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Spotlight on Yuling Luo, PhD – CEO Alamar Biosciences January 2024

Alamar Biosciences Founder and Chairman Yuling Luo is the featured CEO of the Illumina Ventures Spotlight Series for January. Dr Luo is an innovator and serial entrepreneur who has spent his entire career building life science startup companies. His current endeavor, Alamar Biosciences, is a proteomics company empowering researchers to interrogate the proteome with unprecedented breadth, depth, and high-throughput precision.

In this 3-minute read Dr. Luo discusses his personal experience that inspired him to create Alamar Biosciences, and why he believes proteomics is entering its golden age, much like the scientific community experienced with the genomic revolution two decades ago.

What is your origin story? What led you to create Alamar Biosciences?

Dr. Yuling Luo:

Like so many others, I have been touched by cancer. My mom died of cancer seven years ago and I have lost other family members to this disease as well. That’s when I thought about starting up a company to develop technology that could enable the early detection of cancer and other diseases.

At the time, GRAIL had developed a test based on DNA liquid biopsy, but the technology was limited. It only had the sensitivity of detecting Stage 1 Cancer in around 25 percent of cases. From my perspective, that wasn’t enough, we need to get the sensitivity up to 80 or 90 percent for Stage 1 Cancers to really have an impact on cancer. That’s when I thought about using a protein liquid biopsy. Protein is much more abundant than DNA. Every cell has only two copies of DNA, but you have millions of copies of proteins in the cell. Proteins are also more specific, and as the building blocks of life, they are involved in virtually every disease, whereas changes in DNA are mostly applicable to cancer.

That’s when I realized, maybe it’s not biology that’s the limitation, but instead it’s the technology that’s limiting discovery. In other words, there’s a gap in current proteomic technology, and solving for it could be the equivalent of the impact that next generation sequencing had on genomics. We needed a technology that has the combination of ultra-high sensitivity detection of protein biomarkers in a highly multiplex setting. So, I founded Alamar with the mission to develop technology that can power precision proteomics and ultimately enable the earliest detection of cancer and other diseases.

What type of impact do you believe Alamar Biosciences will have on healthcare?

Dr. Yuling Luo:

Proteomics today is very much like genomics was 20-years ago. I believe proteomics is entering into a golden age where technology like NULISA are accelerating the rate of discovery. NULISA is currently the only technology on the market that has the combination of ultra-high sensitivity and the ability to analyze multiple biomarkers in a single assay. Because of this unique capability, it’s finally providing the performance and workflow that allows global researchers to do their proteomics discovery, translation, and diagnostics. I believe proteomics are really going to power the improvement of healthcare in the coming decades and we’re quite excited about that.

How does Alamar Biosciences stand out from the competition? In other words, what is your superpower?

Dr. Yuling Luo:

I believe it is our relentless focus on customers. If you look at all the top brands in virtually every industry, there's only two factors that truly matter. One is product performance, and the other is user experience. Apple and Illumina are two good examples. In product performance, we believe we have delivered a market-leading product. Our NULISA technology has best-in-class sensitivity, 10 to several 1000-fold higher than other platforms in the marketplace. In terms of user experience, we took a lot of thought into making the product very simple, and I'm a big believer that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Not only is it a “push of a button” platform with full automation, but we lyophilized all the key reagents to enable easy shipping and storage, consistent with clinical workflows. We also use monoclonal antibodies so that the customer can seamlessly translate from discovery to translation to diagnostics. Everything we do is with the future diagnostic application in mind. So, what makes us unique in the proteomics field is the combination of best-in-class performance as well as what we believe is the best user experience.

What type of opportunities does the Illumina Ventures investment create for Alamar Biosciences?

Dr. Yuling Luo:

The partnership with Illumina Ventures has been invaluable. In addition to the capital investment that we receive from Illumina Ventures, they also bring a tremendous amount of expertise and insight in genomics and diagnostics. We also benefit greatly from their industrial relationship with all parties, large companies as well as startup companies. It’s a great ecosystem. The other important aspect is that while we innovate on proteomics technologies, the business model we adopt is very similar to what Illumina did in the genomics space. Overall, it's been a tremendous partnership with Illumina Ventures.