Kyle Mikson: Okay, that’s interesting. Thanks, John. On the instrument placement side, so five in the quarter executed — annualized, that’s 20, and you did 51, I guess, last year for full year. Can you just talk about the dynamics in terms of like demand for instruments, or maybe bottlenecks in terms of, like, shipments or something? And internationally, you actually had a stronger quarter than domestic. I mean, there’s a lot of macro headwinds kind of going on. I would have figured that might have been weaker, but I just wanted to give you the opportunity to kind of talk about the placement situation.
John Sperzel: Sure. I wouldn’t read anything into the international demand versus domestic demand. I think at a high level, it’s generally easier to drive adoption in markets outside the US. The US is the strictest regulatory environment. That’s why historically when you look at how most new companies introduce new products to the market, they start in Europe, and then they come to the US. So I think that’s actually a positive. We’re obviously disappointed with five instruments. That’s not where we expect to be. The backorder absolutely impacted that. We — the other impact of a backorder is we couldn’t get new customers to go live as fast as we wanted them to. So instruments that we shipped in Q2 were still backlogged in terms of going live as well as instruments in Q3 because we needed to take care of our existing customers first.
So the backorder doesn’t just impact the potential sales in the quarter, but it also impacts going live with instruments, and it impacts selling instruments to new customers or additional instruments to existing customers. So it impacted the whole business. Again, that’s why we put so much emphasis on resolving it and why we feel good about it being completely resolved in the fourth quarter.
Kyle Mikson: Okay. And there’s one more and I’m going to hop back after that. The gross margins, that’s a key metric that you’ve been trying to improve. Maybe just talk about how that progressed in the quarter. We don’t really have visibility into that, I think, here in the press release. And then, how does the backorder situation kind of impact that? Because you would think that maybe it’s all test, [indiscernible] revenue, that’s higher margins recurring. So how do all these moving pieces sort of fit together, I guess, with gross margin? And how is that improving?
John Sperzel: So you’re absolutely right, Kyle. Having lower test sales, which is the razor blade of the razor/razor blade model is not favorable when it comes to gross margins. We haven’t finalized our Q3 results. They’re obviously still subject to review. So we’re not reporting on gross margins yet. We’ll do that in the normal course in the first half of November.
Kyle Mikson: Okay. How about cash burn? Is that something you can kind of comment on possibly just given it’s a profitability type metric, I guess?
John Sperzel: Well, we finished the quarter with $24.3 million in cash. We had finished Q2 with 16.1%. We’re obviously in a better cash position. Our balance sheet has strengthened also through the conversion of debt to equity and the lower interest payments that go along with that. So we feel much better this quarter with the cash position and the runway than where we were at the end of Q2.
Kyle Mikson: It was more of like a going-forward type question, but that sounds good. All right, thanks so much for the time. Appreciate it.
John Sperzel: Thank you, Kyle.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Ben Haynor from Alliance Global Partners. Ben, your line is live.
Ben Haynor: Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the Q2 Biothreat clearance. First off for me, you mentioned, I don’t know, five, six potential customers for the T2Biothreat Panel. How many of those institutions or agencies have you’ve been in contact with? How are the discussions coming there? Any color that you can provide?
