Li­nus­Bio, a Mount Sinai spin­off start­ing out fo­cused on neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­ders like autism, an­nounced Thurs­day it raised $16 mil­lion in Se­ries A fund­ing.

Pro­ceeds will go to­ward build­ing its plat­form that us­es ex­po­some bio­mark­ers with the aim of im­prov­ing and quick­en­ing the di­ag­no­sis of health con­di­tions as well as mea­sure re­spons­es to en­vi­ron­men­tal ex­po­sure.

Ac­cord­ing to the New York-based com­pa­ny, the plat­form ex­am­ines pa­tients at the mol­e­c­u­lar lev­el and can pro­vide da­ta from a sin­gle strand of hair equal to over 500 liq­uid biop­sies or blood sam­ples to catch health con­di­tions that ge­nom­ic bio­mark­ers can’t and “maps the mol­e­c­u­lar dy­nam­ics of hu­man phys­i­ol­o­gy in a time-de­pen­dent man­ner.”

The plat­form is al­ready in­volved in two spon­sored tri­als.

In No­vem­ber 2022, the com­pa­ny an­nounced a part­ner­ship with Novozymes to use Li­nus­Bio’s plat­form in a pro­bi­ot­ic clin­i­cal tri­al in Mex­i­co to an­a­lyze lev­els of lead and oth­er harm­ful chem­i­cals in par­tic­i­pants — again us­ing a sin­gle strand of hair. Lead ex­po­sure is still a wide­spread pub­lic health prob­lem in Mex­i­co.

Li­nus­Bio has an FDA break­through-des­ig­nat­ed di­ag­nos­tic called Strand­Dx-ASD, which the com­pa­ny claims can pre­dict the like­li­hood of autism at birth “with 80% to 90% ac­cu­ra­cy.” It’s de­signed for in­fants through peo­ple 21 years old. The tech has al­ready re­ceived the CE Mark des­ig­na­tion in the Eu­ro­pean Union.

“We chose to fo­cus on autism first for many con­sid­er­a­tions, an im­por­tant one of them is the dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent tra­jec­to­ry in cas­es of an ear­ly de­tec­tion and ef­fec­tive in­ter­ven­tion. The im­pact on the pa­tient and the pa­tient’s fam­i­ly can be sub­stan­tial,” Li­nus­Bio co-founder and CEO Man­ish Aro­ra said in a state­ment.

There’s more in the pipeline, in­clud­ing bio­mark­ers for ALS, on­col­o­gy, in­flam­ma­to­ry bow­el dis­ease and men­tal dis­or­ders.

Great­Point Ven­tures and Bow Cap­i­tal led the Se­ries A, fol­lowed by Di­ver­gent In­vest­ments, Bia-Echo pres­i­dent Nicole Shana­han, the David Bel­let Fam­i­ly Of­fice, Gillian San­dler, and Fran­cis­co Part­ners co-founder San­ford Robert­son.

Li­nus­Bio came out of a world­wide li­cense and col­lab­o­ra­tion agree­ment with Mount Sinai In­no­va­tion Part­ners and the in­sti­tute’s Ic­ahn School of Med­i­cine. Aro­ra, the CEO, is al­so vice chair­man of the De­part­ment of En­vi­ron­men­tal Med­i­cine and Pub­lic Health at the Ic­ahn School of Med­i­cine.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.