By Diagnostics World News Staff
September 9, 2026 | LinusBio, the company behind the hair-based autism test ClearStrand-ASD, is applying the same underlying technology to a new consumer product called Traced — a test that tracks a person's exposure to metals and other elements over roughly a month, rather than capturing a single snapshot in time.
Founder and CEO Manish Arora describes hair as a "molecular movie" rather than a single photograph, and the mechanics behind Traced are lifted directly from LinusBio's earlier ASD test: because hair grows at a predictable rate, sampling along its length lets the company reconstruct a rough timeline of what was happening in the body week to week. LinusBio says its process can pull around 10,000 molecular data points from each growth segment, and up to 1,000 segments per sample.
Where Traced departs from the ASD test is its purpose and audience. ClearStrand-ASD was built as a diagnostic aid; Traced is explicitly positioned as a wellness and monitoring tool, not a diagnostic — the company says its goal is to flag questions for a person to bring to their doctor rather than to identify disease. It currently screens 15 elements (essential minerals like zinc and copper, toxic metals like lead and cadmium, and others), with pesticides, PFAS, microplastics-related compounds, and mercury planned for future versions. Results are benchmarked against a proprietary global reference database spanning multiple countries, which LinusBio says helps avoid mistaking a whole community's elevated exposure for "normal."
The company is framing Traced as the first piece of a broader "exposomic" platform — additional products, including an outdoor-exposure test that doesn't rely on hair and a hair-based ALS test, are reportedly in development. Pricing starts at $299 per test, or $239 on a quarterly subscription, with LinusBio pitching repeat testing as the real value: a longitudinal record of exposure rather than a one-off result.
For the full interview with Arora, including more detail on the robotics behind the hair-processing method and how the scoring system works, see Allison Proffitt’s story at Integrative Practitioner.