Akoya Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKYA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Massaro: Right. And just to clarify, that reagent revenue growth target is approximately 40% this year, correct?

Joe Driscoll: Correct. Yes.

Mark Massaro: Okay. We’ve seen some other tools companies sometimes have push pulls between the razor/razor blade contribution and the services contribution. But in your case, we’re really not seeing that. So you drove a strong 65% growth year-over-year in services last year. I think, historically, you’ve talked about a services target of in the 30% to 40% range. Recognizing that you just did 65%, are there any qualitative factors perhaps that would suggest any reasons why that growth rate is likely to moderate other than just challenging comps?

Brian McKelligon: Maybe, Joe, you could describe kind of what’s in that and then I can take a

Joe Driscoll: Yeah.

Brian McKelligon: specific commentary around the Lab Services specifically.

Joe Driscoll: Right. So our services are going to have another good year in 2023. What we have in that bucket right now is really the CLIA Lab, which is doing projects for large pharma and I’ll let Brian comment some more on that. That’s been going very well. We’ve got a second services lab that focuses on PhenoCycler projects, so early stage discovery projects. And now we also — in that bucket, we also have CDx revenue. So this is the Acrivon deal that we signed in 2022. You’ve got a piece of that is in our 2022 revenue, but more will be in 2023, the milestones and things like that, that we get for doing the Acrivon deal. So those three pieces are really the bulk of that services revenue. So 2023 should be another good growth year for services.

Brian McKelligon: And then again, just to go back to — as promised, Mark. So Lab Services includes working with the biopharma groups really to drive adoption in early translational all the way through clinical trial studies and those were the services that Joe just alluded to. But it also includes the revenue that’s realized in doing our partnership as also as a Lab Service through Acrivon, where we have these milestone-based — milestone-driven these revenue milestones that we achieved throughout last year and this year, that’s also included within that and that helps explain Mark, why that number has grown so much, because of the success of both of those efforts.

Mark Massaro: Okay. Excellent. And last one for me. Joe, I think, I heard you say that you’re seeing volumes pick up nicely here in Q1. So reagents are off to a good start. It doesn’t seem like there’s a huge necessarily a challenge with respect to funding or budgets at the customer level. But maybe can you just speak to any conversations you’re having about forecasting orders throughout the course of the year and whether or not you’re seeing issues with budgets?

Joe Driscoll: We have not seen any issues with budgets. Really, the only hiccup we had in 2022 is really things like COVID lockdowns, which we really can’t control. But other than that, other than unusual things like that, budgets seem to be fine and back to normal.

Brian McKelligon: And Mark, a lot of what — a lot of the macro commentary around biopharma funding is really what — the discussions have been around the smaller emerging biopharma this year or the latter part of last year relative to 2020 and 2021. And two comments on that. That’s really not a meaningful percentage of our customer base. We’re mostly dealing with a multinational biopharma who have seen kind of a tremendous surge in R&D spend, particularly as their COVID spend has muted. So I don’t really think that the biopharma commentary is not restructure small pharma has not really impacted us. And again, large pharma funding in terms of their R&D has been pretty darn strong, particularly in oncology, where you’ve got clinical trials up something like — it’s like 38% of all clinical trials, a 10% CAGR, which is really where we play with our HT system.

Mark Massaro: Excellent. That all makes sense. Thanks for the color.