The Scientist Behind Traced: Why a Mount Sinai Researcher Spent a Decade Studying What Information Your Hair Holds
Most lab tests provide a snapshot. Traced is designed to provide a timeline of elemental patterns. That distinction, and the science behind it, comes from more than ten years of research by Dr. Manish Arora, an environmental exposure specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the founder and CEO of Traced's parent company, LinusBio. Dr. Arora received his PhD from the University of Sydney in Australia, and then did his fellowship training in Environmental Medicine at Harvard.
From Baby Teeth to Hair
Dr. Arora didn't start out studying hair. Trained as a clinician and environmental epidemiologist, he was drawn to a foundational question: what is hidden in the time dimension of our physiology? Could the body keep a record of past environmental exposures, the way a tree keeps a record of past seasons in its rings? And what does it mean about how we understand the sources associated with these exposures?
While looking at a cross-section of a cut tree, he noticed a ring that looked unusually thin and irregular, and it made him think of baby teeth, which also grow in layers. That observation became the starting point for a research program looking at how metals such as lead and arsenic get laid down in the layers of a growing tooth, creating a kind of timestamped exposure record.
Teeth turned out to have an obvious limitation: they can't be collected easily at any time (they shed when they shed). That search for a more practical tissue led Dr. Arora to hair, which grows in a similarly layered way and can be collected non-invasively at any time.
A New Way of Thinking About the Environment and the Body
In 2020, Dr. Arora and his colleagues formalized this line of thinking into what they called the Biodynamic Interface Theory, the idea that the environment doesn't leave a single, static mark on the body. Instead, it interacts with our physiology continuously over time, and that ongoing interaction can, in principle, be read back if you have a tissue that records it and the tools to decode it. This theory is also the subject of his book, Environmental Biodynamics: A New Science of How the Environment Interacts with Human Health, published by Oxford University Press in December 2021.
The technology that grew out of this idea became the platform LinusBio uses today: proprietary robotic and laser ablation methods to slice a single strand of hair longitudinally, and open it like a book. Since hair grows at a fairly predictable rate of about one centimeter per month. Each segment can then be analyzed for trace elements, effectively turning one strand into a month-by-month timeline rather than a single snapshot.
Recognition From the Federal Research Community
This work has drawn sustained support and recognition from the National Institutes of Health over more than a decade. Dr. Arora has been the recipient of the NIH Director's New Innovator Award (2014) and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, presented by President Obama in 2015. He currently serves as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on multiple NIEHS-funded research projects, including the Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource (HHEAR) Untargeted Center grant and an NIEHS RIVER grant supporting broad, long-term exploration of hair-based biomarkers.
That RIVER grant funding is part of what allowed the lab to broaden its focus from studying individual exposures to building tools that could be used more widely, work that eventually led to founding LinusBio, the parent company behind Traced.
From Research Lab to a Consumer Test
Traced builds on insights from Dr. Arora's research makes the science behind it accessible through a simple at-home collection process and commercial laboratory analysis. A person mails in a few strands of hair, and the lab analyzes 15 elements across a 30-day window, providing a view of how elemental patterns in the analyzed hair vary across that period. Every element in the report is also compared against a percentile ranking from a broader reference database, alongside plain-language notes on general, non-occupational sources people commonly associate with that element.
The company describes its own difference this way: most tests give a moment, Traced aims to give a timeline.
Grounded in Scientific Research
For a test like this, the credibility of the science behind it matters as much as the sample-collection process itself. Traced isn't a new idea bolted onto an existing lab test. It's the direct output of a research program that started with a question about tree rings, moved through more than a decade of NIH-backed work on teeth and hair biomarkers at Mount Sinai, and was formalized into a published scientific theory before ever becoming a consumer product.
Traced is an educational and informational tool, not a diagnostic or a substitute for medical care. What it does offer is something most people have never had access to before: a personal timeline of elemental exposure patterns, built on a strong research foundation more than ten years in the making.
Traced is an informational exposure assessment test that measures selected elements in a hair sample and compares the results to a reference database. It is intended to help people understand elemental patterns in their hair and learn about common environmental, dietary, and lifestyle sources associated with those elements. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease and has not been evaluated by the FDA.
