LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — A Lexington-based genetics company has played a role in helping solve a mystery people across the country have been following.
Looking around the TruDiagnostic lab, it'd be easy to imagine you're in Silicon Valley, but their office is just off Harrodsburg Road.
University of Kentucky graduate Hannah Went is the co-founder and director of operations. They analyze epigenetics - basically, the ways people's DNA can be influenced by their lifestyle.
"We specialize in looking at these molecules on top of your DNA that actually control your genetic expression," Went said.
The goal, Went said, is to use that information to make better lifestyle decisions.
"How can we change that DNA modification through, maybe, lifestyle factors, taking different supplements, medications, or doing different procedural-based therapy," she said.
One of their products is a test that aims to give customers a sense of how their cells are aging relative to their actual chronological age.
"You essentially get a number. It's called your biological age. It's really how you're aging on a cellular level. We can compare that to your chronological age. Ideally, you want to be younger compared to the rest of the population. If you are, you're probably doing something positive in your life that's going to reduce your risk of all-cause mortality, which is death and also morbidity, other types of age-related diseases," Went said. "Aging is the number one risk factor for every single chronic disease and death. In order to manage it, we need to measure it."
A precursor to this technology was using genetic information to figure out the age of the person it belonged to.
"It was actually used in forensics at first, to identify the age of DNA at a crime scene. It was even used to date refugees to see if they were old enough to seek asylum," Went said.
Turns out, that technology was incredibly useful for a woman named Natalia Grace. She's the subject of an Investigation Discovery series airing now on Max called "The Curious Case of Natalia Grace". She's a Ukrainian woman who was adopted by an Indiana couple as a girl. Grace has a form of dwarfism. A decade ago, her original adoptive parents were accused of changing her legal age from eight to 22 because they believed she was actually an adult, and abandoning her to live alone in an apartment. The adoptive father was acquitted of neglect charges and charges against the adoptive mother were dismissed.
TruDiagnostic stepped in to answer the question of whether Natalia Grace was a child or an adult when she was adopted back in 2010. That testing determined she is now about 22 years old, which means she would have been around eight years old when she was adopted.
"Imagine going through your entire life being lied to, essentially, or thinking that this story is being made up about you or trying to tell your truth and no one believing you. I honestly couldn't imagine what she was going through. It was probably a huge weight lifted off of her shoulders. When we were revealing those results with her, there was a lot of emotional outpour, you can see in the series there are some tears and her dad consoling her and saying, 'How does this make you feel?'" Went said.
Went said they were thrilled to help Grace fill in part of the mystery and believe their epigenetic testing is the future of healthcare.
"We truly believe epigenetics is going to be the biomarker of the future. We're starting to see it be used in every area of medicine, not only aging. I think in probably the next decade or so, or even sooner than that, it'll probably overtake conventional blood testing, 60% to 70% of what your traditional primary care physician is already doing," Went said.
As far as the future of the Natalia Grace case, it’s unclear whether the TruDiagnostic technology will play a role in any possible legal developments.
