Seer, Inc. (NASDAQ:SEER) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So what the — what the SIP does is it lets that customer bring the CapEx in-house in terms of the loner. Now our expectation is that a significant number of these customers will end up buying it. But then to use whatever money it is instead of buying that instrument to actually buy samples, run the studies and get these guys to find secure funding and others for them to eventually scale up on their assay. So I think that the solution or the problem that these 2 solutions offered is a very different one than the macro picture, Tejas, in my mind, largely, it was opening up the market. I think the macro is just making it difficult for us. The sales cycle is longer. We’re seeing a significant slowdown in China that I don’t have visibility to the resolution over the coming couple of quarters.

I think it’s tough, but I do think that we’re making the right step, Tejas. And I don’t see a need to make any additional kind of strategic pivots or strategic changes to do this. I think the next real big turn, if you would, in the flywheel is going to come when customer publications comes because what Seer did was it makes it possible to access content, proteomic content at scale speed that wasn’t previously possible. And then the next important, if you would milestone is the why should I care about that content, which is what is the value of that biological insight in terms of making me make decisions clinically or scientifically in terms of, I don’t know, biomarker discovery and others. And those are the kind of real milestones that are going to drive adoption and it’s just publications from customers.

And the beauty of it is that the visibility that we have in what the customers have done with the work really is validating in what we had expected Tejas, even better than my expectation. By far, by the way.

Tejas Savant: Got it. That’s super helpful, Omid. And just a couple of quick follow-ups here. So on the SIP side of things, have you sort of started loaning those first instruments yet? Or is that still ahead of you? Give us a flavor? I know you mentioned sort of good progress, but any flavor around the number of customers that are interested in accessing the Proteograph through SIP. And then a quick follow-up to your comments and just the cadence of publications and how important that is. Out of all the preprints in bioarchive at the moment, are there 1 or 2 that are particularly pivotal in your mind in terms of unlocking adoption for the XT?

David Horn: Yes, I’ll take the first one, Tejas, just on the SIP. We have placed instruments under that program. And I’d say it’s a handful, maybe a little bit more than a handful. And so – and again, that came with a consumable purchase. And again, we place these in accounts, as Omid said, where we fully expect them to purchase. Again, they may or may not, but they don’t – they’re not obligated to. But certainly, we hope to get them excited about the data that they’ll run. And so we have had some good uptake with that program, both in the second quarter and the third quarter, and we expect to continue that in the fourth quarter as well.

Omid Farokhzad: And Tejas, let me maybe just take the one on the publication side of it, which is – the bioarchive papers, I would say about half of them – actually, probably more than half of them are currently under review at various different journals. Now here’s the interesting part of it, which is the early ones that were submitted have all gone through one round of revision, which basically means that they’re very close to kind of being accepted and to come out. And here is the most important part of it, which is those papers are in what I consider to be a very, very kind of top journal, either the top 1 or 2 journals that you can imagine or the sister journals from those. And that just really reflects kind of like the level of science that became possible when you did unbiased proteomic at scale, deep unbiased proteomic at scale.