Empowered Patient Podcast Exposome Platform Unlocks New Possibilities for Diagnosis and Treatment of Autism and Other Brain Disorders with Manish Arora LinusBio
Manish Arora, the CEO and Co-Founder of LinusBio, is developing technologies to measure and analyze the exposome which reveals lifelong exposure to environmental factors. Their platform measures molecular signatures in hair samples for early detection and diagnosis of conditions such as autism, where traditional observational methods can be limited. LinusBio is also exploring the use of the platform for other neurological conditions like ADHD and ALS and gaining a better understanding of the role of environmental exposures in the development of diseases. The company has received Breakthrough Designation from the FDA for its autism biomarker to bring this technology to patients.
Manish explains, "Our genes are static. So if I were to measure your genes when you were a child, or measure them today, I would get the same answer pretty much. Whereas your exposome changes all the time and so does your body's reaction to it. Let me give you a very simple example. A cup of espresso in the morning has a very different reaction to you than a cup of espresso at 9:00 PM at night, which will keep you awake. So even the same environmental input can have a very different reaction within a day."
"So the technical challenge is this: how do we map something that is constantly dynamic? It's always changing in time, and unfortunately, medicine is set with these snapshot technologies. Can that snapshot really give us enough information on what is happening to me? How am I reacting to that environment over the entire year since my last blood test? And that is the big technological challenge facing us as we enter into this arena of exposomes."
"The way we're measuring the exposome is that we've developed a technology where we can map exposures and our response at almost an hourly interval. You get all this data in a few moments in more detail. Using that single strand, we get enough information that would take you a thousand blood tests. There's this massive volume of data. To put a number on it, we just recently generated 50 million data points for each patient in our study. Not all of that signal is easy to decipher. So what we do is we put many, many controls, quality controls in there to say anything below this we do not trust. And these controls have been set in place through years of good scientific practice."
"So, going back to the technology to very briefly describe, we open up a strand of hair, and then we start looking inside it using lasers and these detectors that we call mass spectrometers, which can measure thousands of molecular features. So that is what we are measuring. We are measuring molecules in your body."
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