Proteins to the Rescue: How Alamar Biosciences Is Improving Early Disease Detection
For serial entrepreneur Yuling Luo, PhD, Alamar Biosciences is the culmination of decades of scientific work and a personal passion to eradicate cancer. He’s raised $250 million to date to commercialize his novel approach to protein detection, which has immediate applications in Alzheimer's disease.
Written by Logan Plaster
Proteomics
If I told you that a company called Alamar Biosciences was the new gold standard for protein detection, as they proudly state on their website, you might have questions. Unless you have an advanced degree in proteomics, the study of proteins, you probably have all the questions. But this is a startup story that could bring hope to millions of people worried about getting Alzheimer’s or cancer or any other disease, so it’s worth getting into the details.
First, a word about proteomics. Over the last few decades scientists have come to appreciate how proteins are produced and transformed under different conditions. Understanding how proteins change in the presence of certain diseases has opened the door to a new method – and a new hope – for early disease detection. The idea is that if we can detect and evaluate the proteins in a blood sample at the right level of accuracy, we can see the signs of a disease long before there are physical symptoms, allowing us to intervene early.
The field of proteomics is relatively young and full of promise. But there have been foundational challenges to the technology that have kept scientists from achieving the level of accuracy they want in protein detection. To oversimplify it, the problem is too much noise distracting from the signal. Yuling Luo, PhD, the founder of Alamar Biosciences, likes to use the metaphor of the night sky to explain the problem.
“If you look at the sky in San Francisco you're not gonna see a lot of stars,” says Luo, who founded Alamar in 2018. “But if you go to Yosemite you’ll see a sky full of stars. The light of the star is the same; the difference is the environment. There’s light contamination in the city.”
Luo had a theory. What if he could turn off the lights in San Francisco, metaphorically, and let those proteins shine?
Origin Story
Most successful health tech founders share common attributes – it turns out the secret to success isn’t so surprising. For Yuling Luo, it’s a triple threat of experience, funding, and passion.
Luo is a scientist-founder who built three successful life science companies. All three businesses were acquired, giving him the full entrepreneurial experience, from concept to exit.
In terms of funding, Luo had two major things going for him. First, he had breathing room.
“Because of my previous acquisitions, I'm more free to take on a more ambitious and personal project,” says Luo. His acquisitions also gave him the confidence of a ready network of investors, people he’d worked with over the course of three successful deals, who he could tap when the time came to scale his next venture.
Finally, and most importantly, Luo had the passion for health transformation. Cancer has been a part of his family for years. He lost his grandmother, his grandfather, and his father-in-law to the disease. In 2024 his father was diagnosed as well. But it was his mother succumbing to cancer in 2017 that flipped a switch in his mind. Too many families had suffered like his. It was time to put his experience and funding to work to change how cancer is detected, treated, and cured.
In Search of a Breakthrough
The Alamar journey started with a deep scientific curiosity. Luo was familiar with the world of DNA liquid biopsies, which can help in cancer detection, but he wasn’t satisfied with their accuracy.
“They’re only about 25% sensitive to early-stage cancer. I didn’t think that was good enough,” says Luo. “We need to move early-stage cancer detection to 80 or 90% to meaningfully impact people’s lives.”
Luo had the theory that the answer was in the study of proteins, and in the process of reducing the “noise” that was degrading the signals, but in order to prove this he had to find the right scientific collaborator. After diving deep into the research, he ended up at a scientific meeting listening to a presentation on antibody engineering by Yiyuan Yin, PhD.
Pretty quickly, Luo and his longtime business partner Steve Chen identified that Yin was the right person for this project. At a fateful lunch at a Chinese restaurant near the San Francisco airport they pitched her the idea of leaving her comfortable career and throwing her lot in with them, on an unproven concept.
It was risky, but she saw the vision and believed it was possible. So Yin came on as a co-founder. For the two years that followed, Luo worked with Yin and a small team of scientists to prove the feasibility of their idea – this novel way of improving the accuracy of protein detection. In 2020, they proved it worked. The study was small, but it was enough to get attention from the right people. Luo was able to raise a $30M series A. It was time to scale.
Since those early studies Alamar has grown from five employees to 140, and from a $30M series A to $250M total raised to date. Today, Alamar Biosciences is successfully doing exactly what Yuling Luo dreamed it could do – reduce the noise in a protein sample and purify the signal by manipulating antibodies.
“We suppressed the background noise by as much as ten thousand fold,” says Luo. “That's how we make this a best-in-class technology. Our sensitivity is about tenfold higher than the current sensitive leader and about two hundred fifty fold higher than other high multiplex protein detection technologies. I believe our technology is going to break open the proteomics market.”
Next Steps
As a protein-analysis technology, there are a myriad potential applications of Alamar’s platform. However, focus is key to any go-to-market strategy, and Alamar has decided to use Alzheimer’s disease as a way to move from concept to diagnostic tool. Alamar recently received $10M from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) to support this work on early Alzheimer’s detection.
Part of Alamar’s business model will be to provide their proteomics platform for researchers to work on detecting biomarkers for specific disease states, like Alzheimer’s, spinning out their research into FDA-cleared diagnostic tests that can be commercialized. They’ll also use their platform to help pharmaceutical companies develop better therapies and cures.
In the end, for Luo and his team, it all comes down to personalized, precision medicine – giving the right medicine to the right patient at the right time. As complicated as the technology can seem on its face, the end goal couldn’t be simpler: help families just like Luo’s get the life-saving care they need sooner.
We’re excited to have Yuling Luo and the team at Alamar Bio join StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community.
Connect with Alamar Bio via email
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Published: Jan 30, 2025
