Hello and welcome to today's call. This call's conference is acquisition of Akoya Biosciences. At this time, our participants have been placed in listen-only mode. The call will be open for your questions following the prepared remarks. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. In the press release and slide presentation regarding the transactions that are available at the investor relations section of each company's website. The archive replay can be accessed there following the call. I would now like to hand the call over to Joshua Young, Head of Investor Relations at Quanterix. Please go ahead.
Thank you and welcome everybody. Today's discussion of Quanterix's proposed acquisition of Akoya, including the answers to your questions, will contain statements that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks include, among others, matters that we described in our press release announcing this transaction in our SEC filings. Unless required by law, we disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements and encourage you to review the important information included in our press release regarding forward-looking statements, the forthcoming registration statement filing, and solicitation matters. Our participants today include Quanterix President and CEO, Masoud Toloue, and Chief Financial Officer, Vandana Sriram. After our prepared remarks, we'll open up for Q&A.
Now I'd like to turn the call over to Masoud.
Thank you, Joshua. We're excited to speak with you today about the combination of our two companies. We believe that the transaction is a strong fit with our strategy and will create a true leader in our space with a one-of-a-kind integrated platform across the detection of blood and tissue-based protein biomarkers. Our combined ability to serve customers with a fully integrated offering, unmatched innovation, speed, and reliability not only fills a void in the market, but is also expected to create significant value for shareholders of both companies. The combined Akoya and Quanterix will serve three high-growth markets across neurology, oncology, and immunology, and we'll go to market with a comprehensive suite of technology offerings backed by a strong cash balance, enabling us to reinvest in core growth opportunities and accelerate our path to profitability.
With that as a backdrop, I'll now spend a few minutes providing an overview of the transaction terms. Akoya shareholders will receive 0.318 share of Quanterix stock for each share of Akoya they own. This represents a pro forma ownership of the combined company of 70% for Quanterix shareholders and 30% for Akoya shareholders. As for leadership, post-closing, Vandana and I will continue to lead Quanterix and we will operate under the Quanterix name. We look forward to welcoming two directors proposed by Akoya directors to our board of directors for a total of nine Quanterix directors. As you have seen, certain shareholders controlling more than 50% of Akoya shares have signed a voting agreement in support of the transaction. Finally, we expect to close the transaction in the second quarter of 2025, following approval by both companies' shareholders and satisfaction of various closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
So before Vandana and I review the many strategic and financial benefits of the transaction, I want to start by explaining why. Philosophically, this transaction is so important for both Quanterix and our industry. The Quanterix mission lies in the advancement of enabling early detection of disease before symptoms appear. Today, we're combining two companies focused on different aspects of detection to create an offering able to address a broader range of customer needs. Diseases like cancer begin in tissue, spread to blood, and often end up in organs such as lung and liver that ultimately take life. To effectively detect and treat disease, we must measure signals as they follow this pathway. Typically, you have pathologists doing research in blood and other pathologists only measuring biomarkers in tissue. Our vision is to bring clinical and anatomical pathology together to solve this problem.
By combining the leader in ultrasensitive biomarker detection in blood, Quanterix, with the leader in measuring biomarkers in tissue, Akoya Biosciences, we are building the toolset for this mission and uniquely positioned to speed up market development of new tests. With that foundation, let me now add some further context to what this transaction means for Quanterix and how it'll accelerate our strategic plan to create a scalable platform. Our overarching strategic plan focuses on three core areas. Number one, growing our menu. Number two, expanding into adjacencies. And finally, translating into Alzheimer's disease diagnostics. We have consistently made progress across each area, but where I want to spend the most time today is on pillar two, expanding into adjacencies, as this is really where Akoya will strengthen our position. Our Simoa platform is able to detect over 550 biomarkers in blood, largely targeted to detect neuro disease.
Throughout Quanterix's history, the company has been highly indexed and a leader in the neurology field, but our applications have also manifested in oncology and immunology. Both are two high-growth adjacencies and represent two of the largest markets with the greatest position for early detection. Expanding into these adjacencies will enhance our offerings in research and in academic settings, improving our ability to participate in the most dynamic subsectors of healthcare. Our approach to each market is slightly different. For immunology, we've been focused on the launch of our upcoming new mid-plex Simoa platform, and for oncology, it is through tissue and blood biomarker monitoring and detection. As we think about Akoya's profile, they check both boxes. Akoya's world-class spatial biology capabilities are the gold standard with a roughly 1,300 installed base across oncology and immunology markets, and importantly, their instrument portfolio is highly complementary to Simoa.
Across our combined technology and service offerings, I like to think about our growth potential in three parts that will ultimately drive our continued strong double-digit organic growth. First, menu. We'll apply our combined consumables product development engine to accelerate growth of new biomarker pairs across tissue and blood and deliver on the promise of our integrated platform, as I just described. Second, services. We will replicate Quanterix's Accelerator model to expand Akoya's tissue testing services portfolio. Our differentiated Accelerator offerings have created a valuable franchise that has helped us deliver our consistent double-digit growth. And third, footprint. Given the complementary nature of the transaction, there are significant new cross-selling opportunities across our combined install base of over 2,300 instruments. And when taken together, we now have the opportunity to go after a larger $5 billion Mid-Plex and spatial biology market, positioning us for sustainable growth and market leadership.
So that is how we really look at the core pillar and the acceleration we'll see from Akoya. As it relates to diagnostics, we remain incredibly excited about our potential in the Alzheimer's diagnostics market. As Vandana will review in a moment, we will maintain our financial flexibility to continue building a leading global diagnostic testing infrastructure for Alzheimer's disease and strengthen our promising franchise. Now, I'll turn the call over to Vandana to cover our financial profile of the combined company.
Thank you, Masoud. I echo your excitement for the future of our combined company. The financial profile of this transaction sets both companies up on an accelerated path to profitability. As Masoud mentioned, with our strong foothold in neurology and Akoya's in oncology and immunology, similar customer profiles, and our proven track record of execution, this transaction paves the way to expanded opportunities for both companies. This acquisition will provide us with the opportunity to thoughtfully invest in our combined R&D and expand our commercial reach. Additionally, there is significant opportunity to leverage a common operating and commercial infrastructure to realize considerable synergies of $40 million by the end of 2026. Of that, we expect to realize $20 million of savings within the first year after the deal closes. These synergies will be achieved in three distinct areas.
We expect to consolidate our commercial infrastructure by combining our geographic footprint and call points with customers. On the operation side, Quanterix has already made significant investments in scalability as part of our transformation, and we will leverage those investments effectively in the combined company through driving synergies in testing and manufacturing, and finally, streamlining duplicative corporate structures and general and administrative costs across our separate organizations will drive savings in the combined company. Over a trailing 12-month period ended September 30th, 2024, the combined company has generated revenues of approximately $220 million. We will provide an update on Quanterix's fourth quarter performance next week, and we expect the combined entity to support Quanterix's goal of achieving strong double-digit organic revenue growth. With more than $300 million in combined cash today, we expect to have approximately $175 million in cash with no expected debt at the time of closing.
This $175 million balance accounts for repayment of Akoya's debt, all transaction costs, and the $20 million payment for our previously announced acquisition of Emission. We continue to have sufficient capital to invest in growth opportunities, including our planned investment of $20 million by the end of this year to advance Alzheimer's disease diagnostics. Over the last couple of years, we've reduced our cash burn by approximately 50%. Between our continued initiatives to prudently manage costs and the synergies we expect to achieve with this transaction, we now expect to be able to accelerate our profitability targets and believe we have a cash path to being cash flow positive in 2026. With that, let me turn it back to Masoud.
Thank you, Vandana. In closing, we're bringing together two highly complementary companies that will not only enhance the scale and efficiency of our organization, but will make a meaningful difference to our customers who are on the front lines of treating patients. I'd like to personally thank the CEO of Akoya, Brian McKelligon, and his team. They have built a compelling portfolio with very attractive growth opportunities. With our combined world-class talent, I'm confident we will deliver on the promise of this combination. With that, let's begin Q&A.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now about to begin the Q&A session. At this time, I would like to remind everyone to ask a question, press the start button followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. We will pause just for a moment to compile the Q&A roster. One moment, please, for your first question. Your first question comes from the line of Sung Ji Nam of Scotiabank. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking the question. Just that curious, I know for Quanterix, the end market customer by customer type split is roughly 50/50 academic and biopharma. And I know you guys are also ramping on the clinical side, but curious what the split might be for Akoya at this point.
Yeah, I can take that, Sung Ji. As you mentioned, our split is approximately varies between 45 and 55 between pharma biotech and academia. For Akoya, the split is slightly more skewed towards pharma, a little over 60% for pharma biotech and CROs, and the rest is academic and government.
Okay, great. And then just kind of curious, obviously a lot of synergies here and also great opportunities for the integrated company. Just kind of curious for the, and you mentioned the large install base, combining the two companies, just kind of curious what kind of portion of that, or if there are customers that are currently leveraging both types of applications and technologies, or is this largely aspirational at this point? Just trying to get a sense of how much is currently in practice and how much of it would be contingent on you guys really building out capabilities to move easily from tissue to blood, etc.
Hey, Sung Ji. So this is happening now. I would say it's a very nascent and breaking scientific development. Researchers around the globe are looking at markers in tissue, and there are several publications that are coming out showing key markers like ORF1, PD-L1, and even HER2 showing up in solubilized form in blood, or as cargo in tumor-derived extracellular vesicles, and serving as markers for detecting cancer. So this is happening. We're seeing these publications. They're using, and they require the sensitivity of our platform to make the detection as things move from tissue to blood. And so we have a good sign of this being impactful in the future.
And just a quick follow-up on that, is there a lot of overlap between your customer base versus Akoya's at this point, or?
So I would say between the combined 2,300 installed base, we see biomarker labs that are regularly using the great Akoya platform, and then across the hall, they're using the Simoa platform, or in another lab, they're using the Simoa platform. So in the end, we see biomarker labs who are interested in doing both work in tissue and in blood, needing the combined platform for their discovery and for this new work.
Great. Thank you so much.
Your next question comes from the line of Kyle Mikson of Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the questions. Congrats on the deal. Congrats to Brian and Johnny over there at Akoya as well. So I guess, first of all, could you talk about if the Akoya side is going to be changing its focus and strategy in spatial at all? Is the company still going to be kind of focused on higher plex? I think that was kind of the recent focus of Akoya. And then also any interest on the Akoya side in an internal multi-omics program still that can detect RNA? I think that was a focus in the past. Or is there going to be a partnership model remaining? Basically, is the spatial business going to be high-p lex still, as well as maybe a goal to get to multi-omics too? Thanks.
Hey, Kyle, I'll reserve that question for Brian to answer once we have a chance to talk with Brian. And we're probably not going to comment on Akoya specifically on this call. We're really focused on this call on the combination of the two companies and what that means.
All right, Masoud. That's fair. Thanks for that. I guess both companies have significant services businesses that have been relatively kind of healthy and insulated in this environment. What's the benefits of having such a large service revenue mix going forward? And how do you see that kind of playing out over time?
Yeah, that's a great question, Kyle. We see three key growth drivers. First, there's menu, right? Over the last two years, Quanterix has grown reagents by 24%. We're a life science tools company. That means menu through our platform. And that's a key focus. The second key point or growth driver is what you just brought up, Kyle, which is services. We're going to replicate the Quanterix Accelerator model to expand Akoya's tissue testing services portfolio. As you know, over the last two years, with the investments that we've made, the Accelerator program has grown over 33%, and we see real opportunity there as a combined entity offering services. So it's a key part of the focus and a key part of the plan once we combine.
Maybe just clarify if Akoya's strengthened your position in Alzheimer's diagnostics and the work that you've done so far, given they can kind of target the tissue side maybe, or maybe the early research side of that area?
Yeah, that's a great question. We learned through the process that obviously Akoya is very active in neurology and in a lot of the early discoveries related to neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. A lot of the customers we talk to are involved in translation, but they're working or they're partnering with people who are trying to understand the biology of Alzheimer's disease, and as you know, it's still not very well understood, so we're really taking and bridging and going from discovery all the way to translation and having a combined company to be able to offer that across neurology, immunology, and oncology is pretty powerful.
Awesome. And final one. Vandana mentioned over $200 million of capital allocated for 2024 and 2025 to advance diagnostics. Does that include any investment in Akoya's clinical work?
To be clear, I referenced $20 million of investment in Alzheimer’s diagnostics. This is the same $20 million that we had announced in the beginning of 2024. In the beginning of 2024, we had earmarked $20 million that would be spent between 2024 and 2025. And we remain committed to that investment and continue to move forward with that plan as we described before.
Then on the companion diagnostics part, Akoya, I think that Kyle, that you were referring to, Akoya has a great companion diagnostics business, and we intend to make sure that that is moving forward, if not accelerating, with investment.
That makes sense. Thanks again, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Puneet Souda of Leerink Partners. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi guys. Thanks for the questions here. So first one is maybe a multi-part question. Masoud, why is now the best time to get into spatial technology? Because when you look at the opportunities that are ahead of you, you have Alzheimer's diagnostics. It's not easy to drive diagnostics while running the tools business. So obviously, speed is needed there. You have FDA approval potentially down the line, and you have reimbursement and other milestones. So just trying to understand why is now the right time to pursue this. And then could you elaborate a bit more on how much of the business is going to be now translational versus pure research? And what can you do in the Accelerator part of the business, meaning how much that could actually help?
But at the same time, it looks like it could potentially even cannibalize some of the sales that are happening as pharma companies could shift over their work towards Accelerators. So maybe just talk to us about those points.
Thanks, Puneet. I'll start with your first question on now and why now, and I want to just go back and reemphasize the strategy that Quanterix laid out two years ago when we underwent a large transformation, and we said at the outset that our strategy is going to be centered around three key pillars. And we've repeated these over and over, which is you can use the acronym GET to remind you of the three pillars. It's G, we've got to grow menu. We're going to extend our lead position in neurology biomarkers. That's key to maintaining our number one position in translational ultrasensitive detection of these markers. That's a key focus for us. Number two, expanding into adjacencies. The Simoa platform, while we have 70% focus in neurology, is already in immunology and oncology.
We need to expand those adjacencies and make sure that others who are working in these fields have the power of ultrasensitivity, so we need to democratize the platform and get Simoa into more labs, and a big focus of our strategy has been expanding into immunology and oncology. Obviously, as I mentioned in the earlier remarks, Akoya is a big part of that, and then finally, t, the third pillar of our focus is we're a translational company. On the backs of Quanterix, we've taken biomarkers all the way from research through discovery to translation and now diagnostics, and as Vandana mentioned, we're very focused on our allocation of capital and resources for testing and building that infrastructure, so we believe that, hey, we're going to be able to march on these three pillars effectively. We have a talented team that can work through this.
And if anything, with the combination of Akoya and their diagnostics efforts, we see some real synergies. On your second question related to Accelerator and cannibalization, our focus two years ago in Accelerator had always been, this is synergistic, meaning it used to be a try before you buy the Simoa platform. And it's become, hey, I have a fleet of Simoa or HD-Xs in my laboratory or in my pharma environment, but I have so many samples. I need to run these samples in a place where I have a high throughput ability to get data. And so a lot of our pharma customers have this dual model where they're running consumables. They have our instruments. They're adding instruments, but they need high capacity, high volume of the 24 systems we have here in Accelerator.
I can imagine as we learn more and work together with Akoya, this is going to be a similar scenario. So we don't see it as a cannibalization. In CapEx constrained environments, as you can see, it's been very productive with our Accelerator business growing 33% over the last two years.
Okay, that's helpful, Masoud. One question that we're getting from investors is this year, Akoya's expectation, I think in street numbers is about $92 million. Is that something you're still comfortable with, and just want to clarify, I mean, your expectations for 2025, given just delays in the sales cycle, instrumentation sales, and challenges that Akoya has seen. Obviously, they had to cut the guide for 2024, so just trying to understand what are you baking in for expectations this year?
Yeah. So again, I'm not going to comment on Akoya specifically and Akoya standalone as a growth and their growth rates. But Akoya, I would just emphasize, has the largest install base and supporting publications in tissue and spatial biology. And that perfectly pairs with our solutions. We have proven ability to sustain double-digit growth despite the CapEx environment. I've talked about three ways that we're going to be very focused upon integration, driving growth between the combined companies. And I think this complementary nature of the acquisition and the vision we laid out in the early remarks are going to bring not just strong top-line revenue growth, but help improve cost position across the combined enterprise.
Got it. And just last one, if I could, for Vandana. On the $40 million cost synergies, could you elaborate a little bit more on that? How much of that is on the sales and commercial side? How much is sort of on the facilities that you're planning to shut down potentially? How much is maybe just to help us understand the overlap and redundancies?
Yeah, thanks for the question, Puneet. We do think there's tremendous opportunity for synergies here. All of the items you mentioned, they're all part of that construct, and we spent a lot of time really digging into this through the diligence process with the help and collaboration of Brian and the team, so the three key areas are really firstly commercial, there's a lot of overlap in geography in the areas we operate in our business model as well as our key customers, so bringing that together as a total solution through one sales and service team is great from a cost perspective, but will also give better outcomes to our customers, then on the operation side, there's definitely a facility element here, but there's also a fair amount of commonality in our fulfillment processes.
We spent a lot of time and investment over the last couple of years, very specifically investing in the scalability of our operations. So that gives us a lot of leverage here. And then we're two small-cap public companies. So there's a fairly significant overlap in terms of the corporate function of both companies that we'll be able to streamline. So we'll develop these specifics as we continue to plan our integration and as we continue to move this forward. But all of the areas you mentioned are contemplated in that $40 million.
Good. Thanks, Masoud.
Thanks, Puneet.
Your next question comes from the line of Matt Sykes of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the acquisition. Maybe just kind of starting off from the last question, I'm just curious about cross-selling examples, meaning if you can maybe outline one or two theoretical ways that you envision the cross-selling happening and what the opportunities would be there. And then in part with that, how do you envision the commercial strategy? Vandana, you kind of mentioned a little bit in the previous question, but I'm just curious about how do you maintain the specialist knowledge of some of the commercial field force on their respective instruments and offerings while at the same time trying to consolidate those two sales forces together?
Do you expect to do some cross-fertilization of salespeople or product specialists within each group in order to help identify cross-selling opportunities that might not be obvious to the original commercial salesperson at the individual companies?
Hey, Matt. Yeah, so I'll answer your first question first. And the first thing I would say is important to remember is that both companies measure biomarkers. Akoya is number one at measuring biomarkers in tissue. Quanterix is number one leader in ultrasensitive measure of biomarkers in blood. And what we've seen and what we've already learned is that to measure through our customers, we're seeing first signs of our customers measuring markers moving from tissue to blood. And that requires ultrasensitivity. So to date, about 20% of our installed base is from oncology. However, within that base, we're showing new work that was traditionally just tissue.
And I mentioned some of the markers, ORF1, PD-L1, HER2, showing up in blood or in extracellular vesicles and serving as markers for detecting cancer. So the amounts are small. Our customers need ultrasensitivity for that detection. And by combining best-in-class tissue and blood detection, we're speeding up market development of new tests. So we're already seeing this with our customers. We're already seeing this with customers using the Akoya platform. And we're basically pouring gas through this combination by accelerating this effort to build and speed up tests. So that's where we see great cross-synergies across the teams. And then the commercial side, well, one, I would tell you that I'm personally intimately familiar with this technology when the technology was at PerkinElmer. And second, through that experience, we already have folks on our commercial team who've actually worked at Akoya.
We have several world-class talented individuals who have experience with the technology at Quanterix and have been reiterating the power of the technology. So we've already, through just the fact that we're both based in Boston, they're in Marlborough, we're in Billerica. We have some cross-pollination here of our employees. And we know that strong, talented commercial individuals with experience in selling is going to be a key factor to this. And so we'll be keeping that in mind as we focus on the integration.
Got it. Thanks for that. Very helpful. And then on the Emission deal that you did earlier, I'm just curious as to how Emission would fit into any potential for synergies or cross-selling opportunities, or even just on the cost side from a manufacturing standpoint. And did you kind of have in mind both of these acquisitions roughly at the same time?
So they're synergistic, or is it just timing was different?
Thanks for the question, Matt. Yes. So going back to the three pillars of Quanterix's growth strategy, growing menu, expanding adjacencies. In the second pillar, expanding adjacencies, we've talked about immunology and oncology being key areas that, as a company, we want to advance and develop new biomarkers, especially that require ultrasensitivity. And with the Emission acquisition, we've been talking about the importance of multiplex. And that for neurology, one to four biomarkers are perfect, but for immunology and oncology, the need for twice that amount is going to be critical. And so we're going to be talking, hopefully, at the beginning of this year about a new platform that we're going to be launching in 2025 that's going to be Higher Plex. We're going to talk about the attributes of that platform.
Where Emission comes in is that Emission offers these proprietary dye-encoded beads that are really solid and allow us to expand our multiplexing and will be vertically integrated into that platform. That acquisition was in the mind of immunology and detection of ultrasensitivity. We'll talk more about that in the coming days.
Okay. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.
Maybe just to add on Emission, really on Emission, we believe the key financial benefit really will be in recapturing margin. So as we start to generate sales of the new platform, there'll be some amount of margin recapture. That's how the payback works on Emission.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Dan Brennan of TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you. Thanks for the questions. Congrats on the deal. Can you just discuss, first off, was this a competitive deal?
Yep. Yeah. So we're not going to get into that. However, that should all come out in the registration and the files when we publish them. But we're not going to get into the details of the transaction.
Got it. Okay. I know there's been a couple of questions on the top-line outlook. I'm just wondering, I mean, can you share any color regarding what type of top-line, excuse me, what type of top-line growth you kind of assumed in your Akoya deal, kind of the deal model? Do you have an ROI target that you can share for the deal?
Yeah. I mean, I think in the earlier remarks, we've said that with the vision that we have of translating markers from tissue to blood and the test acceleration we're going to do, the combined effort of both companies really driving menu, our services, and the doubling of the footprint, that we're going to get to strong double-digit organic growth by 2026.
Got it. Right. No, I saw that. Would you be comfortable defining strong double-digit? Is that something in the mid-teens? Is that something north of 20? Any context around that?
Yeah. Dan, we're going to, I think we've outlined strong double-digit. We feel confident about that. We're going to learn more as things come together, probably towards the second quarter of this year. And at that time, once we've seen and talked to teams and get a better sense of the opportunities in more finer detail, at that point, we'll provide some more color on strong double-digit.
Got it. And maybe between the PhenoCycler-Fusion and the PhenoCycler-HT, one lower plex, one higher throughput lower plex, and one higher plex lower throughput. Can you just describe, are both of these equally interesting, exciting, given the kind of go-forward kind of synergistic opportunity you see, or is one more important to you?
They're both leading platforms in the field, so Akoya has done, and Akoya's management team and employees have done an incredible job in the largest footprint in spatial biology and tissue, and that's a testament to the quality of the technology, and in the research space, we know that the Cycler is used. It's used as we go and talk to labs and biomarker labs. We see the Cycler in the field, and then, as I said earlier, the HT is something that I'm intimately familiar with, and the performance of that platform is unmatched, and so we see that in the translational markets. When we talk to our pharma customers, we see the HT platform, and it's running, and it's running samples, and across the lab, they're using Simoa.
And we're seeing the real opportunities in test development by monitoring that first biomarker in tissue leaking and going into blood. And so whether it's discovery for neurology with the Cycler and translation with Quanterix, or this test development that may be more translational, we see the opportunity across both platforms, and we're very excited about both.
And your business is heavily consumable service. Their business is heavily instrument. How do you think about taking on a heavy instrument business at this point?
I would say that in any sort of life science tools business, and our focus at Quanterix as well, has been menu. Key menu that we can provide customers is going to lead to higher and higher pull-through on platform. We've seen that in our business with our reagents growing 24% with some of the initiatives that we've put in. Frankly, Akoya's large installed base is music to everyone's ears here, and we intend to apply our product development engine to accelerate growth of menu across both companies, and we already have a suite of synergistic biomarkers in development.
Got it. Terrific. Thank you.
Thanks, Dan.
Your next question comes from the line of Tejas Savant of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Good morning, and thanks for the time here. Congrats on the deal. Maybe just to kick things off, Masoud, can you just walk us through your thoughts on competition in spatial proteomics as you evaluated Akoya and potentially other sort of options out there as well? What about Akoya's approach jumped out at you through that process?
Yeah. That's a great question. I'll refer back to the strategy that we outlined several years ago and the growth in menu expanding to adjacencies and translation and diagnostics. When we laid that out, our commitment was we're going to deliver on that strategy. And every single component of that strategy will be delivered. And so part of it expanding adjacencies was immunology and oncology. And when we set that strategy out, we were very interested in this vision of bringing clinical and anatomical pathology together to solve a very difficult problem that I alluded to earlier. And we began looking in search of a company that was best at measuring biomarkers in tissues. Akoya is number one. And so our focus from that point had been we need to do something together to work and build a toolset to solve these complicated issues and disease.
Got it. That's super helpful context, actually, and then it came up a little bit earlier on the call as well, but can you give us a sense for whether Akoya's technology IP or expertise can help you increase plex on your platform beyond the eight to 10-plex range that you already have in the works? And conversely, I think you just alluded to the possibility of increasing throughput on Akoya's installed base. That has always been a little bit of a gating factor for investors on that story. That's interesting technology and platform, but sort of relatively limited in terms of consumables pull-through, so what are the timelines in your mind in terms of being able to push that through on their installed base?
Yeah. As I mentioned, strong double-digit growth, combined company, we have a plan, and it's going to be, as you alluded to, menu services, cross-selling across the combined footprint. On menu, two years ago at Quanterix, we looked at the opportunity of the platform. We said, on a per-install basis, the platform is underutilized. We found that, hey, we need to increase menu and that in any life science tools company, menu and pull-through is the bread and butter. Over two years, we invested time, resources, we built a team, we redeveloped our assays, and we ensured that every single one of our platforms in the market and in our Accelerator lab, we're going to do higher pull-through with larger menu. We see the same opportunity at Akoya. Akoya's platforms are the most high-throughput in the market.
And so if you look at all spatial technologies and all tissue technologies, Akoya has the highest opportunity for increasing throughput, especially when it relates to protein-based biomarkers. On your second question, Tejas, on the technology acceleration, I think that's something that our teams are going to pay close attention to. The modalities of tissue and blood suggest some basic separate technologies. However, in our acquisition of Emission, we began alluding to, while both our companies are protein-focused, that we're starting to look at opportunities in nucleic acid, DNA, and RNA, just as Akoya has been doing. And as our future becomes more multi-omic and solutions are not just going to be DNA or RNA, but are going to require protein or combinations of those, we're paying very close attention to that. And the good news is both our platforms have the capability to expand into those areas.
Got it. That's really helpful, Masoud. And then last one for me here. The last 12-18 months has been a rough time for Akoya. They've engaged in very significant cost cuts. And I think you guys laid out another $40 million over the next couple of years here in cost saves, partially from the commercial channel. So just walk us through how you're thinking about balancing those cost saves with continuing to invest in R&D. These are innovative niches in the life sciences, and there's a lot of players here throwing a lot of money at coming up with better solutions. So how are you going to think about the balance between investing in R&D and sort of reinvigorating growth versus achieving those commercial synergies?
Yeah. So great question, Tejas. Well, first, I'll start and say we have a very good understanding of the end market and the customers. And we believe we have the right organizational structure that will result in a significantly higher level of visibility as a combined entity. And so in a lot of ways, our plan is to repeat the playbook that we've had over the last six-to-eight quarters. You can see the results. And this time, we're going to do it with our partners, with the folks and the great people at Akoya, and with the Akoya system and platform. So on the R&D commercial side, look, we're a life science tools company. Akoya has a number one lead position in spatial and tissue. Quanterix is a number one lead position in ultrasensitive detection of protein biomarkers.
We're going to maintain and extend that lead across both entities, and that means innovation and investment in technology. And so that's going to be a key focus of us. We have the balance sheet, as Vandana and I mentioned, upon close to be able to do this, and it's going to be a continued focus of the organization.
Yeah, and I'd just add, Tejas, if you look at how we've run this at Quanterix over the last couple of years, we've been hyper-focused on reducing cash burn where it makes sense, but also investing where it makes sense. So in 2024, we outlined significant investments. We'll continue to run the same play where there's clear synergy to be had and where there's operational efficiency. We will go after that. But at the same time, we will make sure that we continue to deploy capital towards growth.
Got it. That's helpful, guys. Appreciate the time, and good luck with the deal close.
Thanks, Tejas.
There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Masoud Toloue for final closing remarks. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you, everyone, for joining. This transaction accelerates our progress by creating the first platform, as we talked about in the call, that lets researchers and clinicians track disease progression from tissue to blood by starting in tissue and detecting early signs of complementary proteins in blood using ultrasensitive technology. We're uniquely positioned to speed up market development of new tests. We look forward to working together with the Akoya team to achieve this mission. Thanks, everyone.
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