Learn The Impact Of Regular Blood Tests On Your Health

Kashif Khan

All right, everyone, we have an interesting discussion for you. A lot of what we talk about here is problem centric. We’re talking about fibromyalgia. We’re talking about endometriosis. We’re talking about menopause. We don’t often get to spend about the time that we’re about to spend focusing on a solution. So many of you out there saying, hey, well, what do I do? What do I use? What’s supplements do I take what doctor I talk to? What testing do I use? So we were able to track someone down that has built something really cool, taking a whole bunch of what you may have done separately and put it all went in one place. We’re going to discuss the science behind it today and all that’s being offered. 

So, Michael, thanks for joining us here today. Yeah, thank you. We were just chatting about the product and what it does. It sounds really awesome. We’re going to break it down and go through each component of it. But it’s very difficult to go have functional insights that measure the things that people want to measure. It’s kind of like if you’re going through the typical allopathic route, it’s you tell me about my cholesterol. Tell me about a vitamin D marker and what does that even mean? The ranges are like this and all of a sudden there are tools out there like yours. So what where did this start? That kind of what drove you to even bring something like this to market? Then we’ll get into, like, what it actually is.

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah. We’re at heart a blood tests hardware company. We make these, like blood tests on a chip. There’s like a small chip in here. It’s a little bit hard to see, but that’s it’s a miniaturization of a large instrument. So there are a lot of components on there that are optics components which are normally in like, if you open a lab testing tool that LabCorp or wherever, that’s going to be a lot of optics. So that’s our long term mission is to miniaturize not that long term. I mean, something that’s around the corners to actually put this in people’s homes. But we launched an interim product which actually is still probably the most innovative in the market despite being what we’re really building is like 100 fold better than going to a phlebotomist, but this is maybe tenfold. So you put blood on this card, so it comes in a kit to your home and this is on the market now. We have lots of both direct to consumer subscribers that get these kits like on a monthly or quarterly basis. And we also work with a lot of businesses, ranging from pharmacy chains to individual like, practices holistic medicine practices, whatever, like across the board who are looking to get blood data as part of whatever they’re doing. Basically the end user puts blood onto these windows, it runs across and the blood cells are filtered from the plasma. So this goes into a package that’s dried and that’s that goes into a USPS mailer or in Canada, it goes into, I believe, UPS or FedEx. Then that goes to a lab where we collect the data. So we do 17 biomarkers from this across inflammation, metabolic health, cardiovascular risk, and hormonal, and like some nutritionals. It includes a lot of interesting stuff like the typical markers. It’s not like Glycans or something. It’s stuff like hs-CRP, fasting, insulin, Apo B, lots of markers that people have heard of, probably if they’re in the space, but all in one test and it’s all proteins and hormones and some lipids. We just saw that there was an opening in the market kind of to provide a nice, comprehensive panel that’s very low cost, very convenient. So that’s what we’re in the market with now. We’re hoping to bring some of that to like instant results in the home, eventually more like a glucometer. But for now that is all we have and it’s actually growing pretty quickly and we’re very excited about it. Another thing that we do is we actually also collect data from wearable devices, and so then we put that all together into a single dashboard for the end user.

Kashif Khan

So the user is getting accesses dashboard where you’re kind of aggregating everything. And then there’s one place to make sense of.

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah, so we don’t collect if you weren’t ordering or whatever, you have that track your sleep activity, they’re going to have an app that has tons of layers and lots of information. We don’t do any of that. We just take that data and we average it like the key, the critical stuff. We average it across a week or two or a month before the blood test so we can see, okay, how does your sleep correlate to this blood data? How does your activity correlate to this blood data? So, it’s not really a way of like tracking your sleep daily or something. You know obviously we’re never going to do better than or their own like tracking their own data, but it’s more about having that aggregate information and seeing how it affects your biomarkers. We also do continuous glucose monitors for the same reason. So, we don’t produce continuous glucose monitors, but we provide them and then you can see that data in your dashboard as well. Like how was your glucose control over the last two weeks, that kind of thing.

Kashif Khan

So, when you were trying to solve this problem you’re compacting all this stuff into one easy to use test. How did you decide what actually needs to be tested? Because there’s so much you could have done. Word of this could sort of consolidated down.

Michael Dubrovsky

It’s a good question. So we have a bias for proteins and hormones because that’s what our technology does. But we could have but the mail-in test, could have been, we could have added, you know there are other tools, there are all kinds of tools in the central lab. It’s just using central lab tools. So it could have been the mail-in test could have been anything. But I tried a lot of different products and what I found is that we wanted something that could be easily affected by behavior and quickly. So for example, you could do like DNA methylation, but that’s not affected by behavior very quickly. So it takes a long time for that to change. We wanted something where like a monthly or even a weekly test would make sense. You end up with proteins, hormones make the most sense. So you can do like metabolites, but those change every hour. So it’s difficult to interpret them. People do metabolomics, but it’s really not clear yet, like exactly what the data means. But a lot of proteins and hormones that have been studied for 30 or 50 years, there’s a lot of good data, like hs-CRP amazing data. That, if your hs-CRP baseline, not like if you’re sick, but your standard kind of inflammation levels hs-CRP is higher than point five, that’ll have a negative correlation to your life span. That’s really well established. There are a bunch of things like this. I think we basically chose across the board like trying to cover as many of the chronic diseases or like health optimization areas as possible in one test.

Kashif Khan

That’s awesome because that convenience factor is often people don’t do things because they’re not easy to do. Yeah, the convenience alone is a reason why some of you might adopt this, which can truly change your life and change your life in terms of if you have a data sitting in front of you that tells you the outcome of your habits. I am assuming that’s why you chose to build this as like a subscription where it’s not just about get some data, but also inspire lifestyle habits and change so that people actually get better.

Michael Dubrovsky

I think we see that in our data just from our users where we’ll discover some percentage of them will have like pre-diabetes or high inflammation or whatever it is, and that does actually prompt people to try to do something about it. We do give some insights, so we have a whole bank of insights based on your biomarkers that we provide. So they’re kind of auto generated. Then we have an M.D. You look through them before they’re sent out to you, but we don’t do like very serious, deep, like lifestyle planning. We kind of leave that to coaches and other people that are more in touch with the person and know them on a closer level and can make a decision with them about what they should do. But we provide like the classics. This is known like Kirkman will drop your syrup for 80% of people or whatever it is. So that’s like an easy one. So there we have 100 of those or 200 of those that we will provide with the data. Of course, we’re always growing that, but we’re not very aggressive. If you look at, for example, InsideTracker, they’ll have like 400 foods they usually eat. We looked at that when we were building this and thought, okay, we don’t really want to clutter the app with this. We just provide like a couple of suggestions every time you take a blood test and that’s it.

Kashif Khan

There’s value there. Because I’ve seen platforms like you’re talking about with the InsideTracker and often the idea is good, but the practical use is like, where do I start? Thank you for giving me all this information. But somebody has to consolidate this down to like what’s actionable and easy. Then often you may start in the wrong place and you don’t know what the weight is of which one actually gives you the most outcome. So it’s great to like whittle it down to like the priorities and the focus. So now with this at home product, how do you? Where did you go from like, okay, we had this hardware device, but in between we were making this card. Do we need both? Or is it just an interim thing until the other one lie? Or what was the intention?

Michael Dubrovsky

We really wanted to be in the market and actually doing blood tests because this is what the current device that we’re building for the home looks now. So, about a year from now, we’ll start a study where thousands of people can use these at home, if they signed up for the study for like wellness health optimization. Each cartridge will have four or five biomarkers or something like that, but they’ll be like an information one mental for themselves, whatever. But yeah, we just saw that to be honest, you in health care, you don’t need to innovate that much to do something innovative that’s kind of the crazy thing that I learned. So when we got into this, we’re engineers and scientists and we thought the home device, like, we had to have the home device to be innovative, but then we actually look what was out there, we said, okay, if somebody just launches a really high quality home test, just like the kit, that would already be innovative. Because the current kits that you could go to Everlywell or let us get checked, you have to buy four kits to get this panel or maybe five you have to prick your finger five times. 

It’s like just by maxing out what’s possible with the off the shelf technology. Of course, we’re blood testing experts, so maybe we’re able to make a broader panel, but in general, it’s not like in semiconductors, they double the speed of the chip of all the chips every two years. That’s not the kind of thing you see in diagnostics. Like blood tests don’t get two times easier and cheaper and faster every two years. So, it’s pretty easy to actually do something new. That’s what we found this after we started the company. It’s like a year or two into building the hardware. Then we discovered that we can actually launch a mail-in tests and do something significant with it. It teaches us a lot about which markers actually change. Like we’re collecting a lot of interesting data and we can use that to then guide like whatever we were going to launch with the hardware to home hardware.

Kashif Khan

A lot of people have concerns like, okay, this sounds like an amazing product I’d like to try. Then people start thinking about data and privacy and security how does that all work when your and your blood is being sent to a lab? Every quarter, for example?

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah. I mean, it’s all pretty much every company in the industry works the same way. So its blood data is a little bit less serious in some ways than DNA because it’s not really identifiable in any way. So like couple of biomarker, the biomarker profiles of different people look pretty similar. It’s not like a fingerprint if your test and maybe if you tested all 3000, there would be more of a fingerprint. But if you’re testing like ten. But it’s all very regulated by the federal government and by states and so on, like the way that the data should be handled and anonymized and everything. We just follow the standard like guidelines. But I mean, if you’ve ever done a venous draw blood test that your doctors like, that’s it’s essentially being handled the same way people do. Like, of course we have like Facebook ads in the comments are like, you’re going to take my DNA and whatever and it’s actually would be good for us to test the DNA, but it’s very expensive. So, probably we could get some benefit out of having their DNA information as well. But like full DNA sequencing thing is, whatever, three or $400 now at least so. But that’s if it was very cheap, that would be a good idea.

Kashif Khan

So what is the current price? What are people paying to do?

Michael Dubrovsky

So it’s it’s $95 per test. Then we do a monthly membership fee to be like in the system and that gives you other benefits as well. So you can do that. So you get kits and any time you use a kit, you pay $95 and then we replace it. That’s kind of like our standard unlimited membership as a call. But then you can order also like continuous glucose monitors. There’s a bunch of other things and that’s all it costs. Like we don’t really make money from that and we try not to really make money with the tests either. Actually, we drop the price whenever we can and then we have a B2B offering where we do at low volume, it’s $120 a kit and we’ll actually put the logo of the let’s say if you’re a wellness clinic or you have a startup that’s doing something, health optimization and you want to have blood tests involved. So we’ll actually put your logo on our kit and put your logo in the dashboard that the user sees. Then you can also do some other customization, add your own insights and things like that.

Kashif Khan

So I’m curious, the device I know you’re not there yet, but at home device, where is that going to land for pricing when it’s finally like.

Michael Dubrovsky

It’ll probably be part of the subscription. So instead of getting like one test for $95, you would get like four cartridges and you can take them at intervals during the month or like whatever. Depends a little bit on what you’re doing, but that’s our target is to get it to about $25 a cartridge. Then, the device would be for you with the subscription.

Kashif Khan

That’s phenomenal because things are affordable, because I know like you talked about on every level, for example, you pick up a Leiden-V Test, a hormone test, and a couple of you get a few hundred dollars very quickly. If you get it on one shot and some people asked when it comes to new technologies like, I don’t know about accuracy, like I trust those are really well guys, I trust Quest Diagnostics, even though I’m paying a little bit more. How do we know that a card draw that sent to the mail provides that same level of data?

Michael Dubrovsky

So the way it works is there’s an organization, like the FDA, but it’s specific to blood testing. It’s called CLIA, that sets out all the requirements. So basically what people do is every lab has to validate. You have a lab director and they run the all the validations to show that your test is equivalent. So let’s say if you’re doing a finger prick test, it’s equivalent to the Venus drop. Any test that they cannot figure out how to get like the same results in a very controlled experiment, validation study doesn’t get launched. We basically only offer the tests that are possible to do in a mail-in format like this. So there are some tests that don’t really work well, like blood counts don’t work. It’s very hard to preserve blood in shipments and things like that.

Kashif Khan

There’s a lot of people listening right now. Some are health enthusiasts that are just wanting to learn and do more and some are chronically ill saying, I need a solution, someone help me. Who is this best suited for? Is it for everybody or is there ideal person? Like if you’re in this phase of your health, this is ideal for you.

Michael Dubrovsky

That’s a good question. I like to think of it as like there are the people who are getting lots of blood tests already. So for them, this is like maybe it’s interesting, maybe it’s not. I mean, if you’re going and getting venous draws constantly, maybe you can just add these markers to your order and you don’t care about getting them at home. I would say there’s like a bigger circle of people around that who are curious about these markers, but not getting them measured frequently because of the difficulty of getting to a phlebotomist, of the cost, whatever it is, getting your doctor to prescribe it. I mean, a lot of people complain that they can’t even get their doctors to prescribe these tests. Yeah, I think that’s where the sweet spot is. So it’s people that are curious but are not currently. That there is a pretty big group that already does blood tests on their own somehow or they’re getting like through a functional medicine doctor or whatever. There it can be useful in some cases or maybe not. I don’t know. It depends what their protocol is. But I think we’re finding that there are a lot of people that kind of know about this stuff but haven’t really gotten to try it yet. So that’s where that’s like where we play. That can be somebody either with chronic disease or just optimizing their health prevention or whatever. Like across the used cases, it’s really about like access. Like do they already have access to blood tests on a frequent basis or not?

Kashif Khan

Yeah, I’ve heard the problem you mentioned earlier where I know what I need because I listen to a podcast, I talk to someone functional, but my doctor won’t prescribe it. So in this case, are you prescribing or is there no prescription?

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah. So every blood test has to be prescribed. So there is a back end. It’s like your typical telehealth business. So there’s a back end where a doctor will prescribe it to you, but it’s completely seamless so that actually you don’t have to have a visit. They basically because these tests are routine and not risky or like not special in any way, they’re prescribed like in a very simple way. But there is a doctor prescribing in the background. There are some like rules around how it all works. So if you get a very high value or very low value for something that’s dangerous, could be dangerous. We actually call you there’s like a whole protocol. So there are some like a bit of a medical piece to it, but it’s very small. It’s mainly if there’s something that’s out of range and we think it’s too far out of range for us to like see it as like a wellness thing. We will just tell you to go to your doctor essentially. If it’s so far out of range that we think it’s urgent and the doctor that prescribes actually sets these physicians on the ranges will call you and have you go retested LabCorp and go see your doctor. And so on. That’s how it works.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, that’s awesome to know that it’s that because you don’t get that with a lot of the some of the platforms that are out there should say it’s either hardcore allopathic and it’s hard to get anything done. There’s a predetermined blinders on like, here’s how we do things. Or It’s way on the wellness side and you don’t have the supports and you get lost like, okay, great, I have this report now what? You’re kind of fulfilling the needs is well thought through. I appreciate that because it’s like you are solving the problems that are practical, and blockchain resolving  if somebody gets a report back. I know you have this amazing dashboard and it allows people to interpret. It’s kind of like you’re doing the interpretation. Do you think there’s still a need for a practitioner to dive in and is there more value that can be sought if somebody is coaching through?

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah. I think you probably always get better results if you have a really good expert or coach working with you also because they motivate you to take action to improve things. But we do give like there are a lot of people that just want to do the stuff themselves and we give more than enough information for that, for the optimization stuff. If you’re not well, if you’re not like very ill, if you’re just trying to optimize, let’s say you’re pre-diabetic. If you go to a doctor and you say you’re pre-diabetic, they’ll say, yeah, just try to improve your diet, this, that. But really you want to be trying things, looking at your markers, maybe wear a continuous glucose monitor like there’s like a game you can play to try to get back into range. I think we give a lot of good advice around that and also like coaching, I think in the end there’s a difference depending on how serious the person is. I think our coaching service makes a lot of sense. It’s something that we’re actually trialing also. We don’t advertise that much, but we have a coaching tab in the reports, so you can actually book a coach through there and we’re just testing it out and seeing how people like it. But we basically do like a short coaching session and put together a plan for them based on their markers. But it’s not that different from the report, but it just adds like the human element where they can ask a question and things like that.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, to know it’s there is always awesome because a lot of people say, yeah, I’ll get it, but if I need help, is there someone to help me? Often lab and clinical are separated. So when you’re dealing directly with a lab, it’s like, well, I don’t have any support where I go to and the doctor gets grumpy and says, Why do you do this test? We didn’t need any answers. So it’s good to know that you’re working towards that. That’s exactly what I think people need. Do you think that there’ll ever be an expansion in the future or additional reports, panels like if somebody is on your subscription, there may be new products that come along?

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah. So we launched the hormone expansion where you get like five more hormones. You have to fill more blood. There’s like another strip that you have to fill-up. We’re testing that out and seeing how people do with it. There is some demand for it. It seems people are interested and we’re going to kind of work out a system where you can do add ons like minerals and other things. That’ll be in the next six months we’ll probably roll out five of these or something like thyroid minerals, like the kind of the top ones that we don’t cover now. So we have DSH where we don’t have like the full thyroid panel. So that’s, I think over the next six months we’ll have probably another five or six panels. The one thing like a decision we made is, you always get the standard panel, like you can’t get like a piecemeal thing from us. You can get only add ons because we just think it’s like good to people, just have to test us over and over so that they have like a baseline of these markers and then they can add other stuff as well.

Kashif Khan

Got it. So you had the box there. Is a kit inside?

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah. It’s a whole this is just like you get everything you need to collect your blood. So it’s one thing we do. This is kind of subtle, but we have four lancets, so it’s funny. This is like an older kids, so it only has three openings. So this has since been fixed. This is like a prototype. But these two are this is what I really well or let’s go check will ship you so this is like the watch this kind of like the butcher lancets so this one really works but you don’t really need it. The reason they ship it is because if you don’t warm your hand up, if you don’t follow the instructions, it works better. But we ship actually also a like these lancets which are much less painful. So I always use these. I’ve done 40 of these tests or something and it makes it much better. Like for example, if I use and this is one reason why people don’t always want to do home tests all the time because like if I use the blue lance and then I go play basketball, I can actually feel like it hurts my finger. That’s not the case with the smaller Lancet. So we do this. We provide a lot of instructions around like how to make the blood collection easier or less painful. Then there’s a mailer that’s in there that goes, you should put it on your mailbox and it gets picked up and that’s it. So there was no like traveling somewhere to drop it off or whatever. Yeah, that makes a big difference actually.

Kashif Khan

Okay. I get that because I’ve used that blue lancets in some I think it was epigenetic testing. For me, butcher, I laughed when you said that because that was the experience and the person next to me couldn’t even get their blood drawn like it didn’t even work for them now. So that’s why I asked to see the kit, because that one thing, the experience and I can see that you guys are really thinking about what the customer needs and a lot of people don’t do that like we’re a lab. Here’s how things get done. We know better. Even just working with somebody who values and appreciates what people actually need makes a huge difference in outcomes. I appreciate that. Where do people find the test? You said it’s live now.

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah. So just siphoxhealth.com. It’s SIPHOXHEALTH dot com. Then if you’re a business, you can go to the partner or like for business section and see kind of like there’s a flow there or if you just want to buy a kit, you click start your journey and select. There are some options for different delivery types and whatever, that’s it.

Kashif Khan

As a business, a clinic works with you. Are you dropshipping on their behalf or you’re.

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah. So we do everything they can get the data either through an admin dashboard or an API. They’re also their customers can just send them. It’s very easy to share the results, like anonymously through our system or print them out as PDFs. USB or whatever. So that’s all really simple. We have a 30 kit minimum. So basically let’s say you have a clinic and you want to set this up, you basically pay the 30 kit minimum and you’re in the system and you can start giving us addresses or putting them into the admin dashboard or API or whatever and we’ll start doing everything. So you just 26:25India and get the report you don’t have to worry about like holding people’s hands through the process of doing the test, anything we do, everything.

Kashif Khan

Understood. Okay, that’s awesome. It’s just it’s great to see the work you’re doing because I like me being sort of call it semi biohacker health enthusiasts. I have done the multiple tasks and I have used all the way from LabCorp down to a bespoke mom and pop type of stuff. Been to all our labs here and there. This is really easy to use. It’s a home line set. Then going on to a card, no phlebotomy, no driving to the clinic, no worrying about all the sometimes you have to have ice and packing and all this crazy stuff. It’s very difficult. How long does the card last once I get my blood on it?

Michael Dubrovsky

Two weeks. It’s like, very robust. If the mail gets stuck for three days or whatever, it’s not a big deal.

Kashif Khan

I don’t know if people realize how phenomenal that actually is, that this card that you’re putting blood on to and you can still measure up for two weeks.

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah, because it’s dry. So that’s the real advantage. Then it kind of shifts the complexity on to the lab to you have to rehydrate it and then account for that change and everything. But in the end, for transportation, it’s amazing. That’s one of the weaknesses of many of home tests is you take it, you ship it, and then it gets stuck for a day in shipment and they reject that. Then it’s like, all right, we’ll ship you another kit. 

Kashif Khan

We’ve seen that many times. Or it’s too little or too much or it’s just yeah. When you’re not sitting in front of a phlebotomist, it’s challenging. You get a contamination, that type of thing. But this makes it very easy. So this is a great discussion. What do you see as the future of, I see this as like kind of disrupting blood work. I don’t know if you’re going to, is there going to be a LabCorp or Quest knocking on your door and saying we need you guys down or what..

Michael Dubrovsky

But that’s a good question. I mean, I think there are so many blood tests. It’s very going to take forever to. There are other companies also working on like home blood counts and things like that. So there are so many blood tests is going to take a long time to disrupt like the whole industry. It’s not going to one, companies aren’t going to do it. So there are some companies that are kind of doing the Thanos thing, which is like, let’s do blood counts, chemistry and immunoassays like proteins and hormones is what we do one on one. So there are a couple of there’s like Truven if you’ve heard of them. Yes, but they’re more for like doctor’s offices so nobody’s doing that for the home.

Yeah. I think honestly, we’re pretty orthogonal. Like I don’t think we’ll really take any business from Quest or LabCorp. It’s really about people are getting like ten tests in a decade. We’re talking about doing ten tests in a year. So it’s really about like increasing the frequency, maybe decreasing the number of markers in some cases, depending on like what kind of panel you’re getting normally. But making them more interesting. So looking at markers that change quickly, so I think it’s pretty orthogonal. It’s really it’s more about I would say it’s like disrupting the I don’t know if the word disrupting is correct, but it’s really about trying to do something about the fact that people only get treatment once they’re sick.

That’s everybody talks about this. But I think blood testing is one of the big ways that you can approach this, because it just gives you information that it’s very hard to know really what’s going on and what’s working, what’s not working unless you have symptoms. So then you have to wait for symptoms. A good example of this is like you’re fasting, insulin will be out of range five years, ten years before your glucose. If you start seeing your fasting insulin increasing, that like you’re getting more insulin resistance and that’s really where you want to start, like figuring out what’s going wrong and if that’s probably maybe the biggest problem in America for Americans like American health care in general is insulin resistance. Another might be another one, but that’s probably one of the biggest ones where like smoking was. It’s actually kind of interesting. We’ve treated smoking for insulin resistance hasn’t really.

Kashif Khan

Yeah it’s very similar. It’s a slow silent killer, it’s but yeah, for sure. I think the CDC said that only 5% of Americans are now metabolically healthy.

Michael Dubrovsky

No, that’s crazy.

Kashif Khan

It’s unbelievable. This is coming from the CDC. So that’s going to be a conservative number. You have 90 million pre-diabetic, I think 40 million diabetic. Then the rest are tipping on the borderline. So, yeah, well, yeah, to me it’s like what I see here is kind of like the ordering of blood work you’re making it easy, accessible and trackable, which is awesome because now all of a sudden people can implement and can use this as a tool. It is part of your toolkit. There’s another metric that drives your health outcomes. So I think you’ve done an amazing job. It’s really good. I’ll be ordering my kits fairly soon to figure out what’s going on in my body. So thank you for taking the time. It’s a great discussion, everybody. We’re going to post notes on your website, and where to get it from. You made the cost so easy. Most of the things we look at when it comes to blood work in testing, it’s usually four, five, six, seven dollars it’s price point. It’s like anybody can access that, which is awesome. So we urge everybody to do so. So we’ll share the info on where to get it from your website, etc. and thank you for joining us is a great discussion.

Michael Dubrovsky

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for your time.