Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Seer Inc third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Carrie Mendivil, Investor Relations. You may begin.
Thank you. Earlier today, Seer released financial results for the quarter ended September 30th, 2022. If you have not received this news release, or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investor@seer.bio. Joining me today from Seer is Omid Farokhzad, Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chair, and David Horn, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled Forward Looking Statements in the press release Seer issued today.
For a more complete list and description, please see the Risk Factors section of the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q from the quarter ended September 30th, 2022, and in its other filings with Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, Seer disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast, November 8th, 2022. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Omid.
Thanks, Carrie, and thanks everyone for joining us this afternoon. I'm encouraged by the growing enthusiasm for the Proteograph Product Suite across a variety of applications spanning discovery, translational, and clinical research. During the third quarter, our team continued to make important progress against our strategic plan, and we ended the quarter with $4 million in revenue and approximately $441 million of cash equivalents, and investments on our balance sheets. I have never been more bullish than I am today about the future of Seer. Our technology will meaningfully enable researchers to undertake population scale studies that can uncover the complexity of the proteome, including the discovery and identification of previously unknown protein variants. Identifying and elucidating the biological role of these protein variants is the next frontier in the quest to understand human health and disease.
To that end, key leaders in proteomics are calling for the establishment of the Human Proteoform Project, similar to the Human Genome Project, which was profoundly important in the transformation and acceleration of biological and medical research using genomics. The ambitious goal of this proposed initiative is to map the entire human proteome by generating a definitive reference set of protein variants produced from the genome. The needed discovery work simply cannot be done without the deep, unbiased access to the proteome at scale that Seer uniquely enables today. We believe that initiatives like the Human Proteoform Project are key in enabling the proteomic community to vastly increase the resolution of proteomic studies. For this to become a reality, we will need the synergistic combination of two distinct technologies. First, an unbiased detector with peptide level resolution to identify and differentiate protein variants.
Second, a platform to capture the vast array of protein variants at scale and in an unbiased way. This will enable population scale studies, which will be required for identifying and cataloging the universe of protein variants. Now, the gold standard for unbiased detector for proteomics is mass spec, and the only commercially available platform for deep, unbiased sampling of proteins at scale is the Seer's Proteograph Product Suite. We expect Seer's platform will be a major enabler of initiatives such as the Human Proteoform Project because of our ability to deeply interrogate the proteome in a scalable way, which provides an unmatched ability to discover and catalog novel content.
Now, I'll start today by sharing some updates on our progress against our key objectives to drive growth in 2022 and beyond, and then I will turn the call over to David to provide more detail on our financial results. As a reminder, our five key objectives are, first, supporting customers to scale their use of the Proteograph Product Suite for projects of increasing size and scope. Second, expanding our global customer network and install base of instruments. Third, continuing to build our team, commercial capabilities, and geographic footprint. Fourth, expanding our partnerships to make it even easier for customers to adopt our technology. And fifth, driving our product roadmap to enable more applications.
Starting with how our customers are using the Proteograph. We're excited to see our more established customers ramping their use of our technology with an increasing interest in larger studies, ranging from hundreds to thousands of samples. As we've said previously, the Proteograph removes the barriers that previously constrained deep unbiased proteomic studies in complex sample types to fewer than 50 samples. Our technologies are also highly extensible. Through our engagement with customers and prospective customers, we're seeing significant interest in utilizing the Proteograph to explore a broad range of sample types, diseases, and organisms through studies of various scopes. With our growing install base, our centers of excellence or COEs coming online, and the addition of prospective customers to our sales pipeline, we have a line of sight to a growing number of larger studies.
We're seeing excellent progress with our COE partners in both the size and scope of studies being performed. Three of our COE partners are now working with large pharma and academic customers in significant studies. In addition, these COEs are demonstrating the power of the Proteograph Product Suite with their own data. For example, Evotec has used the Proteograph to deeply interrogate the proteomic content of biological samples beyond plasma, such as urine, cerebrospinal fluid, and conditioned media. The latter enables studies of the secretome, which are proteins that are differentially secreted by cells and tissues in health and disease. Their team will be hosting a webinar in the coming weeks to discuss their data with different biofluids using the Proteograph Product Suite. We're also seeing interest from pharma and biotech customers in running service projects with hundreds of samples across various applications.
These projects span a broad range of disease families, including neurodegenerative diseases, oncology, cardiovascular disease, reproductive health, and aging. Notably, beyond applications in human samples, our technology is inherently species agnostic in that it also enables researchers to use the Proteograph Product Suite on studies with model organisms and applications in other end markets, such as animal health. We're encouraged by the breadth of projects among our customers and are excited to see multiple studies that were run earlier this year moving closer to manuscript submission. Customer-driven proof points are essential in developing the market for any first-of-its-kind product. We believe that as more third-party data enters the public domain over the coming months and years, the differentiated value proposition of the Proteograph Product Suite to provide novel insights into the proteome and to enable the next generation of multi-omic studies will become more and more established.
While third-party data moves toward publications, we continue to publish on the underpinning of our technology to demonstrate its unique capabilities. To that end, during the third quarter, we announced the publication of a groundbreaking study in Advanced Materials, demonstrating the power of engineered nano-bio interactions to enable deep access to the proteome. This paper highlights how the combination of proteomic methods, nano-engineering, and machine learning enables the capture of thousands of proteins. The published results significantly expand the field's understanding of the nano-bio interactions and how the optimization of these interactions could enable the discovery of novel biomarkers and biological insights. It is exciting to see the groundswell of enthusiasm emerging around proteomics. Over the past few months, we attended several conferences where we continue to see a growing interest in the presentations from both Seer and our customers. This content is featured and available on our website.
Most recently, our team attended the American Society of Human Genetics conference, or ASHG, in Los Angeles, where we presented three posters highlighting our proteogenomic capabilities. Although this conference is traditionally more focused on genomics, we're emboldened by the exceptional enthusiasm for potential customers who attended our posters, talks, and visited our booth. We're seeing an increasing interest from genomics researchers who want to access proteogenomic content and are excited by what the Proteograph Product Suite enables. Importantly, a growing number of publications and commentary are also highlighting the challenges of existing targeted proteomic approaches. Researchers are excited about having unbiased access to the proteome, which enables them to discover novel protein variants and to deepen their multi-omic insights.
To that end, we presented a poster at the ASHG demonstrating the power of our Proteograph Analysis Suite to enable user-friendly data visualization and reproducible analysis of proteomic and genomic data at scale, including the identification and exploration of variant peptides. We also demonstrated how the Proteograph enables disease classification and biomarker characterization in a poster looking at 200-sample Alzheimer's cohort performed in approximately four weeks and generating data for over 5,000 proteins. Finally, in a study of non-small cell lung cancer patients, we showed that peptide-level resolution can reveal biologically important differences in the expression of distinct variants of the same protein at the protein isoform level. This important difference in protein variant expression would have been masked if the study was performed at the protein level without peptide-level resolution.
These presentations help demonstrate to researchers how the Proteograph Product Suite can enable high-resolution proteogenomics by providing unbiased peptide-level data at scale in a timeframe not previously possible. Now turning our attention to our commercial progress. There continues to be a growing interest and excitement surrounding the Proteograph Product Suite across a wide range of customer types and applications. We're seeing strong interest across geographies, and our pipeline of qualified leads is equally split between academic and commercial customers. As we've said previously, the sales cycle for our commercial prospect is shorter relative to our academic prospects. The enthusiasm for the value proposition of our technology continues to grow, which has been a strong tailwind in a market full of economic headwinds.
We continue to pay attention to the evolving macroeconomic environment, particularly related to the uncertainty with respect to its impact on biopharma spending, constrained CapEx budget, staffing shortages, and limited customer access in certain markets such as China. These factors have served to elongate the purchasing decision for potential customers. Our team continues to execute despite these challenges, and we remain focused on the task at hand. To that end, we're making great progress hiring top talent to support our growing commercial efforts. Seer continues to attract leaders from across genomics, proteomics, and other leading omic companies, and I'm very proud of the team we have built and are continuing to build under Scott's commercial leadership. Now, we also continue to make important progress with the Proteogenomics Consortium.
As a reminder, this is a multi-year collaboration that we established with Discovery Life Sciences and SCIEX, in which Discovery will offer deep, unbiased proteomics capabilities to their existing and new genomic services customers with a goal to ramp to an annual capacity of over 100,000 samples. Discovery Life Sciences has both the Proteograph and SCIEX instruments installed and will undertake a 500-sample proteogenomic study to generate marketing data for their upcoming launch. Finally, we're driving toward the next set of innovations to further extend the capabilities of the Proteograph Product Suite. Last quarter, we released our proteogenomic workflow or PAS 2.0, which makes high-resolution proteogenomics and novel biological insights accessible with a click of a button.
Early feedback has been extremely positive, and we're committed to delivering continued advances that make it easier for different customer groups to adopt deep, unbiased proteogenomics at scale. As we mentioned, we're extremely encouraged by the interest and reception received for our presentations on this topic at the recent ASHG conference. At Seer, our overarching objective is to allow our customers to see deeper into the proteome by innovating across workflows in our instrument, assay, consumables, and data analysis software. We're relentlessly focused on delivering a great customer experience from sample loading to final report. Our data and software teams are continuously expanding our data tools, data management, and data analysis with an eye on enabling a broad range of labs to adopt the Proteograph.
We're also paving a path into the future as we expect to see studies expand to thousands and even tens of thousands of samples by innovating how large datasets can be managed to enable population-scale, deep, unbiased proteomic studies. One current example of how we're innovating with our analysis approach is the use of Seer-generated peptide reference libraries. Using these libraries, we're able to go up to 50% deeper into the proteome than we could previously, reanalyzing prior studies and discovering more content. Our goal is to incorporate these libraries, as well as multiple tools for larger studies and datasets, into our Proteograph Analysis Suite releases in 2023. I'm so excited for what is ahead for Seer. Our customers continue to amaze us with their use of the Proteograph and to imagine what's possible in their proteomic studies, a testament to the value and power of our technology.
I'm encouraged by the enthusiasm we're seeing across our current and prospective customer base, and I'm confident that we're well-positioned to capitalize on the large opportunity ahead. With that, I will now turn the call over to David.
Thanks, Omid. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2022 was $4 million, representing an increase of 84% compared to $2.2 million in the third quarter of 2021. The increase in third quarter revenue was primarily due to increased sales of the Proteograph Product Suite and its related products. Product revenue for the third quarter of 2022 was $3.9 million, including related party revenue of $1.3 million, and consisted of sales of SP100 instruments, consumable kits, and platform evaluations. Related party revenue of $1.3 million represents product sales to Prognomiq. Since our SBIR grant from the NIH was renewed in the third quarter, we expect a resumption of revenue contributions from grant and research-related collaborations beginning in the fourth quarter.
Total gross profit was $1.9 million for the third quarter of 2022, representing a gross margin of 49%. Our gross margins improved sequentially as a result of higher consumable sales in the third quarter, particularly as our early customers begin to ramp. We will continue to see variability in our overall gross margin on a quarter-by-quarter basis as a proportion of instrument and consumable sales will fluctuate between any given quarter. We continue to expect our long-term gross margins to be between 70% and 75%. Total operating expenses for the third quarter of 2022 were $27 million, including $9.1 million of stock-based compensation, compared to $19.6 million, including $6.8 million of stock-based compensation in the third quarter of 2021.
Research and development expenses for the third quarter of 2022 were $11.6 million, an increase of 49% compared to $7.7 million in the third quarter of 2021. The increase in R&D expenses was primarily due to an increase in product development efforts related to the Proteograph Product Suite, including $2.7 million in employee compensation costs and other related expenses, including stock-based compensation due to growth in research and development personnel and an increase in expenses related to the build-out of our facilities to support our R&D efforts. Selling, general, and administrative expenses for the third quarter of 2022 were $15.4 million, an increase of 30% compared to $11.9 million in the third quarter of 2021.
The increase in SG&A expenses was primarily driven by a $1.2 million increase in employee compensation and other related expenses, and a $1.1 million increase in stock-based compensation. Other increases are attributable to an increase in professional and consulting fees and our facility expansion. Net loss for the third quarter was $24 million, compared to $18.4 million in the third quarter of 2021. We ended the quarter with approximately $441 million in cash equivalents, and investments and continue to be disciplined about our level of spend and the rate of return that we will earn on our deployed capital. With our extremely strong balance sheet and disciplined deployment of capital, we believe we are well-funded to execute on our strategic plan for many years to come.
Turning to our outlook for the year, we continue to expect revenue to be in the range of $14 million-$16 million for 2022. Omid said, we are paying close attention to the evolving macroeconomic environment, which we believe may impact the timing and the scope of customers' purchasing decisions. Despite this environment, we are enthusiastic about the interest in our technology and expect full year revenues to be in the upper half of our guidance range. At this point, I would like to turn the call back to Omid for closing comments.
Thanks, David. We made great strides this quarter, and we continue to work closely with our customers as they scale their studies. It is exciting to see the Proteograph Product Suite being adopted by customers around the world to conduct first-of-their-kind studies that explore the proteome at a depth, resolution, and scale that was not possible previously. As we move ahead, we're excited about our opportunity, focused on our goals, and committed to enabling our customers' success. I look forward to updating you on our progress. With that, we will now open it up for questions.
Hey, thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone. We please ask that you limit yourself to one question, one follow-up. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. One moment for questions. Our first question comes from Dan Brennan from Cowen. Your line is now open.
Great. Thank you for taking the questions. I guess the first one would be, Omid, you talked about seeing significant interest from would-be customers or existing customers to explore a broad range of, I guess, trials or you know, different research. Can you just discuss some more color on the funnel, what it looks like and kind of, you know, what you've assumed within the full year guidance, particularly in light of the elongated close rates that you discussed?
Dan, thank you so much. We're seeing interest, you know, across really three different groups. Proteomics folks that are mass spec experts. Genomics folks that are really kind of new to proteomics and are interested in adding proteomics to their research. Genomic folks who are already generating proteomic data but are looking for alternatives to current offerings and looking to see more from their studies. Broadly speaking, that is the bucket of customers we're dealing with. That split is, from a pipeline perspective, about 50/50 between commercial industry customers and academic customers in both our lead and our pipeline.
I think as we're bringing customers from interest to a close. While the pipeline is about equally split between those two, we're seeing that the close rate for the commercial customer is higher. I think it's just a cycle of the funding dynamic differences between an academic researcher and a commercial researcher driving that more rapid sales cycle in the context of a commercial customer. Now that said, you know, given the broader macro picture, we are seeing that the purchasing decisions for potential customers, both in terms of academic and commercial customers, you know, getting elongated. You know, the breadth of the studies that folks are taking, it knows everything from basic research to translational work looking at cohort studies with diseases, neurodegenerative, aging, cancer.
Also, we're seeing studies now being done in the space of animal health. We actually just did a reasonable size service project focused on non-human sample type.
Okay.
Yeah, Dan.
Yeah, go ahead, Dave. Thank you.
Yeah, no, David, thanks for the question. Just in terms of the guidance, look, I think we're trying to, you know, factor that in, what we're seeing just from an interest level, and then just some of the macro headwinds. It, you know, it's trying to balance those two tailwinds and headwinds on some of these things.
Okay. Omid, you talked about having line of sight on a growing number of larger studies and also publications, which we agree, we've heard publications will certainly drive interest and maybe help the sales process, or certainly should. Anything notable we should be looking for in the next, you know, whether it be in year-end or in the first half of 2023 that could actually, you know, is there any one or two really large studies that could be notable selling points for you? Or just anything on that front that would give us a sense of what to watch for?
Sure, Dan. Look, just let me paint the picture, and then I'll kind of hone in with high resolution. Since we started, there's been 109 presentations at conferences. And of that 109, 19 of them were from customers, and this is going back to 2020. Of course, we just started in 2020, so that year had about five presentations from Seer and none from customers, so it really picked up in 2021. What's interesting is if you look at 2022 alone, 66 presentations from Seer and 12 from customers. This is at conferences. Importantly, we need to see peer-reviewed publications that Seer has been publishing. Our first one was in Nature Communications, then we did the PNAS paper, most recently the Advanced Materials paper.
If I look at third-party publications, there's visibility at least to a handful of manuscript from our customers that my expectations are gonna be submitted tail end of this year and then heading into next year. I think we should then begin to see these submissions come out in the form of publications probably the second half of 2023. The scope of them are varied. I mean, just yesterday, I was talking to a proteomic KOL who has an instrument in his lab. He was just giving me an update on a study that they had ran, where they were able to see upwards of 5,000 protein.
In his judgment, an unbiased proteomic with the ease of the workflow that Seer offers for a high degree of accuracy, reproducibility to give you 5,000 proteins is remarkable. That is the kind of thing that's gonna be getting published from an expert. In addition to that, biomarker papers, folks looking at different diseases, there's actually one KOL who also has used other platforms in the past, other proteomic platforms in the past. He is, if you would, an expert user of the various different proteomic technologies, and has also gotten access to the Seer technology. My expectation is, you know, that data set is gonna get published.
Anyway, I think what's coming then should be really validating of exceptional quality and high impact papers. Obviously, we've seen some of it, but these are really customer work, customer data, which they'll publish at their own pace.
Great. If I can just sneak one more in. Any guideposts as we're heading into the fourth quarter, how to think about next year? Obviously, you're not gonna guide here, but I know consensus says revenue's doubling, so I'm just wondering, given the comments on macro and elongated decisions, but at the same time, all the momentum from the customer channel, just wondering any early thoughts about how we should think about next year?
Yeah, Dan, thanks for the question. Look, as you know, we're not gonna give guidance until our fourth quarter call next year. Look, I think as we think about it, and, you know, again, some time will pass, but certainly, you know, the macro environment's not lost on us, both with inflation and raising interest rates, as well as, you know, some of the, you know, layoffs and things people are seeing across the sector. So we're just being mindful. You know, again, we always wanna be be thoughtful and conservative as we approach it.
Again, I think we're just gonna have to weigh everything, you know, again, as we've said, the positive tailwinds from the customers relative to just the macro constraints of budgets being tightened and CapEx, you know, decisions being elongated, you know, kind of how that all factors in. We'll update you in the first quarter, but that's generally what we're weighing as we look at it internally.
Okay. All right. Great, guys. Thank you.
Thanks, Dan.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Derik De Bruin from Bank of America. Your line is now open.
Hi, good afternoon. Dan just asked the question that was sort of the one I was getting from investors is just sort of the outlook for next year. Just explain that a bit. Can you talk a little bit about sort of your OpEx plans? I mean, you know, you have a ton of cash on the balance sheet, but just how should we think about your spending patterns for next year and hiring and such? Thanks.
Yeah, Derik, thanks for the question. Look, we are very prudent with our spend and our deployment of capital. I think you can expect us to continue to be so. We've, you know, also been real thoughtful about how we're gonna spend that capital. I don't think, you know, and the metric we tend to use is free cash flow and looking at, you know, our free cash flow burn. Look, we're gonna be very thoughtful about keeping that in check and not doing anything that's imprudent.
We certainly feel like we do have a huge asset in our cash, and we wanna preserve that and deploy that as appropriately as we can over the course of next year so that we're in good position to weather the storm however long it lasts and when it comes. Again, I think we're gonna be really mindful in terms of our spend.
I guess sort of asking prior question another way is, like, are there, you know, when you talk about major studies and things that are kicking off, you know, some of the larger scale genomic studies, I mean, are those likely to kick in in 2023, you know, to be sort of like more meaningful contributors?
Derik, the answer is, it depends on how you define large. Do I have visibility to a 50,000 sample study next year? I don't. Do I have visibility to multi-thousand sample study next year? I absolutely do. I think the key point to keep in mind is that the premise, the underlying foundational premise for starting this company is consistently proving to be exactly correct, which is the field is directionally moving toward deciphering the complexity of the protein at the protein variant and the proteoform level. We're beginning to see the scientific community talk about it in that way, and Seer uniquely offers that solution to them. We started off before Seer, we were the largest unbiased study in plasma doing deep proteomics with 48 samples.
Now we've got customers that are talking about doing multi-thousand sample studies, you know, shortly after launch. This is remarkable. By the way, I have every expectation, Derik, that we will absolutely see the multi-tens of thousands of sample studies also come. It's just not, at least today, I don't have visibility for that to be a 2023 event.
Great. Thanks.
Thanks, Derik.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Tejas Savant from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
Hi, this is Neil on for Tejas. Wanted to build off that question on the elongation to purchasing cycles. Are these trends divergent as far as the different geographies that you're targeting? What is your current handle on the risk of pushouts to these decisions that could swing placements between, say, year-end and early 2023?
Yeah. Thanks, Neil. Yeah, in terms of the purchasing decisions, you know, I think the question was really around geography and are we seeing it different in different places. Certainly, you know, China remains China in terms of, you know, the lockdowns and just lack of access to customers, you know, depending on how that's rolling through. That continues to be a factor, you know, just access, if you will. In terms of Europe, I think that's certainly something where, you know, certainly with the, you know, the inflation headwinds that they're seeing there, not to mention, you know, the FX risk.
I mean, obviously, you know, we sell in dollars and our products become more expensive as they look to convert that into euro. Again, you know, that just adds to the elongation of people thinking about it, constrained CapEx budgets and the like. In the U.S., again, I think as we've mentioned on previous calls, you know, again, it's really just the macro of not only inflation, but then capital budgets that people are looking at reassessing.
We've seen, you know, approval levels get kicked up a level for people so they, you know, need to go up a level to get approvals where they wouldn't have had to in the past. We've actually heard of a couple customers putting a freeze on all CapEx budget or CapEx spend for the rest of the year. You know, these anecdotes just kinda add up to people are just taking longer to think about things. I think it's globally, with, you know, various factors factoring in terms of the global picture in terms of headwinds.
Got it. On that second part, does the current guidance kinda contemplate that risk of any, you know, swings between quarter to quarter or?
Yeah, I mean, again, we're trying to, you know, we left the guidance at $14 million-$16 million, and as we said, we do expect it in the upper half of that range. As you know, I mean, look, given we're on a very small revenue base, you know, one or two deals can swing it either way. Again, we're just trying to be prudent. As we sit here today, we are trying to factor in those various factors in our remarks.
Appreciate the color. One more from me. As you progress towards those initial customer sample runs for the Proteogenomics Consortium by year-end, any high-level thoughts on, you know, how you see this partnership beginning to scale through 2023?
Yeah. I'm not gonna comment on 2023 yet with respect to the partnership. I will say, DLS and SCIEX have been fantastic partners. I think we all have the same goal to get it up and running and scaling as quickly as we can, and working closely with them. Again, we've got great interest. You know, in fact, we both had booths at ASHG, DLS and Seer. You know, the team was jointly talking to different people. You know, there were certain genomics customers who said, "You know, sounds great. Would love to just get access to data.
How can I do that quickly?" For those customers, it's probably not buying an instrument, but it's going through one of our COEs, including the Proteogenomics Consortium. You know, being able to kinda have them talk to DLS at the same time they're talking to us, I think was great and just kinda shows you the interest that people have in trying to access our data on a relatively quick basis. You know, we're really encouraged by that, and look forward to working closely with both DLS and SCIEX next year to ramping the consortium further.
That's great. Appreciate the time.
Thank you. One moment for our final question. Our final question comes from Julia Qin from JP Morgan. Your line is now open.
Hi, this is Amy on for Julia. Thank you for taking my question. My first question is about the gross margin. I know that this quarter you guys see a 5% increase in gross margin. Can you share a little bit about what are the contributors to the improvement in the gross? And also moving forward, right, what other incremental sources that you guys seeing that can help improve the gross margin to the long-term 70% goal, other than, you know, scale up in volume?
Got it. Thanks, Amy. Yeah, I mean, I think the big contributor this quarter was, we did see, you know, higher consumable sales, which was, you know, in our view, a positive, in terms of people are ordering kits and using the system. We feel like, you know, that is something that, you know, will continue to contribute. I will say, just as a, you know, a note of caution, you know, the mix is gonna change quarter to quarter, so we will continue to see fluctuations. Again, a relatively small revenue base, you know, will lead to some fluctuations.
In terms of the long-term gross margins, I think there's lots of areas we see to being able to drive that. The first is certainly improvement in the gross margins on our instrument. We feel like there are ways we can help improve that, and that will certainly be a contributor. We also see significant ways to improve our overall gross margins on our kits. Not only you know the kits consist of not only our nanoparticles, but all the reagents and enzymes and buffers you need to run the experiment, as well as plastics.
As we continue to optimize that, you know, I think over time, not only from an assay perspective, but also, you know, in the kit and how we source those products in the kit, will allow us to significantly improve the gross margins on the kits themselves. The combination of that, we feel. Then you add in volume, just the inherent benefits of increased volume that we'll be able to drive to those long-term gross margins. And again, don't forget, you know, we only broadly commercially launched at the beginning of this year, so we're still early on the journey here, in terms of that process improvement. We are working on it.
You know, over the course of the next couple of years, we'll continue to, you know, to see the gross margins trend upward.
Thank you. Yeah, that's very helpful. My second question is about the revenue from the research customers. I hope I remember correctly, you mentioned like starting Q4, as the grants are getting approved, that the revenue from research customers or academic customers is going to start coming in. I'm just curious, what's the scope of this part of revenue? Like, how much is going to be spent on instrument? How much is going to be on consumable? And what's the run rate of that part of business?
Yeah, let me clarify that a little bit, Amy. What we were talking about there is, you may recall, we've had a small business innovation research grant from the National Institutes of Health, and that was always characterized as grant revenue. What that is that's essentially grant revenue that allows us to conduct some research internally that then is reimbursed under this SBIR grant from the NIH. That grant actually expired at the end of May. We applied to renew that grant to get dollars that had expired. A lot of this was dragged out 'cause of COVID. We applied in the third quarter and got approved.
That grant revenue, in other words, revenue from getting reimbursed for our research under this grant will start to get reimbursed again in the fourth quarter. It's simply a grant revenue process that now is gonna start again. As you can see, historically, you know, again that was in anywhere from, you know, tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of types of revenue in any given quarter. That's simply just a pass-through reimbursement for research that we're doing under that grant.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. Thank you for the clarification. My last question is about the clinical markets. Just curious about like, are you guys, you know, talking or have plans to work with liquid biopsy companies to, you know, integrate the proteomics into the genomic analysis for the clinical settings? Just curious.
Yeah. Of course, the answer to that question is yes to all of it. Number one, we spun off a company out of Seer, Prognomiq that is squarely focused on multi-omic tests, core to which is deep unbiased proteomics. In addition, looking at other omics as well, transcriptomics, metabolomics, lipidomics. In addition to Prognomiq, we've had a number of dialogue with just about anyone that you can imagine in terms of the possibility of integrating the Seer Proteograph into their workflow. Of course, we're not disclosing the number of existing or the name of the existing customers in that liquid biopsy space that have adopted the platform or are considering it. In general, we've said that we will not disclose the name of our existing customers.
A certain set of customers who themselves have publicly announced are using the Proteograph. Those customers we discuss, but otherwise we don't. To answer your question, very unequivocally, the answer is yes.
Okay, that's very helpful. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.