Esya Labs Is Putting a New Spin on Brain Health Diagnostics
After a traumatic illness left her temporarily paralyzed, co-founder Dhivya Venkat decided to use her experience as a business strategist to tackle the problem of neurodegeneration. Now, with Esya Labs, she’s attempting to flip the typical R&D narrative, focusing on collaborative, multiomic solutions rather than the work of one brilliant scientist or lab.
Origin Story
Most startups are born in an office, around the kitchen table, or on the back of a napkin. Esya Labs was born in a hospital bed. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
Dhivya Venkat began her career in 2003 as a consultant for Accenture. She learned the ropes and then rapidly came to realize that her passion was to build her own business, not merely help someone else with theirs.
So just four years later, Venkat took the leap and started her own boutique consulting firm, eventually earning the business of blue chip clients like Vodafone, HSBC, Best Buy, and Barclays.
When asked why she branched out on her own so early in her career, Venkat points to her grandfather.
“He was an entrepreneur in India, and even when I was a young child, he'd take me into the office,” she recalls. “He worked in the agricultural sector, making paddy threshers, sugar cane crushers, motor pumps, and other agricultural machinery. I'd see him overseeing the factory, handling meetings, and that became the norm. You take problems and you find solutions for them. That’s my ethos.”
That ethos might have kept Venkat in the financial sector had it not been for one very traumatic event that left her bedridden and paralyzed.
In 2016, Venkat took part in a quadrathon, a race where participants do four marathons in four days. She flew back to India right after the race and quickly fell ill. Two days later she woke up to discover that she couldn’t move her lips on one side or close her eyes. Her face was partially paralyzed. She thought she was having a stroke. The hospital treated her for meningitis and she stayed in intensive care for 11 days. Eventually physicians settled on a diagnosis of Ramsay Hunt and she was given a 30% chance of recovery.
While lying in the recovery room, Venkat’s problem-solving mindset kicked back into gear. She shifted from the micro – her own struggle with neurological deficits like memory loss – to the macro. Why, she wondered, was there no diagnostic tool, no screening test, for neurodegeneration? Why was there no clear way of testing if you have brain inflammation? After all, we have well-studied panels for heart health, lung health, and kidney health. Why not the brain?
In the end she recovered physically, but the experience left an indelible mark. She’d found a mission worthy of her time and experience.
Launching Esya Labs
Venkat dived into the problem of neurodegeneration and soon she was workshopping it with a family friend, Prof. Yamuna Krishnan, PhD. One conversation led to another until they figured out that the professor’s work on lysosomal storage disease had a direct link to Alzheimer’s. Dr. Krishnan invented an award-winning technology that could measure the ionic composition of lysosomes / endosomes in a way that had never been done before. This turns out to be relevant to Alzheimer’s because lysosomes are like the garbage disposal units in our cells and it is this endo-lysosomal pathway that is dysregulated in most neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's. It appeared very promising that Dr. Krishnan’s work could be foundational to a new blood test for Alheimer’s disease. The company Esya Labs was born to bring that idea to fruition, with Dr. Krishnan and Venkat as co-founders.
This was 2019 and there wasn’t a simple blood test for detecting dementia. Most companies were working on tests that required cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from a lumbar puncture.
But this initial discovery that launched Esya Labs was just the foot in the door. Once Venkat began raising money for Esya and stepping further into the world of neurodegeneration, she realized there was a much bigger opportunity: to build the world’s first and best brain health panel. The world didn’t just need a single pathway for detecting Alzheimer’s, it needed a broader approach to brain health that was multiomic, meaning it is an integrated approach combining multiple areas of biology, like genes, proteins, etc.
Under the Hood
“We started off as a skin-based test, then moved into blood, then realized a single lysosomal single marker wasn't sufficient,” Venkat explains. “We then added targeted proteomics, transcriptomics, genetics, and now we have a fine-tuned assay that combines key markers and lysosomal data to enable us to understand onset of dysfunction, 15-20 years before developing the symptoms for Alzheimer's.”
To outsiders, it might seem obvious for a brain health company to take a multiomic approach to diagnostics. We all appreciate at some level how complex our brains are. However, it is actually a differentiator for Esya Labs that they are working from the problem backwards. More common in neuroscience is to take the specific work of a brilliant PhD or lab and try to make it fit the market. Esya represents a tech-agnostic framework for combining leading diagnostics related to neurodegeneration. That mindset also makes Esya more future-proof as they are designed to continually evolve their methodologies.
"Many in this field are fixated on a single hypothesis, often tied to their PhD or life's work. They believe it's the only solution and focus solely on bringing it to market. However, with my business background, I approach it differently: I start with the problem and explore all available solutions to address it effectively."
That same business-forward approach also plays into Venkat’s view on the competitive landscape. There are so many parts to the Alzheimer’s disease value chain, she explains. Esya’s model would lean on collaborations and strategic partnerships in order to create more of a one-stop solution.
Today, Esya Labs measures five key proteins that are dysfunctional and combines that data with an understanding of cellular dysfunction to get a molecular signature that allows them to give patients a risk scoring for neurodegeneration. Their vision is to roll this out at the primary care level so that neurodegeneration can be caught early – and inexpensively – and patients can have an informed conversation about lifestyle changes and therapeutics with their doctor. Venkat has raised $2 million to date and is raising again soon to move into the next phase of lab research and to work through the FDA process.
Join us in welcoming Dhivya Venkat, Yamuna Krishnan, PhD, and the Esya Labs team to StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot.
Connect with Esya via email
Call for Alzheimer’s Innovation
With support from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) and Gates Ventures, we’ve launched a new global initiative created to develop a collaborative innovation community alongside leading companies, research teams, and stakeholders with a mission to accelerate progress in prevention, diagnosis, and management of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Learn more and apply for an Alzheimer’s Moonshot Fellowship.
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Published: Aug 29, 2024