Quanterix Corporation Stock

Thank you for standing by. My name is Carly, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Quanterix Corporation Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Mary Conway, Investor Relations.

Thank you and good morning. With me on today's call are Everett Cunningham, Quanterix's President and CEO, and Jason Fessler, Quanterix's new Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded and a replay of the call will be available on the Investor section of our website. We will make forward-looking statements covered under the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and assumptions as of today, August 10, 2026.

We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. To supplement our financial statements presented on a GAAP basis, we have provided certain non-GAAP financial measures.

These non-GAAP measures are used to evaluate operating performance in a manner that allows for meaningful period-to-period comparison and analysis of trends in our business and our competitors. We believe that such measures are important in comparing current results with other periods' results and assessing our operating performance within our industry. Non-GAAP financial information presented herein should be considered in conjunction with and not as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP.

Investors are encouraged to review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures set forth in the presentation posted to our website and in the earnings release issued today. Finally, any percentage changes that we discuss will be on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Everett Cunningham.

Thanks, Mary. I'm pleased to be with all of you here this morning to bring you up to date on both our second quarter results and our plans for the back half of this year. We are revising our expectations and we want to be transparent about our actions and intended impacts. Our first half results were not what we anticipated based upon market softness and executional challenges, even though our cash preservation efforts were better than planned. As a result, we are taking speedy action to address execution, as I'll describe momentarily, but this performance will affect our annual outlook.

Let me start by addressing the specifics around what contributed to Q2's results, then share more details on our plans to pivot our organization to improve performance in the second half and in 2027. The revenue shortfall in Q2 was broad-based and roughly $3 million, or 9% lower than the guidance we provided on our call in May. The commercial execution initiatives we began earlier this year have not yet delivered the sustained revenue performance or sales productivity we believe this organization can achieve. As a result, more decisive action is required.

We entered this next phase with significant strengths: one of the largest install bases in our sector, market leadership in ultra-sensitive, reproducible protein detection, differentiated proteomic sensitivity across both tissue and blood, and a deeply committed team of employees. To fully translate these advantages into durable growth, we need experienced commercial leadership with the acumen, discipline, and expertise to strengthen our customer engagement and drive consistent execution. Accordingly, we are making a series of significant changes in our commercial organization, starting with adding new proven leadership.

As we announced today, Jim Gute is joining our team to help drive improved execution in our commercial organization. Jim was most recently Senior Vice President and Commercial Manager, General Screening at Exact Sciences. Prior to joining Exact, a $3 billion revenue company acquired earlier this year by Abbott Labs, Jim spent 18 years at GE, where he became President of GE Healthcare in 2025. Jim brings more than 25 years of experience leading enterprise organizations, accelerating growth, and transforming complex healthcare and diagnostic businesses.

He's developed high-performing commercial organizations that combine strategic vision, operational discipline, and leadership excellence to create sustained enterprise value. We are so excited to welcome Jim to our team and work together to achieve our goal of re-accelerating revenue growth. In addition, we are reorganizing our commercial team around solution-based selling models. Given the highly specialized nature of our instruments, assays, and diagnostic offerings, we believe greater product expertise and more focused customer engagement are essential to improving commercial execution and reigniting sales productivity.

As announced in early June, we welcomed a seasoned leader with over two decades of diagnostics experience, Geoff Albrecht, as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Diagnostics. As we transform this business into a critical component of our future growth, Geoff's more than 25 years of deep commercial leadership experience is already making an impact. Most recently, he served as regional vice president for the Northeast U.S. at Quest Diagnostics, leading a group generating approximately $2.9 billion in revenue.

Last, our Accelerator business was down significantly in the quarter, mirroring trends towards smaller projects that we saw in Q1. Therefore, we are creating a dedicated sales team focused on driving Pharma Lab services to deliver improved results in the second half. On a positive note, in Q2, this business produced nice bookings, and shortly I'll share some exciting progress we're seeing in Q3. We believe these actions and this momentum will produce growth starting this year and more meaningfully in 2027 and beyond.

Based upon our first half performance and recognizing that the significant changes that we are announcing today will not produce results immediately, we are lowering our revenue guidance for 2026 to a range of $142 million to $148 million from the prior range of $169 million to $174 million. Our team has thoroughly assessed the commercial pipeline and underlying in-market assumptions, giving us the confidence that this new forecast is appropriate. At this revenue level, we expect to end 2026 with a roughly $80 million cash balance. This would also push our cash flow break-even to 2027.

While we plan to invest in our business to leverage growth opportunities, our ability to conserve cash demonstrated by the higher than expected cash position at the end of Q2 2026 will enable us to be disciplined in balancing cash and investment needs. To that end, we completed the Akoya integration in Q2, finalizing the ERP and cost synergies, and achieved the planned $85 million in annualized savings. In summary, we expect these actions to support stronger performance in the second half and position the company for higher growth in 2027 and beyond.

Our updated guidance reflects a level of performance that we are confident we can deliver without assuming a substantial recovery in our end markets. This confidence is supported by our industry-leading solutions and services, our growing customer base, and the continued momentum in our higher growth diagnostics business. Now let me turn to the factors underpinning our confidence in the strategy and our ability to execute successfully. We see early, important size momentum throughout the business that we intend to galvanize and accelerate to improve our results going forward.

We are cautiously optimistic about the green shoots in Q2, such as a sequential increase in bookings, leading to a book-to-bill of 1 to 1, driven by orders in Spatial instruments and consumables and some more Accelerator business. Pharma revenue also increased sequentially in Q2, led by Spatial, even though this market has been reported to be struggling recently. The number of LucentAD Complete tests increased significantly in Q2, albeit off a small base, as we strive to transform our diagnostics business into a more sizable component of Quanterix's growth trajectories.

We were very pleased that beginning July 1, 2026, members covered under Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield medical policies can receive coverage for qualifying blood-based biomarker testing, including Quanterix's LucentAD Complete test when medical necessity criteria are met. Now, this is happening in advance of our broad-based market access strategy. We've also expanded our assay development with the launch of an important emerging synaptic biomarker, NPTX2, and in Spatial, we launched two new products. We intend to keep up the pace of new offerings.

We're excited about Quanterix's prestigious election as a co-investigator institution in the PD-BUILD program, supported by The Michael J. Fox Foundation. This grant-supported mandate will advance Parkinson's disease research by developing and deploying biomarker tools aimed at enabling earlier detection, improved patient stratification, and more effective monitoring of Parkinson's disease. Importantly, it will also validate our technology in an important neurological area. We're also seeing momentum across customers and regions within diagnostics.

We've dramatically increased the opportunities for which we are competing, and winning our fair share of these will further increase our credibility. We're excited about these opportunities, which involve accelerated revenues as well. Our partnership with [ Tempus ] announced last quarter is getting underway quickly, and we're working together on several potential opportunities. These, in addition to the clinical utility studies that we expect to read out shortly, should amplify our credibility in the market.

Recent studies, including the ones that we shared at AAIC in London, underscore our opportunity to strengthen our commercial moat by demonstrating our premier positioning of an ultra-sensitive, multi-analyte algorithm for targeted translational work, as well as diagnostics. [ And finally, ] I'll speak more about this when I discuss our diagnostics progress. Let me turn to slide 4 and provide some perspective on where we compete in proteomics today and how our core capabilities extend across the continuum from discovery and translational research to diagnostics.

Quanterix is recognized as a market leader in ultra-sensitive protein detection with differentiated and highly reproducible proteomic sensitivity in fluids and more recently, tissue. However, we believe the near-term diagnostic potential of technologies is not fully recognized, particularly as early disease detection becomes more important across healthcare. As you can see on this slide, Quanterix is a market leader both in blood and tissue proteomics as the only provider with differentiated leadership in ultra-sensitive blood biomarkers and high-plex spatial tissue analysis across the continuum.

We start with Quanterix Simoa, the industry standard for low-plex, ultra-sensitive early detection utilizing blood samples for translational work and diagnostics, bringing the key benefit of reproducibility. On the tissue side, we bring Quanterix Spatial, which sets the bar for high-throughput discovery and translation efforts. As our primary markets in pharma and academia begin to recover, we are primed to be an enormous asset in enabling them to advance scientific discovery to the lab and clinic. Let's move to slide 5, where we show our updated organizational priorities. We have three priorities.

Number 1, laser focus on execution. We realize that we must regain credibility and the quickest way is to meet our commitments each quarter. Simply put, we must execute better. The leadership and structural changes that we're making are precisely designed to improve execution and we'll be relentless about driving better commercial execution, especially in our core research sectors. Number 2, pursue our strategic roadmap. We will focus on reinforcing our in vitro diagnostics or IVD strategy and strengthening our position in ultra-sensitive protein detection, thereby continually enhancing our competitive moat to accelerate revenue growth in our core business.

And number 3, build our Alzheimer's disease diagnostics business. We plan to accelerate our diagnostic investment in 2026 prudently with the goals of improving workflow, building lab infrastructure, and increasing our shared mind for our LucentAD with our key audience. Now, on the next slide, I'll share more details about executional changes. As I mentioned, we have a seasoned leader heading up our commercial organization. This leadership and a solutions-based approach to customers is designed to drive greater accountability and focus across Simoa, Spatial, and Accelerator.

Our Chief Commercial Officer, Jim Gute, will be accountable for commercial execution across the portfolio, and he brings a strong track record of success leading scaled businesses and commercial organizations. We're also pivoting our sales force structure. We're moving from a largely geographically-based model to a dedicated solution-based execution, working more closely with customers across all of our businesses. We're confident that this model will generate greater customer success and increase sales productivity. And our team is so excited about engaging with new and existing customers on this basis again.

Now moving to the next slide. Let me share with you some thoughts on our streamlined strategic roadmap. Feedback from customers and collaborators led us to prioritize our Simoa HD-X platform and other investments both for research tools and for diagnostics, including new neurology markers. We're incorporating learnings and enhancements from our next generation platform into the HD-X platform to guide overall development of the Simoa platform. Lastly, we're working diligently on our future 510(k) application for our HD-X platform as an IVD in 2027.

As I mentioned, we expanded our assay portfolio with the launch of the Simoa Ultra-Sensitive Immunoassay for NPTX2, an important emerging biomarker of synaptic function. On the Spatial side, our key priorities for 2026 remain expanding our PhenoCycler-Fusion biomarker panels for discovery applications, and also releasing new reagents for the PhenoImager HT platform to better support clinical applications. For instance, we launched two new products, the Spatial Molecular Barcoding kit for the PhenoCycler-Fusion, initially available through an early access program, and the Spatial Spectral DAPI 2.0 for the PhenoImager HT.

Moving to our third priority, let me update you on our progress in building out our Alzheimer's disease diagnostics business. We're creating a strong foundation within the emerging molecular Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, and we're excited about recent developments to support our efforts. We've developed what we believe is the best-in-class multi-marker test, which provides quantitative biomarker readings for all patients versus 70% for the other available tests. And only 10% of our patients fall within the indeterminant zone compared to 30% of the competitive approaches.

Our value proposition focuses on reliability and reduced ambiguity, addressing the clinician's needs. We're also building on the infrastructure to support the growth trajectory of this business. We submitted a 510(k) application for our single-site, multi-analyte, algorithmic, blood-based biomarker test to the FDA, and we remain in productive dialogue with the FDA. And we're continuing to advance our efforts to drive adoption and increase mindshare ahead of the FDA clearance, including securing premium pricing of $897 for LucentAD Complete tests from CMS.

And now, Anthem insurance coverage, with additional studies underway for use in payer outreach. Healthcare providers who treat Alzheimer's want a reliable, non-invasive test to drive earlier intervention of this terrible disease. We firmly believe that we have the most comprehensive Alzheimer's diagnostic tests available today in LucentAD Complete. And we expect to garner meaningful market share as blood-based biomarker tests and continues to grow. In summary, as shown in the next slide, we believe Alzheimer's diagnosis and monitoring will increasingly rely on multi-marker tests that can deliver early detection and low clinical ambiguity.

The lowest combination of ultra sensitivity, multiplexing and automation will power Quanterix to be the lead test provider in this space. Furthermore, Quanterix has a first in market advantage with our LucentAD Complete test that is commercially available with established CMS pricing. Quanterix stands unchallenged in offering all the benefits of a multi-analyte immunoassay for Alzheimer's disease diagnostics, and this positions the company as a neurodiagnostic leader.

Before I turn the call over to our CFO, I want to assure everyone that our entire team is committed to building a profitable and sustainable research tools business with market leadership in both Spatial and ultra-sensitive proteomics. We expect the actions that I discussed today will start to drive commercial effectiveness in the second half of 2026, but more impactfully in 2027 and beyond. We're not waiting for better markets. Instead, we're taking thoughtful and deliberate action to propel Quanterix to where the industry is going.

We're excited about our opportunities with a strong experienced management team leading the way to a brighter future for Quanterix. Now let me turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Jason Fessler. You know, Jason joined us in late May, and I'm already so pleased on how valuable he's been to me, the management team, and the board already. Jason.

Thank you, Everett, and good morning. Before I cover our financial performance, I would like to share a few observations from my first 45 days. First, I'm excited to be here at Quanterix. Everett has moved quickly to put the right leaders in place to drive better customer experiences and healthcare outcomes and put Quanterix on a steady growth path. In addition, Quanterix has a strong brand, strong customer relationships, and we are uniquely positioned in both our tools and diagnostic opportunities. I believe Quanterix is positioned for long-term success, and we now have the leadership to capture it. Moving now to Q2 and slide 12.

Revenue for Q2 '26 was $32.9 million, lower than expected. Our revenue grew year-over-year on an as-reported basis by 34% compared to Q2 '25 revenue of $24.5 million. When including pre-acquisition revenue from Akoya in Q2 '25, what I refer to as pro forma, total revenue declined year-over-year by 23%. I will cover details of our revenue performance on the next slide. Despite the revenue performance and volume in Q2, we managed our cash well in the quarter. Cash usage was $5.7 million in the quarter, and we ended Q2 with a cash balance of $96.9 million.

On an adjusted basis, after excluding certain severance and integration costs, we reported adjusted cash usage of $4.0 million. Including pre-acquisition cash usage for Akoya in Q2 '25, this represents a decline of $8.4 million. The company has taken significant steps as a part of its Akoya synergies and cost-cutting actions, which combined with improved collection activity enabled us to attain better cash preservation this quarter. On slide 13, I'll provide an overview of our Q2 2026 revenue performance.

One factor in our year-over-year pro forma revenue decline was a 5% headwind driven by revenue pulled into Q2 '25 ahead of tariffs implemented last year. Excluding this impact, our APAC revenue of $4.5 million was only down high single digits. EMEA revenue of $10.3 million also declined by mid-single digits on lower consumables pull-through. Finally, Americas was down significantly, mostly reflecting commercial execution, but also continued softness in academic and government spending.

In Q2, Simoa revenue of $20.6 million declined in the low teens percentage, with a smaller decline in Simoa consumables, but year-over-year growth in non-Accelerator services. Our Accelerator lab services, which mostly falls under the Simoa product family, declined more than the company average on lower project sizes, as we saw in Q1 '26. One bright spot in the quarter is the significant increase in bookings in Q2 '26 for our Accelerator business. Spatial revenue of $12.3 million was down year-over-year across instruments and consumables, reflecting continued weak funding from U.S. Academic and Government markets.

Our Pharma CRO revenue of $14.2 million was down mid-teens percent year-over-year, but grew sequentially for both our Spatial and Simoa products. Academic and Government revenue of $18.7 million was down significantly in line with our Spatial performance. Revenue from diagnostics partners was $1.6 million. While Q2 instrument sales were lower versus prior periods, consumable volume grew for our single biomarker test from our diagnostics enablement partners.

Thanks to new leadership in our diagnostics group, we are making progress in the field of diagnostics with academic medical centers, commercial reference labs, and the physician community, specifically in primary care. In addition, we are working with partners to expand the direct consumer experience in neurology. Moving to the P&L, GAAP gross profit and margin for the second quarter was $12.7 million, or 38.5%. Non-GAAP gross profit was $15.8 million, a 54% increase from Q2 2025, and non-GAAP gross margin was 47.9%, an improvement of 600 basis points.

The year-over-year improvement in gross margin was largely driven by Akoya acquisition synergies and cost cutting. Operating expenses for the second quarter of 2026 were $62.1 million. Included in operating expenses are approximately $30.4 million of costs related to acquisition, integration, separation, and purchase accounting. Notably, this includes a $26.9 million one-time non-cash write-off related to Akoya goodwill. This impairment is required for U.S. GAAP and was driven by macro factors and company performance.

This adjustment has no impact on operations or liquidity, and we believe the Akoya opportunity remains achievable once market conditions improve and our execution strengthens. The resulting non-GAAP operating expenses of $31.8 million in Q2 '26 were up $0.7 million from $31.1 million in Q2 2025. But reflecting the significant synergy cost actions over the last 12 months and when applying pre-acquisition expenses from Akoya to Q2 2025, our pro forma and non-GAAP operating expenses declined by more than $19 million.

As Everett mentioned, we're pleased to finalize the Akoya integration effort in Q2 '26, with the completion of the ERP integration and our cost synergies finalized by Q1 '26. Chief cost reductions and strategic roadmap realignment have allowed Quanterix to reallocate capital to drive sustained growth. We are prioritizing several investments, such as building out a dedicated commercial diagnostics team and sufficient infrastructure to manage our diagnostics partnerships. We have also made continued investments in our tools, commercial organization, and in our service teams to get closer to the customer.

Our adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $10.0 million. Sequentially, this was roughly flat despite lower revenues versus the prior quarter. I will now turn to guidance for 2026 on the next slide. Due to the Q2 revenue shortfall, we are revising our guidance for the full year 2026 and now expect to report approximately $142 million to $148 million of revenue rather than the previous $169 million to $174 million of revenue. In addition, we expect non-GAAP gross margins to be in a range of 48% to 50% compared to non-GAAP gross margins of 49% to 53% previously.

We now anticipate achieving cash flow break-even in 2027 rather than year-end 2026 and expect to end 2026 with cash of approximately $80 million compared to about $100 million previously, and no debt. Finally, in terms of our quarterly cadence, we expect Q3 revenue to be flat to slightly above Q2. And we expect that the significant commercial organization actions we are taking now will begin to drive increased revenues later in 2026, but more materially in 2027 and beyond.

Based on our current plans, cash usage in the second half is expected to be double digits in Q3, which will moderate in Q4. I will now turn it back over to Everett for closing remarks. Everett.

Thanks, Jason. We made meaningful progress in the second quarter, including strengthening our leadership team and preserving cash better than planned. And we're moving very quickly to address the impact of the Q2 revenue shortfall driven by execution challenges and continued market softness. We're taking immediate and significant action to address commercial performance, including reorganizing our teams and adding seasoned leadership to sharpen accountability, accelerate execution, and improve operating results in the second half and beyond.

I'm very excited about the new leadership, and I intend to work closely with all of them to make Quanterix's team among the best in the sector. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to Mary to begin the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions]

Your first question is from Dan Brennan with TD Cowen.

Maybe just to level set the guide, if you don't mind, just to start out. So when we think about the back half of the year, we got the top overall view from Jason sequentially, but could you break it down a little bit how you're thinking about instruments, consumables, and service, you know, as we go through the back half of the year? And then any color since you are breaking out Quanterix and Akoya in the Q, just would be interesting to see how those progress in the back half of the year, just to start.

Yes, Dan, this is Everett. I'll let Jason take that before I do. I'm pleased with what Jason's done in his first two months. The finance team even got closer to the commercial team in terms of doing a robust, bottoms-up look at our pipeline, our funnel for each of these businesses, Spatial, our Simoa business, and Accelerator. I also think we're driving better forecast accuracy because of that deep dive, so we're confident in our new guide, but I'll have Jason break it out.

Sure, Dan, nice to meet you. So a few things I would add. We're not going to guide to the product lines, but what I would say is our second half, we expect a couple of pickups in Simoa versus Spatial. I think we're not expecting anything on the Academic/Gov recovery. So I think Spatial will lag compared to Simoa.

And I think based on our new assay releases, I think we're expecting some pickup on the consumable side, but there definitely is a sequential improvement expected on the instruments as well. I think I'll cut it there. I think the one thing I would also add is seasonally H2 is higher, so I think you would expect a bit of a pickup in the second half as well.

Okay, obviously a lot in the prepared remarks. Maybe, Everett, just on Akoya specifically, I think Jason talked about at the very end, you know, once market conditions improve and execution improves on Akoya, I know there's a lot in your remarks about the commercial go-to-market and all the changes you're making. But specifically on Akoya, what would you say, how would you highlight what needs to get done there in terms of the improvement in execution?

Yes, thanks, Dan. I'm optimistic about our Akoya Spatial business for a few reasons and Jason highlighted first of all our new launches. I've done over the last two months, guys, an intentional spending time with our customers. I've been in the field with field reps doing field rides globally. And what they've been telling me is, hey, the launch of new assays will give us momentum. So when I think about our PCF platform, we've launched the new PhenoCode molecular barcoding kit. We're already hearing from customers that it makes it easier for them to develop, which is right in our business space.

On the PhenoImager HT, we've had new launches around our new ADC lung cancer panel. And also I spent time in California a couple of weeks ago with one of our largest Spatial customers, Prelude DX, using our PhenoImager HT machine as the preferred platform for multiplexing immunofluorescent spatial diagnostics. So the technology is out there. We're getting feedback from customers that we're in the right place. In addition to that, we feel that the segmentation of our sales organization will pay dividends in the second half, will provide good sequential momentum.

We have a legacy Akoya team that is out there. They know the customer base. They've been selling Spatial for decades. And what we're doing now is we're prioritizing that team to sell Spatial only to Spatial talent. That's the feedback that I received from our organization, and we made the quick pivot and that should pay dividends in the second half.

And then maybe one more on just diagnostics, and I'll go back into queue. I think you talked about $10 million in partner revenues last year and that that's not a bad proxy for this year. I think you're expecting FDA in the back half of this year. Can you just update us on where that stands today? You're still really enthused on diagnostics obviously from the prepared remarks, you're investing a lot, you think you're differentiated, but just more, how do we think about the next, say, 12 to 18 months in diagnostics, either from revenue contribution, FDA, and then any other key milestones?

Yes, thanks. Really excited about diagnostics. Again, when I got here back in January, I was intentional about ensuring that we had a diagnostics team dedicated to growing this business. I've actually invited our diagnostics leader, Geoff Albrecht, on the call. I'll have him say a couple of comments because this is what he's done 24/7 over the last three months. Let me just mention a couple things that I still feel really enthusiastic about. Number 1 is our differentiated blood-based biomarker test. We have a 5-marker, multi-analyte, algorithmic test that we're hearing from our customers gives them better answers, right?

Every patient gets a quantitative result, so 100% of patients get that, and this indeterminate zone of going down to 10%, that's just giving clinicians better answers. We're starting to see that pick up with our LucentAD test, quarter-over-quarter growth. We feel good about that business. We're in productive discussions with the FDA around LucentAD Complete FDA approval. And also our HD-X machine, we stated last quarter that we were going to be able to have that IVD ready in 2027. I spent time in Stuttgart, Germany, with our contract manufacturer that's working to upgrade that machine. And again, that is right on time. So our early head start is continuing to play out and just the early blood-based biomarker acceptance in the field will only help us with momentum. But Geoff, anything else in your first three months?

Sure, Everett. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for the time here. Everett, I think you hit most of the highlights, but I think a few of the things that I'm particularly optimistic about. As we continue to scale this team, we're working with a number of partners on the front end and the back end regarding what we're doing with infrastructure, what we're doing with resources, what we're doing to simplify the process for clients, whether those clients might be academic medical centers, commercial reference labs, or physician clients, as Everett mentioned.

We're also continuing to scale this business smartly, prudently, but in a disciplined fashion in terms of how we grow the team and how we deploy that against some of the key resources. I'll close with one other thought, Everett. We did have the opportunity to go to the AAIC conference a couple months ago. We spoke with some of the thought leaders in the space. Their reactions, their responses to what we're doing in the space not only positions us well now, but it positions us very well for where we're going.

We spoke with some of the key partnerships that we have with some of the people in the space, really resonating in the market. So we're very bullish here, we're very optimistic about where we're going to go, and with some of the things you mentioned relative to the payer dynamics and some of the things to differentiate a decision making with the multi-marker assay, it's really going to resonate in the short term and the long term. So thank you for the time.

Maybe I could take one last one, and just the free cash flow break-even getting pushed out to '27, obviously on the lower guide, makes sense. Is there a revenue number associated with hitting free cash flow break-even next year that you need, like we should have in mind?

Yes, Dan, one follow up on the diagnostics before I get to that. I did want to mention we are on track for growth ahead of the $10 million that we mentioned in Q1 for diagnostics. So that's a great sign based on the partnerships from last year. And that's also on lighter instruments in the first half. So I think there's a lot of reasons for excitement on the DX. And the test volume is ramping accordingly to the partnerships that we established last year and continue to establish this year. So I thought that was useful. And then back to your question. At this time we're not ready to talk about 2027 revenue. But we are fully committed to cash break-even in 2027.

Your next question is from Kyle Mikson with Canaccord.

So Everett, good to see all these actions that you're taking and all the changes and so forth to improve performance. But maybe just talk about why continue to focus on investing and establishing that diagnostics business if it's not going to pay any near-term dividends and you have this research tools business that continues to be pressured and challenged. And you could probably help improve that perhaps first to just kind of alleviate this cash burn issue potentially as well.

Yes, thanks, Kyle. Our strategy is an 'and' strategy. Our research tools business is a very important business to be in. We differentiate when it comes to being in this space. When I think about our Simoa technology and hearing from customers, we deliver clinical grade, ultra-sensitive results, precision, reproducibility, which I keep hearing when I'm in the field. Reproducibility is critical in this translational and clinical setting. Having consistency from lot to lot, test to test, lab to lab is critical. In Simoa, we're right there.

And then Spatial, listen, we're a high-plex proteomic platform for discovery, and also we play in the translational and clinical application. So what we offer there in terms of our customers, they need Quanterix. We need to do a better job of executing our strategy, articulating our value prop, and we're going to do that with our new go-to-market. The other end is diagnostics, especially Alzheimer's disease diagnostics. Listen, Alzheimer's is a terrible disease. And like I said, I spent the last two to three months in the field talking to neurologists, talking to memory centers. They are thirsty for instruments, they're thirsty for solutions that can give them earlier detection of this disease.

And because we have a differentiated blood-based biomarker in LucentAD Complete, because we feel we have the instrument that will be IVD ready, and now we have a dedicated team focused on this, we're in the right place to grow Quanterix sequentially. So we're excited about both the research tools and the diagnostics opportunity.

All right, got it. Thanks for that. And then on consumables especially, I mean, it makes sense that instruments would be down and everything. It's a tough environment. But on reagent revenue for Akoya, that was a smaller business for them historically, in the spatial consumables market this quarter had seen growth. So I'm curious what happened there. And then in Simoa, anything on pull-through you can have to talk about over there?

Yes, maybe let me kick it off and hand off to Jason. Listen, our Spatial business, the space market has been facing headwinds, especially in U.S. Government and Academic accounts, constrained. Again, we're hearing this directly from our customers. Listen, our job is going to be, I keep getting back to this, we're going to execute better in the second half. I love the fact that we're now going to have singularly focused segmented representatives going to talk to customers that they've been talking to for decades. I think that's going to pay dividends.

And that prioritization will definitely help us with not just instrument placement, but just as important as consumable pull-through. So we have good, solid strategies and incentives to do that in the second half. Jason, I don't know if you want to add anything.

Sure, Kyle. I think what I would add is I think the Simoa consumables were a bit weaker, and that's likely linked to some of the execution challenges. I think we're excited about the tool and its capabilities. So I think we're excited. I think this is much more an execution issue and Everett's taking very decisive, significant steps here to impact the execution of the second half. So I think that's what I would add.

All right, perfect. And then lastly, on the Anthem coverage for the Alzheimer's test, that was great to see. Obviously not really any impact revenue-wise from that for a while probably, but how does that maybe influence other commercial plans to grant coverage to those types of tests or other neurology tests, do you think?

Yes, I mean, I'll have Geoff handle this in a second, but we're excited about the Anthem coverage of blood-based biomarkers, specifically our opportunity with LucentAD Complete. I think it justifies the importance of blood-based biomarkers, the fact that Anthem was a first mover. What I'm excited about is this is happening before our kind of scalable, broad-based reimbursement strategy that Geoff has in place. But Geoff, if you want to talk a little bit about Anthem.

Sure, Everett, thank you. And I think the Anthem position puts us in a nice situation to look to the other payers in terms of what's next. And I can say also, in conjunction with where we are with CMS, it puts a lot of the dominoes in line for what we're looking to do. Obviously, with Anthem being one of the larger payers, there's other payers out there of their size and significance that we'll be speaking with this about as well.

But we think that as we move forward, we'll apply a dedicated resource against this for health plans. They will work with the local plans as well as the nationals. And we think again, this first mover experience with Anthem is going to put us in a good position to line up some of the opportunity that we have there.

Your next question comes from Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners.

Maybe just walk us through, what are you assuming for Simoa versus Spatial and versus Alzheimer's in the full year guide? And I think the bigger question here is, why is there not risk for further guide cuts? Just given the macro backdrop we're in, the competitive positioning of the products you have versus core Simoa, Spatial launches are also coming in the market, and all of this is happening while the organization is undergoing somewhat of a transformation towards Neurology DX. So with all of these moving parts, maybe just give us a sense of your thinking in the overall guide cut and why should this be the last one?

Yes, thanks, Puneet. I appreciate the question. Listen, Jason has come in in short time, and I'm really happy with the robust nature now of us just digging in rep by rep, territory by territory, funnel by funnel. Spending time out in the field getting kind of what I would call just-in-time feedback on not just our offerings but the market, what customers are saying, I feel confident in our second half guide. I do. I also feel confident of the momentum that we're building in our diagnostics business, Puneet.

Putting the right resources in place, we're having the right conversations, not just internally, but Geoff has accelerated partnership conversations with reference labs. That will actually pay some dividends here in the second half, but most importantly in 2027. In addition to that, I like the leadership that we're adding. And this isn't new leadership to healthcare. I spoke about Jim who has decades of experience in capital equipment with his experience at GE Healthcare. Jim also led a big service business at GE Healthcare.

And then just his background at Exact Sciences of establishing sales and marketing and operations discipline. I mean, he will absolutely hit the ground running on day one. And Geoff with the same background of growing our diagnostics business. These guys are seasoned veterans that I've worked with in the past. So you combine the fact that we have differentiated instruments and technology, the fact that we're going to have a renewed focus on everyday sales execution, and then just been there, done that leadership that's going to drive day to day, we feel confident in our second half guide. Jason, I don't know if you want to add anything.

Yes, the one thing I would add, Puneet, is I really think that the productivity benefit from this reorganization of the sales team, I think we're excited. I think this was an effect that took place with the past alignment. I think we're excited about the potential and I think the team is excited about it as well.

Yes, I'll add this. Lastly, this segmentation of what we're doing with our commercial organization, and how we look at our current talent, and the fact that I think that there's going to be less disruption, this is something that they've been asking for. They want to get deeper within their respective expertise, get deeper with customer interactions, and being able to just articulate their specified value prop, like Jason said, we're excited about the second half sequential improvement.

Maybe to your question on the guide. I won't guide to the specific platforms, but what I would say is probably the decline for Spatial continues to Q3, Q4, similar to the first half with more of a recovery on the Simoa side led by consumables with some sequential improvement in instruments. So that's some more detail.

Yes, that's helpful. And then look in the pivot to Alzheimer's, the Anthem, overall neurology diagnostics, I mean, could you talk a little bit about sort of how much of the tools business is how much of a core is that business? Within the life science tools business, how much of a core is Spatial versus Simoa? I mean, we're just getting questions around whether this is, given the pivot, how are you thinking about these two businesses longer term? Is this something that remains core to Quanterix longer term as well?

Yes, thanks, Puneet. Our research tools business is absolutely core. We look to stabilize this business, get it back to flat, and then start growing it very soon. I think it's representative of the leader that I brought in. I mean, I brought in Jim Gute, who I've worked with in the past for seven years at GE and Exact. He is experienced in terms of bringing back discipline, sales productivity and growth. Jim will be responsible for turning our research tools business around. And I'm confident that Jim will do that.

In addition, diagnostics is the same. We've done, and we said this on previous earnings calls, we've made priority decisions here and that's freed up some resources and investments. And we're taking those investments and we are investing in diagnostics. So it's not like it's going to all of a sudden blow out our spending, but we're prudently, again, investing in diagnostics with partnerships, with leaders that we're bringing in, and really like what Geoff has done in the last two months with having a focus on scaling diagnostics in the right way to drive growth this year. And then you're going to see that take off in 2027.

Got it. And just last one for me, I mean, with the rapid CMS pathway, I don't know if you had a chance to look at that and see if there are any benefits here. Anything you can provide on the FDA side would be helpful too. Thank you.

Yes, thanks, Puneet. And again, I'll have Geoff maybe talk about the CMS $897 differentiated price. Listen, we're in regular dialogue with the FDA. We believe that those discussions have been really productive, especially over the last month, that's enabling us to ensure that we get approval for our LucentAD Complete test somewhere towards the end of this year. Geoff, CMS?

Yes, super pleased with where we've landed with CMS relative to the multi-marker assay. I think it really just solidifies the fact that they see the value in terms of what we have with the algorithm, with the decision-making tied to the five assays. It's starting to take hold right away. I mean, this is relatively new to the space and this is getting out there in the physician community.

Initially when we were starting with this message we were talking to many of the academic medical centers, but as this discussion has evolved into the physician community with primary care, memory centers, neurologists, these are folks that are really appreciative in terms of what we've done with this CMS piece. So I think you've really just seen the beginning of where we're going to go with this. We'll report more traction on this in the very near future, but we're bullish about where this is going to go.

Got it. All right. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Puneet.

At this time, there are no further questions. With that, we'll conclude today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Evie Koslosky, life science tools and diagnostics analyst here at Goldman Sachs. I'm joined here by Everett Cunningham, the President and CEO of Quanterix. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Evie. Thanks for having us.

Yes. So I guess just to kick things off, you've had several months under your belt as CEO of Quanterix. Maybe walk us through how your background positions you well as you look to expand from kind of core research into clinical diagnostics and the high-level strategy of how you plan to execute this transition.

Yes. It's been almost 5 months since my new job here at Quanterix. I'm a lifer when it comes to health care. I've been in health care for 34 years. And my background in the pharma space, the research tools space, the precision oncology space lends it really well in terms of the timing and fit with Quanterix.

If you look at Quanterix now, our research tools business, big robust business, really impressive installed base, how we pull through our consumables to generate growth. Our research tools business is a very solid business. And I talk about fit and timing, Quanterix to go to that next level being in that diagnostics business, our diagnostics opportunity, especially in the Alzheimer's side of the business, right now, and I know we'll talk about it, but just from a timing standpoint of submitting our 510(k) for our blood-based biomarker test, making sure that our instruments are IVD ready, making sure that we get solid reimbursement. I've been through all of that in the past companies, and how do we build that up to generate growth, it's exciting.

Yes, definitely. Let me jumping in, you mentioned it, you recently submitted the FDA 510(k) application. It's now under review. So what have your conversations been like with the agency? And I think you mentioned a time line of around 6 to 9 months of when you expect to hear back. So I guess, how are you thinking about that?

Yes. We submitted our 510(k) in January. We've had ongoing conversations with the FDA. While we can't predict what the FDA is going to do, we have all signs that we're going to get FDA approval in the second half of this year. And that time line is right on track. A good sign is the FDA continuing to ask us really solid questions and us following up on those questions. So we feel good about -- and that is a really big kind of sign for us to continue to execute our diagnostics plan, is getting LucentAD complete FDA approved in the second half. So all signs are headed in the right direction.

Great. And how should we think about the labeling requirements for multi-marker test versus some of the single analyte pTau-217 tests?

Yes. Like I said, our LucentAD complete test is a multi-marker, a 5-marker test. The blood-based biomarkers that are on market now are 1-marker, 2-marker tests. How we look at that in terms of how we're going to get designation is our test is differentiated. When you look at the 1-marker test that's out there now, that indeterminant zone is around 30%. So 30% of patients, you don't really get an answer. With the 5-marker test, that indeterminant zone goes from 30% all the way down to 10%.

So we look at that as a couple of things. First of all, it just gives more answers. It gives more answers to the patient, which is critically important. But it also gives more answers to the health care provider. And then when you think of giving more answers, there's less than need for PET scan. So it also -- it decreases the amount of health care dollars that are being spent and the workflow just becomes easier.

The last thing I'll say about the 5-marker test is CMS. So we got a really good price crosswalk of $897 for our 5-marker test compared to the CMS price crosswalk of the 1-marker test that's around $130. So it's not just clinicians saying that our test is differentiated, but it's also CMS with that robust price crosswalk.

Yes, definitely. And I wanted to touch on the pricing more. Maybe talk through what this means from a margin perspective, and how you compare it to the single analyte test, maybe on the margin side as well would be great. And I guess, how do you feel this helps you with early conversations with payers?

Yes. So a few things are going to help us with early conversations with payers that we're having right now. One is around our clinical utility studies. So we have 3 studies that are out there with 3 really credible partners, Mass General Brigham, Mount Sinai and the University of Florida. Those are clinical utility studies. They should read out in the second half of this year. So we're taking those studies because they're real-world studies in the neurology setting and the primary care setting.

We're going to take those studies, and they will help us with the reimbursement discussions that we're going to have with payers. So we feel good about that. As far as margin, we're not going to talk about specific margin numbers right now. However, we're very confident that this will be and help our margin and be accretive to our margin goals for this year.

Great. And maybe touch a little bit more on some of the clinical utility studies that you mentioned. I think completion in the second half, but maybe talk through what you're seeing there.

Yes. No, it's -- we're right on track. So we talk to those 3 partners that I talked about on a frequent basis. Those studies should read out in the second half. So we have a lot of things happening in the second half, right? We have our 510(k), we should get FDA approved. We have clinical utility studies reading out in the second half. We have our discussions with payers in the second half. We are also taking our HD-X instrument, which is our workhorse, right? The installed base is robust. We're getting that IVD ready. That should be in 2017 (sic) [ 2027 ]. You're putting all that together.

We talk about that as our diagnostic moat. And what differentiates us from many competitors in our space is the fact that our moat is ready now. You take all of that, and we're setting up -- we're being intentional. I brought in a diagnostics leader from Quest Diagnostics, Geoff Albrecht, 30 years of experience at Quest [Audio Gap]. He's talked to payers in the space. He knows big -- put all of that together, we will -- and our -- we will drive growth with our diagnostics now.

Yes. I mean a lot of catalysts kind of adding up for the second half. I mean, I guess from a sales team build-out perspective, how are you looking at that and then also managing expenses kind of?

Yes. I smile at that, Evie, because it's probably one of the most common questions that I get, right? And it's because people -- they look at my background, and I've built out diagnostics organizations and organizations like Quest Diagnostics, at Exact Sciences. At Illumina, we built out a pretty robust diagnostics organization. Here's the similarity. The similarities are we know the call points that we need to go to grow this product. And what I like about our opportunity is it sits not only in the neurology call point, but it also sits in the primary care call point because half of Alzheimer's is diagnosed in the primary care setting. So we know that we have to be there, right?

And we're going to be there through a multichannel approach. We're going to have obviously key account executives that will call on neurology and that pull through to primary care. We're going to have a multichannel marketing effort that we -- my team, we were talking about that this morning in terms of how do we cast a wider net with marketing and social media and working with advocacy groups to get the word out there.

And then what I'm really excited about is we'll not only do it organically at Quanterix, but we're going to use smart third parties to do it. And we announced in the first quarter a really unique partnership with Tempus AI. They have great relationships at key health systems in the United States. Those health systems are integrated with EMRs, and we're targeting key health systems to integrate Lucent [Audio gap].

We'll scale with third parties like companies like Tempus also.

[Audio gap] This partnership. Are there any key metrics we should be looking at regarding that partnership specifically?

Growth is one. I think another key metric. And we're working really closely with Tempus is we're being strategic on those health systems that we target. Health systems that see a lot of Alzheimer's. Health systems that we have access to. Health systems, like I said, that have a solid EMR partnership. And those are the ones that we started to go to. We kicked this off at the end of Q1. And throughout the year, I'm sure we'll talk about the second half. But that's why we feel optimistic about the second half is because of smart things that we're doing to focus on growth.

Definitely. And you touched on this a little bit, but when you think about like the neurology specialists, which are probably the earlier adopters and then specific investments that are really required to get more into the primary care setting. I guess, how do you balance the education of high-touch point PCP with kind of your current margin targets?

We're going to be smart about this. I mean the key opinion leaders with Alzheimer's, the Alzheimer's journey, dementia are the neurologists. And the good thing about neurologists is the -- what I would say, they're concentrated in big neurology centers that we are already embedded in today. So we'll continue to making sure that we have a diagnostics key account leader in these key neurology centers, and then we'll use it as like a hub and spoke. From that, we'll make sure that we deploy appropriately. I mean -- and I say that only because I've done this before.

The primary care call point is so dispersed. It's so -- there's so many different ways you can go. We'll make sure that we know which primary care physicians are ready for blood-based biomarker adoption, and we'll make sure that we deploy accordingly. That's where Geoff will come in. The good thing Geoff about is his experience at Quest Diagnostics. They have experience in selling blood-based biomarkers. We know kind of where the fish are, and that's where we'll deploy accordingly.

Yes. That's great, that's great. I do want to touch on the competitive landscape. You have some large cap players entering the pTau-217 space. Maybe walk us through the competitive advantage of the multi-marker test relative and then what you're actually seeing from the physicians in the market.

Yes. First of all, competition. I mean we're asked the question all the time around competition and Evie in a really maybe unique way, I love competition. Twofold, number one, it defines how important and attractive this market is. I mean if you think about Alzheimer's, right? Right now, the Alzheimer's journey is a journey of cognitive impairment, a lot of questions, what do I do if I have Alzheimer's and almost people because they don't have tools waiting too late, right? And so the fact that the competition is here in this space, it talks about the need for many, many people to go and compete in this early detection, early biomarker space. So I welcome that. I also welcome it because it sharpens our tools.

And when you have competition that's out there, we have to be that much better. And so I use that as a catalyst for our internal people to say, hey, we do have competition that are out there. How do we differentiate? So here's how we differentiate. First of all, our diagnostics, we call it moat, right? Our diagnostics base is better than any company that's out there right now. We have the tools, the instruments. We have the kit. We have the blood-based biomarker. We have our internal lab right now that we can do order to cash and bring samples to our lab. We also have the opportunity because we have our HD-X instrument, we can have a distributed strategy, too.

So we'll have to determine kind of how we go and where we go. So that's important, the differentiation. And then if I double-click on the 5-marker test, a lot of people think, well, the 1-marker is okay. It's okay for people. I beg to differ. I think that the 5-marker test that looks at all the markers that are essential for diagnosing Alzheimer's is important. And I go back to what I said earlier, if I can then take that indeterminate zone that's now 30%. I could take that down to 10% that's that fold increase in giving more answers and making now the caregivers just knowing what to do with that, to me, we're going to impact the market, so...

Yes, definitely. You mentioned the distributed strategy with your instrument. Maybe talk through like what would be the considerations if you decided to go that route versus maybe using your internal lab.

Yes, we will go that route. First of all, we're going to utilize our own installed base and the relationships that we have on the research tool side of the business in academia and going after the right labs and making sure that they can then use our instrument to process their own samples. So to me, it's flexibility of having a centralized strategy with our own lab, it's amazing. It's in Billerica. It's up and running samples and samples now. So it's not a start-up lab, but it's an established lab. And then having the flexibility of saying, "Hey, we'll put an instrument in your own lab, you run the samples." I think it's given us that flexibility.

Yes, absolutely. It's a good place to start to transition to the core research business. So I guess, pharma revenue in Q1 was impacted by fewer larger accelerated projects and weaker instrument placements. But can you talk through what you're seeing from a macro perspective? It feels like the end market is maybe seeing slow and steady improvements. You've got some MFN deals, slightly better funding from academia, but maybe talk through some of the puts and takes.

Yes. Maybe I'll talk about it from a balance sheet standpoint first. Listen, end markets are tough. They're not just tough for Quanterix, they're tough for...

It's broad based.

Yes, it's broad-based. And I still keep in touch with some of my Illumina colleagues, and we talk about the end market that's impacting everyone. So we actually, in our plan this year, and we talked about it in our earnings call, we don't have anything built into end market improvement throughout the year. So that's from a balance sheet P&L standpoint. From a -- if I could just go pharma, for example, yes, our accelerated business was down, but not because of the number of deals. The number of deals that we've done are kind of compares the same. The number of deals that we're doing is the same in terms of quantity of deals. It's the size of the deal.

So because of that and thank goodness, we've done a lot of research around that. I'm going to dedicate more focused capabilities on our accelerator business. I'm bringing in senior leadership that will focus solely on accelerator. They're going to use the entire company. I say that with a smile because I will start calling on pharma customers, and we need to compete for bigger deals in this space. That we think will bring upside to our Accelerator business in the second half.

As far as academia and research, that business was down in 2025 by 25%. And in Q1, it was down by 16%. So we're still seeing headwinds in that space but that won't preclude or hinder us from going into that customer and still selling our instrumentations in our assays. It's -- we have the best in the market. We need to -- it's on us to go out and execute.

Yes. And touching on that market, too, because we've seen an NIH budget that's now been confirmed out slightly, but there's been talk of like maybe the flow of funding isn't quite as robust as you would expect in that environment. So I guess what are you hearing from those conversations?

Hesitancy?

Yes.

No, it doesn't mean that research isn't important, but hesitancy to see a full release of kind of their spending. I think the important thing, Evie, is that we're there when that spending does start to unleash. And we're working with our entire organization, our commercial organization to ensure that we're not going to let the market impact us from not being out there. We're going to be out there. So when it does, they have the best solutions, the best selling, the best marketing, and we'll be there to capture it.

Yes. And kind of to that point, on the Simoa HD-X, you're upgrading your platform, and you plan to submit IVD status next year. I guess, talk through some of the upgrades and how you expect this upgraded version to help in terms of driving interest in placements.

Yes, reliability. When you get into the diagnostic setting, your machine has to 99% reliable. So it's going to be improving on the reliability of the machine, the software, the workflow. So when we do put it in the diagnostics clinical setting, it is seamless on how our clinicians work with us and health care providers work with us. And that's on track. We made that prioritization back in Q1 that we would focus on upgrading our HD-X. We're doing that because it has the largest installed base. We're working with one of our contract manufacturers, STRATEC. And we have a really good plan in place to be IVD ready at the beginning -- sometime in '27.

Okay. And Simoa ONE is an early access. Maybe walk through the feedback of what you're hearing from customers so far on that, and how you're thinking about that launch, given the environment, maybe more capital constrained?

Yes, Simoa ONE. I mean it's -- I think it's the example of our innovation, right? We're refreshing our HD-X machine, that's innovative because we're getting it ready for IVD. Simoa ONE, like you said, is an early access. I'm actually seeing our early access partner next week down in Providence. And we're still getting insights from the early access program. We'll take those insights not only to improve on Simoa ONE, but also to improve on all of our instrumentation. So it's going well.

Great. And on Akoya, you already hit your $85 million annualized synergy target for the acquisition. So maybe talk through how you're balancing the strategic focus towards attacking new markets versus maybe some of your existing markets in neurology.

Yes. First, my hats off to our existing team. Vandana Sriram did a great job of discipline and hitting targets all across the organization. We hit our $85 million target in Q1. That really helped us from a balance sheet standpoint of, again, being cash flow breakeven in the second half. And so my compliments to the team. One thing that I've been impressed with in my first 5 months is just the discipline around prudent spending, investing, doing the things that we say we're going to do, that $85 million synergy target is spot on. What I said during Q1 that I'm excited about is now making the pivot from being a synergy hitting target organization to an invest-to-grow organization, being on the offense now.

And having the synergy plan behind us and now focused on how do we generate that flat to low single-digit growth in our research tools business, in addition to now starting to have our diagnostics business take off. We have the acquisition behind us and now we can focus on execution. That's the pivot that I've seen from Q1 to Q2, heading into the second half and beyond.

Great. And as you kind of gain more familiarity with the business, is there any way you feel you could drive additional synergies or maybe cross-selling opportunities within your core platform?

Yes. To me, I look at it as productivity, synergy word sometimes is looked at as defensive but productive and making the Akoya capability, the spatial capability, a part of Quanterix. It's just going to bring us -- first of all, it's diversifying our business. So not only are we a neurology-focused company, but now oncology and immunology. So that's a good thing. Other synergies come with our commercial organization. We now have one person going to a similar call point.

So if I look at like pharma or academia, there's no need to have 2 separate people. It's usually the same call point that we can go to. So as time goes on, that productivity decision that we made will only gather momentum. So I'm happy about that. And then -- and I told our company this, right? I mean we had to do a lot to hit the $85 million in synergies, and now we're kind of in invest to growth mode -- invest to grow mode. Now we can look at surgical things that we can do, whether it's a growth opportunity or a synergy opportunity that will benefit our company and that's how we look at it.

Okay. And Akoya is more positioned towards the translational research side. Did you see any low-hanging fruit to start to penetrate on the drug discovery side or maybe the clinical side within that?

Yes, both. I look at our accelerator business, our accelerator business. Right now, it's mostly on the Simoa neurology side of things. There are absolute connections that we can have on the Akoya side of things. So we'll look to stabilize and build up and bolster our Akoya spatial drug discovery opportunity on that side. The other things that Akoya brings that I absolutely love, and we're being purposeful.

I'm actually recruiting back Akoya talent to the company. We recently brought back Antony Catalano, who is now our COO; and Akoya executive that we brought back, I'm looking to continuing to reach out to customers and figure out how can Quanterix partner in that translational side of the business. And then the question is, we saw this at AACR in San Diego, is how do we move from being a big partner in translational staying there, but how do we also move then into diagnostics and clinical. So that will be our focus, too.

Exciting. I have to ask an AI question. So I think when you think about tools business more broadly, we've heard several pharma companies are talking about changing their drug discovery and R&D workflows as they incorporate AI and predictive models. I guess what are you hearing from customers on that front?

Yes. I mean, AI is -- we were at our CEO dinner last night, and thanks again for hosting us. And AI was a big topic in terms of how AI is just revolutionizing the world, but specifically in health care. If I look at AI and what I'm hearing is with regards to Quanterix, and how we can partner with customers is around assay development. And how can AI not only increase assay development, but bring assays quicker to market.

We will not shy away from AI and helping us with assay development. I can do it because of my Chief Commercial Officer kind of like Jean. I always think of AI in terms of how can we better target customers, how can we target patients, how can we be more precise at marketing? There's a lot of space that AI will play and help Quanterix speed to market.

Yes. Turning to the financial performance. You reaffirmed your top line guide in 1Q. But given the 1Q softness in instrumentation, a lot of those like kind of end market challenges that are broad-based, I guess, what specific catch-up could kind of help support growth in the second half. You talked about some of the catalysts and maybe from a financial perspective.

Yes. Let me -- so just to reaffirm what we talked about at our last earnings call was we have about $100 million in cash. No debt. We will hit cash breakeven in the second half. So we feel good about that plan. We're right on track, even with the softness in Q1. We say that Q2 would be about the same as Q1. And then we would then start to see a lift in the second half of the year. And we're standing by that because we made moves in Q1. A few of those moves are -- we enhanced our commercial organization. We saw that while our current installed base was okay, our net new customers fell behind a little bit.

So we actually instituted lead generation representatives. All they do, Evie, is they go after new business. They look at leads, they legitimize those leads, and they work to bring those leads in to where we can sell and close. So I love that piece of our business. We put more money into our spatial marketing. We -- for whatever reason, in Q4, Q3 of last year, we decreased marketing efforts on the Akoya side. We put monies and investments back into that. So we feel really good about that.

You talked about our commercial organization and training. We need to make sure that we train them up on their capabilities, whether they're legacy Akoya. They need to trade up on Simoa and vice versa. So we've increased our training in that. So those investments will definitely accelerate our business, bringing in executives that really understand Accelerator. We brought in a new head of diagnostics, and we're putting in more investments in our diagnostics business. All of those will help us, what I would say, change the trend in the second half.

Great. And you're targeting free cash flow breakeven by 4Q. What are the primary levers to drive this? Is most of it kind of on the top line recovery and then getting the operating leverage on that?

Yes. I mean, it's revenue cures a lot of woes, we always say. So that growth in the second half will definitely help us with cash flow breakeven. And then just doing what the organization has already done before I got there. The discipline that Quanterix has around hitting its targets and doing the right things is still there. So -- and we have that plan in place for the second half of the year. You combine our revenue lift with the continued discipline. We're confident we're going to hit revenue with cash flow breakeven.

Great. And margins, as you kind of expand into clinical diagnostics over time, what initiatives are in place to ensure you have sort of a self-sustaining tools business to make sure that you have the necessary capital sort of reinvest back into this clinical diagnostics opportunity?

Yes. I look at our -- right now, our footprint across Quanterix. And we look at this almost on a daily basis, like do we have the right mix? Do we have the right mix to grow our research tools business by low single digit? Make sure that our diagnostics opportunity, we invest in the right way with that. And as I look at our mix, we're there. Like we're there now. This isn't, a, hey, we have to go out and we have to all of a sudden ramp up more people in the research tools business. I spent a week in Beijing with our Asia Pacific team. And I asked the question to them like, do we have the right footprint to maintain our research tools business and to grow an amazing opportunity in diagnostics in China?

And the answer is, yes. Now as we get FDA approval, we get more partnerships and all that stuff, we will not shy away from adding especially on the diagnostics side, but our research tools business right now and the footprint that we have, the relationships that we have, the installed base that we have, the way in which we interact with our KOLs on that side, we're in good shape.

Great. And with some of these upgrades coming on with the Life Science -- within the Life Sciences space, like how do you think about a replacement cycle? Like do people then look to replace their instruments as you have upgraded versions coming out.

Yes. I mean, we'll do. We will give our customers a lot of insight and transparency in terms of what that upgrade is, how it helps in their own workflow. So they won't be surprised in terms of knocking on their door. And a lot of the customers we bring in, they give us input. So the transparency that we have around upgrades, and how we do that and get paid for the upgrades, it's already there.

Would you ever have a dynamic where a customer kind of knows that you're coming out with an upgrade, maybe they see the early access and that they actually wait to buy an instrument until they can get the newest version?

Yes. And we're working on those plans, those specific plans now. One of the things we don't want. And not just from a P&L standpoint, but from even technology innovation standpoint, we don't want people waiting. So that's where transparency comes in. But our planning right [Audio gap] we're also selling in the moment of what we have today. I like the balance...

I want to make sure we have time to touch on this, but this morning, you announced the CFO transition. So maybe talk through Jason's background and sort of how you're excited about that.

Yes. I have to just first talk about Vandana. Day 1, I got there in the middle of January and probably anybody I've talked to the most in the company has been Vandana Sriram, and she's been so helpful to me in terms of getting to know the business, getting to just know the company, getting the rhythm of our numbers, what we need to do to set ourselves up for growth. So kudos and thank you to Vandana.

We actually extended a robust search. We used a third party to cast a wide net for colleagues that are out there. Jason's background fits perfectly with Quanterix. He has experience in strategic planning on the finance side, a robust FP&A experience, a solid investor relations experience. He's a local guy, working with Bruker out of the street. So the transition from like relocating, it's going to be quick. He starts on June 22. And just excited about not only his experience, but his personality, his growth mentality. He's transformed and integrated companies into Bruker, which we need from where we are today. He will be a really good addition. We're excited to welcome him on board.

Awesome. Very exciting. And I guess, you have a couple of minutes left. So maybe to wrap up, you've been with the company for just over 5 months, but what kind of excites you the most? And what do you think investors are most sort of underappreciating about the Quanterix story as we stand here today?

I'll tell you what excites me the most. It's the people. I have a few colleagues that are with me today and the enthusiasm and the sense of urgency of making an impact on disease states that need solid partnerships in [Audio gap] blood-based biomarkers, listen, everyone in some way [Audio gap] cancer and the passion that our team brings every day to their jobs gives me the confidence that we're going to make an impact in this space, so that's number one.

Number two, maybe something that investors are underestimating and that is the balance that we have in the company. We have a solid research tools business with probably the most robust installed base. We have amazing technical and researchers that are developing new assays. We have a diagnostics opportunity that is second to none with a differentiated blood-based biomarker. KOLs that are out there, giving us input and relationships that we have on the payer side and also a compare versus last year. Our compare was at this time, this company was going through a major acquisition. So acquisition was kind of on the brain. Now with the acquisition behind us, we can focus on execution. That means upside growth for Quanterix, and we're excited.

Great. Awesome. That's a great place to end. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Evie. Appreciate it.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Quanterix Corporation Q1 2026 Earnings Call.

[Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to Joshua Young. You may begin.

Thank you, Preyila, and good afternoon, everybody. With me on today's call are Everett Cunningham, Quanterix' President and CEO; and Vandana Sriram, Quanterix' Chief Financial Officer.

Today's call is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on the Investors section of our website. During the course of today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements covered under the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and assumptions as of today, May 6, 2026. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that might cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

To supplement our financial statements presented on a GAAP basis, we have provided certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are used to evaluate our operating performance in a manner that allows for meaningful period-to-period comparison and analysis of trends in our business and our competitors. We believe that such measures are important in comparing current results with other period results and assessing our operating performance within our industry. Non-GAAP financial information presented herein should be considered in conjunction with, not as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Investors are encouraged to review the reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures set forth in the presentation posted to our website and in the earnings release issued today.

Finally, any percentage changes we discuss will be on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Everett Cunningham. Everett?

Thanks, Josh. I'm happy to be here with all of you this afternoon. My time at the company has been very exciting and informative, and I'm more confident than ever about the future of Quanterix.

Now in that spirit, I'd like to start off by sharing some of my key observations in my first 100 days with the company. First, we have a passionate employee base full of people who want Quanterix to win and be successful for the long term. Now based on our customers' feedback, we remain the market leader in early detection of critical disease biomarkers, and that's a great position to be in, one that we must capitalize on.

Next, we have an installed base of over 2,300 instruments across passionate customers who appreciate the value of our products and services. Our market-leading technologies include Simoa, where we are the leaders in ultrasensitive digital immunoassays for protein biomarker quantification and spatial, where we have the highest plex proteomic platform on the market. Now these are both businesses where we can generate strong growth and build solid businesses moving forward.

Next, our strong foundation positions us to be a leader in the Alzheimer's diagnostics industry. Now it's early innings, but I believe in our capabilities, and I want to invest in them now. So in summary, I believe that we have a clear path towards profitability for our research tools business and a balance sheet to support our growth ambitions for our Alzheimer's disease diagnostics with approximately $100 million in cash and no debt. Now this journey, I'm here to undertake is exciting, and I couldn't be more excited to be here.

Now moving from a high-level observation to more of a detailed strategic and tactical consideration. I gathered a lot of feedback in my first 3 months here. The company has many strengths to build upon, but we're not currently fulfilling our potential. So as a result, I'm making some operational as well as strategic changes now and in the future quarters that will help us better capitalize on our compelling opportunities. One overriding philosophical change that we must move the company from a mode of integrating and realizing synergies to a mode of investing and growing our business for long-term growth. We are allocating resources to growth opportunities where we see compelling near-term returns while ensuring that we continue to hit our annual operating targets in 2026 and beyond, just as we delivered our $85 million of cost synergies from the Akoya acquisition.

In the first quarter of 2026, we reported $36.4 million of revenue as our end markets remain difficult. While our consumable revenues performed as planned, our revenues from our instrumentation business was slightly softer than expected. Now some of the shortfall is related to timing issues, but there's also some changes that we're going to be implementing to bring more focus to our sales efforts. These changes will bring benefits as the year progresses. Now, in addition to investing in growth opportunities, we are hard at work at creating a culture of operational execution and delivering quarterly expectations as a key tenet of our organization we are building here at Quanterix. We've established good operational rigor, which can be seen in our gross margin performance, our disciplined approach to spending and in our ability to consistently hit our cash usage targets.

Now during the last call, I shared details of my 30-year commercial background at companies such as Illumina, Quest Diagnostics and Exact Sciences. I know what best-in-class commercial organizations look like, and I've identified multiple opportunities to take Quanterix to the next level of operational performance. As a result, we're making several investments to improve our commercial effectiveness in 2026 and beyond. Now these investments include: we're going to elevate our pharma partnerships in our accelerator business with an experienced senior leader. This important business has slipped in recent quarters, and we are changing that now. I expect that myself, the new leader and our current professionals in this space will have frequent and candid dialogues with our pharma clients to understand how we can better solve for their needs. Now with our best-in-class technology and solutions, we expect significant improvement this year.

Next, we are expanding our team of lead generation representatives to improve our outbound targeting and drive net new business. We're also going to hire new market development leaders that will support the sales team in training, systematic value propositions and competitive positioning. This is intended to refocus our sales force on their customers while clarifying Quanterix' many advantages of our overall value propositions in our key end markets. We will be harder hitting on differentiation. For example, we will highlight our ability to detect proteins more accurately than others while doing it more consistently.

Next, we're leveraging Thermo Fisher's distribution capabilities to improve our online presence. Now this will have a dual benefit of helping our customers by easing their barriers to access for our products while reducing the manual work of our commercial team to provide pricing quotes. Everything that we're doing is centered on investments that will yield near-term returns to sharpen our focus, expand our opportunity set and grow our top line performance in 2026 and beyond.

Now our customers have told me repeatedly that we are the market leader. Armed with this feedback, we're adjusting our course and importantly, we're moving quickly with a sense of urgency. Now we're also increasing our investment in our Alzheimer's diagnostics business. Health care providers who treat Alzheimer's want a reliable noninvasive test to drive earlier intervention of this terrible disease. We firmly believe and industry leaders concur that we have the best performing and most comprehensive Alzheimer's diagnostics test available today in LucentAD Complete, and we expect to garner meaningful market share as blood-based biomarker testing continues to grow.

So we're making the following investments in our diagnostics business. First, we are hiring a new diagnostics leader reporting directly into me to build and invest in our emerging diagnostics business. With this move, we are bringing in strong leadership to expand and strengthen our diagnostics portfolio as part of our commitment to advancing our position in the nascent Alzheimer's testing market.

Next, we are upgrading our next-generation Simoa HD-X platform and expect to file for IVD status with the FDA in 2027. Now this will position us not only to serve research customers who increasingly request IVD solutions for their clinical trials, but it will also set us up to support the distributed IVD model for our lab customers. Next, we are investing in lab infrastructure and implementing new targeted sales and marketing tactics to increase mind share for our LucentAD Complete test in anticipation of FDA clearance in the second half of this year.

Now these investments will build on the strong momentum that we have in our diagnostics business. As a matter of fact, today, we just announced an important and exciting partnership with Tempus AI. Under this agreement, LucentAD Complete will be integrated into [ EHR ] systems at select Tempus Partner Health System locations as part of the Tempus Next program. Now patients who meet the clinical criteria will be flagged using a proprietary algorithm and testing will be available for order at a clinician's discretion.

Now to help fund these investments, we're streamlining our product road map. Now my engagement with customers and collaborators in this sector over the past 3 months has led us to prioritize our Simoa HD-X platform and other investments, both on the research tools and diagnostics sides of the business. Also, we're incorporating learnings and enhancements from our next-generation platform into the HD-X upgrade. And additionally, we are continuing to gather feedback from our early access launch program that we expect to incorporate over time into the next-generation Simoa program.

Now on the spatial side of our business, our 2 key priorities for 2026 are to expand our PCS biomarker panels for discovery applications and to release new reagents for the HT platform to better support clinical applications.

Now from a financial perspective, we continue to expect to reach cash flow breakeven performance by the fourth quarter this year. The entire company is committed to building a profitable and sustainable research tools business that are leaders in both spatial and ultrasensitive proteomics. Now we expect the investments that I discussed today will help drive commercial effectiveness in the second half of 2026. We are not waiting for better markets. Instead, we're making thoughtful and deliberate decisions to drive Quanterix to where the industry is going.

And finally, we are excited about our Diagnostics business as we are delivering on key milestones this year while welcoming in a proven seasoned business leader to accelerate our performance in this space.

Now let me turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Vandana Sriram.

Thank you, Everett, and good afternoon.

Total revenue for the first quarter was $36.4 million, an increase of 20% from the previous year. Organic revenue declined by 21%. Revenue from our diagnostics partners was $2.9 million, up meaningfully year-over-year from $1.6 million in the first quarter of 2025. This reflects increasing volume for our single biomarker test from our diagnostics enablement partners. During the quarter, both of our end markets and our consumables revenue were largely in line with our expectations, but we saw slightly weaker-than-expected results in instrumentation with a handful of instrument transactions getting pushed into the second quarter.

From a product perspective, Simoa contributed $24 million, a 21% organic revenue decline and spatial reported $12.4 million, down 26% year-over-year. Instruments revenue was $4 million, comprised of $2.3 million from Simoa and $1.7 million from spatial instruments. We placed 16 Simoa and 11 spatial instruments in the quarter. Consumables revenue was $21.4 million. This consisted of $14.5 million in Simoa and $6.9 million in spatial consumables. Accelerator Lab services were $4.3 million, $3.5 million in Simoa and $800,000 in spatial. Our customer mix was meaningfully skewed to academia, which represented approximately 65% of the business in Q1. On a pro forma basis, assuming Quanterix and Akoya were combined for the full year, academic revenue for the first quarter declined approximately 16%. Pharma revenue declined 33% year-over-year, primarily due to fewer large accelerator projects and spatial instruments placed. As Everest already mentioned, we are adding resources and refocusing strategies towards the pharma end market, and we expect to see better results here in the coming quarters.

Moving on to the P&L. Gross profit and margin for the first quarter were $15.6 million or 42.7%. Non-GAAP gross profit was $18.5 million and non-GAAP gross margin was 50.9%. The synergies from the Akoya transaction are apparent here. Even with a reduction in pro forma revenue, we are maintaining non-GAAP gross margin over 50%.

Operating expenses for the quarter were $56.9 million. Included in operating expenses are approximately $22 million of costs related to acquisition, integration, restructuring and purchase accounting. Notably, this includes a $19 million onetime write-off from an intangible asset related to the termination of an Akoya Diagnostics development agreement. Offsetting this, other income contains $22 million of liabilities written off, resulting in net noncash income of $2.3 million from this termination. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $34.7 million, a decrease of roughly $2.3 million sequentially as a result of the synergies. We are now operating the new Quanterix entity at roughly the same level of operating expenses we had when we were a stand-alone company.

As Everett mentioned, as a result of the Akoya integration actions taken to date, at the end of Q1, we have delivered the $85 million of annualized cost synergies that we committed to as part of the acquisition. The combined entity is operating as expected. And while there are a few remaining actions to complete, we will not continue to report these synergies after this quarter.

Our adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $9.8 million, a sequential improvement of $1.5 million despite lower revenues versus the prior quarter.

We ended the quarter with $102.6 million of cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities and restricted cash. During the quarter, we used $19 million of cash, of which $4.2 million was related to onetime integration and employee-related costs. Adjusted cash usage during the quarter was $14.7 million. The first quarter is our highest quarter of cash usage, similar to many companies due to approximately $11 million of annual payments such as insurance renewals and annual bonuses. As we look ahead, we expect our cash usage to move meaningfully lower as these annual payments are behind us and we make progress towards our cash flow breakeven target.

Finally, turning to guidance for 2026. We are maintaining our guidance for the full year 2026, and we continue to expect to report approximately $169 million to $174 million of revenue. We expect GAAP gross margin to be in a range of 41% to 45% and non-GAAP gross margins to be in a range of 49% to 53%. In the first quarter, we changed our accounting policy for classifying shipping and handling costs for product sales to record them within gross margin. Historically, they were recorded in SG&A expenses. We believe this classification is preferable because it better aligns costs with related revenue and is consistent with our peers. We reflected this reclassification in our GAAP margin guidance, but there is no change to the underlying non-GAAP margin expectation.

We continue to anticipate achieving cash flow breakeven in the second half of the year and expect to end the year with cash in the range of $100 million with no debt. And finally, in terms of our quarterly cadence, we expect second quarter revenues to be roughly in line to slightly ahead of Q1, and we expect that the commercial initiatives that we're investing in will help to drive increased revenues in the second half of 2026.

I will now turn it back over to Everett for closing remarks.

Thanks, Vandana. We're moving quickly. We're making decisions that will improve our commercial effectiveness, streamline our product management priorities and also enable Quanterix to capitalize on a compelling opportunity in the Alzheimer's diagnostics market. And we're doing all this while moving Quanterix closer to cash flow breakeven performance.

And with that said, I'd like to turn it over back to Josh for questions and answers.

Thank you. Preyila, please assemble the Q&A roster.

And your first question comes from the line of Kyle Mikson with Canaccord.

Good to hear all these updates here changes and so forth. I guess, Everett, the one that sticks out to me is the preparation for the IVD submission for HD-X in '27. I guess like the question is kind of like why do you need IVD for that system? You talked about, I think pharma important there as well as a distributed model. But maybe just dive into is that -- is this needed more for Alzheimer's, neurology or oncology? Is that part of the aspiration here? And then maybe like a decentralization strategy internationally. I'm curious if that's in the works as well because when you think about this compared to some other platforms that we know of, it could be interesting to think about long term.

I appreciate the question. And I will just go back to my last 3 months of being out in the market, talking to customers. We're investing in our HD-X platform because it's our workhorse. We have a really good robust installed base. It's our installed base. The timing of it fits nicely to our diagnostics build-out. And also with making the machine more reliable, it's also going to benefit our research customers, too. So when we build the machine, it is for 2 reasons. First of all, it will solidify our research-only business. It will get us ready for diagnostics, and it will give us what I would just say, optionality to have a distributed plan for our lab partners, both domestically and internationally. And that's why we've made the choice of really prioritizing our focus in getting that machine IVD ready in 2027.

Yes. Okay. That was great. And then maybe just a follow-up. What's the status of the Simoa 1 platform? And honestly, I think you were talking about like an early access last quarter. And that platform, I believe, was -- had some translational use cases like may be higher plex. And so I feel like given the focus on pharma going forward, it could have actually aligned with that. So could you just give us an update there?

Yes, absolutely. And thanks. We're still very focused on being technology leaders in the marketplace. And Simoa ONE is part of our next generation. We are still doing early access with Simoa ONE. We're getting feedback from our customer, and we're looking to take that feedback and actually help us with our HD-X next generation and our HD-X upgrade. So Simoa ONE still is part of our portfolio, and we're getting really good feedback.

Awesome. And then finally, on proteomics competition relevant recently, obviously. You guys obviously targeting low plex, a little bit of mid-plex. You got the sensitivity advantage that probably is driving this firm hold on the low-plex market, we would hope. Can you just talk about what you're seeing competitively over the last few months and maybe going forward and just speak to your conviction level that you're going to maintain this share or increase it?

Yes. We feel -- and I'll have Vandana help me too. We feel really good about our position in the spatial low plex market. We have 10x the number of low-plex assays available in the marketplace. compared to our competition. Our installed base in this space is larger than our competition. Quanterix focuses on part of the translational research market that includes later-stage clinical trials, of which reproducibility is really, really important. Again, feedback from our customers, we lead in that space.

Where I see benefits of our spatial business moving forward, our tools, our technology is market-leading. We're going to improve our reach to our customers. We're putting in more marketing investments. We have amazing exciting launches in the spatial space, and we feel that that's going to give us a boost in the second half.

Vandana, I don't know if you want to mention anything else?

No, I think that's exactly right. On the Simoa front, while there has been a lot of talk of competition, I think all of the data and all of the research suggests that we have the broadest menu as well as the greatest level of sensitivity as well as lot-to-lot and lab-to-lab reproducibility versus anyone in the market.

And then on the spatial side, with a concentration both in the research and in the clinical side, there's a lot of exciting things going on there. As Everett said, we're now going to kind of turbocharge that to make sure we're getting the right share of market that we deserve.

The next question comes from the line of Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners.

So I'll ask my questions in one. First, Everett, great to see the actions you're taking on the diagnostics side, bringing in leadership and investing into that business. Just wanted to get a sense of the level of investment that you need there? And how should we expect -- what should we expect for Alzheimer's in the overall guide here? This looks like a second half weighted guide. So I just wanted to get a sense there.

And then could you maybe also elaborate as you transition some of the business or the focus from the core tool side to the diagnostics side, is there a chance for any air pocket? Obviously, that's a question that we frequently get from investors.

Yes. Maybe I'll start out with just the diagnostics investments, Puneet. Listen, I feel good about bringing in a seasoned leader. I'll give you a little bit of background. I can't name the person specifically yet, but in a couple of weeks, we'll be able to name. This leader has 25-plus years in diagnostics. I've worked with this leader before. Not only the sales side, but they know important customers in this space. They've had really good payer and reimbursement interactions. They know the blood-based biomarker business. And so it's like the perfect fit for Quanterix and where we are now. So that's one. And this person, along with many others here at Quanterix is going to help me build out that end-to-end plan.

What we're investing this year, I feel is really appropriate. We're adding right now feet on the street that will help us sell LucentAD Complete and also help with our lab partnership that we have going now. We're investing in clinical utility studies. Those clinical utility studies will read out in the second half. And we're thinking about what is the next phase that we need also to continue to move this forward. And then just to me, I look at this as a surround sound type thing when I think of diagnostics. Our lab infrastructure needs to be ready for order to cash. And so we're investing in our lab infrastructure, too. We will be ready once we get FDA clearance in the second half, we will be ready to what I would say, scale.

The last thing I'll mention for a diagnostic standpoint, and I've always thought this way, even back in my Exact Sciences and Quest Diagnostics days, we're not going to do this alone. We're going to have smart, unique partnerships to help us scale this business, and we started now. Our partnership with Tempus AI is a great example of what we're doing and how we're creating scale in the business. We have lifeline screening, again, more scale in helping us get our LucentAD and our LucentAD complete that's out there. We'll do the same once we get FDA clearance of how do we organically build scale, but how do we create really smart partnerships moving forward.

Yes. And Puneet, to address your questions on what this means from a financial perspective, we've always had a baseline level of investment in Alzheimer's diagnostics, frankly, for the last 3 or 4 years at this point. What we're doing in this plan right now is being very, very deliberate on where our investments go. We've streamlined projects in other parts of the business where perhaps that payback was not as immediate as these are. And that's what's helping us fund both the commercial acceleration as well as the acceleration in the diagnostics platform.

And then from a revenue perspective, as you know, we did almost $10 million of revenue from our partners in 2025. Our expectation is that we have about the same level in 2026. We'll probably have less instrument sales, but an increase in consumable sales as our partners start to do more tests. We're not counting on revenues from direct testing in 2026. We think it will take some time for that to inflect. If that happens sooner, that will be helpful to us, but we're not counting on that picking up very quickly.

And Puneet, the last part of your question in terms of how do you balance both. My first 3 months here, I've had a lot of interaction with our commercial colleagues with Ben Meadows, our new Chief Commercial Officer. We have a solid research business, research tools business. The relationship that they have with the customers in the academic space and the research space, it's really, really deep, and we're going to help them get even deeper with the enhancements that I talked about during my remarks. It's an end, and we're going to build up that same expertise on the diagnostics side.

Today, we have the appropriate size of our diagnostics business just based on where we are. But the new leader that's coming in will build a plan that will assume, again, FDA clearance. We have a good price crosswalk. We're going to get scalable reimbursement. We will be able to toggle very quickly to build out scale in our diagnostics. We're going to balance on both research, tools and diagnostics.

The next question comes from the line of Dan Brennan with TD Cowen.

Maybe first one, just it was already kind of asked in one way in terms of the guide. So if you're kind of flattish in Q2, it implies almost like a 40% back half sequential like second half, first half. So could you just break down a little bit more what would be the drivers of that? Do you want to share any color, maybe instruments, consumables and service, maybe core Quanterix versus spatial? And then I can have a few more questions.

Yes, Dan, let me talk about the investments that we're making that these aren't investments that have a year ROI. And I'm just taking this from my past experience of, hey, we need to build out momentum within the next few quarters. These are the investments that we're making. Let me just maybe give a couple of them color to give confidence of our second half ramp. Our lead generation reps are critical to our growth. Our lead generation reps are working with our marketing team and taking our robust leads that we have and making them credible, making phone calls to ensure that when they hand them over to our sales reps, those leads are ready to buy. We've already instituted lead generation reps. And in the first 3 weeks, we're seeing a market difference in terms of net new opportunities. So I look at in the second half, our net new opportunity growth to be absolutely better than it was in Q1.

Secondly, our marketing. We have appropriately put investments in marketing on both the Simoa and spatial side of the business to develop more of a multichannel approach. So I always like to say we're selling when people are sleeping. So we feel that that's going to be a major benefit to our business.

And then lastly, what I'll add is we are looking strategically at areas to where we could put just more feet on the street on the commercial team today. And like I said, Ben Meadows and the team have done a good job of, again, not overhauling, so we create disruption, but strategically putting more feet on the street so we can get more opportunities in the second half.

I think the only thing I'd add there, Dan, is there's also a lot happening on the product side. We recently announced a new molecular barcoding option for customers, which gives our spatial customers a whole new channel for self-serve opportunities on the assays. We also have a handful of assay launches as we generally do that are now coming online and are expected to have more of an impact in the second half of the year.

Great. Okay. Are you guys assuming end markets improve as part of the outlook? Obviously, it has been challenging, but we've heard various signs of things getting a little bit better here. Just wondering how you think about that as you contemplate like the improvement in addition to obviously, all the critical company-specific things you're doing?

Yes. So on the end markets, on the pharma side, we do think that the end markets are strong. It has really been a little bit of the focus that's been lacking on our side, which we've already started to correct and we're starting to see the results on.

The academic side was a little bit slow in the first 3, 4 months of the year. As you know, overall funding slowdown has been a little bit slow. So we're not counting on a big rebound over there, but we do think there might be a small amount of improvement as we get towards the end of the year. But we're not assuming markets change materially. We're really assuming that a lot of the growth is going to happen from our actions, both on the product side as well as on the commercial side.

And the only thing I'll add, again, just from an execution standpoint, in the first quarter, start of the second quarter, the communications, the sales calls, the KOL kind of interaction has been very, very solid on our side. We're not waiting for markets to improve. And I think those conversations, that consistent relationship connection that we have with our critical customers, when markets do improve, we will be there to capitalize on that.

Great. And then you listed, I think, 4 studies in the press release or maybe in the deck. Are any of those -- I mean, obviously, I'm sure they're all important. Otherwise, you wouldn't have listed them. But any of them stand out more than not in terms of either that will play into FDA play into the label or will they all just be pieces of the puzzle as you build the marketing plan on your diagnostic assay?

Yes. Listen, I like the studies that we have. First of all, they're with 3 credible partners, the study dynamics that I've been reviewing on a weekly basis. We're hitting really good enrollment. The settings are mostly in that -- where people are being treated in the specialty care and primary care setting. It demonstrates how LucentAD Complete changes clinical decision-making and patient outcomes. So we're looking at the right things from a clinical utility everyday diagnostic standpoint. I will also add too, I'm excited about the timing. The timing is spot on for us to read out in the second half of 2026, and that will just bolster our meetings with payers to get widespread reimbursement.

If I can sneak one final in. Just on the spatial side for Akoya, since you do break it out, like is there an implicit assumption and maybe you've already done this at 4Q when you set the initial guidance, but how are you thinking about kind of the contribution organically for spatial in 2026?

Yes. We didn't break out the guide between Simoa and spatial just because they are starting to -- we are starting to kind of report them all together. Our expectation of mix between Simoa and spatial between 2025 and 2026 was relatively consistent though.

Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, this now concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Colby, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Quanterix Corporation Q4 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Joshua Young. You may begin.

Thank you, Colby, and good afternoon, everybody. With me on today's call are Everett Cunningham, Quanterix President and CEO and Vandana Sriram, Quanterix Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on the Investor Relations section of our website.

During the course of today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and assumptions as of today, March 2, 2026. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. To supplement our financial results presented on a GAAP basis, we have provided certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are used to evaluate our operating performance in a manner that allows for meaningful period-to-period comparison and analysis of trends in our business and our competitors.

We believe that such measures are important in comparing current results with other periods results in assessing our operating performance within our industry. Non-GAAP financial information presented herein should be considered in conjunction with and not as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Investors are encouraged to review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures set forth in the presentation posted to our website and in our earnings release issued earlier today.

Finally, any percentage changes we discuss will be on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Everett Cunningham. Everett?

Thanks, Josh. And I'm so excited to be with you this afternoon. I'm looking forward to meeting many of you over the coming weeks and months. Now for those of you that have not met, I want to share some information about my background and what brought me here to Quanterix I've spent my entire 3-decade-plus career in health care with a diverse background in pharma, tools and diagnostics from a variety of commercial and enterprise operational roles which is very relevant for where Quanterix is and as we scale our business.

Now in my last role as the Chief Commercial Officer at Illumina. I led the commercial strategy and execution for this $20 billion market cap company as we go deeper into sequencing and array-based solutions. During my tenure at Illumina, I work with the team that delivered one of the most transformational technologies in the analytical instruments market. Now my work there built on my experience as a Chief Commercial Officer at Exact Sciences, where my team encompass sales, marketing and customer service in precision oncology diagnostics and screening.

Now my prior roles at Quest, GE Healthcare and Pfizer effectively round out my commercial and my operational portfolio and combined, provide you with the insights needed to accelerate Quanterix' overall growth. Now I believe that Quanterix is well positioned to achieve a leadership position in the diagnostics industry. And I'm just very excited to work with my colleagues to achieve our commercial and our financial goals.

Now there are several reasons why I'm very excited to be leading Quanterix at this time. First, Quanterix has developed differentiated technologies in disease states that need health care breakthroughs and also need solid business partnerships in neurology, oncology and immunology. Second, we have a compelling base business in the research tool space that exceeded our expectations in the fourth quarter and will drive us to breakeven profitability this year.

Now this continued operational rigor will also provide a steady normalized growth path. Third, there's a massive opportunity for growth in the diagnostics market, starting with Alzheimer's disease, and Quanterix' ultrasensitive platforms are uniquely positioned here. Next, we have a strong foundation here at Quanterix, including a talented and dedicated team and a solid balance sheet with more than $100 million of cash and no debt.

And lastly, I'm just thrilled to be joining Quanterix at this inflection point. I'm also looking forward to leading this company this year and beyond. Now my immediate focus area will be to spend as much time as possible with my leadership team and the employee base to fully understand Quanterix' potential from an insider's perspective and to ensure that our culture supports our priorities. I also fully need to understand the business and technology from a customer and strategic partner vantage point. So I'll be spending a lot of time with customers and partners, too.

Now my objective is to continue to focus on what's working well and to evolve Quanterix into a stronger, more agile and scalable company. Now that entails fully understanding where we are the strongest and have the best opportunities to win, working together with our team and drawing on my years of experience in this field to guide our direction forward. I also want to establish an open and transparent communication process with our analysts and investors. I'm sure that many of you have a range of ideas and insights about our path forward, and I welcome your ideas. We will, of course, keep you updated as we move forward. So now let me turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Vandana Sriram. Vandana.

Thank you, Everett, and good afternoon. Total revenue for the fourth quarter was $43.9 million, an increase of 25% from the previous year and up 7% sequentially. Organic revenue was a decline of 22%. Revenue from our diagnostics partners was $3.1 million in the quarter. During the quarter, we saw better-than-expected revenues from the release of pent-up demand from our academic customer base. From a product perspective, Simoa contributed $27 million a 22% organic revenue decline and spatial reported $17 million, down 23% year-over-year.

Spatial revenues include $2.5 million from a diagnostics development agreement that is now terminated. Excluding this agreement, spatial revenues were down 16% year-over-year. The terminated agreement was dilutive to the company's financial results and will have a minimal impact on our core business in 2026. Instrument revenue was $6.1 million, comprised of $3.2 million of Simoa and 2.9 million special instruments. We placed 21 Simoa and 17 special instruments in the quarter, as compared to 18 Simoa instruments in the fourth quarter of 2024. Consumables revenue was $23 million, up $3.8 million sequentially.

This consisted of $15.4 million in Samara and $7.6 million in spatial consumables. Accelerator lab revenue was $8.3 million, $5.3 million in Simoa and $3 million in spatial. Our customer mix was slightly skewed to academia, which represented approximately 55% of the business in Q4. On a pro forma basis, assuming Quanterix and Aqua were combined for the full year, academic revenue for the fourth quarter declined approximately 24%.

Pharma revenue declined 21% year-over-year primarily due to lower large accelerator projects versus the prior year. From a diagnostics perspective, we now have 25 partnerships that generated $9.6 million in revenue during 2025, up from $6 million in the prior year. This includes our recently announced partnership with Lifeline screening a national health screening group focused on identifying asymptomatic risks for chronic conditions in a community health setting.

We continue to deliver key milestones in our [indiscernible] Diagnostics business as we execute our long-term strategy. Our Lucent complete test, which is a multi-analyte algorithmic blood test for Alzheimer's disease remains a highly differentiated test in the market. We recently achieved 2 significant milestones for Lucent AD complete. Firstly, in Q4, the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services approved a reimbursement rate of $897 for the test. This milestone provides a nationally recognized reference price for the test. We are now focused on generating clinical utility data in support of Lucent AD complete in various payer conversations.

Secondly, in January 2026. We submitted a 510(k) premarket notification to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for this test. Both these milestones further our mission to provide superior, noninvasive, high-performance diagnostics tools to aid in the evaluation of patients with cognitive symptoms for possible Alzheimer's disease. During 2025, we also launched 13 new assays, including 2 new Simoa Tau assays, pTau-205 and pTau-212. We have seen strong interest in both products during the initial launch period. In the coming year, we expect tower biomarkers to remain of high interest and plan to launch additional products addressing this growing field. On the special side of the business, we launched 2 new [ Phinocordiscovery ] panels in Q4 25, a metabolism spike in panel and a mouse neurology panel.

The most neurology panel expands our spatial biology and neurology offerings into mouse models and complements our previously launched human neurology panel. Moving on to the P&L. Gross profit and margin for the fourth quarter was $20 million or 45.7%. Non-GAAP gross profit was $21.9 million and non-GAAP gross margins 50%. Operating expenses for the quarter were $44.8 million. Included in operating expenses are approximately $6.4 million of costs related to acquisition integration, restructuring and purchase accounting and $1.4 million of shipping and handling costs. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $37 million a decrease of roughly $1.5 million sequentially as a result of synergies.

As already mentioned, we've completed major integration activities and are turning our attention to profitable growth and delivering on our commitment to be cash flow breakeven in 2026. We have already implemented $74 million of our $85 million cost synergy target, and we're on track to meet our target by the end of Q1. Additionally, we remediated our material weaknesses related to revenue and inventory. By putting these material weaknesses behind us, we have established a stronger foundation for future growth. Our adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $7.9 million, a sequential improvement of $4 million as compared to a loss of $11.9 million in the third quarter.

We ended the quarter with $122 million of cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities and restricted cash. During the quarter, we made a $10 million milestone payment for the Mission acquisition and spent $3.5 million related to severance and other nonrecurring expenses. Adjusted cash usage during the quarter was $3 million compared to $16.1 million in Q3, a marked sequential improvement as a result of synergies and improved working capital. I will now turn to our guidance for 2026.

We expect to report approximately $169 million to $174 million of revenue, which assumes no underlying improvement in the academic or pharmaceutical end markets. In 2026, we expect a minimal impact to our core business from the terminated diagnostics development agreement, which yielded $5.6 million of revenue for the full year of 2025. Excluding this agreement, we expect pro forma revenue for 2026 to increase by approximately 2% at the midpoint of the guide.

We expect GAAP gross margin to be in a range of 45% to 49% and non-GAAP gross margin to be in a range of 49% to 53%. We anticipate achieving cash flow breakeven in the second half of the year and expect to end the year with approximately $100 million of cash and no debt. And finally, in terms of our quarterly cadence, we expect similar seasonal pacing to revenue as in prior years. I will now turn it back over to Everett for closing remarks.

Thanks, Vandana. I'm confident in our base business. I'm also confident in our plan for breakeven profitability this year. And lastly, I'm confident in scaling our business into areas of profitable growth. Now I want to turn it back over to Josh.

Thank you, Everett. Colby, please assemble the Q&A roster.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Kyle Mikson with Canaccord Genuity.

This is Alex Please. I'm the line for Kyle congratulations everyone on the new role. We look forward to working with you. This one is for Everett. So in your assessment of contracts is core high sensitivity proteomics as well as special biology businesses, what do you see the company has been executing on effectively? And additionally, what are some aspects of the current strategy that you would like to adjust or change with these 2 businesses in the near term?

Yes. No, thanks for that question. I'm looking forward to working with you also. As I come on, I've been now with the company for 35-plus days, and I'm taking this opportunity to really assess our diversified strategy, which I love. I'll mention a couple of stats about what Akoya has done in our spatial business before Akoya we were, what, 90% neurology, 10% oncology immunology. Now with Akoya and the spatial technology and expertise we're not more diversified. We're now 60% neurology and plus 40% spatial and oncology and immunology. So I like that diversification.

What I like is I like the fact that they have a broad footprint. I like the talent that the business has brought on to Quanterix. I also like the fact that there's been a lot of work around synergy targets and making sure that we can take advantage of that, as you heard from Vandana, we will hit our $85 million target at the end of Q1. Now what that's going to allow us to do, it's going to allow us to really focus on how do we now execute our growth plan in the Simoa space, but also in the Akoya-spatial space. And the footprint, the technology that they bring on, the customer relationship that they have I think really makes us really appropriate to drive our growth strategy this year and beyond.

Got it. And just 1 more for me. So you noted earlier on the call that you launched about 13 new assays in 2025 alone. On the pipeline, any new asset or new product launches were on for 2026? And more specifically, what is the timing for the more general availability of your higher plex Simoa ONE platform? Any feedback from the early access program that gives you confidence this new platform and its capabilities could drive greater proteomics performance in the near term?

I'll have Vandana take the first, and I'll take the Samoa ONE question second.

Alex, you're right. We did 13 assays in 2025. We did about 20 assays in 2024 before that. This is really an indicator of the fact that our innovation engine is now moving and we expect to have a regular cadence of assay launches every quarter. We have a couple that are already in the pipeline for Q1 that will be coming out shortly, but the intent really is that this is a continuous stream throughout 2026.

Yes. And as far as Simoa, we rolled out our early access program for Simoa at the end of last quarter. And right now, what we're doing is we're currently executing the test plans with our customers. So we're going to continue to gather feedback and that feedback we'll get will actually steer our decision-making. The benefit of me taking over recently is also in the process of doing a holistic review of all of our product development and launch initiatives here at Quanterix. I will say this.

We have attractive segments on both sides, the Samoa and the spatial side. The one thing that we will have to do because of that attractive segments, we'll have to make some decisions. And our decision will be based on return on investment and bringing growth back to mean Quanterix as quickly as possible.

Your next question comes from the line of Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners.

Question. First one, Edward for you. You emphasized Alzheimer's diagnostics Obviously, you're coming with significant experience in sales and commercial side. So I wanted to get a view from you going forward as you talked about the diagnostics opportunity, how should we think about the overall prioritization or when you look at the diagnostics versus the -- so no proteomics versus the spatial business that you have? And how are you thinking about those 3 segments -- and also, if you can provide an expectation for the investments needed to drive growth on the Alzheimer's diagnostic side? Can you still reach the cash flow breakeven expectation by the year-end after the addition of those sales and commercial investments that you are potentially planning here?

Yes, Puneet, thanks for the question. I appreciate that. I'll touch on a few things and maybe have Vandana talk about the breakeven piece. I'm excited about the diagnostics opportunity. I spoke about it in my initial remarks. And we're well -- really set up to make an impact in the on the Alzheimer's diagnostics opportunity. As Vandana has said, we had a good price crosswalk from CMS. We had our CMS approved pricing like I said, of $897 per LucentAD. We now have several ongoing clinical utility studies for LucentAD, and we look to work with 3 organizations to an academia and then as we track the results, we're looking for releasing those results in the second half of this year.

What that's going to do is that will really guide us with our payer engagement and reimbursement strategies. From my past, I've learned that you really need to get the payers on board, good reimbursement scalable strategies that will allow for our customers to pull this amazing opportunity through. Now that's our Alzheimer's diagnostics opportunity. I also feel that we have an oncology diagnostics opportunity. But again, 35 days into this, give me time to really look into this, focus on it and really invest in how we bring that to market. Now the impact for that will probably be starting in '27, but I'll let Vandana talk about that.

Yes. Hey Puneet, in terms of our framework for investment in diagnostics, as you know, over the last couple of years, we've been somewhat pacing the market, but we've been putting in additional investments where needed. We already have a double-digit sales force that's out there that right now has been focused on partnerships, but very quickly is shifting their focus to really bringing LucentAD complete to the market. So in our cash plan for 2026, we have contemplated all of the work that will go into the reimbursement pathway, as well as into building the infrastructure required from an order to cash perspective, et cetera, to be able to support volume in that company.

So our plan for now contains all of those relevant investments and still gets us to breakeven in that second half of the year. Now if the market were to move faster or things were to develop faster, those would be good problems to have in a way. And we would welcome speed of adoption in this area.

Got it. Okay. That's helpful. And then on the FDA submission side, can you just update us any dialogue with FDA? What they're looking for. Sorry, you have a breakthrough designation earlier on. So I just wanted to get a sense of potential time line and approval of the product. It's good to see that you already have reimbursement, but just wanted to get a sense on feedback to your perceived.

Yes. Thanks, Puneet. We're working very well with the FDA. Again, we submitted the 501(k) in January. We expect the approval to take anywhere between 6 to 9 months, and then we anticipate securing that same thing by Q4 of this year. But again, 6 to 9 months is what we're looking for. I think the most important thing around that, that Vandana said is working sequentially with waiting for the FDA approval, making sure that we have good order to cash within our own lab. And then I'd tell you that making sure that we have a good payer strategy around when we develop that clinical evidence. So we're excited about our surround sound strategy.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Tom DeBourcy with Nephron Research.

Sorry about that. Can you hear me?

Yes. We got you, Tom.

So I just wanted to understand your Accelerator lab and lab services. It seems like Q4 was stronger than expected, maybe even particularly in Samoa. And so just in terms of the level of demand from pharma customers? And then as you look out, at least for the first half of the year, have you seen the rebound in activity and demand for Ford lab services, I guess the pipeline had previously, I guess, maybe run down a little bit there.

Yes. Let me take the Q4 question and then Everett and I will tag team on what we're seeing for Q1. So Q4, again, a strong finish to the year. We were generally very pleased with all of our sectors, consumables and lab services in particular. On the Simoa accelerator side, as we've mentioned before in 2025, the interest for the offerings continue to remain strong. In Q4, we saw a handful of projects come to an end, and we also saw, again, a good diversity of projects that basically helped on the revenue side..

Yes. I like our Accelerator business. And I think my first week here, they were talking about how profitable our Accelerator business is. And we have a lot of good partnerships that are out there. Right now, my goal is to really understand our accelerated business. Our projects are about $50,000 on average. My goal is, I want to get bigger projects with pharma. I think there's an opportunity to do that with how important solving this Alzheimer's dilemma is. So we'll continue to invest in our Accelerator business. We'll establish broader partnerships with pharma, and it will be an opportunity for us to continue to grow that segment.

Thank you. With no further questions in queue, that concludes our question-and-answer session. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Tiffany, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Quanterix Corporation Q3 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Joshua Young, Head of Investor Relations. Joshua, please go ahead.

Thank you, Tiffany. And good afternoon, everybody. With me on today's call are Masoud Toloue, Quanterix's President and CEO; and Vandana Sriram, Quanterix's Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on the Investors section of our website. During the course of today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and assumptions as of today, November 10, 2025. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

To supplement our financial statements presented on a GAAP basis, we have provided certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are used to evaluate our operating performance in a manner that allows for meaningful period-to-period comparison and analysis of trends in our business and our competitors. We believe that such measures are important in comparing current results with other periods results and assessing our operating performance within our industry.

Non-GAAP financial information presented herein should be considered in conjunction with and not as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Investors are encouraged to review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures set forth in the presentation posted to our website and in the earnings release issued today. Finally, any percentage changes we discuss will be on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Masoud Toloue. Masoud?

Thank you, Joshua. We're pleased with how we executed in the third quarter, especially given the significant integration work underway and the challenging industry conditions we continue to navigate. This quarter reflects the strong execution, focus and resiliency of the Quanterix team who've continued to deliver results while driving major integration milestones and advancing key strategic initiatives. I'd characterize the third quarter around a few key themes. First, we delivered on our revenue expectations in a demanding environment. Second, we're moving fast and hitting key integration milestones following our acquisition of Akoya. In just over 3 months since the closing of the transaction, we're operating as one company under one common infrastructure and leadership team. We've created meaningful scale, built a stronger foundation for growth and already realized $67 million of the $85 million in synergies we're targeting.

Third, we continue to invest for growth. We're making significant investments in Alzheimer's diagnostics and in new assays across our Simoa and Spatial franchises. Year-to-date, we've invested roughly $27 million in R&D, just under 30% of our revenue, which underscores our conviction in the opportunities ahead and the innovation pipeline we're building. And finally, we remain disciplined in managing our cash. We're on track to finish the year with around $120 million in cash and no debt and will be cash flow breakeven in 2026.

We generated $40 million in revenue in Q3, a solid start to our first quarter operating the Simoa and Spatial portfolios under one umbrella. While demand across the broader industry remains uneven, we're seeing signs of stabilization, particularly in academic, government and pharma markets. Instrumentation and accelerator revenues were both up sequentially, signaling a gradual recovery that we expect to continue over the next few quarters.

Since bringing Simoa and Spatial together, we're already seeing early commercial momentum. Customers are increasingly interested in combining tissue and blood insights, and we're starting to see real cross-selling opportunities between both portfolios. This is expanding our presence across leading pharma and academic customers where multimodal biomarker strategies are becoming an important focus. We're also seeing early activity in oncology where both platform sensitivity and reproducibility are proving valuable in emerging liquid biopsy and tumor profiling applications. These are still early days, but the traction we're seeing reinforces the strategic power of bringing these two technology platforms together and the potential to unlock entirely new growth avenues for Quanterix.

The integration itself is progressing very well. We had three clear goals when we started. First, build one Quanterix organization under a unified leadership team; second, continue delivering on our core revenue expectations while positioning to capture tissue to blood-based opportunities; and third, capture meaningful cost synergies from the transaction. We've made substantial progress on all three fronts. We've consolidated four manufacturing and lab service operations into two Quanterix sites. We're fully aligned under one structure. And as I said, we've already implemented $67 million of the $85 million in targeted cost synergies. That's a strong start, and it gives us the flexibility to keep investing in growth while improving profitability.

We're also making some of the most significant R&D investments in our history. We're developing our next-gen platform, advancing our Alzheimer's diagnostics programs and expanding our assay portfolio across Simoa and Spatial. We'll soon launch an early access program for Simoa One to give key partners hands-on experience with the technology and gather feedback ahead of a broader launch. We believe this will be an important catalyst for future instrument growth.

In Alzheimer's diagnostics, we received a positive pricing recommendation to crosswalk our LucentAD test at $897 with a final approval decision expected later this quarter. We also added 4 diagnostics partners in Asia, extending our reach and making high sensitivity, clinically relevant biomarker testing available to more patients worldwide. Diagnostics-related revenue was $2.4 million in the quarter, another step in the right direction. On the balance sheet, we remain in a strong position. The cost reductions from our integration activities are driving real improvements in cash performance. We expect to exit the year with about $120 million in cash and no debt, supported by improved working capital and a full quarter benefit from the synergies in place. We're building a stronger, more agile and more scalable company.

With integration advancing ahead of plan, early commercial synergies taking hold and continued leadership in neurology and diagnostics innovation, we're laying the foundation for sustained growth, profitability and impact. Our progress this quarter is a testament to the dedication and talent of the Quanterix team and the momentum we're building together positions us well for long-term success. Now I'll turn over the call to Vandana.

Thank you, Masoud, and good afternoon. As a reminder, we closed Akoya on July 8, so the following results represent a partial quarter of Akoya's operating performance and excludes $600,000 of revenue recognized by Akoya in the first week of July. Total revenue for Q3 was $40.2 million, an increase of 12% year-over-year. From a product perspective, Simoa contributed $23 million, a 36% organic revenue decline and Spatial reported $17.2 million, down 9% year-over-year. Spatial revenues include $1.2 million of noncash revenue from an off-market contract.

Instrument revenue was $7.2 million, $2.5 million in Simoa and $4.7 million in Spatial instruments. We placed 16 Simoa and 27 Spatial instruments in the quarter as compared to 13 Simoa instruments in the third quarter of '24. Consumable revenue was $18.8 million, which consisted of $12.3 million in Simoa and $6.5 million in Spatial consumables. Accelerator lab revenue was $8 million, $5 million in Simoa and $3 million in Spatial. Simoa Accelerator lab revenue of $5 million increased sequentially by $1 million in the quarter.

Our organic revenue decline was driven by weakness in the U.S. academic and pharmaceutical end markets. For consumables, the number of orders this quarter were consistent year-over-year, and we had a net increase in the number of accelerator projects. But in both cases, the dollars per order or project were lower than last year, driving the decline in revenue. Our customer mix was evenly split between pharma and academia in the quarter.

On a pro forma basis, including Spatial revenues, U.S. academic revenue declined approximately 30%, which is tracking to the decline in academic grants. Pharma revenue declined 23% year-over-year. Gross profit and margin were $17.2 million and 42.8%, respectively. Non-GAAP gross profit was $18.5 million and non-GAAP gross margin was 45.9%. The alignment of Akoya's accounting policies to Quanterix resulted in the reallocation of certain Akoya expenses into cost of sales, causing a reduction of approximately 900 basis points to the combined company's gross margins, which was then offset by the favorable impact of synergies.

Operating expenses for the quarter were $54.5 million. Included in operating expenses are approximately $15 million of costs related to acquisition, integration, restructuring and purchase accounting and $1.3 million of shipping and handling costs. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $38.2 million, an increase of $7.1 million sequentially. I'd like to comment here on the synergy realization from the Akoya transaction. These synergies are in three areas: firstly, the alignment of the commercial organizations into one; secondly, the integration of the supply chain into one manufacturing operation and one lab; and thirdly, the elimination of duplicate public company costs.

Prior to the acquisition, Akoya had a run rate of nearly $20 million of quarterly operating expenses. So the $7.1 million sequential increase in spending for the combined company really highlights the impact of the swift action we've taken to capture cost synergies. Our adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $11.9 million as compares to a loss of $5.5 million in the third quarter of the prior year. We ended the quarter with $138 million of cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities and restricted cash. During the quarter, we paid approximately $126 million in deal-related costs, which includes the debt pay down, shareholder payments, severance and other expenses. We acquired $16.8 million in cash from Akoya. Adjusted cash usage during the quarter was $16.1 million.

I will now turn to our updated guidance for the year. We continue to expect to report $130 million to $135 million of revenue for 2025. This assumes approximately $100 million to $105 million of Simoa revenue and implies pro forma revenue of $165 million to $170 million for '25, assuming the 2 companies were combined for the full year. We expect GAAP gross margin to range between 45% and 47% and non-GAAP gross margin to be in the same range. We've tightened the gross margin ranges versus our prior guide as we know more about the effects of integrating Akoya, and these account for the allocation changes I touched upon earlier.

None of the allocation changes impact our cash construct. And finally, on to cash. We continue to expect adjusted cash usage of $34 million to $38 million for the full year. We ended the third quarter with $138 million in cash. For the fourth quarter, we expect to pay $10 million for the Emission acquisition, which was completed earlier this year and to use approximately $8 million cash in operations. The sequential cash improvements from $16 million of adjusted cash usage in Q3 is expected to come from incremental synergy realization in the quarter as well as working capital improvements. This keeps us on track to end 2025 with approximately $120 million in cash and with no debt. With that, I will now turn it back over to Masoud.

Thank you, Vandana. Operator, let's take some questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Kyle Mikson with Canaccord.

So just looking at the core, the Quanterix business, Simoa, consumables were down, I think, 30% or so year-over-year. I know there were a similar number of orders, but there were lower dollars per order. But could you just really kind of dive into that and elaborate on what's happening there competitively and macro-wise and if you're confident that can rebound maybe next year?

Kyle, so I'll take that first question. So yes, on the consumable side for Simoa, as you articulated, the order volume was consistent with last year, but the order size was smaller, which explained the entire decline. So what we're seeing on the academic side are project sizes that weren't the same size as they were last year. And so from a customer perspective, we're getting the same number of customers ordering the products, just project sizes is smaller than it was in the prior year.

And we're really attributing that to the basic academic grant environment that we're in, which we saw less of in the prior year. And I think we're seeing also the same thing on the Accelerator side. We saw an actual double-digit increase in total number of accelerator projects this quarter how -- but those projects are smaller in scope versus '24. So it's still a sticky business, and we expect those smaller projects to scale in '26.

All right. Got it. And then as I look to the 4Q '25 kind of plans to implement more synergies, I think one aspect is building out this one manufacturing team and other is the combining of the lab services. And I feel like that's probably an Accelerator illusion. So [indiscernible] Spatial has already done $3 million in the quarter, which was good to hear. Could you just again kind of walk through what the plan holds for 4Q just because it seems like the last leg of the stretch here, and it seems like it could be more challenging than it seems on the surface.

Kyle, I think you're referring to the integration chart that we put together with Simoa and Spatial. And so in Q4, we've already implemented the single manufacturing team and we're now combining lab services. And when we say combining lab services, we're already in under one footprint, and we've combined both labs. We're operating out of a single building. And what we're looking for is some additional synergy opportunities as we get down the final stretch. Those include synergies that we see -- opportunities we see in the lab side. But then also as we enter at the beginning of next year, we'll have the company running on a single ERP with all systems and financials integrated into one organization.

So we expect to pick up the remaining part of our synergies as we round out the first quarter. So you mentioned it could be difficult. I think we're ahead of schedule with what we've done so far. I would call the implementation of the operating lines, probably some of the most challenging parts of the integration. And now we're actually see good line of sight towards the end and the full $85 million of synergy.

All right. Great. And then finally, just on diagnostics, $2.4 million in revenue in the quarter. As we think about the CLFS later this month or this quarter, how should we think about kind of durable Medicare coverage and the payment rate being close to the $897 and then maybe next year, again, is this like an inflection year for that business for Lucent?

Yes, that's a great point. We got the preliminary reimbursement recommendation. We expect to hear back by the end of this quarter on something definitive. And you make a good point. We're now, I think, for the first time, basically sending up providers, taking orders and we didn't have that in the beginning of the year. So we do expect to gain some traction based on this pricing. And this is the beginning part of our diagnostic journey. What we need to do is continue to deliver on our clinical utility studies, which show that a five-marker algorithmic test outperforms single marker tests and gets the value that we've initially been assigned. So we think it's a beginning part of the journey, but a lot more traction in '26 versus '25.

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Brennan with TD Cowen.

Congrats on the quarter. Maybe just on the Akoya business, can you just walk through kind of the assumptions kind of in the fourth quarter, I guess, so what you did $17 million this quarter. And it's $30 million for the back half. Is that right? So it's $13 million in the fourth quarter. Is that right? Just kind of -- I know it's simple math, but just walk through what you're assuming in the fourth quarter for Akoya?

Yes. So we got off to a really good start on the Akoya transaction and $17 million of revenue in the third quarter. For the fourth quarter, we've modeled a slight step down simply because there's a level of uncertainty in the market still. There's still questions on when funding will really start to flow down. So we've derisked Q4 just given the uncertainty in the market. Now of course, if that were to change, then Spatial would be in a position to take advantage of that.

Got it. I mean were there any like one-off issues in the quarter where you had more success maybe getting some orders in, like any pull forwards? Or you just executed really well and kind of got that $17 million in the door?

Yes. Again, it was just solid execution from the team. There wasn't anything material or anything pull forward. So it was good traction. And this is the first quarter we had both teams, everything -- all product lines were under the same umbrella. So even in that circumstance, when you combine two organizations, I'd say that our commercial team did a fantastic job.

Got it. And then just on the kind of high-level core Quanterix, I mean, I guess the fourth quarter guide assumes kind of flat to down, but -- or at the higher end up, a decent step up. Just kind of you commented in the prepared remarks, you're seeing improvement and improving signs in pharma and academia. Maybe can you just speak to a little bit of like what you're specifically seeing and kind of how you've tried to characterize that in kind of the core Quanterix fourth quarter guide?

Yes. So when we look at the full year, you'll notice we haven't changed the full year guide. And I think that's what you see is us being prudent, and we're still under a government shutdown, and there's just some uncertainty. So we want to be realistic and conservative on the fourth quarter. The -- on your commentary along the lines of performance, I think we were very happy with the outcome of Q3 and going into Q4, we saw sequential -- actually, going into Q3, we saw sequential improvement in both Accelerator and Instruments. We saw a greater number of projects coming in through our pharma customers in Accelerator. We hope that, that basically continues going into the fourth quarter and going into 2026. So we can keep that momentum going up. We're excited about '26 even in the pressured environment.

Got it. And then maybe one other just in terms of the cross-selling opportunity, which I don't think you guys formally baked in anything, but you made a bunch of comments early in on the prepared remarks about early success there. Just maybe a little bit more on that. And you kind of look ahead, like are you already starting to see some incremental wins? Or how do we think about the cross-selling opportunity?

Yes. Early days, it's been positive, Dan. If you take a look at both consumables portfolio, Simoa, it has the #1 liquid biomarker franchise everywhere. And then Spatial, we have the #1 protein tissue biomarker panels versus anything else out there. So -- what we did immediately was that we talked to our neurology customers, and they're interested in understanding where these proteins are moving along the brain and the early signs of Alzheimer's and how this grows from tau tangles to plaque to conditions for a patient. So we're seeing some of our Simoa customers interested in -- and actually making purchases for the Spatial product line. And then on the other side, we're seeing on the oncology or immuno-oncology side, formerly Akoya customers wanting to measure and track these biomarkers in blood. So I'd say we have probably a double-digit list of opportunities that we're tracking and early days have been positive.

And sorry, truly final one, like 2026, will we get the first update at JPMorgan? Will it be on the fourth quarter call? Most companies are kind of saying something at this point. Any early read? I don't know if you were -- if you were consensus has landed. Just wondering kind of how we might think about an early look at next year?

Yes. We're not going to provide sort of the '26 guidance on this call. We typically do it on our last quarter call for the year. So I think we'd continue to wait there. But I just want to reiterate, we've made -- '25 was a big investment year for the company. We've made a lot of investments in the product and service portfolio. And so we expect to enter '26 with real momentum.

Your next question comes from the line of Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners.

Just wondering what you're accounting for the government shutdown, if there was any impact that you're thinking about in the fourth quarter? And then just how should we think about -- if the shutdown is over now, how should we think about the recovery or potential for maybe slight upside if the government shutdown was to end and normalcy was to reverse in the academic accounts?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Puneet. We did take the government shutdown into account as we set our Q4 guide, and that was the primary reason for the slight deceleration on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Q4 tends to be a tough quarter with all of the holidays, et cetera, and we are about halfway through the quarter already. So we thought it prudent to hold the guide and reflect that impact. We don't think it gets worse than that. If there is any kind of year-end flush or if the government opens up sooner than expected, that would be favorable to us from a revenue perspective. But we do think we've bottomed out the risk here.

Okay. And then Masoud, a bigger high-level question for you around competition. I mean I hear your comments on academic weakness backdrop is tough. We all know that. But how do you plan to address the significant market competition that is emerging from high sensitivity, high multiplex platform on the discovery side and academic discovery side as well, especially in neurology and pharma and biotech as well, at least on the discovery side, I could say we can -- we're seeing more of that. So just wondering how do you think about that? I appreciate your clinical trial business is not impacted, but how do you compete more aggressively on the discovery side of the business?

Yes. Puneet, thanks for the question. So just for clarity, we really compete in the 4 or 5 marker space, which is a lot more of a translational segment. So if a customer is interested in looking at something that's a 20 to 1,000 Plex, we really don't play in that part of the market. Now we acknowledge that, that's a fast-growing segment, and that's great for Quanterix because as discovery accelerates as new markers are identified by customers doing 1,000 or 100 Plex, that really translates, usually 4 or 5 markers come out of those studies, and that translates to more business for Quanterix. So we're very happy with that discovery progress and expect new markers to come into our pipeline.

Overall, from a competitive standpoint, I think basically, orders were on the consumable side, flat, which is good -- of good performance given sort of some of this academic shutdown and grant instability. So overall, we're not losing any share. In fact, we're gaining share in some of the diagnostics segments and clinical trial studies as we are able to do 4 markers, 5 markers with our algorithm, we provide unique insights that you just can't get with a single marker. So high plex discovery, good for Quanterix, translational single marker, we've been able to identify a great solution on the clinical side.

Okay. And then last one for me. Could you remind us what was the volume for you in LucentAD in the quarter? And how should we think about the volume ramp in '26? Wondering if you can provide an update on the commercial end of that? And just related, out of that volume, how should we think about the new pricing applying to what portion of that volume?

Yes. So I'll let Vandana answer the question on the revenue. But for diagnostics, we're going to be entering '26 with an established pricing recommendation. It's just something we didn't have this year. And so that positions us really for stronger traction and growth in the segment. And so when you look at current revenue, it's mainly through partner enablement where this is basically customers buying a platform, buying consumables, buying tests and running it through their own LDT laboratories or reference hospitals and reference laboratories.

And that really makes up the majority of our diagnostics revenues. We are, as I said on the call, running patient samples and through our own CLIA, LDT lab and that continues to increase, and we expect with established pricing that to, as I said, give us more traction and growth next year.

Yes. Maybe just to add to that. We don't disclose our direct testing revenues and volumes just yet. But as they start to get meaningful and material, most likely next year, we'll start to talk about that. The one point I'd make on the enablement side is this is an area where we are starting to see a really steady business now. Over the last several quarters, it's been a little bit lumpy depending on one deal or the other. But we're now reaching a point where our enablement partners are regularly starting to buy consumables, and that is helping to hold the revenue at a fairly steady level each quarter. Year-to-date, we've done about slightly north of $6 million of revenue already versus $6 million for the whole of last year. So we are definitely seeing an uptick in our partners using our single marker test for testing as well.

Your next question comes from the line of Thomas DeBourcy with Nephron Research.

Just first, I was just wondering if you could clarify the difference between, I guess, your cost reductions implemented versus, I guess, cost reductions realized because even if I annualize those, there's a little bit of a gaps. So just can you help me reconcile the two?

Yes, sure. I can take that. So the cost reductions annualized is the full year impact of an action that you'll see in the 2026 time frame. What's realized in the quarter is true dollar savings that fell through within the quarter. So for example, if you take some of the leadership changes that happened, 2 months' worth of impact is captured in that $12 million number. But when you look to next year, that would really be a full 12 months' worth of impact.

Understood. And then just, I guess, on the instrument side, obviously, that's been difficult for pretty much everyone in the market. Just in terms of kind of as you look at improvement in the end market, hopefully, in the near future, would you expect to see, I guess, more of a rebound in lab services ahead of potential instrument placements? Or just how are you thinking about how that might materialize?

Yes, Tom, we're already seeing increase in numbers of projects through the Accelerator program. Now there's certainly some quarterly ups and downs on services. And as those smaller projects become larger, we expect some smoothing out of that volume. So we're already seeing an uptick on the Accelerator side. It's just a matter of time on -- as these projects become larger or more spending happens, that will improve.

And I do expect it to perform that way to see services outperform sort of consumable instrument uptick in the following quarters. Instruments performed well. We obviously want to place those, as you know, across the franchise now both our HD-X, our [ HT ] and the PhenoCycler, they're all high-volume instruments with the capacity to run high volumes of consumables, and we're going to continue our work in making sure we get these placed globally.

Your next question is a follow-up from Kyle Mikson with Canaccord.

On the point there about instruments on Simoa One, I just wanted to ask about the time line there because I thought it was supposed to be launched by the end of '25, but it sounds like now there's an early access program for that. So again, how should we think about this product as being like an incremental inorganic source of revenue growth like next year? It sounds like it could be big, but I mean, what's the funnel kind of look like? Like what do you expect for that, Masoud?

Yes. We've been working with a handful of customers, and they're certainly excited to get access to higher sensitivity compared to where we are today and the ability to plex even further. And so we're going to be kicking off an early access program before the end of the year, where we're going to give early access, get feedback from our customers before we go and move forward with a full launch. Revenue contribution, we haven't talked about that in '26. We'll provide an update on our next quarter call.

All right. Great. And then finally, on the Asia kind of updates for LucentAD, I mean, when does that become material? Like what are the steps of sort of unlocking revenue in overseas internationally for that test, given it's not -- it's obviously unprecedented?

Yes. I think what you see in some of the collaborations we've done right now in Southeast Asia, we're basically kind of early stages, but we're already seeing the opportunity in China. We have a couple of partners there. Partners have already received IVD approval for the platform, and they're moving ahead with testing patients and getting the system out to laboratories across the country. So good signs there. The drug is available. Patients want access, and they're using our test. So that's been a decent contributor to our diagnostics revenue.

Got it. And finally, you've reduced R&D spending quite a bit. I'm just kind of curious if you aim to sort of increase that next year as you think about, again, the small one, you have other products coming out just to maintain a competitive stance and sort of drive growth as well over time because you have a lot of synergies to be taken out -- or sorry, investments to be taken out the business so you need kind of investment to drive more growth. How do you -- what do you think about that kind of a concept?

Yes. So we've been pretty disciplined about the synergies, and we've been careful to make sure that we maintain all of our investment in our growth areas. So R&D is down a hair, but that's mainly because there's some reallocation of some of Akoya's R&D cost into cost of sales. And on the Simoa side, there's been a little bit of pruning and a little bit of housekeeping, but all of our strategic investments are very much intact. So we're still allocating capital to Simoa One as well as diagnostics as well as on assay development, both for Simoa and Spatial. As we go into 2026, some of these programs will come to a natural end. Other programs will start off. But our intention is that we'll continue to balance R&D as a priority item even going into '26.

We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.