Sterling diagnostic startup Aperiomics Inc. has quietly made its exit.
The nearly 8-year-old company sold its technology, which pinpoints causes of unsuccessfully diagnosed infections, to Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (NYSE: LH), the industry giant known as Labcorp, in late 2021.
“When everything shut down, our doctors were no longer ordering tests and we lost nearly all of our revenue. We tried to pivot to Covid testing, but regulations and politics won. Our technology was acquired by LabCorp late last year,” Aperomics CEO Crystal Icenhour wrote in a Jan. 14 Twitter thread, addressing another Twitter user questioning whether the company survived the pandemic. “Unfortunately you are correct,” Icenhour confirmed in her response.
“It has been very hard,” Icenhour said later in the exchange.
Icenhour told us in a LinkedIn message she is “not authorized to speak about the acquisition,” and Labcorp did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The transaction does not appear to have been reported up to this point in Labcorp’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, nor in a company press release, which the firm has used to report other recent M&A activity.
Aperiomics no longer has an active website or social media, and Icenhour’s LinkedIn page pegs her time with Aperiomics as ending in October 2021. Since then, she’s been the microbiome and specialty infectious disease director for Labcorp, per her profile.
The sale comes after a promising and equally bumpy ride for the biotech, whose tech uses genomic sequencing and machine learning to identify every known pathogen — bacteria, virus, parasite or fungus — behind mysterious illnesses. As of early 2021, the company reported that its testing had helped more than 1,200 health care providers across 24 countries since its 2014 founding.
But on the heels of a critical funding raise for the business, the coronavirus crisis threw it some curveballs. The company pivoted to the Covid-19 testing arena, providing a Covid-19 test to universities, airlines, hotels and other businesses through the in-house lab it opened in 2019. But, the company soon found, the expected demand for those tests wasn’t there — for many reasons, WAMU reported at the time. Aperiomics also failed to receive the Food and Drug Administration approval it needed to advance a rapid antibody test for Covid-19.
In the leadup, Aperiomics had fallen short of an initial target for its funding round in a tricky moment for investments. Icenhour had been pitching her startup as the controversy of Silicon Valley blood-testing company Theranos Inc. in which millions of investor dollars were lost came to light. That saga largely tarnished the health care diagnostic space — and Aperiomics felt the effects, Icenhour told the Washington Business Journal in January 2020.
But the business — one of our Startups to Watch of 2017 and 2021 — seemingly found its footing in early 2021: kicking off a hiring push to double its team that year; projecting 50% revenue growth after surpassing $1 million in 2021 revenue for the third consecutive year and shooting for 600% revenue growth in 2022; and beginning insurance billing with players including Medicare, BlueCross BlueShield, United HealthCare and Cigna.
Icenhour, who holds a doctorate in molecular medicine, was previously president and chief science officer of Phthisis Diagnostics Inc., which was acquired by Microbiologics in October 2013.
