UBS Global Healthcare Conference, November 10, 2026: CFO Justin McAnear outlines placement, pull-through and diagnostics strategy

Alamar Biosciences CFO Justin McAnear used a fireside chat with UBS analyst Douglas Schenkel to lay out the unit economics behind the company's NULISA proteomics platform and the sequencing of its move toward clinical diagnostics. The discussion followed a third quarter in which, as Schenkel summarized, revenue grew 68%, consumables rose 79% and gross margin reached a record 61.5%. Alamar also raised its 2026 revenue outlook and announced collaborations with the U.K. Biobank and GSK.

Instrument economics: a $6 million theoretical ceiling versus roughly $440,000 today

The most useful new framing concerned how much revenue a single instrument can generate. McAnear said the theoretical ceiling is "about $6 million plus." The instrument can run 3 plates in a 24-hour period at 8 hours per plate, and a plate costs $9,000 to $10,000. At that rate, running 5 days a week for 50 weeks a year takes a box past $6 million annually.

Current pull-through is far below that. The company's goal this year is more than $400,000 of annualized pull-through per box, which McAnear said is "the equivalent of running one plate a week, 11 weeks out of the quarter for a year," or around $440,000. He added that a customer averaging 2 plates a week would generate more than $800,000.

McAnear also described a dynamic that holds back average pull-through. Biopharma customers buy a second instrument sooner than academic customers because they are focused on weekly sample velocity rather than annual throughput, which he said "puts downward pressure on pull-through." Academic core labs tend to load an instrument more heavily before adding another. Among the company's top customers, he said, the weighting between academic and biopharma is fairly even.

Placements: installed base on track to double in 2026

Alamar ended 2025 with 102 instruments placed, after about 66 placements during that year. The 2026 goal is at least 100 placements, which would effectively double the installed base. McAnear said the drivers into 2027 remain the same. They are further penetration with the two existing main panels, covering immunology and inflammation and neurology, and the launch of a panel in a new disease area next year.

He named cardiometabolic disease and oncology as areas of particular interest and said the company is working on multiple panels internally, though it has publicly committed to one next year. His criteria for choosing a disease area are a larger population with an unmet need that suits multiplexed, ultra-high-sensitivity measurement.

Third quarter was also the company's largest quarter for expansion within existing customers. Alamar defines expansion as an instrument placed in a different lab or geography within the same customer. McAnear said this typically reflects a new disease area within that customer, although the majority of instruments are still going to new customers.

Large studies as leading indicators

McAnear pointed to external validation as a key leading indicator, starting with the two large studies announced in the quarter. The U.K. Biobank project will run 80,000 samples, with completion largely during 2027. It is the first time the repository has run a study of brain-derived proteins, and the output will be a publicly available Parkinson's disease data set. McAnear said thousands of researchers worldwide will have access to it and described the visibility for Alamar as something the company is "very excited about." The GSK collaboration covers at least 60,000 samples across the Inflam 340 and Neuro 220 panels, supporting drug development in 5 areas: respiratory, liver, kidney, neurology and immunology. McAnear said it shows large pharma interest extending beyond neurology and inflammation.

Schenkel framed the follow-on opportunity as new customers drawn in by public data and subsequent studies, and McAnear said that sizing was right, calling a public data set "invaluable." He also pointed to the platform's walkaway automation as essential for high-volume work and said he ran a sample himself: "It worked. It came out great, excellent data."

The company added more than 35 publications and preprints in the quarter and now has over 200. McAnear said these give researchers "more confidence to try it themselves."

Neuro 220 as a template for content rollouts

McAnear described the Neuro 220 launch at the start of 2026 as a case study in how quickly new content can be adopted, with most customers having switched over. He noted that it had an advantage because it built on the earlier CNS 120 panel, so users were already lined up. A new disease area would involve customers who may not use any Alamar panel today and may need more work through the company's TAP sample-testing program. McAnear called TAP "one of the strongest tools in driving adoption," because the data it generates builds confidence and provides documentation to support funding for an instrument purchase.

Academic and biopharma mix

Biopharma became the largest customer group in the third quarter at 49% of revenue, up from 42% in the prior quarter. McAnear described the roughly 50-50 split between academic and biopharma as a hedge. He said Alamar fared well in a tough academic funding environment because its platform was probably seen as a must-have in some cases. He also acknowledged the other side of that: because the company was not hurt as much, it may not benefit as much as peers when academic spending recovers. He cautioned against reading too much into quarterly academic fluctuations, citing lumpiness from large deals at the end of last year and in the second quarter. Consumables now account for the majority of revenue, at 53% last quarter.

Diagnostics enablement: FDA submission by end of 2027

Alamar plans to submit its ARGO DX system and a single assay for FDA clearance by the end of next year. McAnear said clearance is intended to give customers the confidence to build content on the platform that could become laboratory-developed tests or in vitro diagnostics. He said some collaborations could proceed earlier with research-use-only products, but clearance provides the validation that leads partners to commit resources.

On economics, McAnear said Alamar would sell kits to partners and seek to capture a fair share of the economics of successful tests. "If the reimbursement comes in low, we'd probably be happy with the revenue," he said. "But if it were to come in higher, we would want to make sure that we're capturing the fair share of the economics for providing the infrastructure." Partners would also purchase instruments. A diagnostic instrument, built to higher specifications, could cost more and sell at a higher price.

Market sizing and durability of the technology

McAnear sized the advanced proteomics market, defined as ultra-high-sensitivity, multiplex solutions, at about $3.7 billion today, growing to $11 billion over the next decade. Clinical diagnostics is about $0.4 billion today and is expected to reach roughly $9 billion. Combined, the market is about $4.1 billion today and about $20 billion in a decade.

He said the company's differentiation should hold because NULISA suppresses background noise rather than simply amplifying signal, which allows sensitivity to be maintained as multiplexing increases. He cited patent protection and "5 years of trade secrets, which would be extremely hard to replicate." He said Alamar is the only platform combining ultra-high sensitivity, high specificity, flexible multiplexing, broad dynamic range and seamless automation. The instrument lists at $400,000.

AI and multi-marker data

Asked about investor interest in AI-driven demand for large proteomic data sets, McAnear said the opportunity could become important but that it is "very early days." He pointed to a Lancet study discussed on the earnings call, in which two patients showed the same progress on one amyloid-clearance marker while other markers moved in opposite directions and outcomes differed. Measuring multiple markers sensitively is therefore necessary, he said, and some markers had not previously been interrogated in blood. AI could use such multi-marker data to develop signatures, which requires highly accurate inputs.

Reinvestment discipline

McAnear confirmed that the company is in a growth phase and has pulled certain R&D programs forward from 2027 into 2026 to accelerate content. Upfront R&D costs are required, as are investments in clinical ambitions, internal programs, infrastructure and facilities. He stressed that upside will not automatically be reinvested. Pull-forward decisions must show a greater benefit in bringing revenue, and thus profitability, sooner. "There still is a discipline here," he said.

Asked what would show execution a year from now, McAnear named placements, utilization, additional content and further partnerships that hint at the diagnostic enablement approach. "We're here to build a durable long-term large successful company," he said.