Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, we're very excited to be hosting our most recent addition to our coverage as of this morning, Alamar Biosciences. It's a recent IPO that we have the pleasure of being on the IPO and now covering. We're joined by Yuling and Justin. The format of the presentation will be... It'll be a presentation. There may be some time towards the end for Q&A. Yuling, thank you 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.
We have launched this platform since the beginning of 2024, and over the last little bit over two years, we have seen the fastest adoption ever in a proteomics company. 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. With that, you know, let's get started.
This is the usual the disclaimers. 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. 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 Alamar has developed a platform that can unleash its full potential.
Eight years ago, when I started this company with a couple of my colleagues, we set out on a mission to power precision proteomics to enable the earliest detection of disease. To me, this mission is very personal. My family's experience with cancer revealed 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 symptoms occur.
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. Today we feel like we're well on our way to addressing these problems. We have launched our precision proteomics platform at the beginning of 2024, and over the last two years we have seen incredible adoptions. At the end of last year, we have generated over $74 million revenue, second year into launch, over 100 installed base, and with a industry-leading pull-through of over $400,000 per annual instrument pull-throughs. We believe this represent the fastest adoption ever in the proteomics companies. This momentum continues in Q1 this year.
Our revenue nearly doubled over the last year, and our gross margin also improved significantly, and we're quite excited about the market ahead of us. What our platform is addressing is a huge proteomics market, truly massive. Today, this market is estimated to be close to $50 billion, including both research and diagnostics. This market is expected to grow to $80 billion in the next 10 years. Within this, advanced proteomics, which represent the next-generation proteomics 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. At Alamar, our motto is to be Illumina for proteomics. We believe we have all the key ingredient 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 software that can translate data into biological insight. We call this precision proteomics at the push of a button. 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-your-button workflow. What separate us apart from the rest of the proteomic solution is that this is the only platform that combines five critical pillars that powers precision proteomics. This includes the ultra-high sensitivity, the high specificity, the flexible multiplex capability, the broad dynamic 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 very high performance. This precision proteomics is important. It's important for precision medicine, it's important for early detection of disease. How do we do this? We took a differentiated, unique scientific approach. Unlike conventional approach that focus on boost up signals, we focus on, in addition, to suppress the background noise to improve signal-to-noise ratio. Think of this as if star gazing, either in Yosemite or in the city of San Francisco. When you are in Yosemite, you can see a full sky of stars, maybe even distant galaxies. However, when you are in the city of San Francisco, you don't see any stars. The starlight is constant.
What's different is the contamination of city light. We're basically taking a similar concept by dimming the city light so you can start to see the stars. That's what we did. By systematically identify where the noise is and come up with this proprietary NULISA 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. This is incredible improvement in signal-to-noise ratio. We believe this is one of the key moat of our technologies. Not only the approach is novel, but also it's difficult for other to replicate. It's protected by both issued patent and over five years of trade secrets.
If you look at the current proteomics landscape, almost every other solution, they only cover a part of the applications. For example, on one end of spectrum, you have a highly multiplex solution like mass spec and other affinity-based approach. But they often lack analytical performance. They either lack sensitivity or specificity or workflow is very complicated, not well-suited for translation and future diagnostics. On the other hand, you have a single-plex immunoassay technology that's been used routinely in clinical diagnostics, underlying the $20 billion diagnostic market. Most of them, the sensitivity is poor, and they cannot multiplex. Alamar's NULISA 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 diagnostic applications. This is what we call the all-in-one system that enable end-to-end proteomics.
The most important part is that because of the precision measurement of multiple protein biomarkers, we can correlate those measurement into a future clinical outcome. That's what enables precision medicine and early detection of disease. The beauty of this business is that it's a typical razor blade, business model, so we can leverage the tried and true proven playbook in launching a novel scientific tool where the instrument installment drives the recurrent high margin consumable pull-throughs. We started our Technology Access Program in the beginning of 2023, where we're getting samples from customers, and we deliver the data back. The data have consistently show an excellent performance of our results compared with other platforms. We launched the Early Access Program in Q4 2023 to a selected KOL customers.
Very quickly, with the level of confidence to initiate a full launch of the platform in January 2024. Since then, we have seen incredible adoption. Now we are in the phase of market expansion by launching new product and by developing new platform to cover different segment 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. At this very early stage of adoption, our consumable revenue already about 50% of the total revenues. Importantly, biopharma revenue contribute to 44% of the total revenue last year. Biopharma typically are more conservative. They don't adopt until they receive extensive validations. 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.
Let's look at one of the example of a top 10 pharma's journey. They started the Technology Access Program at the end of 2023. By middle of 2024, they adopted the first instrument and seeing the robust data in both discovery and the translation, and they have since adopted many more systems across different geography and across different disease areas. 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 quarter into the launch. By the end of Q1, we're already seeing 124 publications, both preprint, peer-reviewed publication as well as preprints. They cover a variety of different disease areas, including neurology, immunology, oncology, and many of them are publishing leading academic journals. Importantly, Alzheimer's disease alone have generated over 40 publications. This breadth, as well as depths 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 neuro foundations for a variety of different neurological disease areas. One example is ADDF. This is Alzheimer's 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. Other multi-billion dollar collaborations are covering the biomarker discovery, not only in the Alzheimer's disease space, but also expanding to Parkinson's and other disease areas. Within a little over two years, we have seen fast adoption by biopharmas and by rapid publication over a relatively short span of time, by endorsement by leading KOLs and the neural foundations. We're just getting started. We did this with very efficient commercial infrastructure. At the end of last year, we have about 25 sales, commissioned sales headcounts. This translate to about $3 million per sales headcount, which I believe is also industry-leading.
Typically, I would expect maybe $1.5 million- $2 million per sales headcount. We expect, you know, this kind of efficiency will continue as we continue to The growth market. In the near term, there's three obvious driver for growth. One of the driver is continue to expand our commercial infrastructure. The second driver is to develop new products to cover different disease area, deepen our current lead in the neurology and inflammation. Third is the leverage in the biological insight that our customer generated through their publications and collaboration with the KOL to highlight a variety of different use cases that our platform enables. In addition to precision proteomics platform that we built, another reason that underlie our success is we took a very conscientious approach for product market entry.
We selected this targeted disease discovery area where you know, 200 plex focus on particular disease area of interest, and we have achieved a tremendous amount of success in neurodegeneration, in inflammation. Now we're starting to move down to translation and to clinical biomarkers for clinical study, clinical trials. This platform is also designed to have capability for high plex discovery. We believe over half of the current plasma proteome remains to be discovered despite the platform out there, due to the lack of sensitivity of those platforms. 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. One of the lesson we have learned is to build those content in collaboration with leading KOL and the top pharmaceutical companies. We launched our Inflammation Panel in the January of 2024. Many of the marker in this panel, no other technology can measure. We launched our CNS 120 marker for CNS disease in the middle of 2024.
Very quickly, this become our flagship product. This panel covers many neurodegenerative disease pathways, and including many critical markers that we need to measure or our customer need to measure in the blood. 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.
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 gonna see that in every other chronic disease. We're super excited about that. We're moving down to translation. We launched a home brew assay kits, and this enable our customer to develop strategic assays for their own indication use. For example, a drug target they do not want other people to know. Moving further down to clinical biomarkers, we have launched brain-derived p-tau 217 assays for Alzheimer's disease. 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.
We continue to build. In March, at the ADPD conference, we launched the NULISAseq Neuro 220 Panel. This one contains 100 more biomarkers in addition to the one in the NULISAseq CNS Disease Panel 120. Many of the biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease. There we have the largest repertoire of phospho-tau assays that both total as well as brain-derived 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 Foundation. 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 NULISAseq CNS Disease Panel 120, they expect that this one gonna be do much better. What differentiate us from the rest of the life science tool companies?
For one, that we have industry-leading pull-through, over $400,000 per annual pull-through persistence. Second, we believe we 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 continue to grow a bit faster than academics. Our technology has already proven to be the leading tool for Alzheimer's disease and is likely to spread across neurodegenerative disease areas. Our Neuro 220 is geared for that to move beyond Alzheimer's disease. Importantly, as I mentioned at the beginning, protein is the building block of life. They are involved in nearly every disease. In the coming years, we're likely to see product to cover 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 our RNAscope 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 taken the company from concept to commercial success, and in the process, we delivered a strong return to shareholders after its acquisition by Bio-Techne. We built and scaled successful life science companies before. Over the years, we have accumulated additional talents with complementary experience and expertise. This team has an incredible track record of both execution and value creation, and we're quite excited about what lie ahead.
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 Neuro 220 first. Also expand beyond this to other disease area, such as cardiology, metabolism, oncology, or aging. Third, we're gonna enable laboratory-developed test and in-vitro diagnostic test 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 to more of individual lab and individual and emerging labs.
Many of you probably know, you know, over the last few decades, there are platform that has 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.
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 a ecosystem to enable our partners to develop their own high-value differentiated diagnostic tests for whatever disease area of interest and whatever indication of use. 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. We have delivered a precision proteomics 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're already seeing the fastest adoption ever in a proteomics 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 proteomics, and we will usher a new era of understanding whole host of disease and improving healthcare. With that, thank you.
Thanks, Yuling. We have time for maybe one question if anyone wants to jump in. Oh, we're on there. Yuling, Justin , thanks again. Maybe just sort of high-level one touching on what you called out in the end there. You know, catalysts going forward, key events to look for. You've had two years on the market with the platform, really strong commercial execution on ramp. You've got menu expansion coming this year. You know, clinical feels like it's still, you know, a couple years away. What are more near-term catalysts investors can look for throughout 2026 just to, you know, gain confidence it could continue trajectory...
Yeah
... Of the story and the ramp there?
Yeah. I think the key driver is content expansion. That's gonna be 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 KOLs, to highlighting the variety of different use cases. Those are gonna be the major driver for near-term growth.
All right. We are out of time, so we're just gonna have to end it with that. Thanks so much, Yuling. Really appreciate it. Thanks again.
Thank you.