SOPHiA GENETICS SA (NASDAQ:SOPH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Ross Muken: On Illumina, in terms of onboard, obviously, that’s been a trend for them for some time. Obviously, they’re a formidable company, and one that, frankly, in the context of the universe, we are quite synergistic with in terms of growing NGS clinical volumes, which is one of their main goals as well. I would say, putting it onboard is certainly a strategy for them. I’m sure that makes sense. But the reality is what we’re trying to animate in the industry in terms of a decentralized network across many different players sharing information across all technologies, all types of reagent providers, et cetera, and across all modalities, it’s just a fundamentally different strategy. Right? So, I think on the research side, I understand why someone may prefer something as simple as an onboard bioinformatics with their sequencer.

But I think in the clinical space, where, again, this idea of data sharing and collective intelligence globally is really gaining momentum, for us, we feel quite comfortable with our position, and I think all of these players, frankly, can coexist in a nice way and, frankly, just continue to grow the market overall quite effectively.

Operator: The next question comes from Rich Hilliker with Credit Suisse.

Richard Hilliker, Jr.: Being that as the topic right now, I was wondering if you can give us a sense of how you imagine generative AI enhancing the platform as we iterate from here.

Jurgi Camblong: Your question was about general AI. Right? Is that correct?

Richard Hilliker, Jr.: Open AI. There’s a lot of use cases. Yeah, exactly.

Jurgi Camblong: Look, in our story, AI has been there at the heart since beginning because, as I was just explaining to Tejas, in our customer sites, there is a lot of heterogeneity. They use different sequencers, they use different consumables and so on. And so, one has to build algorithms on the basis of pattern recognition, deep learning, and machine learning to be able to digest those data and correct them, normalize them, be able to see the signal and by doing so, bring accurate data, so that hospitals could take more informed decisions. We see that trend as well in other data modalities. That’s now we are going multimodal. And in that aspect, I would say, AI related efforts will be extremely important in my opinion on anything which is clinical data.

And in particular, any clinical data that are being today gathered into documents or in HR systems, where I think AI techniques and open AI techniques will be applied to basically gather those data in a more sophisticated, more, I would say, precise form and be able to bring this comprehensive information to an individual. So, for us, a pathologist, a geneticist, without swamping, if you like, these people with too many information, but really bringing them the precise information that is consistent, and that is important to take actions on this patient in the context of many other patients.

Richard Hilliker, Jr.: Just quickly. Ross, congrats on the COO promotion. Wondering if you can share maybe a couple of your top priorities. Obviously, you’re very familiar with the business as it is, but maybe a few things that you’ll be focused in on initially, and then that’s all for me.

Ross Muken: I would say, in general, my priority set in terms of my new functional role is not too different from what we’ve been focused on as an organization overall. So, obviously, we’ve got a very large market opportunity in front of us. And we’ve got to execute against it. And we’ve got to execute against it in a sustainable way with the capital that we have. And so, in that, I’m personally very focused on how do we accelerate our land, particularly in North America, and how do we get, ultimately, this market to the place where we think it can be. And again, we’re seeing a lot of really good green shoots and momentum there. But there’s still a lot more to be done in North America. I also think as well on the biopharma side, we’re just scratching the surface.