Take your standard vitamin aisle. The media can tell us that fish oil’s good for us this week, and taking B6 shots could help improve and revitalize our libido. But do we actually know what supplements our body really needs? No – which helps fuel the occasional snake oil of the $32 billion dollar supplement industry.
A San Diego company is trying to change that. The freshly launched Vitagene has developed an algorithm that can spit out a personalized supplementation regimen for its users, offered through a network of partnering physicians. It’s using patient DNA, lab results and lifestyle information – as well as a database of curated research data – to help users understand what combination of vitamins and minerals they actually need in a supplement.
The company recently raised a $5.5 million Series A, Vitagene CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia said in an interview, and plans to use this to hire a sales and marketing team. Though Vitagene is now focused on keeping the work in tandem with physicians, it ultimately hopes to expand into that multibillion dollar consumer supplement market.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
“Patients could stop buying generic bottles from retailers, and get a box that’s delivered to them that’s personalized,” he said.
The company launched about a year and a half ago, researching what nutritional deficiencies people have based on their genetics, medical history and medications. It’s since taken that research and created a sophisticated algorithm that tries to answer those questions about the body – providing a nutrition approach that’s tailored to each user.
Vitagene has an interesting investor base. Illumina is on the roster – a worthy choice, as Vitagene is part of the San Diego sequencing giant’s accelerator. Other funders include Neil Hunt, the chief product officer of Netflix, Ken Goldman, the CFO of Yahoo, and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, who also personally invested in 23andMe.
Vitagene is in partnership with Illumina to run a full exome sequence on a group of patients, examining more than 500 different genes that give data on a patient’s supplement needs. But supplement use is also based on an individual’s lifestyle choices.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“We don’t assume you’ll change your behaviors,” Maghsoodnia said. “If you have a certain type of behavior, we will complement it with supplements.”
One of the company’s early research successes, he said, is Vitagene’s use among patients who have had bariatric surgery. This invasive form of weight-reducing surgery significantly changes the ecosystem of the body, Maghsoodnia – so it’s critical how you manage nutrition in the months following surgery.
“I can’t yet make a clinical statement, but the information is very promising,” he said.
Companies are increasingly taking this approach – that is, examining nutrients and vitamins – to suss out underlying causes for imbalance and disease. Take Cambridge-based Pronutria, which just last week raised $42.5 million from Nestlé Health Science. It’s developing nutrition-based therapeutics for conditions largely caused by amino acid imbalance – using tailored foods to fill in the gaps
