LinusBio lands $16 million series A for exposome sequencing

LinusBio has raised $16 million in series A financing from investors such as GreatPoint Ventures and Bow Capital. The company will use the funds to develop and expand its exposome sequencing technology for the early detection of autism spectrum disorder and other diseases.

The exposome is the collection of a person’s chemical and biological exposures over time. The goal in exposome science is to measure these exposures and map them to the individual’s health. Techniques to sequence the exposome typically involve measuring biomarkers in the blood or saliva. These samples provide a recent snapshot of a person’s surroundings. Instead, LinusBio uses human hair, which the company claims can provide a convenient readout of a person’s exposome history. The company says that a single strand of hair can provide as many as 500 time point measurements of the exposome.

“If you were to try to reproduce what [LinusBio] does with a traditional blood or saliva-based test, we would need to do 600 blood draws every 3, 4, or 5 hours for six weeks,” says Paul Curtin, a LinusBio cofounder and a computational biologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The company’s technology involves knocking molecules off a strand of hair with a laser, then determining the species and levels of the ablated chemicals via mass spectrometry. For now, LinusBio is measuring toxic and essential elements embedded in hair, “but eventually we’ll move into small molecules, proteins—basically anything that ends up in a hair, we’re going to try and measure it,” says Christine Austin, another company cofounder and Mount Sinai professor.

Last year, LinusBio put its technology to the test and completed a multinational study for autism detection. The research involved participants in New York City, where the company is based, as well as in Sweden and Japan. The company says the varied locations helped provide diverse hair types among their test populations. The positive outcomes from the study earned the company a breakthrough device designation from the US Food and Drug Administration for its early autism diagnostic aid, StrandDx-ASD.

LinusBio is conducting further studies to secure full approval for the device, as well as evaluating the method for detecting other conditions such as digestive disorders, renal disease, and cancer.