Health Longevity Secrets
A podcast to transform your health and longevity with evidence-based lifestyle modifications and other tools to prevent and even reverse the most disruptive diseases. We feature topics including longevity, fasting, ketosis, biohacking, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, stroke, cancer, consciousness, and much more so that you can find out the latest proven methods to optimize your life. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts, and solo shows that you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe and get ready to change your life. HLS is hosted by Robert Lufkin MD, a physician/medical school professor and New York Times Bestselling auhtor focusing on the applied science of health and longevity through lifestyle and other tools in order to cultivate consciousness, and live life to the fullest .
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Health Longevity Secrets
Does At Home Blood Testing Work?
Imagine unleashing the potential to monitor and optimize your health right from your living room. That's what we discuss with Dr Michael Dubrovsky of Siphox Health in an enthralling conversation about the leaps in at-home blood testing technology.
Note Full Disclosure: Siphox Health is a sponsor of this podcast but we only allow sponsorship by products and services that we believe in.
Michael's journey from biochemistry and photonics to pioneering consumer-friendly blood testing devices is nothing short of remarkable, leveraging the same silicon photonics that revolutionized the internet to now empower personal healthcare. We dissect the contrasts with Theranos' attempts, illuminating how Siphox's approach is reshaping expectations for lab-grade health insights at home.
As a beacon of knowledge on the implications of personal health tech, this episode navigates the maze of optimal health ranges versus the 'normal' and why the distinction matters for longevity. Stress hormones like cortisol, often overlooked, are put under the microscope for their role in biological age clocks such as the Horvath clock. We forecast a future where wearables amalgamate with at-home blood tests, creating a holistic health dashboard that revolutionizes our daily health rituals. The conversation also sails through the potential shifts in blood testing, from the current lab-based giants to more intimate, at-home methods.
Rounding off the episode, we explore the frontier of health monitoring technologies, with a spotlight on metabolomic advances by companies like ilio. Siphox's unique at-home blood test, which sidesteps traditional methods, prompts a reflection on how this technology could democratize healthcare through enhanced affordability and accessibility. We wrap up with a look at the pricing model and benefits of these innovative tests, offering a glimpse of the burgeoning landscape where health management is proactive, personalized, and in the palm of our hands. Join us for this insightful journey into the future of health technology, where managing well-being becomes an integrated part of our daily lives.
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Bluesky: ...
Welcome back to this episode of the Reverse Inflamaging Summit, Body and Mind Medicine, and I'm your host, Dr Robert Lufkin. Today we get to look at a very important area in longevity and that is through at-home blood testing. And we're fortunate to have one of the leaders of a new cutting-edge company in this space, Michael Dubrovsky. Hey, Michael, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hey Robert, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, before we dive into the area. There's so much information to talk about here, but maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about your background and how you came to be so interested in this area.
Speaker 2:So my background is originally in biochemistry. I've done a couple of startups and more recently I was working actually in photonics and materials at MIT and about five years ago I found this field of silicon photonics which a lot of people don't know about. So basically there are the electronic chips that are in everything, so in your car, in your phone, et cetera, in your TV obviously and those are very well known. But there's a subfield of semiconductor where they actually manipulate light in silicon structures and over the last 20 years it's become mature. So, like 20 years ago there were no products and now the entire internet is running on these chips. So our conversation goes through data centers and fiber optics. So every fiber connection requires light instead of electrons. So there are many, many silicon chips between us right now that are converting photons into electrons and back in order to make it possible to communicate with your electronic computer using light in between the computers.
Speaker 2:So that whole industry. That's a very quick explanation, but basically that whole industry has grown up over the last 20 years. In the past it was very large boxes at the ends of the fibers with discrete components like lasers and lenses and so on, and all of that has become chip based and that's enabled other industries to start miniaturizing. So basically my co-founder and I like three years ago so he's from the telecom space, so he basically built one of the most successful chips for internet communications. Like 50% of internet traffic goes through the chip today.
Speaker 2:So him and I were kind of looking at what other industries require, like next generation versions of this technology, where you take some large optical system made of different discrete components and combine it and I obviously had a big interest in biochemistry because of my background and we found that the lab equipment generally is actually optical. So if you get your blood drawn in a tube and it's sent to a lab, all the tools there use optics and it's typically a very complicated, large optics instrument. But then at-home testing like a paper strip test or miniaturized and make them low cost. So typically an at-home test like a COVID test or a glucose test use a totally different technology which can't really be improved to the point where it actually gives you the same performance as a lab test. And we realized that we had the opportunity to take a full, true piece of lab equipment and make it so small and low cost that it can become a consumer product, and that's how we got started with CypherFox.
Speaker 1:Well, I have to ask. One question that's probably on a lot of people's minds right now is just because of the current events and the current events cycle, why didn't Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos use this technology and they could have saved all the jail time and people's money. What is different about this than their approach and why didn't they use it?
Speaker 2:So that's a good question and also frequently asked questions. So basically, um, there actually was a company founded right around the time of theranos, that theranos was founded, that uses, uh, some of this technology, but at the time and this is like 2008 uh, it wasn't very mature. So they succeeded at building something, but it's still a lab instrument. It just uses less blood volume and gives you more markers, but it's $150,000 tool that takes inside it. So this is one of our cartridges. It takes a very similar cartridge with a. There's a chip in here. I don't know if it's easy to see, but that square chip that has 15 that do that, I'll say, is. And so there's a there that uses a sensor like this. Uh, the main difference is that it was the ability to orthogonal to the question, because they were not happens more than people know. So, basically, in every complicated industry, there is something like a Theranos going on every 5-10 years, and the reason is that there's a demand for some magical result like give a complete blood.
Speaker 1:Let's see, we're breaking up a little bit there. Michael, we can edit this part out. It looks like are you on wi-fi or landline? It's on, drop it right yeah, actually your signal's breaking up there, michael people that are technical say, okay, this is important. I'm on Wi-Fi, but you don't happen to have a Cat5 cable that you could run over anywhere to your router, do you? You're showing that you have low network bandwidth and I suspect it's probably just due to Wi-Fi traffic. Yeah, it's actually. Oh, there you go, yeah is this any better?
Speaker 1:uh, yeah, yeah, it just it froze there for a second and um, yeah, that looks, that looks better. And um, what we could do is maybe start start again and we'll. We'll just edit this, it doesn't matter, but start again where you were showing the device and holding it up there in hand, and then I'll ask you the Theranos question again. We'll back it up to that. That should be good. We can just edit from there. And, steve, please make a note to Chris to let them know to edit this and give them the time at uh, about 27 minutes into it yeah, it might.
Speaker 2:Uh, there might be independent recordings on my computer and on yours so that when they go into the editing it might actually not be. But anyway, happy to back up to whatever point. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, Unfortunately we're using Zoom, so it just records in one place in the cloud. I know some people are using local recordings. We're not for this particular thing.
Speaker 2:I see so no big deal.
Speaker 1:If you don't mind, we could just back up to that, because I think this is a really important point when you show the device and everything. So, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:Right, so yeah, so this is the disposable chip here which has 15 real-time immunoassay sensors on it. Basically, there's already an existing tool that the company was founded actually right around the time Theranos was founded, so their whole existence has been in parallel which used this technology to make a high-plex, low-blood volume instrument for central labs. But at the time it wasn't possible to miniaturize everything that goes into the readout. So the sensor is miniaturized, but then that device is like a $150,000 large box that reads out this type of sensor. Uh, we were able to miniaturize everything that goes into that onto this board. So this is a board with four optical chips and it goes into a device. Right now it's this size. By the time we launch in q3 of next year we'll launch studies it's going to be even smaller. It's 80 of these space, so we have to optimize, like the case, uh, but the this is the disposable cartridge and this is the reusable reader, and so they click together uh and what's enabled. This is basically that over the last 10 years, because of the boom in optical chips and telecom, they've become much more. Components are in chips, like lasers, uh and like. It's a long story, but essentially there's been a really big slope of progress in this field and so that's enabled miniaturizing not just the sensors but also the readout.
Speaker 2:I think one important one interesting, like analysis. I mean there's many great things you can read about Theranos, but one interesting analysis about this is just that in difficult fields like deep tech fields so lithium ion batteries, you know LiDAR, ai, self-driving cars, you know blood testing, whatever, something where there's actually a problem, it's not just a problem to find a market, but it's actually a problem to solve the technical challenge In all of those fields there's something like a Theranos every decade and of some size, right. So I mean, the biggest problem you know the reason Theranos is very famous is that they actually hurt people, so they, if they never delivered any results it might have, might have actually gone over better. But basically there's a niche that's easy to fill, which is okay.
Speaker 2:There's a a desire like we want to do a full blood panel out of one drop, like everybody wants that right, and technical people in the industry never promise to do this because you have to do blood counts, blood chemistry and immunoassays to do a blood panel. So, for example, we just focus on immunoassays. How are you going to do that right? There's no obvious way. It means you have to put it into three different machines, because the machines are very different, so you have to split this single drop of blood. It's not an obviously possible proposition. It probably is possible, but the niche is just promise whatever people want and then you can raise money for at least five years before people realize that you have nothing.
Speaker 2:So that is a general niche across many of these industries. So it's happened in LIDAR, it's happened in self driving cars, like it happens in every one of these difficult problems. But I think it shouldn't. You know there are real good working LIDARs that have come out over the last 10 years in parallel to the ones that raised money and never delivered anything. So I think it's important just not to be held back by the fact that this just fundamentally happens in any difficult problem and in the end you know, just like there are probably many airplane companies that never flew anything, right, it doesn't really matter 50 years later, right, like, what matters is the companies that actually deliver something.
Speaker 1:So the technology that's possible right now that you're optimizing is the immunoassay technology. So what does that exclude? You obviously mentioned red. You know CBC, which complete blood count, where you'd have to count the number of red blood cells, and stuff. That's not an immunoassay. What other things that we go to a doctor for, for blood work, would not be amenable to this amino assay approach?
Speaker 2:So we don't do anything like, for example, if you've heard, you've definitely heard of Grail, like the liquid biopsies. So those are all RNA, dna based, so we don't do anything like that. We stay away mostly from like ions, although it's probably possible on our platform, but there are easier ways to do, like chloride or, you know, magnesium and things like that, so we don't really do that. And yeah, it's possible to do things like ketones or glucose, but they're already existing, very simple devices for that, so we also don't focus on those. We generally focus on things that are high value, change very often and are very difficult to measure at home. So testosterone, hscrp, insulin, like things, you know, fertility hormones, things that people would really like to have a quantitative measurement of but can't today with a simple, you know, simple, at home device.
Speaker 1:And, to be clear, this technology and it is amazing technology is a one-shot measurement right. It's not currently, you know, there are only a few things we can do continuous monitoring of, you know, like glucose, and now ketones are in the pipeline and other things, but that's not in the near future for this approach just because of the methodology.
Speaker 2:Is that right? So the core technology is actually a, because it's real time sensing, it's actually able to do a wearable like a wearable form factor as possible. But and it's in our roadmap, but it's like five years away. So because there's no, you know, there's no glucometer for inflammation, there's no glucometer for hormones, so so it's already. It didn't make a lot of sense for us to go straight to wearable because, just like glucose, you know, you used to have to go to the to get a blood draw to get a glucose measurement. Then it became a glucometer. So it doesn't really make sense to try to jump straight to a wearable because wearables just take much longer to develop because of the implant. To try to jump straight to a wearable, because wearables just take much longer to develop because of the implant, like the subcutaneous implants, is very complex but it's not impossible. But it's not the first step on the roadmap.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, let's back up a little bit, and this conference is about longevity and certainly this technology is really important for longevity. But before we, before we look more at the technology again, maybe you could just tell us your kind of your personal view of longevity and aging. Uh, what's the model that you, or the lens you look at it through, in other words, why? Because everybody has sort of a different view. It's interesting. So, in your, in your view, why do people age? What is longevity about?
Speaker 2:This is a great question. I'm glad you know I never thought I'd be asked this question, but basically in late 2020, when it became clear that we were going to succeed at building this, I started thinking about, like, what are the use cases? I started thinking about, like, what are the use cases the most? What is the most general use case? And the general use case is lifespan right, so increasing, like getting more data to actually increase lifespan. And so I read all the popular longevity books and all the classic papers, so I wrote this post.
Speaker 2:There's an internal message board at Y Combinator called book face, so I posted there saying what are all the longevity things people recommend reading. So I read all of them over Christmas and basically the only thing I learned was that you should do intermittent fasting. Like that's based from all everything I read, I literally could not extract like anything that I was 100% sure about, except for intermittent fasting. So I started doing intermittent fasting, which was which has been great. Uh, but that's what I learned, I think, for me coming in from the outside. So I never thought about this at all before building a blood test. Uh, it's, it feels like there's a paucity of data and I know this is like this is also me talking, my book, of course, but it's uh, it does feel like it's very hard to collect data and there's many, many unofficial clinical trials ongoing. So people are trying many things and it's whether or not they're working I think will be. I mean, the more people do things and the more even like Reddit, slash biohackers I think is an incredible resource because there's a lot of self-reported like very interesting information there, because there's a lot of self-reported like very interesting information there. But if there was more hard data, I think it would be easier to evaluate, like what's working and what isn't.
Speaker 2:And from the perspective of like longevity interventions, I think from a theory of aging, I have one thought that I'll share. Yeah, um, that I don't think I have a good answer to, but if it's possible to have like a 40 to 40 year old people, this this might not be maybe in the longevity space. This is, this is like an obvious thing, but for me it's kind of interesting. If two 40 year old people can have a zero year old child is still there in the 40 year olds, right. So at 40, people still contain all the information necessary to make like a zero year old person. So I think that's pretty encouraging. That's like at a high level. But you know, how do you translate that into adding 10 or 50 years to lifespan? I don't know.
Speaker 1:But it certainly speaks to the fact that there is no inevitable wear and tear that wears down cells, that can't be reversed or fixed. Otherwise our germ cell line wouldn't be immortal like it is, which is, which is sort of what you're saying. So which, which of the the blood markers do you think, or how are blood markers going to help people with longevity? Certainly, in intermittent fasting we can see responses, favorable responses with biochemical profiles. What other ones do you? What do you? How do you see that?
Speaker 2:I mean, one of the first ones that I got interested in was HSCRP. So looking at inflammation, I mean people like to look at, I mean, the more markers you can get, the better. But one interesting thing about hscrp is that it's triggered by cytokines. So if you're tracking hscrp, you're actually implicitly tracking several cytokines as well. So I can go into what it is briefly. So your liver makes crp.
Speaker 2:Hscrp and crp are the same thing. It's just a part of the range that you're looking at and normally it's supposed to be very low and in response to bacterial infections and certain other events it's supposed to spike, uh. But the average american crp is like two, uh, two mgs per deciliter or two mgs per liter. And uh, if you look at it, there's there are clear correlations almost to zero of, you know, all-cause mortality and CRP. So ideally you want it at zero and the average American is at two.
Speaker 2:But because the average American is at two, the reference range goes from one to three. So essentially, like if you get a recommendation from a normal medical source, it'll actually say as long as you're below three, that's fine, but all the data suggests you should be below one. So that that I thought that was pretty eyeopening, and then the same turns out to be true about many markers. Essentially, that the reference ranges that are given if you just Google it, the WebMD reference range is based on the statistics rather than on what's known to be actually good for you. So I think that's one of the fundamental things that's interesting about starting to look at this yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, such a good point that the normal range is not necessarily where you want to be. You want to be in the optimal range because the normal American, let's say, is overweight, pre-diabetic. Normal American, let's say, is overweight, pre-diabetic, metabolically abnormal. So you have to be careful about the normal range. And that's such a good point. And finding what the optimal range is for good health can be a challenge because many of our doctors just check oh, you're in the normal range for diabetes, you're not pre-diabetic until your glucose raises a certain point.
Speaker 1:But anyway, one test I noticed you measured is cortisol on this on your panel, which is great, because cortisol is not something that's frequently measured by most primary care doctors, by most my most primary care doctors. Yet cortisol is the stress hormone, that that correlates with mental stress. And um, one of our one of our guests just commented that 30 percent of dna methylation is driven by cortisol or has ties to cortisol. So stress is is a significant factor for DNA methylation as, as measured in methylation aging clocks you know the Horvath clock, the biological clocks and and all and the is. Is that why you picked cortisol? You've already CRP is inflammation, that's important and cortisol drives inflammation. What was your thinking behind including cortisol in this.
Speaker 2:So the reason we include cortisol in the at-home test kit is, I mean, there are. So there are a couple of reasons to measure cortisol, but one of the major reasons that we also track sleep and activity and heart rate. So we we connect to all the pretty much any common wearable device and we put it all in the dashboard so you can see your blood data next to your. What we do is we average your sleep for the month or the week before your test so you can see how your sleep is affecting your test or how it's affected by your blood data. And cortisol has a curve that it's supposed to follow during the day.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm telling you things you already know, but basically there's a circadian rhythm to the cortisol level and so if your cortisol is low in the morning, you're going to feel very tired when you wake up. If it's high at night, you won't be able to fall asleep. And this is just a very common problem and it's pretty easy to fix. So we try to kind of like uncover these things for our users so that they can. These are things that you can fix easily without medication often. So it's something that's high value, because if you can find oh, you have low cortisol in the morning. That's actually very valuable information for the user. That's mainly how we look at it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great things. And just speaking of biological clocks and longevity measurements, morgan Levine, who's also involved with this program, is a researcher from Yale, now Altos Labs, and she working with Steve Horvath I think came up or she herself came up with PhenoAge, which is a biological clock, as you know, with lab markers. And I wonder does the CyFox home health test, does that include everything you need for the PhenoAge?
Speaker 2:I didn't go through that and check, but so when we were actually developing the panel, we considered going just pure pheno age. So why don't we just use that? But unfortunately pheno age because it's from normal lab tests it takes it doesn't have a lot of like the interesting proteins and hormones, because people don't often get those measured and instead they use things like cell counts. Because people don't often get those measured and instead they use things like cell counts. So we don't. We can't do that from home, so we can't do the pheno age easily.
Speaker 2:But what we are doing is we're going to try to basically work with somebody like Morgan Levine to take our panel and correlate it back to an aging clock Because obviously we're very interested in that, to an aging clock, because obviously we're very interested in that, and also break it down more systemically. So how's your metabolic system aging? How are you in terms of inflammation relative to like, your age and things like? So we're going to attempt some interesting aging scores. But that's in the works for like over the next three to six months.
Speaker 1:You know, is there this? This at-home blood testing, with a finger stick, a couple drops of blood, is so appealing. There's so many arguments, just from the cost, the convenience, everything. Is this the future of at least the, the blood tests that are amenable to immunological testing like this? Is what's going to happen to Quest and LabCorp, sort of the old school lab testing companies. Will they all adopt this technology as well, or is there a downside to it?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I mean, I think once you're drawing a tube of blood already for any reason, you might as well. Basically there's no. At that point you have an infinite quantity almost, and you can run it on five different instruments if you want. So you can get very esoteric things. So there are reasons to once you've actually done it, you know you've punctured the vein there are reasons to take a couple of tubes and kind of send them to the gold standard labs.
Speaker 2:I do think the central labs will become more for, uh, broader. So like long-term future, right, you should probably be getting you know there are 3 000 proteins in the blood. Uh, you know probably another 10 000 other markers or maybe 20 000. So you should probably just be getting all of them measured, right, if you're going to draw a whole, a whole tube of blood, you should get something in return, right, rather, rather than like five markers or something. So I think in the long run you'll get these two axes right. Like some things will go wide, like very broad, but you only get the test once a year and then other things will go deep. So you're going to get this test every week or every month and it's going to be much more convenient, much cheaper.
Speaker 2:That's what we're working on, right, but I think doing very broad tests is really interesting. There is a company that came out of Stanford called Iolo that just went through Y Combinator. So they're doing metabolomics. So again it's. There's enormously rich data just in like 20 biomarkers that are standard and have been measured for decades Right. But in parallel, companies are starting to get very broad. I mean, that's what the aging clocks are, that's what, of course, like DNA tests are, and so on just taking a very broad snapshot once in a while and trying to correlate that to things that are happening, you know, on a shorter time scale. So I think that's where the evolution should go. Basically, the lab corps of the world should be doing much broader tests. The same amount of blood, and then the simple tests just need to go straight to the home or to the doctor's office, and the technology is there to support that right. It's just a matter of the market evolving in that direction in parallel to people developing offerings.
Speaker 1:So if you require a blood test that can't be done with this way and you've got to put a needle in a vein, then you might as well just do everything. But if you don't, then you really ought to do it with a finger stick and do it from the convenience of your home, if you can. You mentioned yeah I was interested in that Y Combinator company, ilio, or I'm not sure how you pronounce it company ilio or is.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure how you pronounce it, I've only I think it's either iolo or yo. Yeah, yeah, it looks fascinating and and uh, they, they have. What. Is it 500 or so pro is? It's a metabolome? Right that they're metabolome, so it's small molecules.
Speaker 2:What they do is they get a blood spot and they put it through a mass spec and they look at it's. I think it's not fully quantitative, it's maybe relative values, like you have 10 times more of this amino acid than that one. So it's really like a big data approach in some, in some sense like you're paying them to be part of a study in a way. Uh, because they're also, I think I mean, they have a lot of papers and everything. But it's not like with the gold standard markers. We have, you know, 70 years of data on, but these are emerging, right. But I think it's really promising and in the end, your yearly blood test will probably should contain something like this so metabolome, proteome, the whole, like just thousands and thousands of markers, should be in the yearly blood test.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's such an exciting time. Yeah, I mean it's such an exciting time. I looked at the, the, the Oleo output on the, all the markers, and I'm going whoa, I haven't heard of most of these and it's probably because, you know, we've never been able to test them conveniently like this. So it's a. It opens up a whole new field. Well, what about? What about your space? Are there? Are there other companies? How is your company different from this? Are you guys locked in with intellectual property, or is this just kind of the way of the future that everyone's going to be doing? How do you see this in five years? Where will Cyfox be and where are the competitors? How does that spin out?
Speaker 2:I think the unique thing about what we're doing is that we are doing an at-home test that doesn't use a paper strip or an electrochemical sensor. That's probably the most unique thing, because there's a sea of competitors that do one of those two. There are some that try to do like, something with microfluidics, slightly different than that, but in general, doing semiconductor, photonics, semiconductors we're pretty much the only company going after at home. That that's, you know, really credible. Um, I think, uh, the best example of a real competitor or like, at least like I don't know, because the spaces were more, I wouldn't even call them a competitor like we're friends with, with the founder, but it's called bloom diagnostics. It's in europe, so they have a paper strip that plugs into a reader and I think they they offer one plex test, so it's like ferritin, crp, uh, and a couple of other ones and uh. So they're kind of stretching how far you can go with the paper strip test by trying to make it quantitative rather than one or zero measurement so that.
Speaker 2:But that's an example of a company. They're already in the market. They have something like an Apple store type store that they actually have like a physical one where you can go in and try getting a blood test and so on, and I think they're doing. They're doing quite well in Europe, so that's really encouraging. They're doing quite well in Europe, so that's really encouraging. Yeah, but I think in general it's very hard to put together a product like this that's actually commercial ready. So, because it takes so many, you have to combine so many different skill sets. That's why we're pretty open about what we're doing. We have like video lab tour, videos of our whole production facility and everything, because it's just very hard to replicate. But I think, of course, in the long run, a lot of companies will be doing something similar.
Speaker 1:And this is such a large space. There's so many people that need this right now that you know not even beginning to scratch the surface, but looking forward you mentioned you're going to have the home device reader and then people will pay for the reader or rent it or lease it from you or something, and then do you see the price coming down? Obviously, everything scales with volume and it's just a matter of that. But do you see big price drops in this or where would you like to get the pricing at in the future, or is it about where it's going to be now? Do you think in?
Speaker 2:the future or is? Is it about where it's going to be now, do you think? Yeah, that's a great question. So our one of our major goals is to just increase the volume of testing and the ease, and obviously cost is a really big factor in that. So we don't. You know, typical medical device approach is to get insurance reimbursement and have the cost as high as possible, right? So we're we're taking the opposite approach and saying how do we get the cost as high as possible, right? So we're taking the opposite approach and saying how do we get the cost down? And that's what chips really do. So if you look at literally any technology that's chip enabled, it gets cheaper and smaller every year or every several years. So we're kind of just following the same logic. So, right now, what we offer? I don't think I went through this yet. So we have this kit, which is you've tried. So this is a offer. I don't think I went through this yet. So we have this kit, which is you've tried.
Speaker 2:So this is a standard mail-in kit where you actually collect your blood onto what's called a serum separator card. So the blood goes on these windows, it goes across the strip and serum is separated from blood cells. Then this is put dry into a mailer like a USPS mailer. It goes on your mailbox and the beauty of this is that it can last two weeks. So that enables like a very low cost logistics where if it gets stuck for several days in the mail it doesn't get ruined. You don't have to take the test again.
Speaker 2:So this technology has really become more ubiquitous in the last five years. There are a couple of companies using it. The difference between us and other companies is that we just packed as many markers as we could into that one blood collection. So we have the most markers on the market from that one card and we offer it at the lowest price. And that's just because our whole philosophy is let's just get it, get the price as low as possible.
Speaker 2:So the next step for us is to take this mail-in test and, uh, move it to where. You're taking this test once a quarter rather than once a month, and then you have the reader in your home and you're doing tests every two weeks or every week with the reader for the markers that you care about. So you do the broad 17 bar marker test. You find out that you have low testosterone and high cortisol, and so then you try to adjust your lifestyle supplements, whatever it is you're doing, you talk to your doctor and then you take another test in two weeks with a cartridge. That's at home, that's specific. Also, finger prick and lower blood volume easier to do and you get the result instantly. And that's specific to XYZ. You know markers that you actually care about or that are the most important to you, and then you do the broad screen again every quarter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that it's so exciting. All this is just happening so fast and it's going to have a large effect on the longevity space. These tools are going to be so important as we understand longevity and as we adjust our own lifestyle and stress and diet, nutrition and exercise and our pharmaceuticals that we take. This is going to be an incredibly important role. How can? Maybe you could tell people how we can, how our audience can follow you on social media, and also maybe you could repeat your website there also, and also I think you may have a free gift that people can get just by clicking next to us here that we'll include on the webpage as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think let me just start by just giving the roadmap again. So today, this kit is already on the internet. You can buy it. Then, in Q3 of 2023, we'll be starting a study with this device where people can actually use it in the home. It's already so. We've already validated this third party triple blinded study for HSCRP today. So this we're speaking now. In December and over the next couple of months, we'll be adding more cardiometabolic markers this device is already for sale for research use only. Anabolic markers this device is already for sale for research use only. And then in Q3, people will be able to use it as part of a IRB approved study in their home alongside our mail-in test. And then in 2024, we'll be filing for FDA clearance for this device.
Speaker 1:I forgot to ask. Oh, excuse me, I forgot. We've been talking about cost and price and coming down. Maybe you could just quote some numbers, just so they know approximately what it costs now.
Speaker 2:So the device today, for research use only, is $1,000 and the cartridges are $50. That's because it's all very low volume. So by the time we're doing the IRB study it'll just be included in the membership and at scale this will cost us under a hundred dollars to produce the reader and $5 to produce the cartridges. So that's by the time we're FDA cleared. That's. Those are the price, the costs that we're targeting.
Speaker 1:And will that be per test, Like? I mean $5 per test per cartridge, Is that what?
Speaker 2:you're so it's like per cartridge and then the cartridge has up to 15 tests in one uh cartridge. So it'll have.
Speaker 1:But yeah, we'll have a markup on that, but that's that's our sure, of course, of course our actual cost, and maybe you could sell it near that yeah, and maybe you could mention the current pricing for the mail home kit if they want to get started with it right now and uh, what that is sure.
Speaker 2:So we really want people to do this monthly, so we actually sell it at a small loss monthly. It's $95 a month and then it's $165 if you do it quarterly or $195 if you do it on a yearly basis, and that's 17 biomarkers plus. You connect your wearable device to have like a dashboard that digests all the information and there are some suggestions for kind of improving and correlating this data as well, and you can follow us at CyFox Health on Twitter or follow me at Mike Dabrowski on Twitter, and we're also offering a white paper as a free giveaway for this interview, so you can, I think, click maybe there, something like that, to download it there. Who?
Speaker 1:knows Great Well. Thank you again, Michaels, for spending time with us today and telling us about everything that you're working on, and thanks for the great work you're doing to help truly make the world a better place and help us become healthier in our quest for longevity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, robert. Thanks for having me on, I enjoyed your info.