Charles S.Y. Yang discusses how his background in physics and quantum sensing led to the founding of MagQu, pioneering ultra-sensitive blood biomarker diagnostics for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. He explains the company’s SQUID-based technology, commercial journey, regulatory ambitions and funding challenges, while outlining the growing role of early diagnostics in enabling preventive care, supporting emerging therapies and accelerating pharmaceutical drug development through precise biomarker measurement.
Could you tell us about your scientific background, and what convinced you your research had genuine commercial viability?
Before founding MagQu, I was a professor at university, and my background is not originally in biomedicine or biotechnology at all, but in physics, working on nanoparticles and quantum sensing. During my postdoctoral work, I began integrating nanoparticle technology with quantum sensing, and through meeting excellent medical researchers in Taiwan, we were encouraged to apply our nanomaterials and quantum sensing technology to biomedical detection, particularly in vitro diagnostics. By the early 2000s, we had achieved strong results, especially in blood testing for Alzheimer’s disease. We also produced promising results in oncology, but given how many companies were already working in that space, whereas very few were focused on blood-based testing for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, we recognised a genuine and largely unmet demand for developing blood-based biomarker testing for Alzheimer’s disease, achievable through a simple blood draw rather than more invasive methods.
In 2008, I made the decision to leave my faculty position and start the company, working from there with excellent physicians across Taiwan, and subsequently in Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the US. We published a considerable body of strong research results, but results alone are not a product, and we could not simply bring research findings to market. We had to make the transition from research to an actual product, encompassing production, quality management systems, and clinical trial design, which meant we needed space, people, facilities and capital. All of our fundraising to date has taken place within Taiwan, and our shareholders remain entirely Taiwanese individuals and companies. We have been fortunate to complete several funding rounds, allowing us to build out our manufacturing and R&D teams, and through collaboration with excellent neurologists in Taiwan, we completed our clinical trial domestically and secured approval from the Taiwan FDA, launching our product into the clinical diagnostic market at the end of 2020.
Unfortunately, 2021 and 2022 brought an unexpected obstacle in COVID-19, during which nobody had any attention to spare for us, and we effectively paused business promotion for two years, only resuming in earnest in 2023. So in practice, we have only been actively promoting the business for around three years. That said, we have already reached meaningful milestones, having installed systems in hospitals and medical centres across Taiwan, mainland China and the Middle East, and we are now working to expand further. Being based in Taiwan makes Asian expansion relatively straightforward, but our ambitions are not limited to Asia, which is why we attend major global trade shows across Europe and the US, travelling extensively to identify potential customers and collaborators internationally.
What gives your technology its sensitivity advantage over conventional biomarker detection methods?
Conventional immunoassays are optical in nature, relying on antibodies, an optical signal, and a photodetector to measure optical density. While this approach can achieve sensitivity in the picogram-per-millilitre range, which is genuinely impressive for optical immunoassay, the biomarkers relevant to conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s exist in human blood at femtogram concentrations, sometimes even sub-femtogram levels. Achieving that degree of sensitivity through optical methods alone is simply not feasible.
We had to think differently, which meant setting optical immunoassay aside entirely. Fortunately, my own doctoral research focused on SQUID technology, superconducting quantum interference devices, which are extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic signals. SQUID technology was, in fact, the subject of last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, in 2025, and represents a form of quantum sensing whose sensitivity genuinely surpasses conventional technology. However, SQUID responds to magnetic signals, not optical ones, so we needed a way to bridge protein concentration to a magnetic signal. Magnetic nanoparticles proved to be the ideal solution: by immobilising antibodies onto magnetic nanoparticles, binding to the target biomarker produces a change in magnetic signal. At ultra-low biomarker concentrations, that change is extremely small, but SQUID is sensitive enough to detect even such minute changes reliably. By integrating SQUID technology with magnetic nanoparticles, we can precisely detect biomarkers at ultra-low concentrations. Having worked on SQUID during my doctorate and on magnetic nanoparticles during my postdoctoral research, I was able to bring these two strands together, and I believe we have genuinely succeeded in applying nanotechnology and quantum sensing to biomedical detection in a meaningful way. This platform has already secured approval from the Taiwan FDA as well as CE-IVD marking in Europe.
You are also developing diagnostics for Parkinson’s disease. How does that broaden your approach to neurodegenerative diagnosis?
Neurodegeneration is a broad category of disease, encompassing Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, frontotemporal dementia and others. At an early stage, the clinical presentation and symptoms across these conditions tend to look remarkably similar, or even tend to be like mental disorders such as depression, which makes it genuinely difficult for a neurologist to determine precisely which disease a given patient is suffering from. Yet the underlying pathogenesis differs considerably between these conditions, and without a precise diagnosis, physicians cannot design an appropriate disease management strategy for that patient. If we can offer a tool that clarifies exactly what is happening within the patient’s brain, physicians gain a clear picture, whether that points to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or another condition. Since each of these diseases originates from a distinct pathogenesis, achieving precise diagnosis requires being able to detect the specific biomarker abnormality associated with each one. That is why we have not limited ourselves to Alzheimer’s alone, but have also developed reagents for Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative conditions, allowing us to offer physicians a broader biomarker panel and a more complete picture of a patient’s likely condition.
How competitive is the neurodegenerative diagnostics market today?
Neurodegenerative disease has become an increasingly prominent area, driven largely by ageing populations worldwide, and it represents a genuinely significant market opportunity. Around five years ago, there were only three major companies working in this space; today there are more than ten, at various stages of development or regulatory approval, meaning we now face considerably stronger competition than before.
What is your regulatory roadmap, particularly for the US, and how do you plan to fund it?
We have already secured approval from the Taiwan FDA and CE-IVD marking, and we are now seeking approval from the US FDA and Chinese regulators as well. Our aim is to secure these approvals within five years, though funding remains our single biggest constraint. We already have a mature technology and a mature, market-ready product, having completed trials and commercial launch in Taiwan, but bringing that through the regulatory process in the US and mainland China is genuinely costly, likely requiring in the region of 50 million USD to initiate those trials.
We are considering several strategies to raise this capital. The first is an initial public offering on the public markets. The second is securing strategic investors. The third is potential acquisition through a strategic partnership. Ultimately, our focus is on ensuring the sustainability of the product and maximising its impact for society, making it genuinely accessible to people at risk of neurodegenerative disease. For now, we remain deliberately focused solely on neurodegeneration rather than expanding into other disease areas, since staying focused matters at this stage.
In 2018, Janssen adopted your technology to measure tau in Alzheimer’s clinical trials. What did that collaboration demonstrate about your platform’s role in drug development?
That is an interesting story. In Alzheimer’s research, early interest centred on amyloid-beta, before attention gradually shifted toward tau, which is considerably more complex. A number of pharmaceutical companies, Janssen among them, were working to develop tau-targeted therapies, and finding sufficiently sensitive detection methods for tau in human blood proved genuinely difficult. That is why Janssen was interested in bringing our technology in-house, allowing them to run extensive confidential testing. They ordered and installed a system in San Diego, though the specifics of that work remain confidential.
Do partnerships with pharmaceutical companies form a key part of your commercial strategy?
In 2018, Alzheimer’s drug development still had a long way to go, for Biogen, for Janssen and for Eli Lilly alike. Biogen’s approval came some seven years later, so at that point in time, the field as a whole remained in its early stages. That said, I would not necessarily characterise our relationship with Janssen as a strategic partnership; they were, and remain, essentially one of our customers, rather than a formal partnership arrangement.
Diagnostics are often said to inform roughly 70 percent of clinical decision-making, yet receive only two to three percent of overall healthcare spending. How are you demonstrating the value of diagnostics within CNS disease specifically?
That framing holds true if you think purely in terms of a hospital-based treatment model, but the picture changes considerably if you think instead in terms of prevention, which is precisely where our focus lies. We believe healthcare systems are gradually moving in that direction, particularly now that Biogen, Eli Lilly and others have secured approval for their therapies globally. Having worked in this field for more than a decade, I can say that before these approvals, neurologists genuinely lacked a clear treatment strategy for patients, which made identifying large numbers of at-risk patients something of a burden for physicians without a corresponding course of action. That has now changed, particularly given that approved treatments have shown to be most effective in early-stage patients, which is precisely where our diagnostics can play a meaningful role, identifying those patients early enough for treatment to be genuinely effective.
Beyond pharmacological treatment, lifestyle factors matter considerably as well. The FINGER trial in Finland, a major intervention study, demonstrated that a genuinely healthy lifestyle can help prevent neurodegenerative disease. Even where drug treatment is available, physicians still encourage patients to gradually adjust their lifestyle alongside it.
What do you think remains most misunderstood about Alzheimer’s and neurodegenerative disease?
I think we are genuinely still at the starting point. Neurodegenerative disease will always exist in some form, much as cardiology and diabetes care exist today. We currently regard it as a serious, frightening disease, but in 10 years I believe it will be seen as simply part of ordinary healthcare, something requiring regular monitoring, much like understanding how to protect brain health through sleep, diet and stress management. Whenever you improve your lifestyle in these ways, you support brain health, but knowing whether your brain is genuinely healthy requires testing, which is precisely where diagnostics become an integral part of prevention.
How are you overcoming the challenges of raising biotech investment in Taiwan?
This is a genuine problem for biotech in Taiwan, given that semiconductors and the broader IT industry dominate the local investment mind-set, which is fundamentally different from the biotech investment mind-set. It is not easy to convince a semiconductor-focused investor that a venture may require ten years of investment before any return materialises; that conversation tends to go nowhere. This is precisely why we do not see ourselves as limited to Taiwan alone, since we are fundamentally engaged in a global business. Disease itself is a global matter, and our conversations extend just as naturally to the US, Japan, South Korea and Europe as they do to Taiwan.
As this reaches international investors and potential biopharma partners, what final message would you like to leave them with?
If you are looking to invest in a company with genuinely unique technology, and in a product that has already been successfully launched and used in the market for several years, and if you care about brain health, MagQu is where you should look.
