Yuling Luo is a serial entrepreneur who has founded three significant companies in life science tools. Most recently, he is the founder and CEO of Alamar Biosciences, which commercially launched its ARGO HT instrument this year, as well as a powerful new panel to detect inflammatory proteins called NULISA.
Before founding Alamar, Luo was the founder and CEO of Advanced Cell Diagnostics, which was acquired by BioTechne in 2016. He was also a co-founder of Panomics, which was scooped up by Affymetrix.
Yuling recently lost his mother to cancer and feels the compelling case that we can do better with early detection. In founding Alamar, he realized this was really a technical problem.
He says that “liquid biopsy is quite popular, but the performance is limited. Detection for stage I cancer is 25 percent. That is not good enough. We need to get to 80 to 90 percent for it to really be meaningful. Why not use proteins for markers?” he asked. “There are hundreds of thousands to millions of copies of proteins. And proteins are more specific to tissue type.”
How does the new Alamar technology work and fit in the overall proteomics tools landscape? Yuling says it is more sensitive and able to detect 90 percent of the proteins in blood plasma, up from 50 percent with other tools. The new sensitivity comes from suppressing background noise 10,000-fold.
How is Alamar’s technology impacting research in the hot areas of Alzheimer’s and inflammatory disease? What is the overall opportunity with this new sensitivity? And what is the biggest challenge for the company over the next couple of years?
CSO
Dr. Willams serves as the company’s Chief Scientific Officer. He was previously Chief Medical Officer at Standard Biotools and at SomaLogic where he pioneered the discipline for discovery and validation of predictive, diagnostic and prognostic models using machine-learning applied to large-plex proteomics. 20 such tests were used for drug characterization, safety and efficacy when incorporated in clinical drug trials at Pharma/Biotech and 17 different multivariate tests were validated and translated into regulated healthcare uses. Prior to SomaLogic, Dr. Williams was at Pfizer in the UK and the USA as a clinical triallist in Translational Medicine, and subsequently as VP, Global Clinical Technology. He sat on the National Advisory Council for the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the Executive Committee for the FNIH Biomarkers Consortium, and worked with FDA and PhRMA on developing evidentiary standards for biomarker qualification. Dr. William’s medical training was in London, at Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School, followed by a PhD in medicine/physiology at the same institution and training in Radiology at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. Steve is co-inventor on 26 proteomics patents and author/coauthor on multiple foundational proteomics manuscripts.
CFO
Mr. McAnear serves as the company’s Chief Financial Officer. He brings over 25 years of operational and financial leadership experience across various sectors and was instrumental in taking 10x Genomics public in 2019, serving as its CFO for over five years. Mr. McAnear served for over 3 years as Tesla’s VP of Worldwide Finance and Operations, supporting landmark initiatives such as the Model X and Model 3 launches and Solar City acquisition. He also held various roles at Apple and J&J earlier in his career and served as a naval officer and aviator for over 9 years.