Alamar Biosciences, Inc. (ALMR) May 12, 2026 Conference Transcript

Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, and we're very excited to be hosting our most recent addition to our coverage as of this morning, Alomar Biosciences. It's a recent IPO that we have the pleasure of being on the IPO and now covering. We're joined by Ewing and Justin, and the format of the presentation will be a, it'll be a presentation that may be some time towards the end for Q&A. So, Ewing, thanks so much.

Thank you for your introduction. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. I'm very excited about the opportunity to share with you how Alamar is establishing a new gold standard in protein detection and analysis. Proteins are the building block of life. Protein accounts for over 90% of drug targets. Proteomics has a huge potential to improve our understanding of health and disease, leading to better treatment. Despite all the great potential, this market remains to be largely untapped. We believe mainly due to the limitation of current technologies. Alamar is changing that. We have now developed a precision proteomics platform that can uniquely combine five critical features of analytical performance that we believe is important for precision medicine and early detection of disease. And we have launched this platform since the beginning of 2024. And over the last, maybe over two years, we have seen the fastest adoption ever in a polyamics company. And in particular, our platform has been extremely well adopted in the Alzheimer's disease research field. The researchers have been using our platform to understand high multiple biomarkers in Alzheimer's disease research and generating important biological insight. And they hope to translate those discoveries into future diagnostics. So with that, let's get started. This is the usual disclaimers. disclaimers. So, proteomics is the next frontier in how we understand the health and disease leading to better treatment, very much like what we have witnessed a generation ago in the genomics market. Proteomics provides a window into the living biology, the way static genome cannot provide so the information you get is far more informative and likely to be far more predictive of disease despite the huge potential this market remains to be largely untapped for the first time we believe alama has developed a platform that can unleash its full potentials Eight years ago, when I started this company with a couple of my colleagues, we set out on a mission to power precision polyamics to enable the earliest detection of disease. To me, this mission is very personal, and my family's experience with cancer reveals a truth that's shared by countless families that for cancer and for many other diseases, early detection is the most powerful intervention. Disease signals, now we know, are often present before a symptom occurs. What has not been issued is the tools that's available are not sensitive enough to detect those signals. And that is a problem I have devoted my career to solving. And today, we feel like we're well on our way to addressing these problems. So we have launched our Precision Polyans platform at the beginning of 2024. and over the last two years we have seen incredible adoptions so at the end of last year we have generated over 74 million dollar revenue second year into launch over 100 installed base and with the industry leading pull through of over 400 000 per annual instrument pursuits and we believe this represents the fastest adoption ever in the proteomics companies. And this momentum continues in Q1 this year. Our revenue nearly doubled over the last year and our growth margin also improved significantly and we're quite excited about the market ahead of us. What our platform is addressing is a huge Polyomics market, truly massive. Today, this market is estimated to be close to $50 billion, including both research and diagnostics. And this market expects to grow to $80 billion in the next 10 years. Within this, advanced polyomics, which represent the next generation polyomics technology, is the fastest growing segment of this market. Alamar has a highly differentiated technology. We believe we are well positioned to capture a significant share of this growth. So at Alamar, our motto is to be illumina for polyomics. We believe we have all the key ingredients to be that. What we have is a full solution of automated instrument on the left plus paired with the robust consumables as well as a software that can translate data into biological insight. We call this precision polyamics at the push button and the reason we say that is because we made the workflow extremely simple with less than 30 minutes hands-on time. Uniquely, we believe this is the only and the first solution that combines the ultra-high sensitivity or high multiplex analysis in a push-button workflow. What separates us apart from the rest of the proteomic solution is that this is the only platform that combines five critical pillars that powers precision polyomics. This includes the ultra-high sensitivity, the high specificity, the flexible multi-plus capability, the broad animal range, and seamless automation. No other solution has this combination. there's always trade-off. They either lack sensitivity, or the workflow is complicated, or they don't have specificity, or they cannot multiplex well. We believe we are the only solution that combines all five critical pillars together with really the very high performance. And this precision polyomics is important. It's important for precision medicine. It's important for early detection of disease. So how do we do this? We took a differentiated unique scientific approach. Unlike conventional approach that focuses on boost-up signals, we focus on, in addition, to suppress the background noise, to improve signal-noise ratio. Think of this as if stargazing, either in Yosemite or in the city of San Francisco. When you're in Yosemite, you can see a full sky of stars. maybe even distant galaxies. However, when you're in the city of San Francisco, you don't see any stars. The star light is constant. What's different is the contamination of city light. So we're basically taking a similar concept by dimming the city light so you can start to see the slides. So that's what we did. By systematically identifying where the noise is and come up with this proprietary Neolisa technology to suppress the background, we're able to achieve this 10,000-fold improvement in signal-to-noise ratio. Just to give you perspective, this is as if you go to an eye doctor to do eye exam to look at the eye chart. Now you can see the letters 37 miles away. So this is an incredible improvement in signal-to-noise ratio. I would believe this is one of the key modes of our technologies. Not only the approach is novel, but also it's difficult for others to replicate. It's protected by both issued pattern and over five years of trade secrets. If you look at the current polyamics landscape, almost every other solution, they only cover a part of the applications. For example, on one end of the spectrum, you have a highly multi-plugged solution like mass spec and other affinity-based approach. But they often lack analytical performance. They either lack sensitivity or specificity or workflow. It's very complicated. not well suited for translation and the future of diagnostics on the other hand you have a single-plex immunoassay technology that's been used routinely in clinical diagnostics underlying the 20 billion dollar diagnostic market but most of them the sensitivity is poor and they cannot mount the plugs so Alamos Neulizer technology, we believe, is the only platform that have this analytical grade-like performance across the entire multiplex level, from high-plex discovery to middle-plex translation to future single-to-low-plex clinical diagnosis applications. And this is what we call the all-in-one system that enables end-to-end polyomics. And the most important part is that because of the precision measurement of multiple protein biomarkers, we can correlate those measurements into a future clinical outcome. And that's what enables precision medicine and early detection of disease. The beauty of this business is that it's a typical razor-raiser-based model, so we can leverage the tried-and-chew proven playbook in launching a novel scientific tool where the instrument installment drives the recurrent high-margin consumable pursuits. So, we started our technology access program in the beginning of 2023, where we're getting samples from customers, and we deliver the data back. And the data have consistently shown an excellent performance of our results compared with other platforms. And then we launched the early access program in Q4 2023 to a selected KRL customers. Very quickly, we deal with confidence to initiate a full launch of the platform in January 2024. And since then, we have seen incredible adoption. And now we are in the phase of market expansion by launching new products and by developing new platform to cover different segments of the markets. As you know, last year is one of the most challenging year in the life science tool industry. Despite that, we have seen incredible adoption. Our revenue have grown from $25 million in the first year of launch to almost 3x to $74 million last year. And at this very early stage of adoption of consumable revenue already about 50 percent of the total revenues. Importantly, biopharma revenue contributed to 44 percent of the total revenue last year. Biopharma typically are more conservative. They don't adopt until they receive extensive validations. So we're very proud that every one of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies by 2024 revenue are our customer last year, and they are in a different stage of adoption curve. So let's look at one of the examples of a top 10 pharma's journey. they started the technology access program at the end of 2023. By the middle of 2024, they adopted the first instrument. And seeing the robust data in both discovery and translation, and they have since adopted many more systems across different geography and across different disease areas. So we're super encouraged by this pattern of adoption, by the validation we have seen by this customer, and we believe this pattern of adoption will continue to spread across the biopharma industries. The other thing that I'm excited about is the scientific output from the researchers, only eight or nine quarters into the launch. At the end of Q1, we were seeing 124 publications, both peer-reviewed publications as well as preprints, and they cover a variety of different disease areas, including neurology, immunology, oncology, and many of them are published in leading academic journals. Importantly, Alzheimer's disease alone have generated over 40 publications. So this breadth, as well as depth of publication, really highlighting the impact of our platform have in the research market. The other thing that I'm excited about is the adoption by the highly influential neural foundations for a variety of different neurological disease areas. And one example is ADDF. This is Alzheimer's Disease Drug Discovery Foundation. They provided $10 million funding, the largest funding they have ever given out to a project to help us to accelerate transition from the current RUO platform into FDA-cleared IVD platform, which we expect to submit for clearance next year. And other multi-million dollar collaborations are covering the biomarker discovery not only in the autism disease space, but also expanding to Parkinson's and other disease areas. So, within a little over two years, we have seen fast adoption by biopharmers and by rapid publication over a relatively short span of time, by endorsement, by leading parallels and the neural foundations, and we're just getting started. And we did this with very efficient commercial infrastructure. At the end of last year, we have about 25 sales, commissioned sales headcounts. So this translates to about $3 million per sales headcount, which I believe is also industry leading. Typically, I would expect maybe one and a half to two million per sales headcount. and we expect you know this kind of efficiency will continue as we continue to the growth market so in the near term there's a three obvious driver for growth one the driver is continue to expand our commercial infrastructure and the second driver is to develop a new products to cover different disease area deepen our current lead in the neurology and the inflammation and And third is leveraging the biological insight that our customer generated through their publications and collaboration with KOL to highlight a variety of different use cases that our platform enables. In addition to a precision proteomics platform that we built, another reason that underlined our success is we took a very conscientious approach for product market entry. We selected this targeted disease discovery area where, you know, a couple hundred plaques focused on particular disease area of interest, and we have achieved a tremendous amount of success in neurodegeneration, in inflammations. And now we're starting to move down to translation and to clinical biomarkers for clinical study, clinical trials. But this platform is also designed to have a capability for high-plex discovery. We believe over half of the current Plasma Polyam remains to be discovered despite the platform out there due to the lack of sensitivity of those platforms. So once we build the content, we can also go upstream to do those discoveries for large market applications. such as early detection of disease, minimal residual disease, et cetera. Clearly, the strong adoption of the platform is important. The next phase is about content expansion to develop product to cover different disease area. Here, we also have a lot of good lessons that we have learned. And one of the lessons we learned is to build those content in collaboration with leading KRL and the top pharmaceutical companies. So we launched our inflammation panel in January of 2024. Many of the markers in this panel, no other technology can measure. And we launched our CNS-120 marker for CNS disease in the middle of 2024. And very quickly, this become our flagship product. and this panel covers many neurodegenerative disease pathways including many critical markers that we need to measure or our customers need to measure in the blood and that's really a differentiation that we have we believe no other technology has this unique combination of ultra high sensitivity, for high multiplex analysis, to understand the disease heterogeneity. And disease heterogeneity is the key, and they underlie almost every chronic disease. We have seen that in cancer through genomics. People are starting to see that in Alzheimer's disease, and they're going to see that in every other chronic disease. So we're super excited about that. And we're moving down to translation. We launched homebrew assay kits. And this enables our customer to develop strategic assays for their own indication of use. For example, a drug target they do not want other people to know. And moving further down to clinical biomarkers, we have launched brain-derived P-tau-217 assays for Alzheimer's disease. And we also launched a 5-plex for Alzheimer's disease, the first time to be able to measure five of the critical biomarkers that are in a single assay that are all in the guideline of Alzheimer's association. and we continue to build. In March, at the ADPD conference, we launched the Neuro 220. This one contains 100 more biomarkers in addition to the one in the Sine disease 120. Many of the biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, there we have the largest repertoire of phosphatidyl assays. that both total as well as brand divide in a single panel we also have many proprietary unique panels 15 or so for Parkinson's disease that are supported by Michael J. Fox foundations and since the launch in early march we have seen incredible adoption of this platform i've never seen a fast adoption in my career maybe one of the reason is because they've seen the data from CNS 120. So expect that this one is going to do much better. So what differentiates us from the rest of the LifeSense 2 companies? For one, that we have an industry-leading push-through over $400,000 per annual push-through persistence. Second, we believe We will have a clear path towards future clinical diagnostics. The third, we have already seen a very fast adoption by the biopharma industry, already 44%, and this continues to grow a bit faster than academics. And our technology has already proven to be the leading tool for Alzheimer's disease, and is likely to spread across the neurodegenerative disease areas and our neuro 220 is geared for that to move beyond autism disease. Importantly as I mentioned at the beginning protein is the building block of life. They are involved in nearly every disease so in the coming years we're likely to see product to cover a variety of different disease. Launching a groundbreaking life science platform is not new to this team. In my last company where I left, ACD, we have pioneered spatial biology space and developed armoscope technology that many believe remains to be the gold standard in the industry. In the process, it has generated over 13,000 peer-reviewed publications. We have took the company from concept to commercial success. In the process, we delivered a strong return to shareholders after its acquisition by Biotechnia. So we built and scaled successful life science companies before. And over the years, we have accumulated additional talents with a complementary experience and expertise. So this team has an incredible track record of both execution and value creation. And we're quite excited about what lie ahead. So five strategic priorities will drive the future growth of this company. First, we'll continue to expand our commercial infrastructure to drive global adoption of our systems. Second, we want to continue to strengthen our leadership position in the neural space and in the inflammation space with the launch of Neuro220 first, but also expand beyond this to other disease area, such as cardiology, metabolism, oncology, or aging. Third, we're going to enable laboratory-directed tests and initial diagnosed tests with our platform, and we expect to submit for FDA clearance of our platform next year. Fourth, we also want to develop a lower-cost instrument that can tailor it to more of an individual life and the emerging lives. And many of you probably know, over the last few decades, there are platforms that have been adopted for more than 10,000 systems. There are still thousands of systems in active use, but sensitivity is hundreds of fold lower than what we have. So we believe this market is poised to be displaced once we have a lower cost system, once we have built the content. Finally, we want to build an ecosystem to enable our partners to develop their own high value differential diagnostic tests for whatever disease area of interest and whatever indication of use. And this is the model that genomics have done where they have created a multi-billion dollar genomic industry clinical sequencing already multi-billion dollar of the market so we have delivered a precision polyamics platform the only one that combines five critical pillars that we believe is important for precision medicine and early detection of disease. This is the only platform that covers the entire customer journey from discovery to translation to future clinical diagnostics. We've already seen the fastest option ever in a poorly arms company. We believe the solution is proven. The market is expanding. and we have a team that has track record of success. We believe we're poised to lead the next frontier of polyomics and we will assure a new era of understanding whole host of disease and improving healthcare. With that, thank you.

We have time for maybe one question if anyone wants to jump in. Yuling, Justin, thanks again. Maybe just sort of a high-level one, touching on what you called out on the end there. Catalysts going forward, key events to look for. You've had two years on the market with the platform, really strong commercial execution on RAM. You've got menu expansion coming in this year. Clinical feels like it's still a couple years away. What are more near-term catalysts investors can look for throughout 2026 just to be in confidence and continue trajectory? of the story in the rap there.

I think the key driver is content expansion. That's going to be the number one driver. The second driver is continue to expand our commercial infrastructure. The third one is really about leveraging the biological insight that's already generated by the publications, by our KRLs, to highlighting the variety of different use cases. Those are going to be the major driver for near-term growth.

All right, we are out of time, so we're just going to have to end up with that. Thanks so much, Yuen. Really appreciate it.