Our Story & Recent Successes are Featured in Startup Health
Check out our new feature in StartUp Health! Polaris Genomics’ Platform Is Modernizing Mental Health with Molecular Biomarkers; read an excerpt below and the 🧬 full story here. 🧬
Origin Story: A Seed Planted at Ground Zero
Some healthcare startups are born quickly, a lightning bolt eureka moment followed by a frenzy of activity. The story of Polaris Genomics is more like a slow growth tree, moving from the seed of an idea to a fruitful startup 20 years later.
It started just after 9-11, 2001, at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
Charles Cathlin deployed to New York City to help with recovery after the terrorist attacks as a US Public Health Service officer. He was charged with protecting his unit from environmental hazards, a role he’d served many times before as an Air Force engineer. It was a job well suited to an engineer: study the environment and the potential risks – whether a dangerous gas or harmful dust particles – and take precautions to keep people safe.
At Ground Zero, however, Cathlin came face to face with an environmental harm he couldn’t prevent, measure, or treat: trauma.
He was familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. He’d seen it in friends and family and fellow servicemen and women. But for the first time, Cathlin grappled with the unique clinical challenge of diagnosing and treating mental health conditions. The standard of diagnosis for conditions like PTSD and depression is observational, based on symptoms and self-reporting.
Cathlin, the engineer, felt there had to be a better way. There needed to be a more reliable, objective way to identify mental health challenges at the source, not just through outward symptoms. Solving this problem could not only improve the kinds of treatments offered to people in distress but also destigmatize the whole process.