Trich Analytics
The only company in the world that time travels using a single hair to reveal your "metal" health story!
Finalist for:
Emerging Technology Company of the Year
When – and how – was your company born
TrichAnalytics Inc. was born in September 2016. It was conceived through the Founder’s, Dr. Jennie Christensen, life-long passion with research, toxicology, hair, wildlife, health, and solving mysteries. Her vision was to disrupt the way the world monitors health and exposure to toxic heavy metals – through non-invasive techniques with micro-sized lasers that provide higher quality data and more detail than conventional approaches, such as blood sampling. The unique and Trich-developed methods are even known to help others travel back in time days, weeks, years to reveal their “metal health” story with just a single hair! There is no lab like us in the world, and we are strongly positioned to capitalize on the huge window of opportunity globally where health and safety is moving quickly into the forefront of industry priorities. Our techniques also have infiltrated environmental monitoring to not only support the improvement of human health, but that of wildlife and the environment as well.
Who are some of your clients? What projects are you working on right now, and what do they do?
For environmental services, we provide metal analysis of fish otoliths (or ear stones). Otoliths grow throughout the fishes’ lives like a tree ring; therefore, provide lifelong metal exposure characterization. For older fish, we can characterize exposure from >20 years ago, and how that exposure changes over time (e.g., effluent discharge into a waterbody). For occupational services, we work with industrial hygienists at mining, smelting and battery recycling facilities to monitor metal exposure in individuals using a single hair. Our state-of-the-art hair monitoring strategy is looking to provide a screening tool for hygienists to reduce the need for needles by 80%.
What was a pivotal moment for your company?
In the occupational hygiene world, the current use of blood and needles to monitor metal exposure is well established and trusted by industry and regulators. It’s challenging to implement a change in an entire industry regulated globally in this way, particularly as it pertains to the health of workers. While we knew our unique solutions would offer high quality, non-invasive, more integrated, and cost-saving analysis using single hairs over blood, having a “late adopter” industry take a chance to test and implement our approach was a big ask. But, we found our industry champion, who is not only excited at the prospect of our work and supporting us financially, but is bringing us into the regulatory world by putting TrichAnalytics in front of provincial and global regulating bodies, such as Interior Health, and the International Lead Association, with 31 industrial company members and >1 million at-risk workers around the world.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned along the way?
That achieving success for your lofty dreams cannot be realized without an incredible team. And by team, I don’t mean only the people who are officially paid by TrichAnalytics, but includes the incredible network of supporters, champions, financiers, and mentors whose only payment is the want for us to succeed. I have been sincerely shocked over the last 1.5 years as to how vast in number and expertise our team has grown and continues to grow every day! As the Founder, I really started out thinking I could do it all – at least until we were established enough to hire a few support staff. Very quickly, I learned that I was absolutely terrible at certain aspects of the business – I mean, my whole background was science, research and toxicology! What was I thinking when I thought I would be naturally able to excel at bookkeeping, financial strategy, and marketing/branding! I learned to bring people on who were the real experts, and ever since our company has excelled and our future prospects are exhilarating – we WILL make a difference in global health! And not because of a single Founder – but because we have an incredible team where each member brings their own passions, experience, expertise and neuroses to the table to make us the “coolest” laser lab in the world!
What does the future 10 years look like for your company?
Years 1-2 define who we are, attaining technical perfection and building our scalable prototype (i.e., lab and analytical services). Years 3-4 we will penetrate the lead industry’s occupational monitoring at a global scale, through our traction in the International Lead Association – develop bespoke monitoring programs, to help the ILA lower lead concentrations 30% by 2025! Years 5 to 10 we will expand into new metals (mercury) and new markets (welding, nutrition). By year ten, we will be located on 5 continents, have 20 labs with 40 machines, 80 incredible scientists, $100M in revenue, and $40M profit.
Why Victoria?
Not only is Victoria a beautiful city to live and work, it is also a government town. While we are still developing our occupational monitoring services, we have already been commercializing on our environmental services. Our current clients are mainly government: MOE, MFLNRO, and DFO. Our mining clients currently reside in lower mainland, where getting there for meetings is as easy as a quick and quite breathtaking ferry ride or float plane! Victoria is a relatively small city with a community feel, but loaded with opportunity in tech and health! To sum up: I recall one of my clients from Calgary saying to me (as I apologized that she had to travel here for an in-person meeting), “Are you kidding me? I look so forward to coming to work with you there! I love these trips! You are so lucky to live in Victoria!”