG, despite being a relatively rare cancer, serves as a model for many other types of cancers. Additionally, the particular protein target that we're studying in that collaboration: Our goal is to measure mutations and post-translational modifications, proteoforms, on individual histone molecules. This ability will provide critical new insights into how histone modification and variation drives the biology of this disease, but also will provide a window into epigenetic modification in general. That's a tremendous area of scientific interest, and TGen is a fantastic partner to work with on these studies. So we're really excited to dive into that.

That's helpful. Sujal, any updated thoughts on the supply chain? And as you look out over the next 12 to 18 months, any pain points you anticipate as you start moving towards commercial launch?

Yes, Brandon, that's a great question. We certainly are continuing to see supply chain pressures out there. Most of that pressure is regarding lead times for various things. It could be simple items like tubes and pipette tips, and it can be more complex components as well. The third area for us is that there are certainly some slow parts of the supply chain with respect to some of the parts of our instrument as well. What I would tell you though is yes, there's some pressure, but we are managing it well. We have a team on the supply chain plan led by our SVP of Operations and Supply Chain. Mary Godwin has been doing this for four decades, and we've been doing a good job on our instrument side, ensuring that we have a pipeline for all of the instrument builds we're planning, and we're planning our supply chain appropriately given the extensive lead times for a few components.

Got it. Last question, maybe better for Anna. The CapEx outlook made another $30 million in incremental spend, let me mostly weighted to the back half. I think you've been pretty cautious about building the commercial team up too soon. Will that begin to take shape in the back half? Generally, where will that incremental $30 million be concentrated?

I can speak to the first part, and then, Sujal, maybe you want to tag on to that. Last year was a bit of an interesting year. We saw a dip in expenses as we consolidated our costs, then we picked up in the second half. I would expect going forward that we would see more consistent growth over the course of the year, certainly with the highest spending being towards the end of the year. That's still very much focused on development. We're continuing to invest there, preparing for scale-up, quality, manufacturing. So those are some of the areas where we'll continue to put both hires and dollars as we scale our experimental capacity. And then certainly, towards the tail end of the year, we would begin hiring for the commercial launch that we expect in the first half and in the middle of 2024.

Yes. Let me take the second half of your question, and then you can dive in more. One of the things you asked was really when to expect the commercial build-out. I think that I will add a little bit of nuance here. There were some questions earlier about the macro environment and how we're reacting to it. When it comes to our commercial launch in mid-2024, we will build out a commercial team. But there are two things that you should note. Number one is that the team itself, we believe, will be a very efficient team, and it's not going to be huge. The primary reason there is that we have an initial deal price of roughly $1 million. The transactional model of being able to generate significant bookings from a particular sales rep will be very good, leading to sales efficiency and helping us with the cost structure of our commercial organization. The other thing to think about is that when capital is readily available in the wider market, you would build your commercial team and start your operational activities earlier in the cycle. When things are tight like the environment is today, you build the commercial team much closer to the launch. I'm not going to commit to exactly what the timing is for that commercial team build-out. What I will tell you is that we will compress that down pretty tight in front of that commercial launch. While that might affect our revenue ramp rate right after the commercial launch, it's our job as a management team to mitigate that. We think that's the most prudent thing to do because the last thing we want to do is overbuild the commercial organization and then face timing difficulties that lead to additional pressure on our OpEx.

Okay. Our last question comes from Tejas Savant with Morgan Stanley.

Tejas. I guess the first one for me would be for Sujal. Thank you for the color on the access challenge. But I was thinking aside from the access challenge and your conference presentations and data releases, how else are you keeping customers engaged ahead of your mid-'24 launch?

Yes. That's a really great question. So I think that there are many different ways that we are engaging the scientific community, meaning the researchers and our potential collaborators and customers. First and foremost, we've had a large number of conversations, hundreds of conversations over the course of the company's six-year life, with potential customers and partners. The response has been incredible. We continue to engage with those customers, giving them regular updates. We engage with them on surveys and formal voice of customer types of interviews. We meet with them at our various conferences, keeping them up to date. That's number one. Number two, one of the things that's really been great here at Nautilus is that there is quite a bit of inbound activity from potential partners and customers because of the excitement around our platform and the capabilities that we've begun to show at scientific conferences. We have a steady stream of conversations with customers, getting them up to speed and doing presentations because of that inbound activity. One of the other things we did in 2022 is engage with about 40 KOLs, most of whom are mass spec users, and we did deep interviews with them on their pain points and what they’re looking for in a proteomic solution that makes a significant impact on their biological research. Through these engagements, we've maintained a meaningful dialogue. So all these factors together — the first access challenge, data releases from conferences — we have a very good interface with our potential customers and collaborators.

Got it. That's helpful. And then Sujal, I'm just wondering, if you look over the past year and all the changes in the proteomic landscape, have your views on the competitive landscape changed at all over the past few months? Are you anticipating any dynamic changes ahead of your mid-'24 launch?

That's a great question. What I'm seeing over 2022 and the first couple of months here of 2023 continues to reinforce for me that we are building a highly differentiated product with a wide competitive moat. What I've seen from the traditional method competitors are continued evolutionary improvements to their platforms, but nothing that is fundamentally game-changing. From the emerging competitive landscape, there are a few names performing quite well on the targeted side of proteomics, which is different and highly complementary to what we're doing. On the discovery side, there are some companies looking to improve sample preparation or pest-type sequencing methods. When we look at the capabilities of those platforms and how they've evolved over the last 12 to 14 months — if I include the first couple of months of 2023 — I'm not seeing any major capability improvements or anything on the horizon that would close the gap with the capabilities of our platform that we're building.

Great. And one final one for me. I guess it's a little bit looking out into the longer term, but the clinical market is a huge opportunity for you guys. With the clinical market today relying mainly on single biomarker assays, what do you think it will take to drive that market to using a broader set of proteins in the clinic? I know you guys highlighted sensitivity, scale, reproducibility, and ease of use as key characteristics. But what do you think are some key features that this specific market would be looking for?

Yes. That's a great question. When we look at the clinical market, we've seen a trend toward transition from single marker-based studies to panels, similar to what occurred in genomics. It started with providing research data across a variety of initial mutations in genomics so that people can take a comprehensive look in a retrospective manner. From this comprehensive look, it made sense to start using panels. Ultimately, measuring these panels by orthogonal means was inefficient. It became easier and faster to simply use the discovery platform as a clinical platform. We anticipate a similar transition occurring in proteomics. Initially, people will use discovery platforms to look at many markers, understand the synergies between them, and recognize the predictive power of looking at multiple biochemical axes at the same time. As those panels grow larger and larger and become challenging to convert into traditional assays, it will spur a natural transition toward using our discovery platform as a clinical platform. We are excited about that opportunity and preparing for it going forward, and I think it's a natural evolution of the field.

Okay. Thank you, guys, for the time today.

Okay. Thank you, everyone, for your participation in this conference. This does conclude the program, and you may now disconnect.