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Monday, Aug. 10, 2026 at 8:30 a.m. ET
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Management reported a decrease in full-year revenue and margin guidance to account for slower commercial execution and persistent weakness in academic and pharmaceutical spending. The company is shifting its sales force from a geographic model to a solution-based structure and has appointed new leadership for its commercial and diagnostic divisions. Management confirmed the finalization of the Akoya integration and the attainment of $85 million in annualized cost savings. The company is focusing strategic investments on its Alzheimer’s disease diagnostics business, supported by new insurance coverage and the upcoming submission of regulatory applications for the Simoa platform.
Operator: Thank you for standing by. My name is Carly, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Quanterix Corporation Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Mary Conway, Investor Relations.
Mary Conway: Thank you and good morning. With me on today's call are Everett Cunningham, Quanterix's President and CEO, and Jason Fessler, Quanterix's new Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is being recorded and a replay of the call will be available on the Investor section of our website. 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, August 10, 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 may 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 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 periods' results and assessing our operating performance within our industry.
Non-GAAP financial information presented herein should be considered in conjunction with and not as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Investors are encouraged to review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their 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 that 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 Cunningham: Thanks, Mary. I'm pleased to be with all of you here this morning to bring you up to date on both our second quarter results and our plans for the back half of this year. We are revising our expectations and we want to be transparent about our actions and intended impacts. Our first half results were not what we anticipated based upon market softness and executional challenges, even though our cash preservation efforts were better than planned. As a result, we are taking speedy action to address execution, as I'll describe momentarily, but this performance will affect our annual outlook.
Let me start by addressing the specifics around what contributed to Q2's results, then share more details on our plans to pivot our organization to improve performance in the second half and in 2027. The revenue shortfall in Q2 was broad-based and roughly $3 million, or 9% lower than the guidance we provided on our call in May. The commercial execution initiatives we began earlier this year have not yet delivered the sustained revenue performance or sales productivity we believe this organization can achieve. As a result, more decisive action is required.
We entered this next phase with significant strengths: one of the largest install bases in our sector, market leadership in ultra-sensitive, reproducible protein detection, differentiated proteomic sensitivity across both tissue and blood, and a deeply committed team of employees. To fully translate these advantages into durable growth, we need experienced commercial leadership with the acumen, discipline, and expertise to strengthen our customer engagement and drive consistent execution. Accordingly, we are making a series of significant changes in our commercial organization, starting with adding new proven leadership. As we announced today, Jim Gute is joining our team to help drive improved execution in our commercial organization. Jim was most recently Senior Vice President and Commercial Manager, General Screening at Exact Sciences.
Prior to joining Exact, a $3 billion revenue company acquired earlier this year by Abbott Labs, Jim spent 18 years at GE, where he became President of GE Healthcare in 2025. Jim brings more than 25 years of experience leading enterprise organizations, accelerating growth, and transforming complex healthcare and diagnostic businesses. He's developed high-performing commercial organizations that combine strategic vision, operational discipline, and leadership excellence to create sustained enterprise value. We are so excited to welcome Jim to our team and work together to achieve our goal of re-accelerating revenue growth. In addition, we are reorganizing our commercial team around solution-based selling models.
Given the highly specialized nature of our instruments, assays, and diagnostic offerings, we believe greater product expertise and more focused customer engagement are essential to improving commercial execution and reigniting sales productivity. As announced in early June, we welcomed a seasoned leader with over two decades of diagnostics experience, Geoff Albrecht, as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Diagnostics. As we transform this business into a critical component of our future growth, Geoff's more than 25 years of deep commercial leadership experience is already making an impact. Most recently, he served as regional vice president for the Northeast U.S. at Quest Diagnostics, leading a group generating approximately $2.9 billion in revenue.
Last, our Accelerator business was down significantly in the quarter, mirroring trends towards smaller projects that we saw in Q1. Therefore, we are creating a dedicated sales team focused on driving Pharma Lab services to deliver improved results in the second half. On a positive note, in Q2, this business produced nice bookings, and shortly I'll share some exciting progress we're seeing in Q3. We believe these actions and this momentum will produce growth starting this year and more meaningfully in 2027 and beyond.
Based upon our first half performance and recognizing that the significant changes that we are announcing today will not produce results immediately, we are lowering our revenue guidance for 2026 to a range of $142 million to $148 million from the prior range of $169 million to $174 million. Our team has thoroughly assessed the commercial pipeline and underlying in-market assumptions, giving us the confidence that this new forecast is appropriate. At this revenue level, we expect to end 2026 with a roughly $80 million cash balance. This would also push our cash flow break-even to 2027.
While we plan to invest in our business to leverage growth opportunities, our ability to conserve cash demonstrated by the higher than expected cash position at the end of Q2 2026 will enable us to be disciplined in balancing cash and investment needs. To that end, we completed the Akoya integration in Q2, finalizing the ERP and cost synergies, and achieved the planned $85 million in annualized savings. In summary, we expect these actions to support stronger performance in the second half and position the company for higher growth in 2027 and beyond. Our updated guidance reflects a level of performance that we are confident we can deliver without assuming a substantial recovery in our end markets.
This confidence is supported by our industry-leading solutions and services, our growing customer base, and the continued momentum in our higher growth diagnostics business. Now let me turn to the factors underpinning our confidence in the strategy and our ability to execute successfully. We see early, important size momentum throughout the business that we intend to galvanize and accelerate to improve our results going forward. We are cautiously optimistic about the green shoots in Q2, such as a sequential increase in bookings, leading to a book-to-bill of 1 to 1, driven by orders in Spatial instruments and consumables and some more Accelerator business.
Pharma revenue also increased sequentially in Q2, led by Spatial, even though this market has been reported to be struggling recently. The number of LucentAD Complete tests increased significantly in Q2, albeit off a small base, as we strive to transform our diagnostics business into a more sizable component of Quanterix's growth trajectories. We were very pleased that beginning July 1, 2026, members covered under Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield medical policies can receive coverage for qualifying blood-based biomarker testing, including Quanterix's LucentAD Complete test when medical necessity criteria are met. Now, this is happening in advance of our broad-based market access strategy.
We've also expanded our assay development with the launch of an important emerging synaptic biomarker, NPTX2, and in Spatial, we launched two new products. We intend to keep up the pace of new offerings. We're excited about Quanterix's prestigious election as a co-investigator institution in the PD-BUILD program, supported by The Michael J. Fox Foundation. This grant-supported mandate will advance Parkinson's disease research by developing and deploying biomarker tools aimed at enabling earlier detection, improved patient stratification, and more effective monitoring of Parkinson's disease. Importantly, it will also validate our technology in an important neurological area. We're also seeing momentum across customers and regions within diagnostics.
We've dramatically increased the opportunities for which we are competing, and winning our fair share of these will further increase our credibility. We're excited about these opportunities, which involve accelerated revenues as well. Our partnership with [ Tempus ] announced last quarter is getting underway quickly, and we're working together on several potential opportunities. These, in addition to the clinical utility studies that we expect to read out shortly, should amplify our credibility in the market. Recent studies, including the ones that we shared at AAIC in London, underscore our opportunity to strengthen our commercial moat by demonstrating our premier positioning of an ultra-sensitive, multi-analyte algorithm for targeted translational work, as well as diagnostics.
[ And finally, ] I'll speak more about this when I discuss our diagnostics progress. Let me turn to slide 4 and provide some perspective on where we compete in proteomics today and how our core capabilities extend across the continuum from discovery and translational research to diagnostics. Quanterix is recognized as a market leader in ultra-sensitive protein detection with differentiated and highly reproducible proteomic sensitivity in fluids and more recently, tissue. However, we believe the near-term diagnostic potential of technologies is not fully recognized, particularly as early disease detection becomes more important across healthcare.
As you can see on this slide, Quanterix is a market leader both in blood and tissue proteomics as the only provider with differentiated leadership in ultra-sensitive blood biomarkers and high-plex spatial tissue analysis across the continuum. We start with Quanterix Simoa, the industry standard for low-plex, ultra-sensitive early detection utilizing blood samples for translational work and diagnostics, bringing the key benefit of reproducibility. On the tissue side, we bring Quanterix Spatial, which sets the bar for high-throughput discovery and translation efforts. As our primary markets in pharma and academia begin to recover, we are primed to be an enormous asset in enabling them to advance scientific discovery to the lab and clinic.
Let's move to slide 5, where we show our updated organizational priorities. We have three priorities. Number 1, laser focus on execution. We realize that we must regain credibility and the quickest way is to meet our commitments each quarter. Simply put, we must execute better. The leadership and structural changes that we're making are precisely designed to improve execution and we'll be relentless about driving better commercial execution, especially in our core research sectors. Number 2, pursue our strategic roadmap. We will focus on reinforcing our in vitro diagnostics or IVD strategy and strengthening our position in ultra-sensitive protein detection, thereby continually enhancing our competitive moat to accelerate revenue growth in our core business.
And number 3, build our Alzheimer's disease diagnostics business. We plan to accelerate our diagnostic investment in 2026 prudently with the goals of improving workflow, building lab infrastructure, and increasing our shared mind for our LucentAD with our key audience. Now, on the next slide, I'll share more details about executional changes. As I mentioned, we have a seasoned leader heading up our commercial organization. This leadership and a solutions-based approach to customers is designed to drive greater accountability and focus across Simoa, Spatial, and Accelerator. Our Chief Commercial Officer, Jim Gute, will be accountable for commercial execution across the portfolio, and he brings a strong track record of success leading scaled businesses and commercial organizations.
We're also pivoting our sales force structure. We're moving from a largely geographically-based model to a dedicated solution-based execution, working more closely with customers across all of our businesses. We're confident that this model will generate greater customer success and increase sales productivity. And our team is so excited about engaging with new and existing customers on this basis again. Now moving to the next slide. Let me share with you some thoughts on our streamlined strategic roadmap. Feedback from customers and collaborators led us to prioritize our Simoa HD-X platform and other investments both for research tools and for diagnostics, including new neurology markers.
We're incorporating learnings and enhancements from our next generation platform into the HD-X platform to guide overall development of the Simoa platform. Lastly, we're working diligently on our future 510(k) application for our HD-X platform as an IVD in 2027. As I mentioned, we expanded our assay portfolio with the launch of the Simoa Ultra-Sensitive Immunoassay for NPTX2, an important emerging biomarker of synaptic function. On the Spatial side, our key priorities for 2026 remain expanding our PhenoCycler-Fusion biomarker panels for discovery applications, and also releasing new reagents for the PhenoImager HT platform to better support clinical applications.
For instance, we launched two new products, the Spatial Molecular Barcoding kit for the PhenoCycler-Fusion, initially available through an early access program, and the Spatial Spectral DAPI 2.0 for the PhenoImager HT. Moving to our third priority, let me update you on our progress in building out our Alzheimer's disease diagnostics business. We're creating a strong foundation within the emerging molecular Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, and we're excited about recent developments to support our efforts. We've developed what we believe is the best-in-class multi-marker test, which provides quantitative biomarker readings for all patients versus 70% for the other available tests. And only 10% of our patients fall within the indeterminant zone compared to 30% of the competitive approaches.
Our value proposition focuses on reliability and reduced ambiguity, addressing the clinician's needs. We're also building on the infrastructure to support the growth trajectory of this business. We submitted a 510(k) application for our single-site, multi-analyte, algorithmic, blood-based biomarker test to the FDA, and we remain in productive dialogue with the FDA. And we're continuing to advance our efforts to drive adoption and increase mindshare ahead of the FDA clearance, including securing premium pricing of $897 for LucentAD Complete tests from CMS. And now, Anthem insurance coverage, with additional studies underway for use in payer outreach. Healthcare providers who treat Alzheimer's want a reliable, non-invasive test to drive earlier intervention of this terrible disease.
We firmly believe that we have the most comprehensive Alzheimer's diagnostic tests available today in LucentAD Complete. And we expect to garner meaningful market share as blood-based biomarker tests and continues to grow. In summary, as shown in the next slide, we believe Alzheimer's diagnosis and monitoring will increasingly rely on multi-marker tests that can deliver early detection and low clinical ambiguity. The lowest combination of ultra sensitivity, multiplexing and automation will power Quanterix to be the lead test provider in this space. Furthermore, Quanterix has a first in market advantage with our LucentAD Complete test that is commercially available with established CMS pricing.
Quanterix stands unchallenged in offering all the benefits of a multi-analyte immunoassay for Alzheimer's disease diagnostics, and this positions the company as a neurodiagnostic leader. Before I turn the call over to our CFO, I want to assure everyone that our entire team is committed to building a profitable and sustainable research tools business with market leadership in both Spatial and ultra-sensitive proteomics. We expect the actions that I discussed today will start to drive commercial effectiveness in the second half of 2026, but more impactfully in 2027 and beyond. We're not waiting for better markets. Instead, we're taking thoughtful and deliberate action to propel Quanterix to where the industry is going.
We're excited about our opportunities with a strong experienced management team leading the way to a brighter future for Quanterix. Now let me turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Jason Fessler. You know, Jason joined us in late May, and I'm already so pleased on how valuable he's been to me, the management team, and the board already. Jason.
Jason Faessler: Thank you, Everett, and good morning. Before I cover our financial performance, I would like to share a few observations from my first 45 days. First, I'm excited to be here at Quanterix. Everett has moved quickly to put the right leaders in place to drive better customer experiences and healthcare outcomes and put Quanterix on a steady growth path. In addition, Quanterix has a strong brand, strong customer relationships, and we are uniquely positioned in both our tools and diagnostic opportunities. I believe Quanterix is positioned for long-term success, and we now have the leadership to capture it. Moving now to Q2 and slide 12. Revenue for Q2 '26 was $32.9 million, lower than expected.
Our revenue grew year-over-year on an as-reported basis by 34% compared to Q2 '25 revenue of $24.5 million. When including pre-acquisition revenue from Akoya in Q2 '25, what I refer to as pro forma, total revenue declined year-over-year by 23%. I will cover details of our revenue performance on the next slide. Despite the revenue performance and volume in Q2, we managed our cash well in the quarter. Cash usage was $5.7 million in the quarter, and we ended Q2 with a cash balance of $96.9 million. On an adjusted basis, after excluding certain severance and integration costs, we reported adjusted cash usage of $4.0 million.
Including pre-acquisition cash usage for Akoya in Q2 '25, this represents a decline of $8.4 million. The company has taken significant steps as a part of its Akoya synergies and cost-cutting actions, which combined with improved collection activity enabled us to attain better cash preservation this quarter. On slide 13, I'll provide an overview of our Q2 2026 revenue performance. One factor in our year-over-year pro forma revenue decline was a 5% headwind driven by revenue pulled into Q2 '25 ahead of tariffs implemented last year. Excluding this impact, our APAC revenue of $4.5 million was only down high single digits. EMEA revenue of $10.3 million also declined by mid-single digits on lower consumables pull-through.
Finally, Americas was down significantly, mostly reflecting commercial execution, but also continued softness in academic and government spending. In Q2, Simoa revenue of $20.6 million declined in the low teens percentage, with a smaller decline in Simoa consumables, but year-over-year growth in non-Accelerator services. Our Accelerator lab services, which mostly falls under the Simoa product family, declined more than the company average on lower project sizes, as we saw in Q1 '26. One bright spot in the quarter is the significant increase in bookings in Q2 '26 for our Accelerator business. Spatial revenue of $12.3 million was down year-over-year across instruments and consumables, reflecting continued weak funding from U.S. Academic and Government markets.
Our Pharma CRO revenue of $14.2 million was down mid-teens percent year-over-year, but grew sequentially for both our Spatial and Simoa products. Academic and Government revenue of $18.7 million was down significantly in line with our Spatial performance. Revenue from diagnostics partners was $1.6 million. While Q2 instrument sales were lower versus prior periods, consumable volume grew for our single biomarker test from our diagnostics enablement partners. Thanks to new leadership in our diagnostics group, we are making progress in the field of diagnostics with academic medical centers, commercial reference labs, and the physician community, specifically in primary care. In addition, we are working with partners to expand the direct consumer experience in neurology.
Moving to the P&L, GAAP gross profit and margin for the second quarter was $12.7 million, or 38.5%. Non-GAAP gross profit was $15.8 million, a 54% increase from Q2 2025, and non-GAAP gross margin was 47.9%, an improvement of 600 basis points. The year-over-year improvement in gross margin was largely driven by Akoya acquisition synergies and cost cutting. Operating expenses for the second quarter of 2026 were $62.1 million. Included in operating expenses are approximately $30.4 million of costs related to acquisition, integration, separation, and purchase accounting. Notably, this includes a $26.9 million one-time non-cash write-off related to Akoya goodwill. This impairment is required for U.S. GAAP and was driven by macro factors and company performance.
This adjustment has no impact on operations or liquidity, and we believe the Akoya opportunity remains achievable once market conditions improve and our execution strengthens. The resulting non-GAAP operating expenses of $31.8 million in Q2 '26 were up $0.7 million from $31.1 million in Q2 2025. But reflecting the significant synergy cost actions over the last 12 months and when applying pre-acquisition expenses from Akoya to Q2 2025, our pro forma and non-GAAP operating expenses declined by more than $19 million. As Everett mentioned, we're pleased to finalize the Akoya integration effort in Q2 '26, with the completion of the ERP integration and our cost synergies finalized by Q1 '26.
Chief cost reductions and strategic roadmap realignment have allowed Quanterix to reallocate capital to drive sustained growth. We are prioritizing several investments, such as building out a dedicated commercial diagnostics team and sufficient infrastructure to manage our diagnostics partnerships. We have also made continued investments in our tools, commercial organization, and in our service teams to get closer to the customer. Our adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $10.0 million. Sequentially, this was roughly flat despite lower revenues versus the prior quarter. I will now turn to guidance for 2026 on the next slide.
Due to the Q2 revenue shortfall, we are revising our guidance for the full year 2026 and now expect to report approximately $142 million to $148 million of revenue rather than the previous $169 million to $174 million of revenue. In addition, we expect non-GAAP gross margins to be in a range of 48% to 50% compared to non-GAAP gross margins of 49% to 53% previously. We now anticipate achieving cash flow break-even in 2027 rather than year-end 2026 and expect to end 2026 with cash of approximately $80 million compared to about $100 million previously, and no debt. Finally, in terms of our quarterly cadence, we expect Q3 revenue to be flat to slightly above Q2.
And we expect that the significant commercial organization actions we are taking now will begin to drive increased revenues later in 2026, but more materially in 2027 and beyond. Based on our current plans, cash usage in the second half is expected to be double digits in Q3, which will moderate in Q4. I will now turn it back over to Everett for closing remarks. Everett.
Everett Cunningham: Thanks, Jason. We made meaningful progress in the second quarter, including strengthening our leadership team and preserving cash better than planned. And we're moving very quickly to address the impact of the Q2 revenue shortfall driven by execution challenges and continued market softness. We're taking immediate and significant action to address commercial performance, including reorganizing our teams and adding seasoned leadership to sharpen accountability, accelerate execution, and improve operating results in the second half and beyond. I'm very excited about the new leadership, and I intend to work closely with all of them to make Quanterix's team among the best in the sector. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to Mary to begin the Q&A session.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question is from Dan Brennan with TD Cowen.
Daniel Brennan: Maybe just to level set the guide, if you don't mind, just to start out. So when we think about the back half of the year, we got the top overall view from Jason sequentially, but could you break it down a little bit how you're thinking about instruments, consumables, and service, you know, as we go through the back half of the year? And then any color since you are breaking out Quanterix and Akoya in the Q, just would be interesting to see how those progress in the back half of the year, just to start.
Everett Cunningham: Yes, Dan, this is Everett. I'll let Jason take that before I do. I'm pleased with what Jason's done in his first two months. The finance team even got closer to the commercial team in terms of doing a robust, bottoms-up look at our pipeline, our funnel for each of these businesses, Spatial, our Simoa business, and Accelerator. I also think we're driving better forecast accuracy because of that deep dive, so we're confident in our new guide, but I'll have Jason break it out.
Jason Faessler: Sure, Dan, nice to meet you. So a few things I would add. We're not going to guide to the product lines, but what I would say is our second half, we expect a couple of pickups in Simoa versus Spatial. I think we're not expecting anything on the Academic/Gov recovery. So I think Spatial will lag compared to Simoa. And I think based on our new assay releases, I think we're expecting some pickup on the consumable side, but there definitely is a sequential improvement expected on the instruments as well. I think I'll cut it there.
I think the one thing I would also add is seasonally H2 is higher, so I think you would expect a bit of a pickup in the second half as well.
Daniel Brennan: Okay, obviously a lot in the prepared remarks. Maybe, Everett, just on Akoya specifically, I think Jason talked about at the very end, you know, once market conditions improve and execution improves on Akoya, I know there's a lot in your remarks about the commercial go-to-market and all the changes you're making. But specifically on Akoya, what would you say, how would you highlight what needs to get done there in terms of the improvement in execution?
Everett Cunningham: Yes, thanks, Dan. I'm optimistic about our Akoya Spatial business for a few reasons and Jason highlighted first of all our new launches. I've done over the last two months, guys, an intentional spending time with our customers. I've been in the field with field reps doing field rides globally. And what they've been telling me is, hey, the launch of new assays will give us momentum. So when I think about our PCF platform, we've launched the new PhenoCode molecular barcoding kit. We're already hearing from customers that it makes it easier for them to develop, which is right in our business space. On the PhenoImager HT, we've had new launches around our new ADC lung cancer panel.
And also I spent time in California a couple of weeks ago with one of our largest Spatial customers, Prelude DX, using our PhenoImager HT machine as the preferred platform for multiplexing immunofluorescent spatial diagnostics. So the technology is out there. We're getting feedback from customers that we're in the right place. In addition to that, we feel that the segmentation of our sales organization will pay dividends in the second half, will provide good sequential momentum. We have a legacy Akoya team that is out there. They know the customer base. They've been selling Spatial for decades. And what we're doing now is we're prioritizing that team to sell Spatial only to Spatial talent.
That's the feedback that I received from our organization, and we made the quick pivot and that should pay dividends in the second half.
Daniel Brennan: And then maybe one more on just diagnostics, and I'll go back into queue. I think you talked about $10 million in partner revenues last year and that's not a bad proxy for this year. I think you're expecting FDA in the back half of this year. Can you just update us on where that stands today? You're still really enthused on diagnostics obviously from the prepared remarks, you're investing a lot, you think you're differentiated, but just more, how do we think about the next, say, 12 to 18 months in diagnostics, either from revenue contribution, FDA, and then any other key milestones?
Everett Cunningham: Yes, thanks. Really excited about diagnostics. Again, when I got here back in January, I was intentional about ensuring that we had a diagnostics team dedicated to growing this business. I've actually invited our diagnostics leader, Geoff Albrecht, on the call. I'll have him say a couple of comments because this is what he's done 24/7 over the last three months. Let me just mention a couple things that I still feel really enthusiastic about. Number 1 is our differentiated blood-based biomarker test. We have a 5-marker, multi-analyte, algorithmic test that we're hearing from our customers gives them better answers, right?
Every patient gets a quantitative result, so 100% of patients get that, and this indeterminate zone of going down to 10%, that's just giving clinicians better answers. We're starting to see that pick up with our LucentAD test, quarter-over-quarter growth. We feel good about that business. We're in productive discussions with the FDA around LucentAD Complete FDA approval. And also our HD-X machine, we stated last quarter that we were going to be able to have that IVD ready in 2027. I spent time in Stuttgart, Germany, with our contract manufacturer that's working to upgrade that machine. And again, that is right on time.
So our early head start is continuing to play out and just the early blood-based biomarker acceptance in the field will only help us with momentum. But Geoff, anything else in your first three months?
Geoff Albrecht: Sure, Everett. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for the time here. Everett, I think you hit most of the highlights, but I think a few of the things that I'm particularly optimistic about. As we continue to scale this team, we're working with a number of partners on the front end and the back end regarding what we're doing with infrastructure, what we're doing with resources, what we're doing to simplify the process for clients, whether those clients might be academic medical centers, commercial reference labs, or physician clients, as Everett mentioned.
We're also continuing to scale this business smartly, prudently, but in a disciplined fashion in terms of how we grow the team and how we deploy that against some of the key resources. I'll close with one other thought, Everett. We did have the opportunity to go to the AAIC conference a couple months ago. We spoke with some of the thought leaders in the space. Their reactions, their responses to what we're doing in the space not only positions us well now, but it positions us very well for where we're going. We spoke with some of the key partnerships that we have with some of the people in the space, really resonating in the market.
So we're very bullish here, we're very optimistic about where we're going to go, and with some of the things you mentioned relative to the payer dynamics and some of the things to differentiate a decision making with the multi-marker assay, it's really going to resonate in the short term and the long term. So thank you for the time.
Daniel Brennan: Maybe I could take one last one, and just the free cash flow break-even getting pushed out to '27, obviously on the lower guide, makes sense. Is there a revenue number associated with hitting free cash flow break-even next year that you need, like we should have in mind?
Jason Faessler: Yes, Dan, one follow up on the diagnostics before I get to that. I did want to mention we are on track for growth ahead of the $10 million that we mentioned in Q1 for diagnostics. So that's a great sign based on the partnerships from last year. And that's also on lighter instruments in the first half. So I think there's a lot of reasons for excitement on the DX. And the test volume is ramping accordingly to the partnerships that we established last year and continue to establish this year. So I thought that was useful. And then back to your question. At this time we're not ready to talk about 2027 revenue.
But we are fully committed to cash break-even in 2027.
Operator: Your next question is from Kyle Mikson with Canaccord.
Kyle Mikson: So Everett, good to see all these actions that you're taking and all the changes and so forth to improve performance. But maybe just talk about why continue to focus on investing and establishing that diagnostics business if it's not going to pay any near-term dividends and you have this research tools business that continues to be pressured and challenged. And you could probably help improve that perhaps first to just kind of alleviate this cash burn issue potentially as well.
Everett Cunningham: Yes, thanks, Kyle. Our strategy is an 'and' strategy. Our research tools business is a very important business to be in. We differentiate when it comes to being in this space. When I think about our Simoa technology and hearing from customers, we deliver clinical grade, ultra-sensitive results, precision, reproducibility, which I keep hearing when I'm in the field. Reproducibility is critical in this translational and clinical setting. Having consistency from lot to lot, test to test, lab to lab is critical. In Simoa, we're right there. And then Spatial, listen, we're a high-plex proteomic platform for discovery, and also we play in the translational and clinical application.
So what we offer there in terms of our customers, they need Quanterix. We need to do a better job of executing our strategy, articulating our value prop, and we're going to do that with our new go-to-market. The other end is diagnostics, especially Alzheimer's disease diagnostics. Listen, Alzheimer's is a terrible disease. And like I said, I spent the last two to three months in the field talking to neurologists, talking to memory centers. They are thirsty for instruments, they're thirsty for solutions that can give them earlier detection of this disease.
And because we have a differentiated blood-based biomarker in LucentAD Complete, because we feel we have the instrument that will be IVD ready, and now we have a dedicated team focused on this, we're in the right place to grow Quanterix sequentially. So we're excited about both the research tools and the diagnostics opportunity.
Kyle Mikson: All right, got it. Thanks for that. And then on consumables especially, I mean, it makes sense that instruments would be down and everything. It's a tough environment. But on reagent revenue for Akoya, that was a smaller business for them historically, in the spatial consumables market this quarter had seen growth. So I'm curious what happened there. And then in Simoa, anything on pull-through you can have to talk about over there?
Everett Cunningham: Yes, maybe let me kick it off and hand off to Jason. Listen, our Spatial business, the space market has been facing headwinds, especially in U.S. Government and Academic accounts, constrained. Again, we're hearing this directly from our customers. Listen, our job is going to be, I keep getting back to this, we're going to execute better in the second half. I love the fact that we're now going to have singularly focused segmented representatives going to talk to customers that they've been talking to for decades. I think that's going to pay dividends. And that prioritization will definitely help us with not just instrument placement, but just as important as consumable pull-through.
So we have good, solid strategies and incentives to do that in the second half. Jason, I don't know if you want to add anything.
Jason Faessler: Sure, Kyle. I think what I would add is I think the Simoa consumables were a bit weaker, and that's likely linked to some of the execution challenges. I think we're excited about the tool and its capabilities. So I think we're excited. I think this is much more an execution issue and Everett's taking very decisive, significant steps here to impact the execution of the second half. So I think that's what I would add.
Kyle Mikson: All right, perfect. And then lastly, on the Anthem coverage for the Alzheimer's test, that was great to see. Obviously not really any impact revenue-wise from that for a while probably, but how does that maybe influence other commercial plans to grant coverage to those types of tests or other neurology tests, do you think?
Everett Cunningham: Yes, I mean, I'll have Geoff handle this in a second, but we're excited about the Anthem coverage of blood-based biomarkers, specifically our opportunity with LucentAD Complete. I think it justifies the importance of blood-based biomarkers, the fact that Anthem was a first mover. What I'm excited about is this is happening before our kind of scalable, broad-based reimbursement strategy that Geoff has in place. But Geoff, if you want to talk a little bit about Anthem.
Geoff Albrecht: Sure, Everett, thank you. And I think the Anthem position puts us in a nice situation to look to the other payers in terms of what's next. And I can say also, in conjunction with where we are with CMS, it puts a lot of the dominoes in line for what we're looking to do. Obviously, with Anthem being one of the larger payers, there's other payers out there of their size and significance that we'll be speaking with this about as well. But we think that as we move forward, we'll apply a dedicated resource against this for health plans. They will work with the local plans as well as the nationals.
And we think again, this first mover experience with Anthem is going to put us in a good position to line up some of the opportunity that we have there.
Operator: Your next question comes from Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners.
Puneet Souda: Maybe just walk us through, what are you assuming for Simoa versus Spatial and versus Alzheimer's in the full year guide? And I think the bigger question here is, why is there not risk for further guide cuts? Just given the macro backdrop we're in, the competitive positioning of the products you have versus core Simoa, Spatial launches are also coming in the market, and all of this is happening while the organization is undergoing somewhat of a transformation towards Neurology DX. So with all of these moving parts, maybe just give us a sense of your thinking in the overall guide cut and why should this be the last one?
Everett Cunningham: Yes, thanks, Puneet. I appreciate the question. Listen, Jason has come in short time, and I'm really happy with the robust nature now of us just digging in rep by rep, territory by territory, funnel by funnel. Spending time out in the field getting kind of what I would call just-in-time feedback on not just our offerings but the market, what customers are saying, I feel confident in our second half guide. I do. I also feel confident of the momentum that we're building in our diagnostics business, Puneet. Putting the right resources in place, we're having the right conversations, not just internally, but Geoff has accelerated partnership conversations with reference labs.
That will actually pay some dividends here in the second half, but most importantly in 2027. In addition to that, I like the leadership that we're adding. And this isn't new leadership to healthcare. I spoke about Jim who has decades of experience in capital equipment with his experience at GE Healthcare. Jim also led a big service business at GE Healthcare. And then just his background at Exact Sciences of establishing sales and marketing and operations discipline. I mean, he will absolutely hit the ground running on day one. And Geoff with the same background of growing our diagnostics business. These guys are seasoned veterans that I've worked with in the past.
So you combine the fact that we have differentiated instruments and technology, the fact that we're going to have a renewed focus on everyday sales execution, and then just been there, done that leadership that's going to drive day to day, we feel confident in our second half guide. Jason, I don't know if you want to add anything.
Jason Faessler: Yes, the one thing I would add, Puneet, is I really think that the productivity benefit from this reorganization of the sales team, I think we're excited. I think this was an effect that took place with the past alignment. I think we're excited about the potential and I think the team is excited about it as well.
Everett Cunningham: Yes, I'll add this. Lastly, this segmentation of what we're doing with our commercial organization, and how we look at our current talent, and the fact that I think that there's going to be less disruption, this is something that they've been asking for. They want to get deeper within their respective expertise, get deeper with customer interactions, and being able to just articulate their specified value prop, like Jason said, we're excited about the second half sequential improvement.
Jason Faessler: Maybe to your question on the guide. I won't guide to the specific platforms, but what I would say is probably the decline for Spatial continues to Q3, Q4, similar to the first half with more of a recovery on the Simoa side led by consumables with some sequential improvement in instruments. So that's some more detail.
Puneet Souda: Yes, that's helpful. And then look in the pivot to Alzheimer's, the Anthem, overall neurology diagnostics, I mean, could you talk a little bit about sort of how much of the tools business is how much of a core is that business? Within the life science tools business, how much of a core is Spatial versus Simoa? I mean, we're just getting questions around whether this is, given the pivot, how are you thinking about these two businesses longer term? Is this something that remains core to Quanterix longer term as well?
Everett Cunningham: Yes, thanks, Puneet. Our research tools business is absolutely core. We look to stabilize this business, get it back to flat, and then start growing it very soon. I think it's representative of the leader that I brought in. I mean, I brought in Jim Gute, who I've worked with in the past for seven years at GE and Exact. He is experienced in terms of bringing back discipline, sales productivity and growth. Jim will be responsible for turning our research tools business around. And I'm confident that Jim will do that. In addition, diagnostics is the same.
We've done, and we said this on previous earnings calls, we've made priority decisions here and that's freed up some resources and investments. And we're taking those investments and we are investing in diagnostics. So it's not like it's going to all of a sudden blow out our spending, but we're prudently, again, investing in diagnostics with partnerships, with leaders that we're bringing in, and really like what Geoff has done in the last two months with having a focus on scaling diagnostics in the right way to drive growth this year. And then you're going to see that take off in 2027.
Puneet Souda: Got it. And just last one for me, I mean, with the rapid CMS pathway, I don't know if you had a chance to look at that and see if there are any benefits here. Anything you can provide on the FDA side would be helpful too. Thank you.
Everett Cunningham: Yes, thanks, Puneet. And again, I'll have Geoff maybe talk about the CMS $897 differentiated price. Listen, we're in regular dialogue with the FDA. We believe that those discussions have been really productive, especially over the last month, that's enabling us to ensure that we get approval for our LucentAD Complete test somewhere towards the end of this year. Geoff, CMS?
Geoff Albrecht: Yes, super pleased with where we've landed with CMS relative to the multi-marker assay. I think it really just solidifies the fact that they see the value in terms of what we have with the algorithm, with the decision-making tied to the five assays. It's starting to take hold right away. I mean, this is relatively new to the space and this is getting out there in the physician community.
Initially when we were starting with this message we were talking to many of the academic medical centers, but as this discussion has evolved into the physician community with primary care, memory centers, neurologists, these are folks that are really appreciative in terms of what we've done with this CMS piece. So I think you've really just seen the beginning of where we're going to go with this. We'll report more traction on this in the very near future, but we're bullish about where this is going to go.
Puneet Souda: Got it. All right. Thanks, guys.
Everett Cunningham: Thanks, Puneet.
Operator: At this time, there are no further questions. With that, we'll conclude today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.
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