LinusBio CEO Dr. Manish Arora explains how robots and lasers turn a few strands of hair into a 30-day record of lead, arsenic, and other toxic exposures.
A blood test tells you what's in your body today. But what about last Tuesday, or the week a wildfire rolled through your neighborhood? In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, radiation oncologists Dr. Trevor Royce and Dr. Tim Showalter sit down with Dr. Manish Arora, founder and CEO of LinusBio, to explore the exposome: the full record of environmental exposures we collect over a lifetime. Manish explains why medicine has leaned so heavily on genomics while largely ignoring the environment, and how a single strand of hair can fill that gap.
The idea started with a tree stump. As a PhD student, Manish noticed a damaged growth ring and wondered whether human tissue kept a similar record. It turns out hair does, logging a new layer roughly every hour. To read it, his team built robots that straighten the hair and slice it open lengthwise, then use lasers to analyze the inner core while leaving surface contamination behind. From one centimeter of hair, LinusBio can take up to 1,000 measurements across 10,000 molecular signatures. Manish shares what that data has already revealed, from a young athlete's recurring arsenic exposure at a community center to the spike in toxic metals among people affected by the Palisades fire.
The conversation also covers Traced, LinusBio's new $299 at-home test that maps 30 days of exposure across 15 elements, with plans to expand to more than 100. Manish explains why the rhythm of a biomarker like cholesterol may matter as much as its level, how the company uses AI and ideas borrowed from music theory to make sense of millions of data points, and why he wants a hair test to become as routine as a blood draw.
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