Nautilus Biotechnology (NASDAQ:NAUT) executives outlined the company’s strategy to “unlock the power of the proteome” and argued that better protein measurement tools could improve drug development, diagnostics, and the use of artificial intelligence in biology.
Founder and CEO Sujal Patel, joined by Chief Financial Officer Anna Mowry, framed the company’s mission around what he described as a gap between the advances of genomics and the limitations of current proteomics. Patel said genomics has become reliable and low cost, but because genes do not change over a person’s lifetime, genomic information often does not reflect the “real-time state of disease.” By contrast, he said proteins perform most cellular work, are targeted by roughly 95% of FDA-approved drugs, and are central to many diagnostics—yet today’s technologies for measuring proteins from blood, cells, and tissues produce “extremely poor” results.
Why Nautilus sees a proteomics bottleneck
Patel also pointed to research spending as evidence of opportunity, citing billions of dollars in U.S. NIH funding across disease areas such as autoimmune disorders, cardiac disease, aging, and neurodegeneration, while contending that these fields have not seen “game-changing new drug introductions” or major improvements in understanding over the last decade.
Limitations of existing tools and a 2025 comparison
Patel described current protein analysis approaches as largely unchanged over the last 20 years and said they yield incomplete, biased, and poorly reproducible results. He referenced mass spectrometry-based workflows as the “gold standard” and described mass spectrometers as $1 million to $2 million instruments sold by large companies such as Thermo Fisher, Danaher, and Bruker. He also mentioned affinity-based approaches from SomaLogic (now owned by Illumina) and Olink (owned by Thermo Fisher).
To illustrate the problem, Patel cited a 2025 paper (and a second 2025 paper he said corroborated it) comparing overlap among Seer, SomaLogic, and Olink. He said the solutions agreed on fewer than 2,000 proteins across the three methods, arguing the lack of agreement underscores data quality issues and complicates customers’ efforts to combine outputs from multiple systems.
Voyager platform and “iterative mapping” approach
Patel said Nautilus has spent more than nine years developing a new method it calls iterative mapping, supported by an integrated platform of instruments, consumables, and software. He said delivering the method required several technology components, including:
- a semiconductor-fabricated chip and flow cell system designed to immobilize “10 billion protein molecules” on a substrate;
- a “brand-new class of antibodies” developed over nine years to generate information about molecules on the chip; and
- software and algorithms to analyze instrument output and deliver data to customers.
At the center of the platform is a benchtop instrument called Voyager, which Patel said is roughly the size of a large genomic sequencer and is designed to accept many sample types (blood, cells, tissue, and more) and deliver results via the cloud. He said Nautilus expects Voyager to be priced at roughly $1 million, similar to high-end mass spectrometry systems used in discovery settings.
Patel said Voyager is expected to enter beta access in the second half of the year and move toward general availability next year. He added that the system is expected to run four, eight, or 12 samples per day.
On the recurring revenue side, Patel said each run requires a consumable kit including reagents, a flow cell, and a chip. While final pricing has not been announced, he said Nautilus has indicated consumables could be priced at a few thousand dollars per sample, with the potential for significant daily pull-through depending on utilization. He added that as customers adopt and operationalize the platform, the company expects consumables pull-through to grow, citing an internal expectation of $500,000 per year over time as usage ramps.
Applications: broad-scale proteomics and targeted proteoforms
Patel described two major application categories. The first, broad-scale proteomics, aims to identify proteins in a sample from any organism and is intended to compete directly with existing mass spectrometry workflows and other market solutions. The second, targeted proteoforms, focuses on measuring different forms of the same protein—an area Patel called “incredibly understudied” due to limitations of current tools.
As an early example, Patel said Nautilus recently introduced a tau proteoform assay capable of measuring 768 different forms of tau, which he said is a dataset the scientific community has not previously had access to. He said this work has been shared with the scientific community through collaborations involving the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Genentech, Mount Sinai, and the New York Stem Cell Foundation, and that the company has seen significant interest. Patel also said Baylor was announced as the first early access customer using the tau assay.
Patel said the company expects to introduce an oncology proteoform assay in early access later this year, and he highlighted a partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation involving a $1.6 million grant, of which $1.2 million goes to Nautilus, to support development of an alpha-synuclein assay for Parkinson’s disease research.
Timeline, market view, and financial runway
Patel presented a go-to-market timeline in which tau proteoforms are available today in early access as a service (customers send samples to Nautilus). He said the broad-scale application is expected to enter early access in the second half of the year and reach general availability in the first half of next year. Patel said the company does not expect “material revenue” from current early engagements, positioning them as efforts to validate the technology and support future instrument purchases.
He cited an estimate that the proteomics market could grow to $57 billion by 2030, representing about a 13% CAGR, and said Nautilus believes new technologies could also expand the market by enabling new clinical applications.
Mowry said Nautilus ended the last reported quarter with $156 million in cash. She said the company reduced spending in 2025 to extend runway and has communicated an expectation that cash will last through 2027, beyond the late-2026 launch timeline discussed in the presentation.
In a brief Q&A, Patel explained how improved proteomics could be used in drug development across target discovery, mechanism-of-action studies, and toxicity evaluation, with the goal of improving the chances of success before entering costly clinical trials.
About Nautilus Biotechnology (NASDAQ:NAUT)
Nautilus Biotechnology is a life sciences company developing a next-generation proteomics platform that aims to provide high-resolution, single-molecule protein analysis. Its core technology combines proprietary microfluidics, advanced optics and custom reagents to capture and identify thousands of proteins simultaneously, offering researchers detailed insights into cellular processes and disease biology. The company’s platform is designed to improve sensitivity, reproducibility and throughput compared with traditional mass spectrometry approaches.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Nautilus Biotechnology serves pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academic institutions and research organizations seeking to accelerate drug discovery and biomarker research.
