Andrew
Quong

Every protein in your blood has sugar molecules attached to it. That coating - technically called glycosylation - changes when something goes wrong in the body. It has changed with cancer, with inflammation, with disease states that every other diagnostic approach misses. For decades, nobody had a fast enough, smart enough system to read those changes at the scale medicine requires. Andrew Quong joined the company that built one.

When Quong was appointed President and CEO of InterVenn Biosciences in early 2025, he wasn't arriving from a corner office somewhere. He'd been inside the company as GM and EVP of Operations, watching the GlycoVision platform mature from research ambition to clinical reality. The transition wasn't a hire - it was a promotion from within, made by a team that already knew him.

That kind of institutional trust takes a specific career to earn. Quong's runs 30 years and touches five institutions that most people in biotech would never visit in sequence: Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Georgetown University, Thomas Jefferson University, the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, and Fluidigm (now Standard BioTools). It is a career that tracks the emergence of computational biology as a discipline - written in the resume of one physicist who kept following the biology wherever it led.

From Weapons Labs to Cancer Ward

Quong graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in both physics and applied mathematics before heading south to UC Irvine for a PhD in physics. His postdoctoral fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory - as a National Research Council Fellow - gave him his first taste of working inside institutions where the stakes were higher than publications. Then he went to Sandia National Laboratories as a Senior Member of Technical Staff, and to Lawrence Livermore, where he eventually ran both a Computational Systems Biology group and a Computational Materials Science group. At LLNL, material physics and cancer biology were problems he held simultaneously. That's not a common combination. It's also exactly the kind of cross-domain elasticity that glycoproteomics would later require.

The pivot to cancer biology happened when he moved to Georgetown University's Department of Oncology in 2004, and deepened at Thomas Jefferson University's Department of Cancer Biology, where he was Associate Professor from 2006 to 2013. His research there focused on systems biology approaches to breast cancer resistance and biomarkers of therapeutic response. He published extensively, sat on the editorial boards of both Cancer Research and The American Journal of Pathology. He was, for nearly a decade, an academic cancer biologist who also happened to think computationally.

The Fluidigm Years - and the Turn Toward InterVenn

In 2019, Quong moved into industry as Chief Scientific Officer at Fluidigm (now Standard BioTools), the microfluidics and proteomics tool company. He served also as Microfluidics Franchise Leader - a role that meant understanding not just the science of single-cell analysis and mass cytometry, but the commercial mechanics of building instrument-based businesses. He stayed three years. Long enough to learn what scaling a proteomics platform actually requires. Not long enough to get comfortable.

InterVenn Biosciences had been founded in 2018 with a specific thesis: glycoproteomics - the study of glycoproteins - held an untapped layer of biological insight. The GlycoVision platform, built around mass spectrometry and machine learning, could read glycoprotein signatures in blood at clinical throughput. The scientific case was compelling. The path to the clinic was not obvious. Quong joined as General Manager and EVP of Operations, taking responsibility for the operational systems that would translate a platform into products.

By the time InterVenn closed its $201 million Series C in August 2021 - led by SoftBank Group, Heritage Provider Network, Irving Investors, Highside Capital Management, and existing investors including Amplify Partners and True Ventures - the company had quintupled its lifetime funding in a single round. The proceeds went to accelerating GlycoVision development and commercializing Dawn, the liquid biopsy for immune checkpoint inhibitor response prediction. Quong was running operations through all of it.

GlycoKnow and the Path to the Clinic

The flagship product that crystallized InterVenn's clinical mission is GlycoKnow Ovarian. It's a blood-based liquid biopsy that distinguishes ovarian cancer from benign pelvic masses. Ovarian cancer is notoriously difficult to diagnose early - most cases are detected at late stages, in part because existing tools struggle with specificity. A non-invasive blood test that can make that distinction earlier changes the diagnostic calculus for patients and clinicians alike.

In July 2025, InterVenn received an AMA Proprietary Laboratory Analysis (PLA) code for GlycoKnow Ovarian - the kind of administrative milestone that matters enormously in healthcare because it means the test has a standardized billing code, enabling integration into clinical workflows across U.S. healthcare systems. Quong's statement on the milestone was direct: "The PLA code for GlycoKnow Ovarian marks a significant milestone, making this proprietary, advanced diagnostic more readily available to the women who need it most."

Then, in January 2026, InterVenn announced a partnership with Aranscia - a company specializing in oncology software and EMR-agnostic clinical workflow solutions - to accelerate commercialization. Aranscia brings Spesana and 2bPrecise software platforms plus logistical support through AccessDx Laboratory. Quong on the partnership: "We're pleased to be partnering with the Aranscia team in our mission to improve the care and treatment journey for all who may benefit from the insights afforded by GlycoKnow Ovarian and potential additional GlycoKnow tests in the future." The "future" in that sentence is doing real work. InterVenn's commercial roadmap is not just one test.

The Glycoproteomics Thesis

Glycoproteins are proteins with complex sugar structures attached - those sugars (glycans) are not random decoration. They carry biological information. They change in measurable, specific ways with disease states. The challenge has always been reading them at scale: glycoprotein analysis historically required specialized equipment, enormous expertise, and time that clinical diagnostics can't afford. InterVenn's GlycoVision platform addresses this through AI-driven mass spectrometry that can analyze glycoprotein signatures from blood samples at the throughput clinical labs demand.

This positions InterVenn at a genuinely unusual intersection. Most liquid biopsy companies chase circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) or proteins. InterVenn is reading the sugar-modified proteins - the glycoproteome - a layer of biology that most competitors have not built the infrastructure to decode. Quong, with his background in computational systems biology and cancer biomarkers, is among the few executives who arrived at this kind of company with the scientific credentials to understand exactly what his platform does and why it's different.

InterVenn has also demonstrated scientific range beyond ovarian cancer. Earlier work included glycoproteomic biomarker signatures in metastatic melanoma patients treated with checkpoint inhibitors, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma liquid biopsy studies, and COVID-19 infection progression markers - evidence that the GlycoVision platform is not a single-indication instrument. The company's future product pipeline, which Quong references without naming, extends the GlycoKnow brand into additional indications as clinical validation data matures.

Career Timeline

Achievements