January 23, 2025 | At this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Masoud Toloue, CEO of Quanterix, presented his company’s achievements of 2024, the acquisition of Akoya Biosciences, and their plans for the new year. Toloue opened with Quanterix’s mission, “The mission at Quanterix is to create the tools to enable discovery and better health.”
He highlighted the company’s foundational platform Simoa, which allows users to look at biomarkers in blood with ultra-sensitivity. The key aspect of Simoa is detecting signals from noise. Traditional methods of biomarker detection require sifting through millions of molecules. Simoa shortens this process by looking for single molecules needed to reach a detection limit in a digital fashion. By taking this robust signal identifier, Simoa can find biomarkers that are unmeasurable by other technologies. This allows users to detect early-stage disease markers before symptoms appear.
The platform has seen great success. Over the past two years, Quanterix has had a 15% increase (65% to 80%) in recurring revenue. This has led to Quanterix’s next steps in growing their company, which Toloue elaborated on during the presentation.
Three Strategies for Growth in 2025
Toloue covered three core growth strategies for Quanterix in 2025. The first is extending the company’s position in measuring neuro-based blood biomarkers. In 2024, they launched 12 neurology assays. This included the 4-Plex A assay (N4PA), which is expected to have an important role in neurodegeneration detection. Quanterix also launched extracellular vesicle technology that allows customers to look at biomarkers moving from tissue to blood. For 2025, as neuroinflammation pathways become more relevant for Alzheimer’s disease, Quanterix plans to develop and launch inflammatory and pro-inflammatory response assays for pharmaceutical customers to measure and look at efficacy markers for therapies.
The second strategy is expanding into adjacencies centering around immunology and oncology. The Simoa platform has been used in all sorts of labs, but for customers in immunology and oncology, there has been demand for three things: ultra-sensitivity, twice the plex, and fast turnaround time. To meet these demands, Toloue announced the launch of Simoa1.
Simoa1 is designed to include code match technology—optically encoded barcodes on proprietary emission beads that allow plex growth while maintaining high specificity across the assay, according to Toloue. Typically, when increasing plexity, the sensitivity of the platform is proportionately reduced. Simoa1 can maintain the sensitivity even with increased plexity, which is going to be a “game changer” for oncology, where the first molecules coming from tissue and going into blood are critical for developing an early detection test and monitoring test.
“Simoa 1 will initially be [used] in the areas of immunology and oncology,” he said. “And we’re pretty sure there are going to be a lot of folks in neurology clamoring for it, but right now, our focus [is on] immunology and oncology.”
Along with the launch of Simoa1 is the acquisition of Akoya Biosciences. The combined efforts of the two companies will accelerate the development of protein-based tests and Simoa1, as well as provide better tools for oncological monitoring and detecting. “I think that learning from Akoya, and Akoya learning from Quanterix, we’re going to provide synergies as a combined entity that is going to be exciting.” There are also anticipated developments for tissue, blood, and complementary biomarker kits that will be made available this year.
The third growth strategy is diagnostics. 55 million people are living with Alzheimer's disease across the world, and the number of patients is expected to double by 2050, according to Toloue. As such, early detection is crucial to treating the disease. Quanterix will expand its global infrastructure by providing their technology to hospital networks across the country and reference labs around the world. In 2024, they obtained 12 partnerships and will add another 10 in 2025.
Other Projects and Expansions
Additionally, Quanterix is expanding Alzheimer’s disease testing infrastructure around Lucent Diagnostics, their laboratory in Boston. There are plans for the development of a five-biomarker multiplex test, which can lower the intermediate zone of a single marker test from 30% to 10%, all while maintaining high sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy compared to CSF and PET scans. The five-biomarker test is now available on the company’s laboratory developed test (LDT), and Quanterix expects approval for a PLA code by the first half of this year.
Furthermore, Quanterix currently has several active clinical trials that are looking at vasculature and inflammation as part of Alzheimer’s disease. “The companies that are utilizing our services to run these trials are interested in the cause of disease as it relates to inflammation. And so, we're an active part of that. If there are small molecules that are developed, we expect our markers to follow that pathway.”
Currently, Alzheimer’s disease testing is special-ordered, but Toloue is hopeful that it won’t have to be in the future. “As therapy adoption improves, I could see it being something that's measured on a regular basis at your physical in the same way cholesterol is.”