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Date

Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET

Call participants

  • President and Chief Executive Officer — Everett Cunningham
  • Chief Financial Officer — Vandana Sriram
  • Head of Investor Relations — Joshua Young

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Takeaways

  • Total Revenue -- $36.4 million, up 20% year over year, reflecting reported growth despite challenging end markets.
  • Organic Revenue -- Decreased 21%, indicating reduced business activity on a comparable basis.
  • Diagnostics Partner Revenue -- $2.9 million, up from $1.6 million, attributed to higher single biomarker test volumes.
  • Simoa Revenue -- $24 million, representing a 21% organic decline.
  • Spatial Revenue -- $12.4 million, down 26% year over year.
  • Instruments Revenue -- $4 million total, with $2.3 million from Simoa and $1.7 million from spatial instruments; instrument transactions were postponed into the next quarter.
  • Consumables Revenue -- $21.4 million, with $14.5 million from Simoa and $6.9 million from spatial consumables.
  • Accelerator Lab Services Revenue -- $4.3 million, comprised of $3.5 million from Simoa and $800,000 from spatial lab services.
  • Instrument Placements -- 16 Simoa and 11 spatial instruments placed during the quarter.
  • Customer Mix -- Academic customers accounted for approximately 65%; academic revenue declined by 16% and pharma revenue dropped by 33%, both on a pro forma basis.
  • Gross Margin -- GAAP gross margin was 42.7%; non-GAAP gross margin reached 50.9%, aided by Akoya cost synergies.
  • Operating Expenses -- $56.9 million GAAP, including $22 million related to acquisition, integration, restructuring, and purchase accounting; non-GAAP operating expenses were $34.7 million, down $2.3 million sequentially.
  • Intangible Asset Write-Off -- $19 million charge due to termination of an Akoya Diagnostics development agreement, mostly offset by $22 million liability write-off yielding net noncash income of $2.3 million.
  • Adjusted EBITDA -- Loss of $9.8 million, a $1.5 million sequential improvement despite lower revenues from the prior quarter.
  • Cash Position -- $102.6 million in cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities, and restricted cash; adjusted cash usage for the quarter was $14.7 million after excluding $4.2 million in one-time items.
  • Annualized Cost Synergies -- $85 million of synergies achieved from the Akoya acquisition, with integration actions completed by quarter-end.
  • 2026 Revenue Guidance -- Maintained at $169 million to $174 million.
  • Gross Margin Guidance -- Expected GAAP gross margin of 41%-45%, non-GAAP gross margin of 49%-53% for the full year.
  • Cash Flow Breakeven Target -- Still anticipated by the fourth quarter of 2026.
  • Quarterly Revenue Outlook -- Second quarter revenues expected to be roughly in line or slightly ahead of the first quarter, with commercial efforts anticipated to lift second-half revenues.
  • Strategic Focus -- President Everett Cunningham outlined resource allocation to growth opportunities, intensification in pharma partnerships, and salesforce transformation to drive growth.
  • Diagnostics Investment and Leadership -- Increased investment in the Alzheimer’s diagnostics segment, hiring of a new diagnostics leader reporting directly to the CEO, and expanded lab infrastructure.
  • Alzheimer’s Partnership -- Announced integration of LucentAD Complete into Tempus AI partner health systems as part of the Tempus Next program.
  • Product Development Roadmap -- Streamlined strategic focus on the Simoa HD-X platform with plans to file for IVD status with the FDA in 2027.
  • Spatial Segment Priorities -- Emphasis on PCS biomarker panel expansion and new reagent launches for the HT platform in 2026.
  • Commercial Investments -- Expansion of lead generation and market development teams and increased emphasis on digital distribution through Thermo Fisher’s platform.
  • Accounting Change -- Reclassified shipping and handling costs from SG&A to gross margin; updated GAAP margin guidance to reflect this without altering non-GAAP margin outlook.

Summary

Quanterix Corporation (QTRX 16.41%) delivered 20% reported revenue growth, while organic revenue and primary segments experienced declines, indicating underlying business headwinds. The company affirmed its full-year revenue and gross margin guidance, sustained by Akoya-related cost synergies and disciplined cash management initiatives. Management unveiled a series of strategic operational shifts, highlighted by investment in Alzheimer’s diagnostics, a new partnership with Tempus AI, and a sharpened commercial focus intended to drive second-half acceleration. Clear initiatives around new product launches, leadership expansion, and infrastructure support indicate confidence in achieving cash flow breakeven by year end.

  • President Cunningham said, "we have a clear path towards profitability for our research tools business and a balance sheet to support our growth ambitions for our Alzheimer's disease diagnostics with approximately $100 million in cash and no debt."
  • Chief Financial Officer Sriram stated, "we continue to expect to reach cash flow breakeven performance by the fourth quarter this year."
  • Management highlighted the anticipated FDA clearance for LucentAD Complete and further commercial scale-up through additional clinical studies reading out in the second half.
  • Operational changes were explicitly linked to improved discipline in spending, streamlined project tracking, and new product launches designed to target expanded market opportunities.

Industry glossary

  • Simoa: Digital immunoassay technology from Quanterix for ultrasensitive protein biomarker detection.
  • Spatial: Quanterix segment utilizing multiplexed proteomics platforms for spatially resolved protein analysis.
  • Accelerator Lab Services: Contract research and development offerings, including sample testing, for life sciences customers.
  • LucentAD Complete: Quanterix’s blood-based Alzheimer’s diagnostic test.
  • PCS biomarker panels: Protein biomarker assay panels for spatial proteomics used in discovery applications.
  • IVD: In vitro diagnostic; denotes regulatory status for devices/tests used in clinical diagnostic settings.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Joshua Young: Thank you, Preyila, and good afternoon, everybody. With me on today's call are Everett Cunningham, Quanterix' President and CEO; and Vandana Sriram, Quanterix' Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded, and a replay of the call will be available on the Investors section of our website. During the course of today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements covered under the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and assumptions as of today, May 6, 2026. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements.

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

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

Everett Cunningham: Thanks, Josh. I'm happy to be here with all of you this afternoon. My time at the company has been very exciting and informative, and I'm more confident than ever about the future of Quanterix. Now in that spirit, I'd like to start off by sharing some of my key observations in my first 100 days with the company. First, we have a passionate employee base full of people who want Quanterix to win and be successful for the long term. Now based on our customers' feedback, we remain the market leader in early detection of critical disease biomarkers, and that's a great position to be in, one that we must capitalize on.

Next, we have an installed base of over 2,300 instruments across passionate customers who appreciate the value of our products and services. Our market-leading technologies include Simoa, where we are the leaders in ultrasensitive digital immunoassays for protein biomarker quantification and spatial, where we have the highest plex proteomic platform on the market. Now these are both businesses where we can generate strong growth and build solid businesses moving forward. Next, our strong foundation positions us to be a leader in the Alzheimer's diagnostics industry. Now it's early innings, but I believe in our capabilities, and I want to invest in them now.

So in summary, I believe that we have a clear path towards profitability for our research tools business and a balance sheet to support our growth ambitions for our Alzheimer's disease diagnostics with approximately $100 million in cash and no debt. Now this journey, I'm here to undertake is exciting, and I couldn't be more excited to be here. Now moving from a high-level observation to more of a detailed strategic and tactical consideration. I gathered a lot of feedback in my first 3 months here. The company has many strengths to build upon, but we're not currently fulfilling our potential.

So as a result, I'm making some operational as well as strategic changes now and in the future quarters that will help us better capitalize on our compelling opportunities. One overriding philosophical change that we must move the company from a mode of integrating and realizing synergies to a mode of investing and growing our business for long-term growth. We are allocating resources to growth opportunities where we see compelling near-term returns while ensuring that we continue to hit our annual operating targets in 2026 and beyond, just as we delivered our $85 million of cost synergies from the Akoya acquisition. In the first quarter of 2026, we reported $36.4 million of revenue as our end markets remain difficult.

While our consumable revenues performed as planned, our revenues from our instrumentation business was slightly softer than expected. Now some of the shortfall is related to timing issues, but there's also some changes that we're going to be implementing to bring more focus to our sales efforts. These changes will bring benefits as the year progresses. Now, in addition to investing in growth opportunities, we are hard at work at creating a culture of operational execution and delivering quarterly expectations as a key tenet of our organization we are building here at Quanterix.

We've established good operational rigor, which can be seen in our gross margin performance, our disciplined approach to spending and in our ability to consistently hit our cash usage targets. Now during the last call, I shared details of my 30-year commercial background at companies such as Illumina, Quest Diagnostics and Exact Sciences. I know what best-in-class commercial organizations look like, and I've identified multiple opportunities to take Quanterix to the next level of operational performance. As a result, we're making several investments to improve our commercial effectiveness in 2026 and beyond. Now these investments include: we're going to elevate our pharma partnerships in our accelerator business with an experienced senior leader.

This important business has slipped in recent quarters, and we are changing that now. I expect that myself, the new leader and our current professionals in this space will have frequent and candid dialogues with our pharma clients to understand how we can better solve for their needs. Now with our best-in-class technology and solutions, we expect significant improvement this year. Next, we are expanding our team of lead generation representatives to improve our outbound targeting and drive net new business. We're also going to hire new market development leaders that will support the sales team in training, systematic value propositions and competitive positioning.

This is intended to refocus our sales force on their customers while clarifying Quanterix' many advantages of our overall value propositions in our key end markets. We will be harder hitting on differentiation. For example, we will highlight our ability to detect proteins more accurately than others while doing it more consistently. Next, we're leveraging Thermo Fisher's distribution capabilities to improve our online presence. Now this will have a dual benefit of helping our customers by easing their barriers to access for our products while reducing the manual work of our commercial team to provide pricing quotes.

Everything that we're doing is centered on investments that will yield near-term returns to sharpen our focus, expand our opportunity set and grow our top line performance in 2026 and beyond. Now our customers have told me repeatedly that we are the market leader. Armed with this feedback, we're adjusting our course and importantly, we're moving quickly with a sense of urgency. Now we're also increasing our investment in our Alzheimer's diagnostics business. Health care providers who treat Alzheimer's want a reliable noninvasive test to drive earlier intervention of this terrible disease.

We firmly believe and industry leaders concur that we have the best performing and most comprehensive Alzheimer's diagnostics test available today in LucentAD Complete, and we expect to garner meaningful market share as blood-based biomarker testing continues to grow. So we're making the following investments in our diagnostics business. First, we are hiring a new diagnostics leader reporting directly into me to build and invest in our emerging diagnostics business. With this move, we are bringing in strong leadership to expand and strengthen our diagnostics portfolio as part of our commitment to advancing our position in the nascent Alzheimer's testing market.

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

As a matter of fact, today, we just announced an important and exciting partnership with Tempus AI. Under this agreement, LucentAD Complete will be integrated into [ EHR ] systems at select Tempus Partner Health System locations as part of the Tempus Next program. Now patients who meet the clinical criteria will be flagged using a proprietary algorithm and testing will be available for order at a clinician's discretion. Now to help fund these investments, we're streamlining our product road map. Now my engagement with customers and collaborators in this sector over the past 3 months has led us to prioritize our Simoa HD-X platform and other investments, both on the research tools and diagnostics sides of the business.

Also, we're incorporating learnings and enhancements from our next-generation platform into the HD-X upgrade. And additionally, we are continuing to gather feedback from our early access launch program that we expect to incorporate over time into the next-generation Simoa program. Now on the spatial side of our business, our 2 key priorities for 2026 are to expand our PCS biomarker panels for discovery applications and to release new reagents for the HT platform to better support clinical applications. Now from a financial perspective, we continue to expect to reach cash flow breakeven performance by the fourth quarter this year.

The entire company is committed to building a profitable and sustainable research tools business that are leaders in both spatial and ultrasensitive proteomics. Now we expect the investments that I discussed today will help drive commercial effectiveness in the second half of 2026. We are not waiting for better markets. Instead, we're making thoughtful and deliberate decisions to drive Quanterix to where the industry is going. And finally, we are excited about our Diagnostics business as we are delivering on key milestones this year while welcoming in a proven seasoned business leader to accelerate our performance in this space. Now let me turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Vandana Sriram.

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

From a product perspective, Simoa contributed $24 million, a 21% organic revenue decline and spatial reported $12.4 million, down 26% year-over-year. Instruments revenue was $4 million, comprised of $2.3 million from Simoa and $1.7 million from spatial instruments. We placed 16 Simoa and 11 spatial instruments in the quarter. Consumables revenue was $21.4 million. This consisted of $14.5 million in Simoa and $6.9 million in spatial consumables. Accelerator Lab services were $4.3 million, $3.5 million in Simoa and $800,000 in spatial. Our customer mix was meaningfully skewed to academia, which represented approximately 65% of the business in Q1.

On a pro forma basis, assuming Quanterix and Akoya were combined for the full year, academic revenue for the first quarter declined approximately 16%. Pharma revenue declined 33% year-over-year, primarily due to fewer large accelerator projects and spatial instruments placed. As Everest already mentioned, we are adding resources and refocusing strategies towards the pharma end market, and we expect to see better results here in the coming quarters. Moving on to the P&L. Gross profit and margin for the first quarter were $15.6 million or 42.7%. Non-GAAP gross profit was $18.5 million and non-GAAP gross margin was 50.9%. The synergies from the Akoya transaction are apparent here.

Even with a reduction in pro forma revenue, we are maintaining non-GAAP gross margin over 50%. Operating expenses for the quarter were $56.9 million. Included in operating expenses are approximately $22 million of costs related to acquisition, integration, restructuring and purchase accounting. Notably, this includes a $19 million onetime write-off from an intangible asset related to the termination of an Akoya Diagnostics development agreement. Offsetting this, other income contains $22 million of liabilities written off, resulting in net noncash income of $2.3 million from this termination. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $34.7 million, a decrease of roughly $2.3 million sequentially as a result of the synergies.

We are now operating the new Quanterix entity at roughly the same level of operating expenses we had when we were a stand-alone company. As Everett mentioned, as a result of the Akoya integration actions taken to date, at the end of Q1, we have delivered the $85 million of annualized cost synergies that we committed to as part of the acquisition. The combined entity is operating as expected. And while there are a few remaining actions to complete, we will not continue to report these synergies after this quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $9.8 million, a sequential improvement of $1.5 million despite lower revenues versus the prior quarter.

We ended the quarter with $102.6 million of cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities and restricted cash. During the quarter, we used $19 million of cash, of which $4.2 million was related to onetime integration and employee-related costs. Adjusted cash usage during the quarter was $14.7 million. The first quarter is our highest quarter of cash usage, similar to many companies due to approximately $11 million of annual payments such as insurance renewals and annual bonuses. As we look ahead, we expect our cash usage to move meaningfully lower as these annual payments are behind us and we make progress towards our cash flow breakeven target. Finally, turning to guidance for 2026.

We are maintaining our guidance for the full year 2026, and we continue to expect to report approximately $169 million to $174 million of revenue. We expect GAAP gross margin to be in a range of 41% to 45% and non-GAAP gross margins to be in a range of 49% to 53%. In the first quarter, we changed our accounting policy for classifying shipping and handling costs for product sales to record them within gross margin. Historically, they were recorded in SG&A expenses. We believe this classification is preferable because it better aligns costs with related revenue and is consistent with our peers.

We reflected this reclassification in our GAAP margin guidance, but there is no change to the underlying non-GAAP margin expectation. We continue to anticipate achieving cash flow breakeven in the second half of the year and expect to end the year with cash in the range of $100 million with no debt. And finally, in terms of our quarterly cadence, we expect second quarter revenues to be roughly in line to slightly ahead of Q1, and we expect that the commercial initiatives that we're investing in will help to drive increased revenues in the second half of 2026. I will now turn it back over to Everett for closing remarks.

Everett Cunningham: Thanks, Vandana. We're moving quickly. We're making decisions that will improve our commercial effectiveness, streamline our product management priorities and also enable Quanterix to capitalize on a compelling opportunity in the Alzheimer's diagnostics market. And we're doing all this while moving Quanterix closer to cash flow breakeven performance. And with that said, I'd like to turn it over back to Josh for questions and answers.

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

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

Kyle Mikson: Good to hear all these updates here changes and so forth. I guess, Everett, the one that sticks out to me is the preparation for the IVD submission for HD-X in '27. I guess like the question is kind of like why do you need IVD for that system? You talked about, I think pharma important there as well as a distributed model. But maybe just dive into is that -- is this needed more for Alzheimer's, neurology or oncology? Is that part of the aspiration here? And then maybe like a decentralization strategy internationally.

I'm curious if that's in the works as well because when you think about this compared to some other platforms that we know of, it could be interesting to think about long term.

Everett Cunningham: I appreciate the question. And I will just go back to my last 3 months of being out in the market, talking to customers. We're investing in our HD-X platform because it's our workhorse. We have a really good robust installed base. It's our installed base. The timing of it fits nicely to our diagnostics build-out. And also with making the machine more reliable, it's also going to benefit our research customers, too. So when we build the machine, it is for 2 reasons. First of all, it will solidify our research-only business.

It will get us ready for diagnostics, and it will give us what I would just say, optionality to have a distributed plan for our lab partners, both domestically and internationally. And that's why we've made the choice of really prioritizing our focus in getting that machine IVD ready in 2027.

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

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

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

Everett Cunningham: Yes. We feel -- and I'll have Vandana help me too. We feel really good about our position in the spatial low plex market. We have 10x the number of low-plex assays available in the marketplace. compared to our competition. Our installed base in this space is larger than our competition. Quanterix focuses on part of the translational research market that includes later-stage clinical trials, of which reproducibility is really, really important. Again, feedback from our customers, we lead in that space. Where I see benefits of our spatial business moving forward, our tools, our technology is market-leading. We're going to improve our reach to our customers. We're putting in more marketing investments.

We have amazing exciting launches in the spatial space, and we feel that's going to give us a boost in the second half. Vandana, I don't know if you want to mention anything else?

Vandana Sriram: No, I think that's exactly right. On the Simoa front, while there has been a lot of talk of competition, I think all of the data and all of the research suggests that we have the broadest menu as well as the greatest level of sensitivity as well as lot-to-lot and lab-to-lab reproducibility versus anyone in the market. And then on the spatial side, with a concentration both in the research and in the clinical side, there's a lot of exciting things going on there. As Everett said, we're now going to kind of turbocharge that to make sure we're getting the right share of market that we deserve.

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

Puneet Souda: So I'll ask my questions in one. First, Everett, great to see the actions you're taking on the diagnostics side, bringing in leadership and investing into that business. Just wanted to get a sense of the level of investment that you need there? And how should we expect -- what should we expect for Alzheimer's in the overall guide here? This looks like a second half weighted guide. So I just wanted to get a sense there. And then could you maybe also elaborate as you transition some of the business or the focus from the core tool side to the diagnostics side, is there a chance for any air pocket?

Obviously, that's a question that we frequently get from investors.

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

And this person, along with many others here at Quanterix is going to help me build out that end-to-end plan. What we're investing this year, I feel is really appropriate. We're adding right now feet on the street that will help us sell LucentAD Complete and also help with our lab partnership that we have going now. We're investing in clinical utility studies. Those clinical utility studies will read out in the second half. And we're thinking about what is the next phase that we need also to continue to move this forward. And then just to me, I look at this as a surround sound type thing when I think of diagnostics.

Our lab infrastructure needs to be ready for order to cash. And so we're investing in our lab infrastructure, too. We will be ready once we get FDA clearance in the second half, we will be ready to what I would say, scale. The last thing I'll mention for a diagnostic standpoint, and I've always thought this way, even back in my Exact Sciences and Quest Diagnostics days, we're not going to do this alone. We're going to have smart, unique partnerships to help us scale this business, and we started now. Our partnership with Tempus AI is a great example of what we're doing and how we're creating scale in the business.

We have lifeline screening, again, more scale in helping us get our LucentAD and our LucentAD complete that's out there. We'll do the same once we get FDA clearance of how do we organically build scale, but how do we create really smart partnerships moving forward.

Vandana Sriram: Yes. And Puneet, to address your questions on what this means from a financial perspective, we've always had a baseline level of investment in Alzheimer's diagnostics, frankly, for the last 3 or 4 years at this point. What we're doing in this plan right now is being very, very deliberate on where our investments go. We've streamlined projects in other parts of the business where perhaps that payback was not as immediate as these are. And that's what's helping us fund both the commercial acceleration as well as the acceleration in the diagnostics platform. And then from a revenue perspective, as you know, we did almost $10 million of revenue from our partners in 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

Everett Cunningham: Yes, Dan, let me talk about the investments that we're making that these aren't investments that have a year ROI. And I'm just taking this from my past experience of, hey, we need to build out momentum within the next few quarters. These are the investments that we're making. Let me just maybe give a couple of them color to give confidence of our second half ramp. Our lead generation reps are critical to our growth. Our lead generation reps are working with our marketing team and taking our robust leads that we have and making them credible, making phone calls to ensure that when they hand them over to our sales reps, those leads are ready to buy.

We've already instituted lead generation reps. And in the first 3 weeks, we're seeing a market difference in terms of net new opportunities. So I look at in the second half, our net new opportunity growth to be absolutely better than it was in Q1. Secondly, our marketing. We have appropriately put investments in marketing on both the Simoa and spatial side of the business to develop more of a multichannel approach. So I always like to say we're selling when people are sleeping. So we feel that's going to be a major benefit to our business.

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

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

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

Vandana Sriram: Yes. So on the end markets, on the pharma side, we do think that the end markets are strong. It has really been a little bit of the focus that's been lacking on our side, which we've already started to correct and we're starting to see the results on. The academic side was a little bit slow in the first 3, 4 months of the year. As you know, overall funding slowdown has been a little bit slow. So we're not counting on a big rebound over there, but we do think there might be a small amount of improvement as we get towards the end of the year. But we're not assuming markets change materially.

We're really assuming that a lot of the growth is going to happen from our actions, both on the product side as well as on the commercial side.

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

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

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

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

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

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