# Polaris Genomics Featured in Startup Health

February 14, 2025

### Our Story & Recent Successes are Featured in Startup Health

Check out our new feature in [StartUp Health](https://www.linkedin.com/company/startuphealth/)! Polaris Genomics’ Platform Is Modernizing Mental Health with Molecular Biomarkers; read an excerpt below and the 🧬 [full story here](https://www.startuphealth.com/startup-health-blog/polaris-genomics-platform-is-modernizing-mental-health-with-molecular-biomarkers). 🧬

### **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.

## Press Contact

Jen Williams

[jen@polarisgenomics.com](mailto:jen@polarisgenomics.com)

+1 802 355 5072

## Additional Reading

### [Our Call to Serve: We’re Veterans Mapping the Biology of Mental Health](https://polarisgenomics.com/our-call-to-serve-were-veterans-mapping-the-biology-of-mental-health/)

November 11, 2025

https://youtu.be/LoiE2KJtNoc On Veterans Day and always, we honor those who have served. As a veteran-owned business, our founding mission of improving the lives of service members and veterans remains at our roots. As a captain, Purple Heart recipient, 9/11...

### [Polaris Genomics Advances Mental Health Biomarker Discovery](https://polarisgenomics.com/polaris-genomics-advances-mental-health-biomarker-discovery/)

September 16, 2025

For decades, psychiatry has struggled with a critical gap: unlike cardiology or oncology, there are no molecular biomarkers to guide diagnosis or treatment. Polaris Genomics was founded to change that, and our mission recently earned global recognition as we progress...

### [Conference Posters for Review](https://polarisgenomics.com/conference-posters-for-review/)

July 25, 2025

Our scientific team is often invited to present posters at a range of academic, pharma, and clinical research conferences focused on neuroscience and mental and brain health. If you have not been able to meet them in person and see our technical information firsthand...