QBI presents a seminar with Yuling Luo, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Alamar Biosciences, Inc.

Dr. Luo has spent his entire career building life science startup companies as an innovator and serial entrepreneur. At Alamar Biosciences, he is the lead inventor of the NULISA™ technology and spearheads the company’s reinvention of immunoassays to enable ultra-sensitive and highly multiplexed protein liquid biopsy analysis for early detection of disease. Prior to Alamar, Dr. Luo was the visionary and inventor of RNAscope®, a breakthrough molecular detection technology that has pioneered spatial biology and become the gold standard in RNA tissue imaging. As the Founder, President and CEO of Advanced Cell Diagnostics (ACD), he led the company from concept to successful product launch and commercialization.Under his leadership, ACD became one of the fastest growing life sciences companies, and was acquired by Bio-Techne in 2016.

Before ACD, Dr. Luo was a co-founder of Panomics (formerly Genospectra), a life science company that was acquired by Affymetrix in 2008. Prior to Panomics, he was one of the earliest senior scientists at Exelixis, now a NASDAQ company. He also co-founded and served as chairman of the board of Avida Biomed, which was acquired by Agilent in 2022. Dr. Luo is also a co-founder and board member of Attovia Therapeutics and a Venture Partner of Illumina Ventures. He has published numerous research papers in top peer-reviewed journals and his inventions are the subject of over 30 issued patents.

Talk Title: NULISA and Its Applications in Alzheimer’s Disease, Cancer, and Autoimmune Disease Research

The blood proteome holds great promise for precision medicine but poses substantial challenges due to the low abundance of most plasma proteins and the vast dynamic range of the plasma proteome. Dr. Luo's group address these challenges with NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay (NULISA) technology, which improves the sensitivity of traditional proximity ligation assays by ~10,000-fold to attomolar level. A 250-plex inflammation panel and a 120-plex CNS disease panel highlighted NULISA’s superior sensitivity in detecting biologically important low-abundance biomarkers in patients with autoimmune diseases, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. The 120-pex CNS disease panel measures neurologically important biomarkers such as pTau217, 181, 231, Abeta 40/42, GFAP, NfL, TDP43, ApoE4 and many other emerging biomarkers, all in one assay using 10 uL of plasma or CSF, providing the research community for the first time the ability to comprehensively profile the molecular heterogeneity of neurodegenerative diseases. Fully automated NULISA makes broad and in-depth proteomic analysis easily accessible for research and diagnostic applications.

Host: Kirsten Obernier