Akoya Biosciences, Inc. (AKYA) Q4 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Akoya Biosciences, Inc. (AKYA 0.26%)
Q4 2021 Earnings Call
Mar 14, 2022, 5:00 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Akoya Biosciences fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. [Operator instructions] Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. Operator instructions]  I would now like to hand the call over to Priyam Shah, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Priyam Shah -- Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, operator, and thank you to everyone who is joining us today on this call. I'm Priyam Shah, head of investor relations at Akoya Biosciences. On the call today, we have: Brian McKelligon, chief executive officer, and Joe Driscoll, chief financial officer. Earlier today, Akoya released financial results for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2021.

A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results or performance are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors.

For a list and description of the risks and uncertainties associated with Akoya's business, please refer to the risk factors section of our Form S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 15, 2021. We urge you to consider these factors and you should be aware that these statements should be considered estimates only and are not a guarantee of future performance. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, March 14, 2022. Akoya disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events or otherwise.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Brian.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Priyam, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Akoya had an incredibly strong and eventful fourth quarter of 2021 as we announced, powerful new spatial biology solutions, reached key clinical milestones, established groundbreaking partnerships and appointed additional industry leaders to our management team. Our continued solid execution is reflected in our strong financial results for Q4 and the full year 2021, generating record revenue of $16.2 million for the fourth quarter and $54.9 million for the full year, representing a 30% top line annual growth. In Q4, we saw almost 70% annual growth in reagent revenue, which is fundamental to our business strategy of driving expansion of system utilizations and recurring consumable revenue.

We finished the year with $113 million in cash, providing us with a strong balance sheet with ample runway and flexibility to continue to invest in the business. And as a company 100% dedicated to spatial biology, we at Akoya believe that spatial phenotyping will inevitably become the standard for analyzing any tissue sample. Our platforms are complete end-to-end solutions, providing instruments, reagents, software, and services to address the spatial biology needs of our customers from discovery to translational research, and ultimately, for clinical use. We now have nearly 700 instruments installed worldwide and approximately 500 mark and leading high-impact publications using our instruments.

Our year-over-year growth in publications went from 109 in 2020 to nearly 280 in 2021 and represents one of the key leading indicators of the growing adoption of our platforms. This adoption and demand are driven out of the simple principle that the spatial data we provide is paramount to understanding the fundamentals of biology and the complexities of disease. Spatial analysis is one of the fastest-growing segments in discovery and translational research with applications in areas such as oncology, inflammatory disease, neurology, transplant medicine and more. Following our IPO, we immediately expanded our research and development efforts to accelerate the launch of new best-in-class spatial platforms, and in parallel, scaled our commercial team to drive adoption and utilization of our existing and new offerings.

At our spatial day in December and at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in January, we discussed our new product offerings, outlined our strategic priorities for 2022 and beyond. And those priorities in our key areas of focus are as follows: First, we will deliver new robust spatial biology solutions to the market to have the speed and the flexibility and the multiplexing capacity that our customers now demand. Next, with this increased robustness, we will provide ongoing expansion of our ready-made content, including multi-omic capabilities with a range of solutions for RNA and spatial transcriptomics. Finally, we will continue to partner with leading industry and academic medical centers to expand on our successes in the translational and clinical trial market, advancing our goal to establish Akoya's platform as a robust clinical solution.

Now, one brief reminder to better align our product naming conventions with these priorities, we recently completed some product rebranding. The CODEX platform has been renamed the PhenoCycler, and aptly so because the platform provides unbiased high-parameter capabilities as an NC2 reagent delivery device. It's cycling reagent on and off of the tissue, and it does so by physically integrating and pairing with our customers' existing microscopes to create one integrated solution. The Polaris platform has been rebranded as the PhenoImager HT as it provides robust high-throughput imaging with the best optical technology in the market, and it was really purpose-built to serve the translational clinical markets.

Historically, even though the PhenoCycler, formally the CODEX, was designed to integrate with our customers' existing microscopes, the majority of customers were nonetheless buying a new third-party microscope to ensure that they had a dedicated system to run the CODEX assay. And beginning in January with the launch of the Fusion system, customers will now preferentially choose our Fusion over a conventional third-party microscope. Capturing the microscope residue with the PhenoCycler is an obvious and core driver for Akoya for this year. The Fusion contains the same leading optical capabilities as the HT, formerly Polaris, but with a smaller footprint and was explicitly designed to integrate with the PhenoCycler.

Because of the powerful optics, a key benefit of the PhenoCycler-Fusion combination is that our customers can now run high plex CODEX experiments nearly an order of magnitude faster, enabling larger, more meaningful studies and a contracted time to result. This speed improvement accelerates time results, drives expanding pull-through revenue per instrument. There is an equally powerful secondary benefit to coupling the Fusion with the PhenoCycler. Our customers can use the PhenoCycler with the Fusion for high plex interrogation of tissues and then use the Fusion as a stand-alone to run high throughput validation studies at lower plex with a throughput of 100 samples per week.

This modular design and tunable workflow enables the flexibility of our customers to do biomarker discovery and biomarker validation on the same platform. It's effectively two solutions in one. We had limited shipments in Q4 and the full commercial launch of the PhenoCycler-Fusion System commenced on January 14 of this year. We're encouraged with the initial customer interest and immediate commercial success and look forward to providing updates on our successes throughout the course of the year.

Now, with this increase in speed and throughput that the PhenoCycler-Fusion provides, we're also expanding both our content menu and our multiplexing scale. Throughout 2022 and going forward, you will see us launch expanded antibody content for fresh frozen, for FFPE human mouse in areas such as cancer and inflammatory disease in neurobiology. Now, with faster speed and more content, we're also expanding the multiplexing of the CODEX assay from 50 markers to over 100. We'll share more details on this higher multiplexing level at the upcoming AACR conference in April.

Now, our commitment to speed and throughput capacity improvements is ongoing. We will release additional workflow and hardware improvements that continue to accelerate our PhenoCycler-Fusion workflow, driving the throughput from 10 samples to 30 samples per week. We will also be introducing new assay methods to further accelerate biomarker discovery and validation. The centerpiece is the launching of our new Universal Chemistry at the end of the year.

This new assay is a best-of-breed between our current high-plex CODEX assay and our high-throughput Opal assay. This universal chemistry will not only simplify the workflow but will also importantly enable cohesion and consistency of antibodies and assay methodologies from high-plex biomarker discovery studies to then more focused high-throughput translation on clinical research programs. So biomarkers discovered on the PhenoCycler-Fusion can then be validated on the Fusion alone and then advance clinically to the HT or Polaris with the benefit of one consistent workflow and solution suite from Akoya. This platform uniformity, enabling both high-plex discovery and high-throughput validation on a consistent and cohesive platform from Akoya is an important driver of our commercial success.

It allows us to own the biomarker journey from the discovery to the clinic. Now, one final update on the PhenoCycler-Fusion System and the reagents is our commitment to providing a suite of solutions for RNA analysis and spatial transcriptomics. Now, recall that the PhenoCycler, again, is an independent in situ reagent delivery system, moving reagents on and off the tissue. It physically pairs and integrates with both our Fusion or a third-party microscope.

This modularity provides Akoya with a distinct competitive advantage. We can develop and launch multiple assays and RNA solutions without requiring a new instrument or new instrument redesign. We don't have a monolithic instrument where the hardware and assays are instructively tied and fixed. It allows us to offer a suite of spatial transcriptomics solutions to meet a range of customer needs.

Our first product launch for RNA analysis comes out of our recently announced partnership with Bio-Techne to automate their RNAscope chemistry on our PhenoCycler-Fusion system. RNAscope is the industry's most widely adopted solution for spatial RNA with over 4,500 publications and thousands of customers. We expect to launch this middle of the year. RNAscope on our system will be used primarily for targeted applications and validation studies in the lower plex range.

But simultaneously for upstream broad-scale RNA discovery applications, we're also working on our own proprietary spatial transcriptomics technologies, which will enable up to 1,000 plex capability. We expect to launch this proprietary spatial RNA solution in 2023, and we'll provide updates at the now rescheduled AGBT conference in June. So to summarize our new product initiatives, we have a powerful new instrument in the Fusion, that when paired with a PhenoCycler, delivers unprecedented speed, capacity and application breadth. We will raise the multiplexing on the protein side to 100-plus.

We'll add additional validated content and provide workflow cohesion across our portfolio with our Universal Chemistry, and also offer a range of RNA solutions. Further, this new instrument solution, the PhenoCycler-Fusion, allows our customers to run their Fusion as a stand-alone system for high-throughput biomarker validation, making the PhenoCycler-Fusion the industry's fastest, most powerful single cell spatial biology system. So now as we look downstream to expand our opportunities and revenue in the translational and clinical markets, we have continued to invest in the PhenoImager HT platform, formerly the Polaris, invested to enable robust clinical-grade throughput and to meet the necessary ISO and quality system certification requirements. In November of last year, our advanced biopharma solutions lab, or ABS, in Marlborough is where we perform lab services on the HT system became CLIA-certified.

Again, this was last November. This certification enables Akoya to support clinical trial enrollment studies and will drive the continued acceleration of our clinical trial partnerships with key biopharma. Now, while we don't yet report our ABS revenue separately, we are seeing a real expansion of our pipeline of opportunities in booked projects and expect ABS to increasingly contribute to our top line growth. Thus highlighting the growing adoption of the PhenoImager HT in clinical trials with both existing and new biopharma customers.

Now, partnerships are central to our success in the translational market and in the clinical markets. We continue to leverage and advance our partnerships with thought leaders at Johns Hopkins, at UCSF, AstraZeneca and many more. In December, we announced a new partnership with PathAI to combine our advanced biopharma solutions service offering with their best-in-class AI-powered pathology. The combination of ABS with PathAI's capabilities and expertise in digital pathology will help streamline biomarker discovery and validation and identifying patients with a high likelihood of responded immunotherapies.

We expect this partnership to be a further growth driver of our ABS service business. So to summarize, Akoya has delivered on our strategic and financial goals for 2021, our new PhenoCycler-Fusion System will be a core platform for our customers, enabling high plex, high throughput multi-omic spatial analysis across whole tissues at high resolution. Our growing reagent menu, increased throughput and speed and expanded installed base will drive pull-through and reagent revenue. With our CLIA-certified ABS lab and our clinical-grade PhenoImager HT, we will continue to accelerate clinical advancements with partnerships across leading academic centers and biopharmaceutical companies.

We are pleased with our strong financial performance in the fourth quarter and full year 2021, and we'll continue to expand on our leadership position in the spatial biology market as we move forward through 2022 and beyond. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Joe to discuss our financial results. Joe?

Joe Driscoll -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Brian. Hello, everyone. As Brian highlighted, total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2021 was $16.2 million as compared to $12.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, which represents 26% growth. Product revenue, which includes instruments, reagents and software, was $12.9 million compared to $10.5 million in the prior year period.

Services and other revenue totaled $3.2 million as compared to $2.4 million in the prior year period. Within product revenue, instrument revenue was $8.5 million compared to $7.3 million in the prior year period. Reagent revenue was $4 million versus $2.8 million in the prior year period, which is a continuation of the growth we've experienced all year in reagents. We had another strong quarter with 46 total instruments sold of which 21 were PhenoCycler and 25 were from the PhenoImager portfolio.

We are including the new Fusion instrument in addition to the legacy instruments under the previously labeled Phenoptics brand in this PhenoImager portfolio category. The total installed base of instruments is now 697 as of December 31, 2021, which includes 182 PhenoCyclers and 515 PhenoImagers. Fourth quarter reagent revenue was on the higher end of our projected range and the performance gives us confidence in our recurring revenue becoming a core driver of our top line growth. Our annualized pull-through on a year-to-date basis exceeds $30,000 per instrument for both the PhenoCycler and the PhenoImager HT.

We have a wide range of usage among customers with our highest PhenoCycler users achieving annual pull-through of $175,000, whereas the high-volume PhenoImager HT users are consuming $200,000 per instrument. Gross profit was $10.2 million in the fourth quarter compared to $7.9 million in the prior year period. This resulted in gross profit margin of 63.3%, an increase from the 61.3% in the prior year period. Increase in gross margin percentage is a key goal for the company as we continue to drive growth in our reagent business.

Total operating expenses were $27 million as compared to $11.1 million in the prior year period. Approximately $3.8 million of the opex was for noncash items, including depreciation and amortization and other noncash expenses. In line with our strategic plan, the increase in opex was part of our investment in the business following our IPO as we hired aggressively in all areas of the business, including our commercial and R&D teams to continue to drive market share growth. In 2022, we plan on making more targeted investments, so we project that opex will not grow at the same rate it did in 2021.

We ended the year with $113.1 million of cash and cash equivalents as of December 31. This gives us several years of runway to continue to make key investments in the business. Common shares outstanding are 37.3 million as of December 31, and fully diluted shares, including the impact of outstanding options and warrants, totals 40.5 million. To summarize, our full year 2021 revenue was $54.9 million a 30% increase over 2020.

Included in that number is almost 70% growth in reagent revenue, which is a critical metric for our business. In addition, we sold 147 instruments in 2021 versus 118 in 2020. We remain confident in our ability to deliver strong growth in 2022 and are providing a full year 2022 preliminary guidance range of $69 million to $71 million. Our base business has hit a stride of continued growth, and furthermore, we expect contribution from multiple additional new revenue drivers we have highlighted on this call.

Now, I'll turn it back over to Brian for closing remarks.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Joe. In summary, we're pleased to report a strong fourth quarter and a strong first full fiscal year results as a publicly traded company. We're thankful for the hard work of our fellow dedicated Akoyans as well as for the support of our customers and shareholders. Akoya remains very well positioned for growth, and we're excited about the opportunities that lie ahead as we deliver new spatial solutions from the discovery to the clinical markets.

And at this point, we will open the call up for questions. Operator?

Questions & Answers:

Operator

[Operator instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Kyle Mikson of Canaccord Genuity.  your question please.

Kyle Mikson -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

Thanks. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the quarter.

All right. So I want to start on the Fusion platform first. So Fusion -- PhenoCycler-Fusion announced in mid-December. Can you talk about like the excitement of the demand so far from customers and maybe even like new prospects? And then given most of your placements probably occur at the end of the quarter historically, could you just talk about do you think there was like any risk of freezing the market there a bit late in '21 or early in '22? Thanks.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So to take those maybe in reverse order. We didn't do a lot of forward announcements of the Fusion. We were working on it behind the scenes.

So there wasn't -- I don't think there was any real kind of freezing the market. We did reveal some details to selected customers on the NDA. So no, I don't think there was any freezing impact. Now, in terms of quality, obviously, we can't speak to the numbers yet, we will at the end of Q1.

The feedback and the demand on the Fusion with the PhenoCycler has really been strong -- extremely strong. It is -- it has resulted in new prospects. While there is an opportunity for existing customers to upgrade, most of the activity has been really new demand from new customers. And I think what we're hearing, Kyle, is the rationale behind our investments, behind what we are aiming for, leveraging the existing whole slide capability in an unbiased manner, now, with speed.

That's been a real driver. And as alluded to during the call, there is another driver beyond just speed and plex. The modularity and the fact that this is our platform of future investment, I think, is giving our customers the confidence that the system is future proof. So it's not just the specifications of driving interest.

The modularity and the fact that this is our foundation for investment going forward, those are some of the key drivers. So it really has been a strong Q1 in terms of demand creation.

Kyle Mikson -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

OK. That was great. Thanks, Brian. Maybe just turning to the financials.

So obviously, the reagents revenue was really strong during the quarter and this year, obviously. So pull-through was great. Could you talk about ASP though on the instrument side? Like it just seems like it's kind of declining a bit. I mean how should we think about that going forward in '22 and so forth? And also what happened in the fourth quarter? Any kind of bundling, things like that? Just curious.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. I'll let Joe speak to the details on the ASPs. I don't think we saw any ASP contraction, but Joe can confirm. So Joe?

Joe Driscoll -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Our ASPs have been consistent all year. It's really just a question of mix of instruments sold. So there was a solid quarter of PhenoCycler sales, and that really drives your overall ASP if you're comparing it to prior quarters.

So -- but there's no inherent change in ASPs in any one of our instrument types.

Kyle Mikson -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

OK. Got it. Thanks for the clarification. And then, Joe, on opex, obviously, pretty high during the quarter.

And you parsed out the stock-based comp, I think, almost $4 million or so. So that makes sense. I guess a couple of questions about that. First, what's the way to think about opex going forward? And then there was an accounting adjustment during the quarter, a change in fair value of contingent consideration.

Could you just talk about what that was related to because it was a little bit higher than previously? It was like about three or four times than what it was in the past?

Joe Driscoll -- Chief Financial Officer

Sure. Yeah. So opex in Q1 is going to be lower than it was in Q4. Q4 had sort of these unusual items, a lot more noncash expenses going through like stock comp and this contingent consideration item.

So it will be lower in Q1, probably $24 million or so in total opex, of which $3 million of that would be noncash things like depreciation, amortization and stock comp. So that's what I'm projecting for Q1. And then, the contingent consideration item is an item that we -- every year, we have a revaluation done of a long-term liability we have to PerkinElmer. So we owe them a royalty over a 15-year period.

It's a long-term liability, gets revalued at fair value every year by an outside firm. And so, it's just a noncash charge. You have to book it to the new fair value at the end of every year. So nothing really to worry about there.

Kyle Mikson -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

Got it. OK. Makes sense. And...

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Just to add qualitatively and reiterate what Joe said during his section. So we were successful in second half of adding a lot of great key talent to R&D into our commercial organizations. But as Joe noted during his section, as we get into 2022, it's going to be a lot more targeted in terms of our additional investments in opex.

Kyle Mikson -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

OK. Got it. It sounds appropriate. Just a quick one for you, Brian.

So the focus on spatial biology proteomatics among the constituents is obviously steadily increasing. Can you just take a moment to remind us of the benefits of Proxima and the ecosystem that could create and the enhancements you aim to make over time? And then, of course, that platform's kind of competitive positioning versus other portals out there.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. What we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure that we have a recognition that there's a lot of great inventions and investments that third parties can and will continue to make in an analysis. So as part of our effort to migrate our existing desktop informatics solutions to the cloud and layer it on as a collaboration system within Proxima, we are also really actively working with third parties through our API to allow those to plug in. So just as we spoke about with PathAI, not directly in line with your question, as a partner to extract meaning, we will invest to build out our informatic platform so that our customers have a go-to solution, but really actively seek out partnerships where we can have real powerful third-party solutions that can plug in.

Because look, our aim is to get them to the answer as quickly as possible. So that is how we think about our informatics solutions and Proxima more generally.

Kyle Mikson -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

Got it. All right. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for taking the question, guys.

Congrats again.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Kyle. 

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tejas Savant of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Tejas Savant -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Hey, guys. Good evening. So maybe, Brian, just to follow up on that earlier question on the Fusion here. Can you just give us your latest thoughts on how many of those you expect to sell as stand-alone versus in conjunction with the CODEX? And any sort of quantitative color on the order funnel year and how that split might evolve with time

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

So yeah, I will refrain from anything quantitative at this point. What was the first part of your question, Tejas?

Tejas Savant -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

I was just curious as to how many were sold as stand-alone fusions versus in conjunction with the CODEX.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So only, as we noted on the call, only a handful were shipped in Q4. And kind of what we're modeling going forward as an attachment rate maybe half the time or a little bit more. That is when somebody buys a PhenoCycler, then about half the time, they're going to buy a Fusion.

In some cases, labs have preferences of their third-party microscopes, and they standardize on them. And so, that oftentimes makes it easier for us to integrate with the third party. And we'll see how that tracks over time, Tejas. it could be higher.

We've decided to come out with a fairly conservative number. And as we look back historically, as I alluded, the percent of time that a customer was buying a third-party microscope anyway prior to the fusion was probably around 60% to 70%. So we're leaving some room there given some potential institutional requirements for certain third-party microscope types.

Tejas Savant -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Got it. That's helpful. And then, as you think about sort of bookends for the pull-through year in the Fusion, Brian, I mean, any early sort of like signs around how that might be trending here as customers start to ramp here in January and February?

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

There's no quantitative or real qualitative data yet. We just launched January 13, just starting to ship those, get those out, get those installed. So as of right now, we'll start to see that data as it comes through, given the increased speed, the increased flexing, driving more samples per week. But with that increased flexing, more dollars per sample.

So it's too early to have anything quantitative because we're literally, Tejas, just shipping and installing at this point.

Tejas Savant -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Got it. Fair enough. And then, Brian, as you progressed into March here. I was curious in terms of just customer activity levels by type.

So in the academic customer base, did you see any sort of like slow start to the quarter that's ramping here through February and March? And also on the biopharma side, any kind of like slower sample intake during the pandemic that's now sort of essentially back to normal? And for Joe on a related note, are you essentially assuming full normalcy on a go-forward basis in your '22 outlook?

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So to take those into reverse order. Right now, we're seeing sort of business as usual. So no real hangover effects, pockets here or there of some access or maybe an instrument or two, but nothing that's fundamental to our numbers in terms of access to the customers' ability to sell instruments.

And there's nothing atypical about this Q1 versus other Q1s. You usually always have a bit of a walking start in January, regardless of broader health or geopolitical things, but our quarter is progressing as we had expected. But again, the second part of your question, we are not modeling in any impacts of COVID anymore on our business. We have the access, and we think the customers have the access to our systems.

Tejas Savant -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Got it. Very helpful. Thank you.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Tejas.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Julia Qin of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Julia Qin -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Hi. Good afternoon. Just a follow-up in terms of your guidance for the full year. Should we assume that you're expecting the same instrument mix between Cycler and Fusion and the rest of the Imager portfolio as we saw in 4Q? And then in terms of fusion at a different ASP.

Could you remind us of the price point and how to think about the image of portfolio ASP trends going forward?

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Let's take those in reverse order. The imaging portfolio going forward, we are end-of-life in two of those historical instruments within the Phenoptics portfolio over time, with the Mantra and the Vectra. So the imaging portfolio is going to be the Fusion and the HT, formerly the Polaris.

That is the imaging portfolio with the Fusion, as noted, being able to integrate with the PhenoCycler. Excluding the Fusion, Julia, and we can layer that in for Tejas' question on attachment, it's been fairly equivalent, maybe one or two more here or there over the prior quarters in terms of the number of HTs and the number of PhenoCyclers we've sold. That's likely going to continue going forward. There's some ebbs and flows, as I noted.

And then, layering in the attachment of the Fusion to those PhenoCyclers is really -- is added revenue on top of us selling, for example, more PhenoCyclers in the prior year. So those are the dynamics.

Julia Qin -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Got you. Very helpful. And then, in terms of consumable pull-through, it sounds like your current guidance has not embedded a lot of meaningful contribution from the RNA menu expansion and proprietary reagents yet. But as we think about the long-term potential, I think you previously set a path toward 50,000 to 60,000 pull-through on both platforms over time.

Does that already embed the benefit from the Fusion launched? Are they menuing proprietary reagents? Or do those represent incremental upside?

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

So those -- the projections of the growing pull-through do include RNA, new reagents, increased speed, increased plexing in dollars per sample. So our projections for driving pull-through on a per instrument basis do include those assumptions.

Julia Qin -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

Got you. Great. Thank you.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Julia.

Operator

Thank you. [Operator instructions] Our next question comes from the line of David Westenberg of Piper Sandler. Your question please.

David Westenberg -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the good numbers here. So great color on the upper limit customers of 200,000 in annual pull-through. Are you willing to give us a flavor of the customer types in terms of what they might look like pharma, biotech, research and in terms of where they're at and maybe the clinical research or any kind of profile that allows us to kind of think about, is this possible with the rest of your customer base?

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So the upper limit customers on the HT side includes CROs and leading academic medical centers that have established ongoing programs. That's not surprising. So in the case of CRO like we have through advanced Biopharma Solutions group, a number of established big pharma that are leveraging our platform.

In the case of the HT or Polaris in a leading academic medical center, these are groups that have established scale translational program with routine sample flow. So those sorts of dynamics are the dynamics that I think are growing. And our ABS growth is an indication of the former. On the higher numbers for the CODEX now to PhenoCycler, there's a number of different types of groups.

There's groups that are building atlas-type programs where they're building out large reference data sets. There's groups that are servicing multiple other -- as a core, multiple other groups internally. And as an aside, leveraging speed going forward is certainly going to help our ability to place our instruments in these core labs because more samples per unit time is how they run their business. And there's other groups that are really digging deep and leveraging our platform to understand the basics of the disease.

For example, Bob Schreiber is one of those groups that's using out of was using our platform and mouse models to better understand response to immunotherapies. So it's the kinds of things, David, I think, that you would expect. But hopefully, that gives you a little bit more color.

David Westenberg -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst

No, it was very helpful, particularly on the CODEX side. So just going to take me a little while to learn the rebranding, but I get it. All right. So I want to continue with one of Julia's question about the pull-through and then the kind of long-term assumption because you are launching a pretty good amount of content this year, and between the Universal Chemistry, the RNA stuff.

So I mean, like I intuitively think about that. But I think you're also adding on the microscope should also add to what the customer can do. So can you talk about the pushes and pulls and the two-year or three-year trends in consumable pull-through that maybe make us think that maybe it's not that, I mean, maybe there's a maturing or there's a -- you're getting more placements and there's a maturity cycle involved and in those additional placements. Any color could help us out here.

Thank you.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So I think when we talk about forthcoming RNA speed improvements, increased in flexing additional content, that sort of flywheel of more samples per no time and more dollars per sample. These are, as you noted, these are solutions that are just getting into the market. So those capabilities are not currently embedded maybe speaking first on the discovery side and the existing PhenoCycle installs.

So they will roll out over time. And so, we have a maturation of the current customer base in the field to leverage these. But also incrementally, as we add new PhenoCyclers with Fusion over time, that will become a higher percentage of our installed base. So you might have -- and this may be an oversimplification, a bit of a bimodal user base between those are on the stand-alone PhenoCycler versus those new customers that have it with the Fusion.

And so, you might have -- we might anticipate a higher pull-through with those early and first PhenoCycler-Fusion customers as compared to a standard PhenoCycler customer. So those are some of the key drivers on a pull-through per unit basis, but still in aggregate by the growing installed base. Those new customers are going to contribute more and more over time in terms of growing our total reagent revenue.

David Westenberg -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst

Appreciate it. That's great color. And then, just a quick one. It's kind of an extension or the opposite of what Tejas asked.

And that is, is there any stand-alone opportunity for the Fusion microscope. And I'm just talking about maybe some of those previous placements that didn't have a microscope, that they acquired a third party and then they said, "You know what? This functionality is a lot better with the Fusion microscope." So any thoughts on stand-alone in that case. And that wraps it up. Thanks.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

That's a great question. And you're calling out something that we probably could spend more time on, that the Fusion really is an incredibly powerful microscope. As we noted, it's got the same underlying image acquisition speed and capabilities as the Polaris, now the HT system, but it's just in a smaller, more affordable footprint. So a Fusion stand-alone is really attractive to a segment of the translational and clinical research market segment that does -- that don't think they need the kind of scale and throughput that the HT system, the former Polaris provides.

So it has all of the same capabilities as the HT as the Polaris, but again, in a smaller footprint that's more affordable. So that is an obvious customer for the Fusion stand-alone.

David Westenberg -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst

Appreciate it. Good job on the quarter.

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, David.

Operator

[Operator signoff]

Duration: 44 minutes

Call participants:

Priyam Shah -- Head of Investor Relations

Brian McKelligon -- Chief Executive Officer

Joe Driscoll -- Chief Financial Officer

Kyle Mikson -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst

Tejas Savant -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Julia Qin -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst

David Westenberg -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst

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