Charles Cathlin
Gaithersburg, Md.-based Polaris Genomics, a mental healthcare firm eyeing physical biomarkers to aid diagnoses as well as treatments, has secured $250,000 in debt, according to a recent SEC filing. The company raised over $5.9 million from investors, according to Pitchbook.
The startup up was founded in 2017 by Yusuf Henriques, a US Army veteran, Charles Cathlin, who served in the US Air Force, Princeton graduate Tshaka Cunningham and physician Anne Naclerio, a 30-year veteran of the US Army, with Cathlin drawing on his experience treating the first responders of the 9/11 terror attacks of 2001.
Cathlin serves as the company’s CEO and Cunningham is chief science officer. Cunningham is director of R&D while Naclerio serves as chief medical officer.
According to a report in Startup Health, Cathlin — an engineer and graduate of the Air Force Academy and Stanford University — grappled with the unique clinical challenge of “diagnosing” mental health conditions, rather than relying on observation or self-reporting.
“The firefighters and police officers were traumatized by what they experienced,” Cathlin told Illumina, whose accelerator Polaris Genomics joined as an early-stage startup. “That had a large impact on me and got me interested in mental health, because no one was really addressing it.”
In his quest, Cathlin eventually tracked down the work of a psychiatric researcher in New York City that connected mental health conditions and RNS expression.
“What got me excited was that there was an actual biomarker to identify who actually had post-traumatic stress disorder,” Cathlin told Startup Health. “The fact that you can introduce an objective tool to that process was a game changer.”
Cathlin believes the company’s mission is to make “invisible wounds visible using the power of genomics.”
“We believe genomics is a driving force to connect mental illness to its biological underpinnings. By doing that, we can decrease the stigma, suffering, silence, and suicide.”
Polaris Genomics has partnered with the Illumina Accelerator, and scientists from Mount Sinai and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry to develop the first-to-market, patented genomic biomarker assay to identify risks of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The company was granted two patents on the blood-based biomarker model for PTSD.
Last year, the company launched a trial with Stella DC to further develop PTS-iD, called a first test of its kind to use genomics to detect the physical changes underlying PTSD. Polaris Genomics believes the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent years of mental health repercussions has “elucidated the urgency for advances in diagnostics and treatment across a range of mental health and neuropsychiatric conditions.”