Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (NASDAQ:PACB) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Christian Henry: Yeah, great. So with respect to the — with respect to new versus existing customers, the workflow is essentially the same for Sequel II to Revio, and that’s a real benefit of Revio. And so we are seeing the existing Sequel II customers typically can get ramped up a bit faster than the new customers. But the system has a lot of innovations to make it easier to use relative to any product that we’ve ever had in the past. And I think that will help our new customers, make sure they get very high-quality DNA out of the gate using our Nanobind technology and then get those high-quality samples onto the sequencers. And so I don’t — I do think the ramp for new customers will be longer before they’re kind of at full capacity.

Probably, I don’t know, 30%, 40%, 50% longer, maybe. But I don’t think — given the ease of use of Revio, I don’t think it’s going to be — I don’t think it’s going to really be that onerous, quite frankly. It’s still a bit early, but that’s the early experience. With respect to Onso, it is really interesting. Lots of conversations going on about bundling, we’ve had orders, but we also had orders of single Onso systems straight out of the gate. And it’s really exciting to see the demand curve and the power of our sales channel starting to ramp up. And so now we’re finishing the late stages of development, getting ready for manufacturing at global scale and full commercialization. And our target date is by the end of the quarter like we’ve been talking about, and I think it’s going to be right there or right around there.

And I think we’re going to have a lot to talk about with respect to Onso, which is — when you think about it, launching two major platforms in the same year with a little company like PacBio is a pretty significant task and when we get it done, hopefully a pretty significant achievement. So look forward to telling you about it more on our next call after, hopefully, we have orders shipping the product and then it’s getting out in the wild.

Operator: Thank you. The next question will be from Julia Qin from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Julia Qin: Hi, good afternoon and congrats on a strong quarter. Christian, you’ve mentioned on the prepared remarks about POP-seq programs that are being included in the pipeline. Obviously, we appreciate the strength at the Broad for All of Us that you mentioned, but could you give us more color on the other POP-seq programs and where we are in terms of discussion and the cycle? And then regarding the Revio mix, a third being from short-reads users, is that a positive surprise to you? And how are you thinking about this mix going forward as probably both — the cost on both the short-reads and long-reads continue to go down?

Christian Henry: Yeah. I think that — so thanks, Julia. I’m going to try to be quick here. But with respect to the Revio mix and short-read samples coming onto the platform, that’s not surprising at all because we’ve achieved the economics and throughput that that’s enabling. And it’s actually kind of the fundamental piece of the thesis here is that we’re going to be able to take market share and be able to expand the market with the unique capabilities of Revio. So I think it just helps — taking samples from existing projects helps us grow faster and get the Revio further up to speed sooner. But I’m not that surprised by it because of the capabilities. With respect to POP-seq, there are lots of projects that are percolating right now.