Adam Bonislawski

For full-year 2024, total investment in these spaces rose by 27 percent with both the number of deals and the average deal size growing year over year.

The company's technology lets users extract proteins from specific cellular regions of interest and measure them via methods like mass spectrometry.

They used the approach combined with protein structural predictions by Google DeepMind's AlphaFold 3 to identify and investigate proteins linked to Alzheimer's.

While technology advances were perhaps less dramatic than in the year prior, several firms teased future releases that could have significant impacts.

According to the company, its research into organoids and mouse models of Alzheimer's disease has resulted in the detection of roughly 800 proteoforms of the protein tau.

The firm claims the system, called Proteus, will ultimately enable the analysis of billions of peptides, though the initial version, slated for 2026, will cover around 50 million.

The company suggested that its shift toward early-stage work reflects growing confidence in its platform among its pharma customers.

The company expects its five-marker LucentAD Complete test to offer higher performance than single-marker assay and to secure higher reimbursement.

According to the company, SLIM will allow for mass spec proteomics experiments without quadrupole filtering, which could improve speed and sensitivity.

The assay allows users to distinguish between target proteins present in a sample bound together in a complex and those same proteins present as free molecules.