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 this year commercially launched its ARGO HT instrument 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?

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