Panome Bio, a multi-omics CRO, launched its exposomics service platform that offers chemical exposure profiling in biological samples. The service suite combines two complementary workflows.
Discovery Exposomics is powered by MassID
, the company’s computational engine for untargeted LC/MS data analysis, and a 32,000-compound database for broad, hypothesis-free exposure profiling, according to a company spokesperson. Targeted Exposomics complements this with quantification of 235 priority chemicals using calibrated reference standards in a CLIA laboratory setting.
Environmental exposures from PFAS and pesticides to microplastic metabolites, industrial solvents, and food additives are estimated to drive 70–90% of chronic disease risk, yet they remain the least measured determinants of health outcomes, according to a Panome Bio official. While genomics has transformed our understanding of disease susceptibility, the genome is static and cannot explain much of the variability in who develops disease, when it manifests, or how it progresses, added the company spokesperson, noting that chemical is a critical missing piece of this equation.
“Profiling chemical exposures with broad coverage is among the most challenging of the omics sciences. This has made it difficult for core services to offer the technology at the operational scale required for impactful findings in diverse human populations,” explained Gary J. Patti, PhD, CSO of Panome Bio and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
The chemical exposure space is extraordinarily complex: tens of thousands of synthetic and naturally occurring compounds can enter the body through air, water, food, and consumer products, each varying in concentration, persistence, and biological effect. Measuring them requires a platform purpose-built for this challenge.
Inter-patient variability in drug response is a persistent challenge in clinical trials, and chemical exposures may be a critical but unmeasured confounder. Patients’ accumulated burden of industrial chemicals, dietary contaminants, and persistent pollutants can influence drug metabolism, modulate disease pathways, and affect treatment outcomes. By capturing this dimension, the company views exposomics as a new lens for understanding why certain trials fail and why certain patients do or do not respond to therapy.
“In drug development, we invest enormous resources understanding the genome and the proteome, but we’ve largely been blind to the chemical environment patients carry with them into a trial,” said Edward Weinstein, CEO and co-founder of Panome Bio.
“Exposomics gives researchers and sponsors a powerful new tool to stratify patients, explain variability in drug response, and ultimately design more effective studies. Combined with our metabolomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics capabilities, we can now connect chemical exposures directly to molecular outcomes.”
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