Accelerate Diagnostics, Inc. (NASDAQ:AXDX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Dustin Scaringe: Okay. Understood. And then lastly, just some more specifics on the BD deal. Wondering how your product is fitting with the existing BD Phoenix system? And then more broadly, how are you guys thinking about competition now that you’re partnered with BD against some of the other existing players on the market?

Jack Phillips: Okay. So great question. So first question is around Phoenix. And just for everybody’s knowledge, Phoenix is a BD platform that’s a very successful platform for Becton Dickinson. It’s a platform that — it actually produces susceptibility results through basically isolates. It does not do positive blood like Pheno does, and it’s not considered a rapid susceptibility system, okay? So with that, Pheno is a true complement to Phoenix in a big way. And the way this is, is that for rapid susceptibility testing in positive blood culture, it’s really the choice is Pheno. You can run ID, AST on one platform. You could run another ID and run AST only on Pheno and then for the workflow of customers that have Phoenix as well for those isolated colonies where they need to run susceptibility, they would just run those on the Phoenix platform, sorry, on the Phoenix platform.

And so it’s really a — it’s not duplicative. It’s actually additive, and it’s really, as David mentioned in his earlier comments, it’s one of the selling effectiveness opportunities where it allows a BD rep to really kind of work with their Phoenix customers or new opportunities on Phoenix and bring in Pheno together as a solution that would really be a total solution for all susceptibility testing. And then moving forward, down the road, Wave will be that competitor to a Phoenix because Wave will have the ability to offer both susceptibility testing in an isolated format colony, but also in positive blood both together. And in that situation, that’s where there’s going to be a competitive situation with Phoenix. But again, that’s our next-generation platform.

BD is very involved in that platform, by the way, and we are doing regular innovation updates. I think you had a second question, and I’m totally…

David Patience: Emerging competition.

Jack Phillips: Yes. Thank you, David. The second question was around emerging competition. As expected, it’s not a surprise. This market is becoming more crowded with competitors. And I think it’s a resounding indication of why this is a much underserved need in healthcare to provide rapid susceptibility testing for sepsis patients, for the reasons of antimicrobial resistance that I stated. And so with that, there’s more and more competitors emerging. We believe we are well suited — very well suited with BD as a partnership to compete with not only competition of today but the emerging competitors. With our total solution of Rapid ID/AST on Pheno, with our AST-only solution for those customers that want an AST-only platform, working with BD on bundling opportunities and bringing total solutions together with BACTEC and Phoenix and Pheno.

It’s a great total solution opportunity. And then in Europe, not yet in the U.S., in EMEA, I mean, you’ve got Arc as well, that’s a great opportunity to optimize workflow and throughput for ID on MALDI platforms and then follow that up with Pheno and AST susceptibility. So again, we believe we have multiple options for customers. We give customers flexibility. And then with BD, it’s just a tremendous complement to their total solutions that they’re selling. One last thing I would mention that is, I think, an important mention here. I mentioned it in the prepared remarks, but BD and Accelerate, we’ve jointly collaborated on a lot of things over the past quarter, training, sales alignment, pricing models, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the really exciting work streams that I was a part of was the bloodstream infection workflow solution that was spearheaded by BD’s global marketing folks and our team.