Quanterix Corporation (QTRX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Sorry, some mute problems there. I am Matt Sykes, the life sciences tools and diagnostics analyst at Goldman Sachs. I have the pleasure of welcoming Quanterix to our conference this afternoon. We have Kevin Hrusovsky, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Quanterix. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us.

Our pleasure, Matt. Thank you.

Great. And I thought maybe I'd just turn it over to you to just briefly. Just maybe talk about -- set the stage and maybe talk a little bit about Quanterix, the platform, and where you see the company sort of in the near and long term?

Absolutely. Thanks, Matt. Yes, we're a disruptive technology company that is focused on proteins, and we're using the ability to characterize with exquisite levels of sensitivity in an automated way with very good cost economics. We digitized the ELISA, and we've -- applying that to protein capability, that detection and that quantitation capability, initially, in research where there's no regulatory reimbursement risk, trying to help drug companies get drugs approved. And we went public about 3.5 years ago, and many of our investors we've known for many years actually own positions in drug companies, and they've been the #1 sales force for us, along obviously, with our great sales teams, but -- and helping move our technologies into those drug companies to help get drugs approved with higher levels of probability, as much as 300% improvement if a Phase I is approved for Phase IV. But we also are having the ambitions to move into the diagnostic side, which the TAMs are significantly larger on the diagnostics side. So we're building this bridge going from research and getting drugs approved, cross the bridge into diagnostics. And recently, with COVID, we pivoted, and we got a couple of EUAs. And the NIH actually gave us $20 million to build that bridge for the first time going from research over into diagnostics. And so we got a couple EUAs that are being utilized now for COVID research on long-haulers and trying to find drugs that can fix a lot of long-hauler issues. But that gives a good characterization that we're both a research company primarily today, with ambitions to go across and to bring the most clinically relevant biomarkers and proteins into the diagnostic regime with less invasive testing, and seeing the disease before symptoms is the key to the sensitivity.

Got it. That's a really helpful overview, Kevin. And maybe we'll start with the news of the week, with the approval on Monday of aducanumab. Obviously, a very positive catalyst for you. Can you just talk about how this could accelerate your role in Alzheimer's, and what this means for Quanterix more broadly?

Yes. I think that something happened this week that we'll all remember for quite some time. I looked at a couple of different parallels. First, I look at cholesterol and the statins. I watched the way that -- to this day, there's still a lot of debate on just how good cholesterol is as a biomarker for heart health, but yet, statins bring down cholesterol. And there's just a lot of excitement around the role statins have played over the last 15 years. And it's a very big drug class. I also look at drugs like from Amgen that were recently approved that shrink tumor size. But yet, you don't know if shrinking the tumor size is going to lead to longer survival rates. So what you saw happen in the field of Alzheimer's this past week is similar to those 2 examples. You found an opportunity where they said we think that amyloid plaque is playing a role in causing Alzheimer's. We don't know if it's going to create the right clinical outcome. But we're going to approve a drug class for the first time to reduce amyloid beta plaque. So that's kind of like the cholesterol of the brain. And so I think it's a really interesting move. And I do also feel like there's been a lot of challenge coming from COVID in the neuro area in CNS. Those that lost taste and smell, our own Nf-L has shown increased elevation of neuronal death, and there's a real question and a real concern of maybe triggering, through long-haulers, early Alzheimer's. And so I think it isn't a surprise to me that the FDA is so concerned about Alzheimer's at this moment with the possible linkages, even to CNS investigations in the long-hauler of COVID. So I think that they felt it was important to get a drug class approved. But now, when you look at this drug and the pricing that's come out, I think everyone thought it would be a reduced market, and they gave it a broad-based label. But with that price point, that broad-based label looks like a very high price. And many are questioning, will the payors and the providers, will they reimburse it? Will they support it? And so I think that, for us, we find this to be a really interesting moment because, certainly, we're going to have the halo effect with many other drug companies we're working with, trying to get Alzheimer drugs approved across the goal line using our biomarkers that can allow you to recruit patients early before cognitive impairment or at least mild cognitive impairment, and also to stratify out Lewy body dementia and frontotemporal dementia. We are enhancing those cohorts for those drug companies through recruitment and even starting to see interest in them as endpoints for the actual drug trials. And so once those drugs do get approved, we think, it becomes an exciting opportunity that, now, that you're going to want to debottleneck getting the drug into patients that deserve to use the drug, which means you've got to have a cholesterol test or an amyloid beta test in blood. And we've got a lot of examples in third-party peer-review publications where we can bring very good evidence and correlations of amyloid pathology through not only our amyloid beta test, but also phosphorylated tau 181 and even Nf-L, neurofilament, which is another measure of neuronal death. So I think we got 3 markers now that could play a role downstream in helping us sort out this large drug trial in the way that's been created. You want to be able to recruit patients in effectively, and then you want to be able to measure whether that drug has got efficacy. And the payors, in our mind, the whole concept of coverage with evidence is going to really start to evolve now. Because I think the payor groups are probably going to have more influence on the size of this market and the pace of it than many of the other drugs that have been approved historically. So having a diagnostic that's a low-cost, high throughput, easy to deploy, scalable, that allows you to see this Alzheimer's cascade early and with good specificity could be game-changing for, I think, the size of this market through either payor influence or even the pharma themselves. And luckily, we've got great relationships with both Biogen and Lilly and many of the other drug companies that are now trying to evolve into the same category.

Great. That's super helpful. And maybe we could talk about the other news on June 17 (sic) [ June 7 ] that you released on the recent Nf-L study, the Simoa that was published in Nature. How significant is this for you? And can you talk a little bit about that study?

Yes. What's interesting is that for 20 years now, we've had this independent foundation called Powering Precision Health. It's a nonprofit that's not part of Quanterix. Quanterix is a major sponsor. I got to be involved in its original finding, and it's a lot of the thought leaders in all of these different disease categories that combine and collaborate to try to accelerate the pace of getting answers to patients. And in the area of neurodegeneration, Henrik Zetterberg and [ Kai ] and the team over in Sweden, and now they have a U.K. lab, they've been some of the leaders. Jens Kuhle, others, they've been using Nf-L now for MS and multiple sclerosis as well as concussions. And it's been evolving very rapidly as a broad-based marker that just shows you brain health and neuronal health. And so I look at it like an engine light that if your Nf-L levels are elevated beyond what age should do to your Nf-L levels, it says that you've got some level of neurodegeneration occurring. And that's what this study did. It looked at all neurodegeneration and found out that Nf-L correlated with the progression of those diseases across all of them. So it's kind of like an engine light went off saying you got a problem with your engine. Now what is the problem? You got to open up the hood and figure it out. Other biomarkers that we have will allow the specificity of what the problem is, but knowing that the Nf-L level is high, tells you you've got a problem. So if you take a drug and that Nf-L level comes down, you know you're on the right drug. But if you take a drug for that neurodegeneration, and Nf-L levels keep going up, that's a problem. And so in the area of MS, it's been said by many of the neurologists that if you are on the right drug, you will die from MS standing up. But if you're on the wrong drug, and it takes a long time to figure that out, you'll probably die in a wheelchair. So the key here is getting very quick evolution of getting on the right drug, and Nf-L is a great, fast, prospective way to kind of monitor and make sure the drugs are working. And they even correlate it with depression in this study. So the higher the level of depression, the higher the Nf-L level. So these are objective markers for the first time that is being measured in noninvasive blood. So this is -- these are breakthrough publications that, I think, will transform the whole area of mental health, allowing psychiatrists and psychologists and neurologists to actually have a little bit more objective insights when they're doing their diagnostics and to watch patient care as they administer whatever therapy they think is best for that patient.

Got it. Got it. Really helpful. And maybe we can talk about -- step back for a second. I've talked to a lot of life science tools companies this week. And you see the usual progression of academic, biopharma, diagnostics, kind of moving along that progression. Whereas you guys have not necessarily started, but you've kind of moved into diagnostics very quickly and kind of been able to attach yourselves to that market with the tools that you provide. Can you talk about the thought process that you had when you were thinking about these different end markets, and who could potentially use the instruments in wide diagnostics?

Yes. So if you go back to the lenses that we were able to create empowering Precision Health Foundation Summits around the world over the last 5 to 7 years in the area of neurology, it kept teaching us that we have this scenario evolving that there's incredible diagnostic opportunity by seeing, with great sensitivity, proteins because it allows you to see disease before symptoms, and it also allows you to see them less invasively, maybe even in saliva if you have enough sensitivity. So that broad category of noninvasive protein detection and protein quantitation allows the presymptomatic determination, we thought, could revolutionize the entire industry. So Quanterix was one of the companies that we thought if we went into it and commercialized towards those killer apps, it really had the potential to achieve that. 908 Devices would be another company that I'm also involved with and feel very good about that opportunity. Now with that said, we originally, when I joined, had a deal with -- I'm sorry, with bioMérieux. bioMérieux was our diagnostic arm, and we had an exclusive deal where all of the diagnostic value would go to basically their build out, and we were really just a supplier in developing that. We got out of that contract about 2 or 3 years ago because it was very constraining, and we were focused on really oncology at the time and neurology where bioMérieux wasn't. So by getting out of that contract, it allowed us to then really start persevering research where we wanted to get the third-party peer-reviewed validation. All of this was going on back at a time when Theranos was still kind of evolving, and they were trying to show the world that they could see disease in a finger prick, but they didn't have any validation. So we used PPH to create, I think, over 1,300 third-party peer-reviewed validated studies now that can show this bridge going from research to diagnostics. And now we had the versatility to go in the research without this agreement. So we went into research, started working with the drugmakers, helping them get drugs approved. Many of the investors helped us get established. Our growth doubled after we went public 3.5 years ago because the investors helped that linkage. And I think that now that we've got all that validation, we're starting to see the validity clinically of some of these key biomarkers. And there's not that many that can create a lot of value. I think, today, if you look at Abbott, Roche and Siemens alone, those 3 companies have about $25 billion of revenue coming from 220 proteins that mostly are being measured after symptoms present and they're 100%, almost 100% single-plex. So you have all that revenue sitting there in those 3 companies. And also LabCorp and Quest have a really big franchise in the LDT part of the diagnostics, probably another $5 billion of protein revenue. So we look at that as being a big area of opportunity to bring greatness to patients if we can move it to asymptomatic or presymptomatic and do it less invasively. So that's been why we decided to land Quanterix from the pharmas, have them help us in neuro, where we think that the pharmas really have a win-win relationship with us. They've actually shared data with us. They're really supportive. Try to, again, get some of these biomarkers clinically validated and over onto the diagnostic side. And so we think the most of the TAM in this landscape, $100 billion of it, lands in where we are at the end of this pipeline. There's a lot of great companies, we would call them a little bit upstream of us that are using multiplex to kind of really further interrogate which proteins have good correlative interest in the pathology of different diseases. And some of them are even trying to get into diagnostics with their algorithms. We actually think that, that's a very complementary opportunity. We'd like to hone in where we think we've got good clinical validity and bring that sensitivity and allow us then to make the sampling much less invasive and to see the disease earlier with already proven validated biomarkers.

I think it's a great segue because 1 thing I want to talk to you about was plex. You have unbiased high plex. You have targeted low plex. You're in the targeted space. And depending on who you talk to, there's advantages and disadvantages, or maybe not, of being in that -- in either area. But 1 thing I wanted to talk to you about is in terms of positioning your company, in terms of thinking about the future, do you have to be low to high? Do you have to cover the whole spectrum? Can you focus on one area? And if you are focusing on one area, then does it become, say, sensitivity is a competitive advantage if you're going to be in low plex? Just help me think about sort of the high to low plex. And you mentioned the complementary aspects of some companies. I mean, maybe they're finding proteins and then people go to you to take a look at -- a closer look at those proteins. Just tell me about how you think about plex?

Yes. First of all, I think there's a slide that I've used in a lot of my presentations that shows the pipeline. And I kind of created a parallel with Illumina in the genomics landscape and how that unfolded. We have the same founder, David Walt, of Illumina and Quanterix. A phenomenal researcher that has -- he's on my Board as well. He've been very instrumental in a lot of the evolution of our companies. But the first thing I would say is that this whole protein landscape, we looked at it from the eyes of the precision health to see what application areas could truly move the needle on these most lethal diseases, the diseases that weren't getting detected until late stage. And that's neurology and oncology. So we decided that, that was key first. And then we decided that going after drug discovery was important because nobody wants to know they have Alzheimer's 15 years before dementia if there's nothing they can do about it. And we actually already have gotten numerous neurologists that have showcased our biomarkers being elevated as early as 15 years before dementia, but we needed to apply that to drugmakers first to get those therapies. And so we started down the path of seeing which biomarkers have the most relevance for drugs. And in the area of neurology, there's about 15 to 17 biomarkers that already have a lot of clinical validity and understanding from the cerebral spinal fluid, which requires a spinal tap or an image, which is either MRI or PET scans. These are $5,000 to $10,000 per sample, and it can be very invasive, very painful, particularly the spinal tap. And so our view was we could just remove the invasiveness and go to blood and maybe saliva for those areas where we already have known proteins. And so plex wasn't as important. And you look again at those 5 companies downstream of us that have almost 100% single-plex, they've showcased just how much revenue can be created from a single-protein and a single-plex. So our view was we wanted to get a lot of value per protein and create a lot of the TAM coverage where we felt the TAM was greatest, and that's where the utility, where we sit, has got most of that TAM, 90%. Upstream, though, where you talk about unbiased, first of all, I would say that there's -- it's hard to use the term unbiased because, first of all, sensitivity. If your technology isn't measuring the single femtogram per ml, well you're unbiased is really biased because you're not seeing anything that's got that really low concentration. So you're biased against proteins that have really low concentration. And if you really want to find them in low invasive samples, that's where those concentrations come way down in saliva, particularly. You start to have a lot of bias if you use those technologies on less invasive samples. And so the term bias, I have a little bit of a challenge with because I think every technology has some level of bias. But I do think that the proteome, in general, is probably only 5% discovered. So it is a frontier that's got a lot of opportunity, but the utility is about the dynamic of the actual disease cascade has triggered when that protein elevates. Unlike DNA and RNA, which are more predispositional, telling you more about the probability that you might get something as opposed to that it's actually happened. So our view was if we can get to the protein, a small number that have a lot of the clinical validity, and be able to measure baselines when you're healthy, any movement from that baseline starts to indicate the beginnings of a disease cascade. And we think that algorithms around the small plex and understanding how they interrelate is going to have a lot of value, and we want to stay concentrated on that. So building out that ecosystem is not easy. As you know, we just brought in Will Geist to run and scale the company from thermo to really build this out because we've got so much growth right now occurring, we want to be able to capture that growth with all of our supply. And we just brought in, this week, in fact, Masoud Toloue from PerkinElmer. He actually ran the PerkinElmer clinical diagnostics business, grew it from $1 billion to $3 billion, and did this in 4.5 years, both organically and inorganically. He is probably one of the highest sought-after executives in our landscape, and he and I had a very similar track record of going through PerkinElmer. And so we've had a good strong relationship. We're very excited. And PerkinElmer is one of the great companies that we really do believe in. So we're really happy that Masoud has joined in our diagnostics capacity, really helping us think through how we can cross this bridge with these very valuable, what we think, very high TAMs, with real good utility of less invasive samples and also earlier disease detection with this sensitivity and even multiplexing up to maybe 10 plex. There's probably going to be enough, we think, to capture the specificity of the disease as well as the progression of the disease.

Great. And maybe we could talk a little bit about sensitivity in this small platform. And you already have a very high degree of sensitivity. You want -- you have a goal of taking that up another 100-fold. Maybe talk about the current platform. And then what would that increase in sensitivity, what would the role be? Where would that take you?

Yes. So it's a very intriguing prospect because when we first were talking about sensitivity, many of the people in the industry says, "Yes, we agree, Quanterix can measure single femtogram per ml. They're the most sensitive by far. But there's really no need for it." And so a lot of what our quest has been with PPH is teaching the world that sensitivity can allow you to see these proteins at baseline levels. You can see disease earlier and then less invasively. As you get into less invasive samples, the concentration comes down. And then as you multiplex, you take away some sensitivity. So we want to have headroom on our sensitivity. We know we have a major opportunity with 1000x improvement that our technology has been able to create. Going another 100x is really important to us because there's a lot of discovery going on in the cerebrospinal fluid, where they might find a protein that's interesting like tau. And then they say, "Well, geez, there's these host modification proteins that have a much lower concentration that we would also like to read, like phosphorylated tau 181 or 217 or 231 or 235." These are subsets of the tau, but they're actually 1:100 -- they're probably 1% of concentration. So if they can see with our exquisite sensitivity those proteins in the cerebral spinal fluid and create correlative understanding about what they mean to the disease cascade, they're now going to want to see those in blood. And if they see them in blood, we need another 100x because in typical, it's 50x to 100x. You've got 3 pints of cerebral spinal fluid and you got 6 quarts of blood. And when you go across that blood-brain barrier, it gets diluted. So we know that, that extra 100x is going to be vitally important for precognitive discrimination for these Alzheimer patients. The more of that 100x technology is the next-generation that can be applied to these different biomarkers and phosphorylated tau, Nf-L as well as the amyloids and even some of the synapsis, we actually think that these higher levels of sensitivity are going to be imperative to being able to discriminate when these drugs have a better chance of stopping the disease cascade earlier. So we actually think that we're almost like a drug company in the value creation of what we're doing here because you're enabling the ability to apply drugs into a cascade of pathology that you could never have gotten to before. So we think that the diagnostic industry could create a lot of value with this ability to be able to find these windows of pathology that, before this, you never could get to. So teaming up with the folks that make those agents and then teaming up with the payors that are going to have to reimburse it, to give them good reasons to kind of make the investments for their members and then to track their members to ensure that their members are getting benefit from the drugs, we think that this coverage for evidence is really going to evolve with biomarkers by having the ability to see these windows. And that 100x is the next key to unraveling that value creation.

Got it. That's super helpful. You talked about COVID and how it's impacted your business. And you also talked a little bit about the relationship with the NIH. But I just wanted to hear a little bit more about that, and how you're helping with the COVID long-haulers? And how has that helped advance your initiatives in neurology?

Yes. First, I would -- I want to shout out to the employees of Quanterix and to all of our collaborators in this PPH ecosystem because they all rallied over the last year, 1.5 years with us. We wanted to just ensure the safety of all of our employees initially, and we have this accelerator lab, where we actually run trials for customers. That actually doubled in 2020 because many other of our customer labs shut down, and our labs were able to run a lot of those trials for our customers. And so that really further evidenced for a lot of our customers just how good our technologies were. And while we were trying to keep our employees safe, we decided that, "Geez, the ability to see COVID pre-symptomatically is key because the virus, unlike any others, was most contagious the 24 hours before symptoms started." And when the NIH knew this that we had this ability with our sensitivity to see very early in the cascade with a much bigger window, the virus, with a lot of sensitivity and specificity, they said, "Become a diagnostics company. Get an EUA and help us." So we pivoted, and the NIH granted us under the RADx program. Bruce Tromberg, one of the greatest leaders, and Jon McGrath and [ Carl Parks ] worked with us at RADx. They gave us $20 million. And we've removed that $20 million from our revenues in our non-GAAP, so we don't create any kind of a onetime effect. But they basically built the bridge and helped us get these EUAs, and cannot thank them enough for all the work that they've -- and time that they've given to us. Now Cliff Lane, who works for Tony Fauci, is down in Bethesda, Maryland, and bought the -- they heard about the technology and how we can measure it in blood like no one else. Everyone was measuring it through nasopharyngeal and nasal swabs and maybe saliva, but we could see it in blood. And we could actually see different levels depending on the severity. We were able to stratify how severe a patient was by the level of virus that they had, plus we could measure all the cytokines, which was the immune system fighting the -- native immune system fighting the COVID. We can measure all of those markers as well as Nf-L, which when they lost taste and smell, the neuronal. So all of those markers created an understanding by our PPH ecosystem to the NIH and to these other agencies what our technology could do, and it allowed our FDA relationship to significantly catapult. We didn't really even know the FDA, and Tim Stenzel at one point on the -- actual director, he was allowing us weekly meetings with him to further understand and learn how our technology could almost become a gold standard versus where they were seeing a lot of false positives and negatives with the PCR at times. And so how could the antigen actually have this level of sensitivity and specificity. And that FDA, they were -- they rallied, the FDA did around-the-clock working with many of the companies in our landscape. And that led us to now having a discussion that goes beyond just COVID because they're using it now to test remdesivir and remdesivir analogs as well as the antibodies from Lilly and Glaxo. There's all kind of opportunities to see how to deploy these in the long-hauler issues that we know exist today. A lot of people haven't been able to get over the symptoms. And so having the ability to use these drugs and test the virus that you can see in blood is giving them objective markers and opportunities for new drugs for COVID to be deployed and even to look at ways to boost the immune system or to down-regulate the immune system in some cases. And now the vaccines have -- are starting to show a lot of challenges. Even the inflammation report that came out today from the CDC, a lot of young males are having inflammation of the heart. I think there's probably a lot of bypass surgeries starting to occur that may not even would have occurred if it weren't for the inflammation of the heart. So I think that there's a lot of new learning that's going on in COVID that links into many of these other categories of disease, whether it be cardiac, respiratory or even CNS. And I like to say, if you look down at Earth from the outer space, you would see islands. If you could drain the water you would see that all those islands are connected. And so I think our biomarkers had the ability to connect from CNS and from infectious disease, many of these connection points that I think are going to be the secrets to the future of medicine. And even the auto -- the microbiome may be having some involvement with Alzheimer's and that cascade. I think we're really starting to feel great about how the NIH has adopted our technologies. And we had a woman, Dawn Mattoon that kind of ran through all that for us and built a lot of this infrastructure. She's now running diagnostics with Masoud. So we now have this new relationships that we're going to try to deploy to help us with Alzheimer's as we lead the COVID landscape and continue to work with drugs for COVID, but leave -- the diagnostic landscape is starting to lessen, we believe.

Got it. And maybe we talk a lot about neurology, but you're also doing some in oncology. You're working with a couple of companies, Freenome and Volition. And how are you thinking about this market? And where does it sit in terms of priorities for Quanterix?

Yes. We all have a deep-rooted, mission-based interest in oncology in our company and in the PPH ecosystem. But what I would say is that we think oncology is a very challenging area. Many of these drug companies today have drugs that have been approved that may only work 10% of the time. And so it's hard, many of the drug companies aren't as focused on all of the companion diagnostics. It's not needed to get approval so much. It's more needed to try to understand response levels. And because it's complicated, and we have such an opportunity with very, very black and white clarity in neurology and with COVID, we're trying to take that one further across the bridge from research over into diagnostics with direct participation. We'll also have partnerships. As you know, we've got the Abbott and Siemens relationships, but we also think there's some direct presence there that will be important because in some ways, we're disrupting what has been done there. And if we don't proactively get in there and do it ourselves, we might get blocked. So we want to have some location that we are actually showcasing what is capable here and create our own entry. In oncology, we'd rather partner. We've seen great progress in, obviously, Exact Sciences and Guardian and Natera and Foundation Medicine. You've got a lot of companies that have advanced the field of oncology. We would like to partner with them, be more like the Intel Inside. We want to provide our technology. We think we can significantly enrich many of their algorithms with protein sensitivity that they can't get today without using our technology. And if by doing so, we think we can increase their sensitivity and specificity, so we're basically using conferences like this to explain what we have, and that allows us for them to hear and learn and to create opportunities for those relationships. We don't have a lot of resources deployed to build those relationships today because we're so focused on these other 2 areas that I mentioned. We don't want to get too diluted. But we do believe we've got those 2 that you mentioned are continuing to evolve and that we think it can be really productive for the world.

Got it. Maybe talk a little bit about the Accelerator lab. You're working with over 400 academic and pharma customers. Maybe help us understand a little bit how that expands and enhances just the overall offering from Quanterix. And what are your long-term expectations for this segment?

Yes, it's interesting with Masoud coming in, he and I got a chance to meet with all the Accelerator personnel. And some of those folks have been in this lab for over 10 years, and they're just the most committed. Some PhDs, smart, energetic, and they know that there's a lot of learning that goes on in these relationships where it's iterative. And this iterative relationship sometimes is more custom. And so you want to have this capability to take a biomarker and build an assay for a customer to help them advance the field very quickly. And then once it gets proven, they run a trial, they pay for that trial in our Accelerator. They then want to buy instrumentation. And so we have found that over the years, a third of those that run trials with us are actually buying instruments post. So it's almost like a promotional opportunity for our base research business. But more importantly now, as we evolve into this bridge of crossing over into diagnostics, we see our CLIA lab capability and the Accelerator being one of the pathways of LDT regional and then maybe LDT single site with the FDA oversight, and then maybe, ultimately, IVD distributed. So we don't want to limit the possibilities of how we cross this bridge, and that Accelerator lab has given us, right now, the opportunity over the next year, 1.5 years to start our own LDT practice while we work with other laboratory-developed tests and evolve these tests that, we think, can start bringing value to drug companies, to patients, to physicians around the world right now, certainly in neurology, but also in infectious disease with what's going on in COVID.

I can see 1 thing about the Accelerator lab, you probably get a lot of intelligence from it. In terms of looking at your own technology, looking at your own process and working on projects for customers. Can you talk about the sort of the synergies that the Accelerator lab creates just for your own intelligence and your own strategy for Quanterix?

Yes, Matt, you're on a really great series of questions here. We don't get a lot of questions typically about our Accelerator. And early on, when I first joined, it was -- there was no -- there was no revenue really in the Accelerator. It was more of a promotional to sell our equipment. Give us your samples, and then -- but what's happened is, is that even companies now that own 4, 5 HD-Xs, they're some of our largest customers in the Accelerator because they're trying to use it for intel gathering to kind of get at that next biomarker and see that disease, precognitive impairment as an example. So we see, like on many CRO there, that is an intelligence source. So we get a lot of our learning that teaches us which biomarker comes next and is important. We also have a homebrew strategy where we allow customers to customize their own assays. We have an open system. They can use their own antibody pairs, going after their own protein and what we call homebrew. Some of our biggest selling products today like Nf-L started and like the Henrik Zetterberg lab over in Sweden started as a homebrew. So either homebrew through our collaborator labs, or our own Accelerator lab, creates the possibility of the next-generation of medicine. And some of our best people in the company and in the whole ecosystem sit in the Accelerator, many of our customers that want to join us. And any customer who wants to join us, let us know because we think that, that's always a really great thing. They typically start in the Accelerator because of those relationships with pharma and with other, I'll call them, drugmakers and academics that support drugmakers. The Accelerator is a great place to play that out. And it's one of our best secret sauces and jewels in our company.

Great. And maybe just a final question. Just talk briefly on capital allocation, how you're thinking about it, organic versus inorganic investments, and things that you feel could be quite additive to Quanterix at this stage? A lot of what you've done has been organic, but just maybe talk about how you're thinking about capital allocation?

Yes. First of all, we did do a couple of raises, and they were always way oversubscribed, and they were always done very efficiently. And we think the banking relationships that we've had with so many of our bankers. Obviously, Goldman's played a pretty important role as has JPMorgan and Cowen and Leerink and Canaccord. And so there's a lot of relationships that the bankers have had, but we've had a lot of investors that have allowed our balance sheet to get evolved all up grounds very productively. And we now got $450 million on the balance sheet, a lot more than we needed to ever crossover, but we wanted to make sure we had strategic optionality on that balance sheet for moments like now when we are seeing these opportunities that are significant. And I would say we also have one of the best boards I've ever been associated with at Quanterix. It's an incredible group of individuals. We just added Laurie Olson, who was basically #2 at Pfizer for many years, just a delight. And as you know, we have Marijn Dekkers and Keith Crandell and Martin Madaus. So we got some really important players, Paul Meister. So we basically are continuing to evolve our thinking around how can we accelerate our strategy by using inorganic investments. So we aren't really in an M&A for M&A reasons. We're only in M&A if it can accelerate our adoption of the Simoa technology and this franchise of crossing the bridge. And laboratories are key for us, as we mentioned, the Accelerator, that's an area that we'll be keeping an eye on. All these antibodies are also very important. We're always wanting to make sure we've got the best. We acquired Uman a few years ago. Typically, we don't need to buy the antibody companies because the proteins themselves aren't under patent protection as the Simoa and the way it gets deployed in digitizing that really creates a lot of this value. So for us, we'll be looking at that whole area of pipeline of next-generation menu as well as laboratories for LDT as well as just general accelerator services as being key areas where we can maybe accelerate our penetration of this awesome opportunity that we have. So I think our balance sheet is in very good position, and we are very careful to not use it inappropriately.

Got it. Well, Kevin, we are out of time. It was great speaking with you, and thank you very much for sharing the story, and we appreciate your time today.

Absolutely, Matt. And we thank you for all of your participation and studying of our company, and look forward to the future.

Thank you.