NeoGenomics at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth and Innovation

On Tuesday, 03 June 2025, NeoGenomics Inc (NASDAQ:NEO) participated in the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, presenting a strategic overview that highlighted both opportunities and challenges. The company emphasized its focus on community hospitals and innovative diagnostic solutions, while also addressing financial growth and operational efficiency.

Key Takeaways

• NeoGenomics aims to achieve cash flow positivity by 2026, with significant revenue and EBITDA growth projected for 2025.
• The company launched the PANTRACER product suite, enhancing its next-generation sequencing (NGS) offerings.
• NeoGenomics is strategically positioned between large clinical labs and Onco-tech companies, focusing on community hospital settings.
• The Pathline acquisition is expected to contribute to revenue growth and improve operational turnaround times.

Financial Results

NeoGenomics has demonstrated a significant financial turnaround, with revenue increasing from $484 million in 2021 to $660 million in 2024. The company reported a positive EBITDA of $40 million in 2024, a notable improvement from a negative EBITDA in 2021. For 2025, NeoGenomics projects revenue growth between 13% and 15% and adjusted EBITDA growth of 38% to 45%.

Operational Updates

The company’s strategy, encapsulated in the "NEO" framework, focuses on optimizing customer experience, enhancing community channel strength, and developing next-generation precision diagnostic solutions. Key operational initiatives include investments in sales force effectiveness, lab automation, and a unified laboratory information management system (LIMS) to improve efficiency.

Future Outlook

NeoGenomics is committed to driving sustainable growth through its clinical business, which accounts for 90% of revenue. The company plans to continue investing in community hospital and oncology practice relationships, aiming for operational efficiencies and margin improvements. The Pathline acquisition is expected to add approximately 200 basis points to revenue growth.

New Product Launch - PANTRACER

The PANTRACER product suite, which includes liquid biopsy and tissue solutions, is set to enhance NeoGenomics’ NGS therapy selection portfolio. The liquid biopsy component is scheduled for launch in Q3, while the tissue products, including those with homologous recombination deficiency (HRD), are available from June. An Evaluation Assessment Program (EAP) has been extended to gather additional clinical data.

Conclusion

For a deeper dive into NeoGenomics’ strategic initiatives and financial performance, readers are encouraged to review the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Andrew Brackman, Diagnostics Analyst, William Blair: All right, hi everyone. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us here. First day of the William Blair Growth Stock Conference. If you don’t know me, I’m Andrew Brackman.

I’m the diagnostics analyst here at William Blair. On my team, Maggie Bowie and Kate Jansen here in the second row. You see us around the conference, feel free to say hi. We’re happy to chat anything and everything diagnostics. With us today we have NeoGenomics.

We have the whole team here in the front row, but presenting is the new CEO, Tony Zuck. Tony, I’ll turn it over to you. Just one last thing. For a full list of research disclosures, please visit williamblair.com. Thanks, Tony.

Tony Zuck, CEO, NeoGenomics: Thank you very much. Well, good afternoon everybody. It is an absolute pleasure, Andrew. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and as well to William Blair for the support over the past few years. We truly do appreciate it.

By way of introduction, as Andrew said, my name’s Tony. I’m the CEO of NeoGenomics. I came on board just a few months ago, but I’ve had the great fortune of being associated with the company for the last two years as a board member. So I have seen the company grow and been a part of that for the last few years. And I could tell you, for me at least, the thing that drove me to NeoGenomics is the mission that the company has.

And I know every company has their placards on the wall. Every company says this is about patient health. What I can tell you is what I have found at NeoGenomics, and it was from day one, is that it’s a true spirit that runs across the 2,400 strong people of NeoGenomics, and it’s captivating. People do look beyond the specimen. They see that beyond that specimen is a real patient, and it’s more than just a job.

It’s a calling in many ways, because we know that these patients are in the fight of their lives. We understand that, and the best thing we can do to save lives is by improving healthcare and patient care, and we do that with actionable results as fast as we can possibly provide them to the provider as well as to the patient themselves. And so for me it was that force, that gravitational pull that got me to neogenomics, and now that I’ve been there for a few months, I’ve seen it in action every day. Now I will be making some forward looking statements, so please read at your leisure the safe harbor statement. For those of you that would like to go in more detail, of course you can get it from our website.

So with that, let me start to share some insights that I have found with neogenomics. First and foremost, let me start off with a terrible statistic. This is just to me amazing. One in two men and one in three women will face cancer in their lifetime. Think about that.

Let it sink in for a second. One in two men. Andrew, one in two. We’re gonna face cancer, one in three women. And if it’s not you directly, it’s gonna be a family member.

It’s gonna be a friend. Nobody gets out of this race. We all see it. We see the impact that it has on patients’ lives. Now the good news for all of us is that with the advances in treatment diagnostics and therapy selection, in recurrence monitoring, combined with the outstanding innovation that’s coming out of biopharmaceutical organizations, we’re seeing cancer patients live longer, healthier, much more productive lives, and we’re seeing many of them actually beat the statistics and go cancer free.

But it nonetheless is an eye opening statistic. Another one for me that’s equally important. The majority of these patients, those one in two men, those one in three women, eighty percent choose to be treated in their local community. Now if you step back and think about it, it makes perfect sense. Where you want to be?

You want to be where you have your provider network, where you have your health care system network, your family, your friends, your support network, the cost effectiveness of doing it locally. But I think oftentimes we have this vision. People are diagnosed with cancer immediately. They’re just running off to the top five or six hospitals across the country, and that is simply not the case. And so for us, this very much informed who we are and who we wanted to be.

And the essence of our strategy is to win in the community hospital setting. We are committed to making sure that patients would receive the same type of cancer care treatment options at Memorial Sloan Kettering, come to their local community, and it’s how we built our organization, and it is the key differentiator for us among other types of companies. Now if we step back and look at our positioning, we kind of sit between the large clinical reference labs to the left of us and the Oncotechs to the right. And I would tell you, we like this positioning, and we like it for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we know that we can drive sustainable and profitable growth from this position because we have over 500 plus test offerings, and so we do have a continuum of care offering by being a pure play oncology company.

So we like that. We also have invested for years in the community setting. So our representatives, our entire organization was built on that premise of serving the community hospitals. So we have very deep relationships with the pathologist community and in heme cancers. We’re able to build upon that, so we believe that we can drive strong revenue and be profitable at the same time with this type of focused strategy.

In fact, you can do both. You can drive revenue and in fact you can be profitable. And I think the management team here at NeoGenomics has proven that very fact. Now that one in two men, that one in three women that will develop cancer over time, There’s an offshoot of that, and unfortunately it translates into a pretty large and attractive market when it comes to cancer diagnostic testing. Now if we look at our own genesis as an organization, we started in that segment diagnostic testing.

And you can see it’s a large market of about $12,000,000,000 but it’s very heavily penetrated at about 70%. So you could say, well, Tony, your ambitions are to achieve double digit growth. The market’s only growing seven to eight. Why are you so confident that you can in fact achieve this outside growth? Well, in that market, it’s diagnostic testing.

The 12,000,000,000 penetrated at 70%. Warren’s commercial teams continue to drive share, and their modalities continue to drive share and growth even in that very crowded segment. But we know organizationally it’s not where we can stay longer term, and so strategically we know we have to move more to the right. We have to move into the therapy selection area which we see again is about a $13,000,000,000 market and that penetration rate is only at about 35%. And so it affords us still a relatively good and healthy runway for more innovative product offerings like the NGS offerings that we have.

So there’s opportunity for continued growth in this segment. And of course, we look further to the right to the MRD marketplace, which some estimates have it as high as $30,000,000,000 and that penetration rate is only between the 5% to 8% level. And so people ask which markets do you anticipate competing in over time? MRD is certainly one of them because we see significant opportunity, we see significant growth potential, and it’s a relatively low penetration rate. And the thing I would ask you to consider is remember these penetration rates are total penetration rates, so imagine what it’s like in the community setting versus just the pure academic setting.

And so these innovations take time to catch up. And so we are very committed to entering this space and bringing offerings in MRD and therapy selection. And that’s how we continue to fuel our double digit growth over our long term plan. Now just to give you a little bit more insight on why we think we’re so well positioned organizationally. Again, we’ve taken to heart that if you’re going be a leader in oncology diagnostics and if eighty percent of the patients are going get treatment in the community setting, then we have to have a footprint, we have to have capabilities and reach to be able to deliver that outstanding service at the community level.

So this is just an example of smatterings of our footprint. There are many, many more, but it gives you a sense of how we have invested to ensure that we can deliver to the community hospitals and to the community oncology practices so that in fact we can realize that promise of very fast turnaround times, giving them the information they need while they’re in the fight of their lives. Now we also acknowledge that technology typically starts in the academic center, but adoption goes into the community. And so if you’re going to be effective in this business, you have to have roots into the community to be able to drive adoption. If you step back and look at what the NeoGenomics team was able to do in 2024, you can see to the left side, well, we supported 700,000 patients in 2024.

That was done through over 4,000 plus accounts where we have relationships across the cancer care spectrum. I’ve shared with you again our portfolio of over 500 plus tests so we can offer continuity of care for oncologists and community oncologists while at the same time giving them a way to reduce vendor selection. And you see 100,000,000 data points generated in 2024 alone. So our outreach into the community is certainly working, and it’s giving us a point of competitive advantage that we’re going to talk about in just a moment or two. So now that you have a high level of the market, you see where the market’s at we are currently in and the markets we want to more formally penetrate.

Let’s talk about some of the strategic drivers for NeoGenomics. I’ve lumped our strategic drivers into three big areas. I highlight with the N, the E, and the O for Neo. Now we can talk about these in any order we want because they’re not linear. We are doing all of these things at any given time across our business.

So let’s start at the foundation, the O. The O for Neo means optimize and win the customer experience. Now for us, that is our competitive strength. We have invested heavily in the community hospital setting. We continue to invest now in the community oncology setting because those deep relationships do pay dividends.

And so winning the customer experience for us is job one. So what does that mean? We continue to invest in our sales force effectiveness work, sales force efficiency work. We continue to invest in our labs. We are now moving towards a one LIMS system, which we can then move and shut down eight legacy systems.

That gives us a degree of efficiency that we didn’t enjoy before, and it enables us to have industry leading turnaround times. Warren and his team are continuing to look at new ways in the lab automation, etcetera, so that in fact we are better suited to meet the needs of our customers at the community setting because win the customer experience for us is job one. We can look at the E. For me, that’s enhance our community channel strength. I’ve said to you now on a few occasions, I believe one of the competitive strengths for neogenomics is this community presence and the relationships that we have.

To me, that’s a leverageable asset. So what can we do to further optimize that strength? Well, we’ve already shared a few of those examples that you’ve seen put into practice through some very effective, interesting partnerships. The adaptive partnership comes to mind where we don’t have a must be invented here mindset. If we can find a way to augment our portfolio and create value for NeoGenomics while simultaneously creating it for a partner, we think that is a great way to leverage our strength in the channel.

We recently made an acquisition for a geographic expansion in the Northeast. We can take our strength, we now can build those capabilities out in the Northeast where we didn’t have the same ability to meet turnaround times. Now we have a local lab. We can build those turnaround time efficiencies back into the business and by definition then start to pull the rest of the portfolio through. So I see a world for us, and Andrew, you and I have talked about this a little bit, where we want to position ourselves to be a strong partner and a partner of choice.

And just as interesting aside, we just came off of ASCO, and historically at ASCO I would spend my time going to the scientific exhibits, what’s new, what are people doing. We’d spend a lot of time with customers. I could tell you at ASCO this year, I was dominated with partner conversations because people see the opportunity and how they might more fully leverage our strength in the channel. So we want to leverage that. And then as I mentioned before, we need next generation precision diagnostic solutions, the N.

There, we’re focusing our own R and D efforts. We’re putting a renewed emphasis in that space. Our organic efforts are being focused in MRD. But again, we are wide open and embrace business development and our own internal R and D as synonymous. We just want to make the right solutions that are going to deliver the best outcome for patient health, and by doing so, we can limit our own R and D spend and we can take advantage of opportunities in partnering that yield even incremental advantage for both companies.

And so these are our drivers, and again, we call them Neo because it reminds us of who we are as a company. Now if you step back and you look at the broader R and D activities, again as I had mentioned, we are not naive to the fact that most innovations start in the academic center, and they drive the initial uptake of these products. We truly appreciate that. But while the initial testing and use comes out of the academic centers, if you want real utilization, you have to drive it into the community. And that takes time and effort, and that’s where NeoGenomics comes into play.

We leverage these great strengths that come out of academia. We then leverage our footprint in commercial so that we can begin to drive adoption of some of these innovative technologies and drive them further up the adoption scale, and by doing so, we start the flywheel effect of how we can help influence the R and D outcomes of the future. What do I mean by that? Well, as we’re driving increased utilization in the community, we can take learnings from those community centers. They have to practice against guidelines.

They practice against real data generation, health economics data. They have different concerns than perhaps the academia would have, and so we’re able to leverage our own teams. For example, our oncology data services. Remember, 100,000,000 data points are generated in a given point of time. Remember that these innovations have to continue to be cycled through.

We can take those learnings and then we can again inform our own R and D activities and with ODS and our pharma team, we can influence what pharma is doing as well. So all of a sudden, this flywheel effect is taking root. We’re becoming an accelerant to the process and the outcome is that we’re now creating product opportunities that don’t just serve academia, but they’re also taking the needs of the local community into effect. So we think we play a key role here, and we want to continue to play a key role there. Now, I did mention just briefly ODX, our oncology data solutions, as well as our pharma segment, so let me just spend a moment on that.

The two combined are our non clinical part of our business. They only represent about 10% of our business, and so economically it’s not a big driver for us, but it is very much a strategic driver for us. And so we see the value that can be created here while we are also looking to monetize and grow that business. But again, to start us off and just ground set, relatively small percentage of our core business. And if you look at Oncology Data Solutions, what are they doing?

They’re taking that 100,000,000 data points that we’ve been able to generate. It’s a large data set. It’s robust. It’s de identified data. It’s AI enabled to capture, allowing for partnerships that also inform algorithms for ongoing R and D activities, and we begin to create collaborations to investigate even new opportunities for future studies.

On the pharma service side, we have custom assay development capabilities and validation expertise. We could do anything, as you can see, from support across all stages of pharma drug development, and it’s an opportunity for us to stay at the forefront of innovation that’s happening in the pharma sector and to stay informed along the way that, again, we’re helping that customer, but at the same time, we’re staying current with the recent innovations. From a business perspective, we shared that we’ve faced some macro headwinds in the pharma business, and so we’ve had some declines in that business, but again, strategically, we’re very committed to this space because we think over time, it can still be a very good contributor, both revenue and margin growth over time, and so we’re going to continue our efforts in the pharma space. Let’s talk a little bit about our sustainable growth through clinical. Now, with our clinical business, this again is 90% of our business, and it is probably the most important asset that we have within neogenomics.

You can see that because of the efforts that have been made for many, many years, we continue to build out those relationships in the community hospital. We’re building out the same types of relationships now with community oncology practices. It’s delivering very real results for us. If you just look to volume, we’ve had 8% year on year growth relative to volume, which is outstanding. NGS, which is a big growth driver for us in Q1, it grew approximately 18%, and this was ahead of market growth.

We anticipate that growth rate will continue to drive throughout the remainder of this year. We’re also confident that when our own R and D activities are positive or through business development, we get access to new technologies, our sales force is more than capable to drive that growth throughout the business. And our proof point for that, five of our recently launched NGS tests generated 22 of our clinical revenue in Q1. So this transition from diagnostic to therapy selection, you can see, is also very real for us, and it’s taking shape as we sit here today. Upon our sales force, as I said, we’ve expanded our sales force to 140 sales reps, the emphasis being in the oncology practice setting, so that we build that same strength there that we enjoy in the hospitals.

We’ve had some interesting partnerships. I mentioned briefly the Adaptive partnership that I think will begin to roll out in the second half of this year. We think that’s a creative way for both companies to benefit from their existing sales forces, but in complementary ways. We’ve also made some geographic acquisitions. I shared one with you.

The Pathline opportunity that we took advantage of. We acquired Pathline. It’s effective April 1, and with that acquisition, it gives us a stronger footprint presence in the Northeast Region. Now that becomes important to us because certain tests like flow need rapid turnaround times, and by purchasing the lab we can then take advantage of those rapid turnaround times that we couldn’t quite service from Fort Myers, right? But by doing it up in the Northeast, we can now meet customer needs there, and the added beauty is they don’t do their own NGS testing in the lab, and so over time now, we can use that presence to build out our own portfolio and drive that business in the Northeast, similar to what we have seen our market share penetrations to be in other markets where we have this advantage, like in California and Florida.

And so I thought it was a really good acquisition that the team outlined and then they executed against because it’s a phenomenal opportunity for us. We’ll talk about the impact it could have just in our long term growth trajectory in just a moment. Now, let’s talk a little bit about PANTRACER, and I’m happy to talk about it because speaking of tests, this past weekend at ASCO, in Chicago, we unveiled our newest product suite, PANTRACER, which includes liquid biopsy, tissue, and tissue with HRD. Now this product suite is the next generation of our solid tumor NGS therapy selection portfolio. It’s been redesigned, it’s been redefined, and in our mind, we’re going to relaunch it as part of our new flagship oncology portfolio.

It’s not just a name change, though. For us, it’s a strategic repositioning that reflects how we want to penetrate this precision oncology marketplace. This portfolio is designed for solid and liquid to work together, empowering oncologists to give them actionable genomic insights so that they can be taking confident, real time decisions that’s best for their patients. The tests can be ordered independently. They can be complementary, again, up to what the provider believes is in the best interest of that unique patient.

Most importantly, from a business perspective, this fills the gap in our product portfolio that our customers were asking for. They see the opportunity to have vendor reduction. They don’t want all these vendors constantly calling on them, so if they have an opportunity to have an outstanding suite of products from NEO combined with our other 500 tests, they see that as a big win for their business as well. Now I’m happy to share that based on the feedback we’ve received to date on our Evaluation Assessment Program, or our EAP, for pan tracer liquid biopsy, We’re extending the program for a limited time, making it available to any provider who would like to experience this high performance assay. The broader program is going to help us validate the insights gained from EAP that have been clinically relevant in shaping a more compelling product profile and our overall competitive position.

So from a launch timing perspective, pan tracer liquid biopsy will now launch in Q3, while pan tracer tissue and pan tracer tissue with HRD will launch in June. So it’s an exciting opportunity for us moving forward. Let’s talk a little bit about our financials. Well, we’re very proud of this. If you look to the left side, you can see that back in 2021 to show you the transformation this company has gone through over the past five years Back in 2021, we had sales that were approximately $484,000,000 but you can see the EBITDA was minus, a negative.

Go just three years later to 2024. We’re generating revenue of $660,000,000 plus and a positive EBITDA of $40,000,000 I think that is just a phenomenal accomplishment and it shows the financial discipline that’s been brought into the company. So I tell you, you don’t have to make a choice between growing revenue and growing profit, in fact, you can do both, and it is our plan over time for 2026 to be cash flow positive. I think Jeff and the entire team there have done a phenomenal job, and we’re going to build upon that. And that momentum continues.

If we look to this year, we expect our revenue to be a growth of another 13% to 15%, so double digit growth, and the adjusted EBITDA up another 38 to 45%. So strong performance across the business and things that we think we can drive it long into the future. Now speaking of that, why? Why do we think we can drive it into the future? Well, earlier this year, we drove a guide.

We increased the guide from 12 to 13%. Andrew, we get the question quite a bit, why would you do that, right? Well, the reality was in 2023, you can see we grew the business 16%. In 2024, we grew the business 12%, and that was in the face of rather significant headwinds on the pharma side. And so our core business continued to grow quite nicely.

We see higher volumes than we’ve ever seen on our clinical side, and we also knew that business development tuck in, Pathline, we were already on the five yard line with that. We knew that was coming. The Pathline acquisition alone offers us approximately 200 basis points of this growth of the 12% to 13%. And so one of the whys were we saw the strength of the business, we saw the Pathline acquisition, and we thought it was reasonable and appropriate to give this guide of 12% to 13%. We also saw opportunities ahead.

We were investing in our sales force. As we’ve talked about, we’ve invested more in the oncology side of the team. The full effect of that won’t even be seen until the latter part of this year, but it will be seen. We are quite confident of that. We have new product offerings like you’ve just seen, the pan tracer family of opportunities.

We also are going to continue to find operational efficiencies. We mentioned the LIM system. That’s just the start. We believe there’s continued efficiencies to be found for margin improvement across the business, and so we see where we can continue to drive and grow the business over time. And so we’re quite optimistic about what the future holds for NeoGenomics.

So I’ll just summarize and say I found the company to be exhilarating. I love the passion that our employees have. I think we have a very focused strategy of winning in the community setting and the community environment. I think we are poised well for next phase of growth as we own our own R and D activities combined with business development, and I think it’s an exciting journey for us to take, and hopefully our investors will see the same. So I’ll stop there, Andrew.

I do appreciate the time. Thank you all very, very much.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.