Launch HN: Iollo (YC S22) – At-home metabolomics test to extend healthy lifespan

167 points by danielgomari 3y ago ↗ HN

Hi Hacker News! We’re Dan, Jan, and Brent from iollo (https://www.iollo.com/). We’re developing an at-home metabolomics test that measures hundreds of “metabolites” in blood, which studies have shown can inform about health status, disease risk, dietary patterns, and physical activity. We will then provide evidence-based dietary, behavioral, and therapeutic treatments to help extend the number of years you’re disease-free (your “healthspan”).

Today’s healthcare system is reactive, meaning diseases are treated only after symptoms are present. By the time they are detected, they’re often already serious issues that require irreversible interventions, like taking lifelong medications and living with their side effects. Collectively, we end up spending trillions of dollars treating diseases reactively that can often be prevented with good health monitoring and management. Also, a lot of age-related diseases develop as a result of molecular imbalances that accumulate over years.

One scientific field where many of these molecules can be measured is called metabolomics. Having worked in this field for more than a decade, we know that the technology exists to detect potential signs of chronic conditions at the earliest stages, when they are most actionable. Dan has a PhD and did his postdoctoral research at Stanford in computational biology and metabolomics. His work covers healthspan extension, lifespan extension and machine learning-based tools for drug repurposing. Jan, who was Dan’s PhD thesis supervisor, is a professor of computational biomedicine and metabolomics at Cornell. He has published over 90 metabolomics-related papers, with a focus on age-related chronic diseases, such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease. Brent was the co-founder of Circle Medical, a primary care provider via video and in-person.

The “metabolome” is defined as the complete set of small molecules found in biological organisms with a size of <1,500 Dalton, also known as metabolites [1][2]. This comprises biochemical substances such as amino acids, nucleic acids, fatty acids, vitamins, and hormones, as well as external chemicals like drugs, environmental contaminants, food additives, toxins [3][4] and metabolites produced by the gut microbiome. As of 2022, over 200,000 metabolites have been identified in nature, 40,000 of which are in blood, and over 1,500,000 are expected to still be identified (what we call the dark metabolome) [5].

The same way that fasting glucose has a baseline, other metabolites in blood, like the ~600 that we measure, also have their own baseline and deviations from these baselines have implications for your overall health and aging [6]. Compared to genetic testing, which tells people what might happen to their health, metabolomics tells us exactly what is happening in a body right now. Recent studies have shown links between blood metabolites and the risk or presence of various systemic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease; see for example [7].

Here are a few examples of what the first generation of iollo reports will include:

(1) The food a person eats and what actually ends up in their blood are not always the same thing. This is related to the concept of “bioavailability”, which differs from person to person. For example, people with impaired sugar transporters in the gut will not experience the same spike of blood sugar as people with a normal receptor (side note: this is not always a good thing, since sugars that remain in the gut lead to IBD-like problems). Our technology measures various markers of food intake, for example of red meat and plant-based diets, that can show what actually ended up in your blood. This can help guide dietary recommendations and healthy lifestyles.

(2) Your personal rate of aging. Research has shown that there is a “biological age”, which might differ from a person’s actual, chronological age. People who are...

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