iollo_health

Thanks for addressing the elephant in the room 😄 We have nothing to do with Theranos.

We already have the technology (mass-spectrometry), which is widely used by universities and pharmaceutical companies for research purposes. Using such established methods avoids the use of custom-made machines and builds on decades of research before.

During Theranos, companies were challenged how they could do it better than Theranos. Immediately post-Theranos, investors were rightfully skeptical of the space. Now, investors (and regulators) are doing better diligence. A lot of investment has returned and grown in this space in recent years with lots of advance in technologies across the board. Here's a nice write up from Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01242-0/

The recent downturn in the market is a concern for all companies right now, but Seed and Series A markets seem to be less affected. Nonetheless, some of the best companies started during the 2007/8 financial crisis. Look at Airbnb 🙂

Thanks for identifying this! It is out-dated language from our legal team that needs corrected.We are consulting them now to update this.

[Edit] The Privacy policy is updated to reflect our commitment to your privacy. Thanks again for finding this one.

Really appreciate the comments. 🙏 We are responding to several of the critical comments from this sub-thread, and hope we can provide clarification. Note that we slightly changed the order in which they appeared:

“If I take my blood first thing in the morning vs after I have had my biggest meal of the day there would be a world of difference. And same if I took it the day after a feast vs before etc etc.”

That is exactly right, and a well-known issue that needs to be addressed when performing metabolic measurements in blood. First of all, the current fasting status has a major impact on the measured values. Thus, we instruct users to always take their sample in the morning, after at least 8-10 hours of overnight fasting. This is an established procedure to remove unwanted variation, and has been used in many large-scale research studies around the world. Regarding your second point, effects of your food that might last more than just overnight, this is exactly one aspect of what we are looking for with our test. If it lasts for more than one day, it is likely related to your overall dietary pattern, and might already influence your fitness and health status for the better or the worse. We also capture dietary intake before and during the sample collection to account for these foods.

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“Could you answer the question why we need an answer every 2 months instead of say every 1 yr or 5 yrs or 10 yes? [...] It would be nice to know what making these measurements on say every 10 years give, then what more you'd learn if you test every 5 yrs, every 1 yr, every 6 month, and finally why it is worth it every other month as you are advocating here.”

“I get what the science is achieving by averaging. I don't get what the consumer is getting.”

“Their plans seem really arbitrary in the cost for the return and the number of tests. Not sure how they came up with it but hopefully op will give us some response.”

As both of you correctly mentioned, an essential aspect of monitoring your personal status is your own baseline and relative changes. Averaging across many samples that we will collect is a very interesting way to build up our own knowledge base for the future, but indeed not the main benefit to the consumer. Rather, we believe that a fine-grained assessment of your personal trajectory, through healthy times and disease, through regular daily life and unexpected changes, through times of activity and inactivity, and potentially through the seasons of the year, will help us know what you look like normally. This in turn will then allow us (a) to see if things are not going well for you anymore and drifting apart, and (b) to monitor potential lifestyle interventions such as an increase in physical exercise or dietary changes, and see the results right away.

Now, admittedly, whether this needs to happen every 3 months, every 2 months, or every month is still up for debate. That’s also why we offer different packages, where people who are more skeptical can start with a smaller version, and people who are very interested in a fine-grained analysis of their personal profiles can go for the premium packages.

We are HIPAA compliant, meaning all of your protected health information (PHI) is encrypted and kept safe. Your information, results, and recommendations will never be shared with employers or insurance companies.

You can opt in to participate in scientific research, like drug discovery, only using your anonymized data, but it will not be shared without your consent. And we will only select research that would also benefit those taking the tests, ie. help you live longer or healthier.

Our subscription plans will sustain and allow us to grow to help more people without having to sell your data.

Yes we do! We match individuals with dietary and behavioral (and in the future, therapeutic) interventions based on the 500+ metabolites that we measure in the lab.

Almost all known medical interventions impact our metabolome in relation to aging and chronic diseases. Some well-studied interventions include the DASH diet [1] (which reduces the risk for heart disease), fasting [2, 3], targeted physical activity [4], statin intake [5], metformin [6] medication (which has been shown to extend healthspan and lifespan), and many more.
References:
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/108/2/243/5038205
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6412259/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32931723/
[4] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30508-0
[5] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCGENETICS.117.001759
[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8508882/