At-Home Blood Testing Will NEVER Be the Same: *Affordable* Blood Tests, Wearable Data & AI-Analysis

You put blood on these squares. This is called a serum separator card. And this basically separates red blood cells from serum. Once the serum is dried onto this card, as long as it's in the desiccant packet, it's good for two weeks. So this allows you to realistically, you know, do home testing. Using this card, we're able to put together what's called a clia lab test. So it's a central lab. The card goes there, it gets rehydrated and run. We're able to put together the best test in the industry by far, the base test, which takes one card and then we have add ons that take one more strip, does 17 biomarkers. Whereas normally if you're taking a test like this, basically for almost the same price, you're getting three markers or something like that. We've tested thousands and thousands of people and we continue to do so. It's growing very quickly. People are getting tons of value from being able to get these markers easily.

In a world of home blood testing, there's a lot of options out there. I mean, they're all over the place all the time. Podcasters talk about the different blood tests that we're doing. I talk about self quantification all the time. And it kind of seems like it's a little bit of a dime a dozen scenario with all the different ways that you can test your blood at home. I have of course been trying all these different tests as I'm prone to do, and one that has kind of caught my eye is called Cy Fox S I P H O X. They're a Boston based company run by today's podcast guest who is a materials chemist and serial entrepreneur. Michael Dabrowski and I have actually been pretty impressed with the platform and the results and the ease of the testing, but more importantly, some of the stuff that they have on the horizon as far as some pretty technologically driven initiatives that should make home blood testing pretty crazy cool. So as you listen in, I will link to some videos, I'll link to some resources, I'll link to some of these tests that Michael and I talk about. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Syfox with an S S I P H O X BenGreenfieldLife.com SciFoxPodcast is where you can access the show notes Michael, assuming you're done pricking your finger and testing your blood. And we're whatever an engineer in charge of a blood testing company does in the morning. Welcome to the show.

Thank You. Thank you, Ben. It's good to be here.

Yeah. I actually am curious. How often do you test? And the reason I ask is, like.

I did a podcast with a guy who was actually at an event with you and me, Michael, down in LA a few weeks ago, Dr. Matt Dawson, who's running True Age Diagnostics, and he said he's testing like once a week or something now as far as this, this Home Tree Age diagnostics test goes. But I'm just curious how often you do it.

So when we first launched our products, we had like an internal team of 30 people that tested every week for quite a while, maybe like six months. And we just wanted to see. There's not a lot of research on frequent testing because it's just been so expensive and difficult to do tests. So, you know, the, the literature is not very good on, like, okay, if you're actually testing every week, what are you going to see? So we wanted to kind of build some of that up ourselves, so we did. I did weekly testing for about six months as part of that group, and now I'm down to probably every month. I think that's like in a. The trade off of, like, how much effort it is to do the test versus how quickly things change. Once a week is like, if you're really making big changes, it's worth it to do it once a week, but I think once a month is where it starts. That's like where I found my balance since then, over the last, let's say, a year and a half, but that's been very helpful, actually.

Yeah. I don't know if it was you or somebody from your team who gave me these tips, but they were super helpful for my own blood spot test because we can get into what the Cy Fox test actually is. But part of it involves pricking your finger and putting the little drop of blood on the card. And I have just. I don't know if it's a thickness of the skin in my fingers or maybe lack of blood flow, I don't know. But anyways, for the longest time I had trouble with it, and then you guys taught me. I'm going to show people in the video how to kind of like pull back the skin of your finger, put the lance on there, and then kind of milk the finger from the base of it to the tip. But you know what the game changer was, was making sure my finger was warm. So now on the day I'm going to do my blood test, I get up, I go down into the sauna. I flip the sauna on and leave it on for like 10 minutes so it's nice and warm. Then I go in there and put the card on the floor of the sauna and blood just gushes. I mean, I can fill up that card in like 60 seconds.

Yeah, that's very funny. Yeah. I think, you know, what we found is, when we launched it first is you'll have like a distribution. So basically, some people bleed too much, some people bleed too little. And it definitely has to do, like, for example, like, if you're weightlifting, you might have thicker. Depending on how you lift weights, you might have, like, thicker skin on your fingers. So I kind of am in the same position as you. Like, I have trouble getting enough blood, but I think there's a lot of good hacks to do it. I think nobody besides you has reported doing the sauna. I think that's actually a very good idea. Kind of like the poor man's version of that is just like very hot water. Before you do the prick, you kind of like, put your hand under water for two minutes. But what I do actually is I have a weight rack in my yard and actually go out and do like 10 squats. And basically after that you get kind of the same effect. You just get warmed up and a lot more. Especially in the morning if you're sleepy, then your hands might be cold and so on. But I think once people figure it out, whatever works for them, it gets very easy. After I figured out some hacks to do it, I've never really had an issue collecting the sample.

I don't know. Doing those squats and stuff before your blood test might throw off your cortisol or your testosterone or your blood sugar or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean, it's kind of like probably the simplest thing is putting your hand under a warm wal water. But it's more. I mean, the squats are more fun. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, the response, right. Like, your body, if you do it right away, I think by the time whatever response you have to the squats gets in your blood, I think it's probably okay. You probably have like 10 minutes or 15 minutes before that. That has an effect. But a lot of the markers are pretty. They're relatively slow changing, you know, like inflammation, some of the hormones, and also like insulin, stuff like that. That stuff is slow changing unless you're really, you know, if you're. If you're fasted and everything, it should be fine, right?

It's not like if you, I don't know, do a few squats, it's going to jack up your testosterone within the five minutes it takes to do the test.

Yeah, exactly.

Anything like that. But we could probably talk for a full hour about how to get your fingers to bleed more and things to do before a test. But I want to get into Cyphox man, because honestly, when I first got the kit, I kind of thought it was just going to be the same as all these other blood tests that inevitably get sent to me. Being a podcaster and a guy who writes about a lot of self quantification stuff. But you guys are doing some interesting things and I mean, I actually would love to just jump into the deep end with this idea of the chips and the semiconductor technology. So I don't know if you have a perfect place or a story starting point for that, but fill me in on how you built this and what's unique about it.

Yeah, sure. So originally we started out actually as a pure semiconductor company, so we weren't doing blood testing. And there's a subset of chips, silicon chips, that run the Internet, which are actually operating with light. So the data centers are connected with fibers. There's light going through those fibers. That's how all of our data is like, that's how this phone call is happening and so on, like this recording. And there are chips at the end of those fibers controlling the light. So using that technology, we were working on building like more complicated systems out of that technology that can do more than just process data, but like the kind of next generation systems. And we realized we could take a tool from a central lab which is full of optics. Actually, like if you go into a LabCorp request and you open up one of the analyzers, it's all lasers and lenses in there. So it's actually very optics heavy. That's one of the reasons those tools are expensive and large.

Okay, and just to pause for just a second here, when you say LabCorp and quest for people who might not be familiar, these are one of the locations spread around the US where you'd often get a rec form sent to you, a requisition form sent to you after your doctor after you have ordered a test, and then you get in your car, you drive to the lab, you wait for an ungodly amount of time, unless you have an appointment, and then you get your blood drawn and you leave. And that's what they're using in those labs, the semiconductor technology?

No, so actually in the labs there's more older School stuff going on. And that's why those tools, it's like a whole table, the tool that does the blood test normally. So we basically decided to take all the optics in those tools and get them onto several chips. So basically several silicon chips to make it very small, something that you can use in the home. And you know, people have talked about doing this for years, but one of the things that's happened is really this technology has matured that allows you to take a lot of optical components and put them onto a silicon chip. So over the last four years we've been developing a home device that we're eventually in the next year or two going to go through the FDA with to allow people to actually test at home. So this is an example of a cartridge where you have a small silicon chip right there. And that chip can do 15 different tests at once. And normally really it's called an immunoassay. These are protein and hormone tests. So we don't do blood counts for example, but we're focused on proteins and hormones. And so that type of test normally really the instrument is like a whole table, It'll be like your whole desk. So we're leveraging some really powerful technology that's scaled the Internet over the last 20 years. So it's not that we built this from scratch, we're really using this supply chain that already exists and applying it to blood testing. But it's definitely a long road to miniaturize a home device. The nice thing about doing it at home with this technology is it's also very low blood volume. So actually what we sell now is like 10 times more blood than we plan to use in the fully at home device. But we launched this intermediate solution because we realized that using actually pretty conventional technology and just our expertise, like we have a team of 15 PhDs at the company. You know, amongst it's about a 50 person company, but you know, 15 or 20 people have PhDs and so just we figured out that we could launch this mail in test that would be actually crush the market and have many more markers, many more useful markers per amount of blood and per dollar than everybody else. So kind of what you see on the market now if you want to get a home blood test is you have two choices. Either they'll send you to LabCorp request. So you know, it's a website that looks like you're buying an at home test, but really they're just gonna send you to the standard like two companies that do blood tests and that there you're gonna get a venous draw. So it's gonna be a phlebotomist, they're gonna get your blood. The other option is to have the phlebotomist come to your house. And those are both very flexible. So you can get like 400, 500 markers, you know, 20 tubes of blood drawn, whatever. But we were looking at what can you do at home. And if you look at what you can do at home, you have companies like let's get checked, everly well and so on. There's a whole bunch of them that are selling kind of like two, three biomarker tests. So typically they'll sell like, okay, here are your lipids, you know, but if you look at like what do I have to do to get these lipid numbers? Okay, I have to order this box, it has to come to my house, I have to go through the, you know, be fast, prick my finger, do all of this stuff, mail it back, right? And then I just get three results. So we realized, okay, there's an opening here to just maximize how many markers you can get out of that one collection. And what we did is we used this. This technology has been around for about five years, so it's not ours, but we work with this company is you put blood on these squares. This is called a serum separator card. And this basically separates red blood cells from serum. And the interesting thing here is that this allows us to the blood is good for. Once the serum is dried onto this card, as long as it's in the desiccant packet, it's good for two weeks. So there's not like this risk of okay, I've collected my blood, I mailed it, but then it gets stuck for a day and it's no good or whatever. So this allows you to realistically do home testing. And the nice thing is that all the instruments typically work with serum. So you really want to get the blood cells out right away. When the person collects the blood, usually they use a centrifuge, they spin the blood very fast and the cells come out. But basically using this card, we're able to put together what's called a clia lab test. So there's a central lab, the card goes there, it gets rehydrated and run. We're able to put together the best test in the industry by far. So it's 17 the base test, which takes one card and then we have add ons that take one more strip, does 17 biomarkers. Whereas normally if you're taking a Test like this, basically for almost the same price, you're getting three markers or something like that. So that's really turned out to be really a breakthrough even before getting to the point of selling an at home device, which is really what we're driving at with the company. And over the last year and a half, like we've tested thousands and thousands of people and we continue to do so. It's growing very quickly and we're really seeing that there's a lot of value in it. So people are getting tons of value from being able to get these markers easily and that's kind of where we're at. So we're both building this very futuristic technology where you can get a very small drop blood of put in a cartridge, get a result in three minutes and then in parallel we run this operations heavy business of shipping these cards, getting them back and so on. So we're kind of doing both things at the same time.

So is the idea here eventually going to be that you'll take the same technology that you guys are using in your lab when I send that blood spot card that you were just holding up back to you guys when running my test and instead I would be able to actually do the analysis in real time in my home?

Yeah, the technology is a little bit different. So this is more advanced than what happens with the blood on the card. But one of the benefits is that it actually.

Cuts the blood requirements. So we're going to be able to do all 17 of the markers that we're doing now with the card with a smaller quantity of blood in the home. And in a very short time, you know, it'll be like you, you can think of it the way you would make espresso, right? So you take out like a cartridge, like a nest press. So you take out a cartridge, you put your blood in there, throw it in the machine, you walk away and in half an hour in your app you have all the data. So that's kind of the user experience that we're working on.

It sounds kind of expensive. Would it cost a lot of money to actually have one of these machines in my home?

No, I don't think so. If you think of the kind of thing. So if you look at an espresso, it's actually only $150 and it's an extremely complicated machine, like super well made. Another thing you can think about in your home that's very complicated but like very cheap is a printer, right? So like a home consumer printer, you can get it for 100 bucks. And it's actually like a circus inside. If you ever take apart a printer, it's an extremely complicated machine. And actually the printheads have a semiconductor chip that's shooting out like tiny ink droplets. So it's definitely possible to make something complicated and actually give it to consumers at a reasonable price. So our price Target is like $100 or below.

Oh, that's super affordable. And so if I do that and you have this printer like device in your home using this chip technology and I'm putting a little drop of blood in there, let's say I'm testing, you can tell me how far out this is going to be before this is available. But I'm then able to right away look at my results or on a phone, app or computer software. See right away.

Yeah, so we're just evolving. The offering we have now is put your blood on the card, put it in the mailer, put it on your mailbox, USPS picks it up, and in three to five days you get your results, the next version. And again, this isn't tomorrow, but.

80% of the company is actually working on commercializing this home printer like, or Nespresso like device. That'll be in a year or two. And that'll be 30 minutes. Right. So you put your blood in there, you know, you walk away and in 30 minutes all the data is on your phone and you can of course share it with your doctor and so on.

Right. Which is great for kind of like the self experimentation crowd who wants to run a lot of stuff in real time. Like what my sauna session do to me. How'd this smoothie compared to yesterday's steak and eggs? Like, why am I not sleeping well? I'm going to test in the morning when I wake up and not have to wait five days, seven days for my results.

Yeah, we see, like with CGMs, you can really see that the instant feedback matters. Right. So people really get a lot of value from the instant feedback. And that's something that we want to bring to hormones, inflammation, insulin. Like things that right now might get measured like once a year, maybe never. Right. Like you don't get measured until you have symptoms. Things like. So we want to bring that almost like a CGM like experience to those markers.

You said 17 markers. Run through them with me.

So we think of it as like if you're doing a, trying to get like a comprehensive panel, right. Because every time you test, you're taking out the time to collect blood, whatever. We're trying to make the Most out of that and cover as many bases as we can. So we look at it inflammation, metabolic health, cardiovascular risk and hormonal health. And in hormonal health we include some nutritional things like for example, ferritin. So your iron levels, which tend to be like. A lot of women have low iron levels. Don't know it, for example. And the opposite for men, actually. A lot of men have higher iron levels in of terms. I don't know it, but those are the four. Those are kind of the four pillars that we try to cover with the test.

Yeah, a lot of male endurance athletes, which, since I got my start in triathlon and marathoning and this podcast, my first probably 50 episodes, are just all about Ironman and endurance training. A lot of my male audience, because I still do consults and look over lab results and things like that, they actually tend to kind of fall into that female category of low iron, low ferritin. Sometimes it's absorption issues, it's copper to iron ratios. But yeah, you're right. There's also a large subset of men who have to deal with the whole body resting from the inside out, hemochromatosis, high iron scenario. But regardless, you've got these 17 different markers. And then you guys also have kind of like a. Tell me about the dashboard from a software interface standpoint, as far as what you've built into that, do you think is most helpful?

So the nice thing is when we went to build this product, we're a hardware company, we're not a marketing company, we're not an E commerce company. The way we built the product is we just said, okay, we need to build something we're going to understand. And we tried everything out there and we said, okay, what would we want? The simple thing is, okay, we tried wearables, we tried the blood test and wearables are actually very good. You can get a really nice cgm. You can get a Oura ring or a Whoop or whatever. Eight Sleep. There's lots of ways to collect wearable data. No great blood tests. So we said, okay, we're going to build a dashboard where you can see all that data in one place so you can connect basically any wearable to the dashboard. And we're not going to compete with, let's say the Aura app or the Whoop app that gives you a ton of information about your sleep. But what we do is we aggregate the. What happened to you before you took the blood test? Let's say you took the blood test April 1st. So we'll look at the 15 days before that in March. And we'll average your sleep quality and other sleep data and put that next to your blood test results so you can see, okay, like when I took the test in April, my sleep was actually poor. And that correlated with low testosterone. And then, you know, when I fixed my sleep, I saw an improvement in testosterone. You know, in, let's say you take the test again in May and you see, okay, I fixed my sleep, my testosterone's back up. And that's something that, like, I've seen a ton in my data. And when we look at our aggregate customer data, you know, we do these like meta studies and you can really see like for, let's say to take that example, like testosterone and sleep. For 50% of men, it's very correlated. So like the more sleep they get, the higher their testosterone. For 50% of men, it's uncorrelated. So basically whatever is causing their testosterone to fluctuate is just not sleep. And so I think seeing that on a personal level is really valuable. So just we allow you to connect basically any wearable you have. It's like 200 different wearables that we support and we put all of them in the same place as your blood test data. The second thing that we do is we have a pretty big at this point, because we've done so many tests, we have a very big bank of insights that we've built up that are evidence based. Again, the company is full of PhDs. We actually put a lot of effort into making sure that we give people good information. So you have a ton of evidence based insights that are basically allow you to quickly, okay, I have this marker that's out of range. I don't know what it is. Okay, I can read up on this. I have a suggestion for at least a starting point where I can try to start optimizing this. So we try to give people the context around the markers and we also combine them into scores. So like you'll get an inflammation score, hormonal balance score, cardiovascular risk score, metabolic score. And that allows you to just like have a snapshot of what's going on. Because once you have a large number of markers, it starts to take some effort to think about, okay, is this improving or not? So we give you a score that weights the markers based on real data, like on population level. How important are these?

Have you ever thought about.

Doing, from an integrated marketing standpoint, kind of a different option in which people who are already opening up, let's say their oura ring Data. I've been experimenting with a new one called Ultra Human, which actually has a blood testing section in it.

Your whoop, your biosensor, whatever. And having an API in which your Cyphox results could appear in that platform. Like, have you thought about partnering up with these wearable companies instead of the API featuring your wearable data in the Syfax section, kind of do the other thing as well. And when I check in on whatever, my Oura ring data, let's say in the morning, my Cyphox blood testing results are on that same platform. Just for the purposes of consolidation.

Yeah, for sure. So there are also people kind of building these consolidation engines and now they're adding AI to them to make them even more powerful. But basically we're talking to several of the wearable companies. We already actually.

Sell tests through one company that sells a ring in Europe, for example. And then we're kind of in slow conversations with all the big wearables companies.

Are you able to say which company it is in Europe or are you sworn to secrecy?

So they sell it under something called Circular xyz. And then there's also another company called Spren that uses our test, which is like, they have an app that does like body mass index or body fat percentage just from they scan you like using your phone camera, and they use our tests. But there's a, you know, these wearable companies, I mean, one of the issues is I think Ultra Human is different in this sense because they're a little bit more adventurous. But if you look at the whoops of the world, I think they're all looking at blood test data and how do we integrate this? But it's just a little bit more, I would say, deeper or more scientific, more medical than what they're used to. So they're all trying to figure out how do we correctly integrate this. But it's coming. I think in a year or two, you're going to see that from the major companies.

I was trying to open up my Ultra Human app because when I was in India, I got one of these rings and they sent a phlebotomist to my hotel room. I got the blood data, and now when I open the app, the blood data is in there. And yeah, it seems like some kind of API. You know, selfishly enough, just because I've been kind of geeking out on the Ultra Human one, I think seeing my Cyphox data in there would be cool. But I actually, I didn't know that you integrated with that many different wearables. On the Cyphox platform itself. So I mean, are you saying that I could theoretically instead of, let's say I'm using an Oura ring, instead of opening up the Oura ring in the morning to look at my sleep score, if there's an API tying that data into Cyphox, I could just open the Cyphox app and have it all there. Both my blood work and my sleep score.

No, we don't really support that just because at least right now we don't feel confident that we can give you that day to day experience that Aura provides at the same level of quality. What we focus on is more long term trends. So because like blood testing today at least is, you know, you're doing it let's say once a month. Right. So it's, the question is how is my sleep affecting these longer term changes?

Right.

So if I'm trying to, I mean, let's say. So this is probably not a problem for you, but let's say somebody has, you know, very high apob, right? So they have like high cardiovascular risk.

I actually, by the way, and I can tell you what I did later on, I had extremely high apob, but go ahead.

Okay. Yeah. So basically, and they get a recommendation, okay, you should do more high intensity interval training, right. So that training that they're doing is going to end up reflected in the activity data because you actually get minutes in high intensity if you're wearing a tracker while you're exercising. And we can show you how those changes like, okay, over this past month I've done twice as much high intensity training. You can see how that affects your apob. So it's more we, what we're offering is kind of different than what the trackers normally do, which is more of like a day to day, we're showing summaries that are, well, easily. Like it's for somebody that's lazy. Like in many ways it was built really for a person like me who's not really a biohacker but is trying to do their best, like very busy, whatever. I have two kids. So the idea is like, okay, if I'm going to take this blood test once a month, I'm just going to wear my wearables and ignore them and once a month I'm going to check the digest and see, okay, how is this affecting my blood work? That's more how it's meant to be used right now. But because we can't at this point, we haven't built out like a amazing app that would compete well with like a whoop or an aura where the app is like one of their main. That's the main part of their product. So that's what we do now. But obviously we intend to add more and more to it. But that's the part that we thought was missing is like, okay, here's my blood test. Here's what I've been doing for the last two weeks or month before the blood test. And this is, you know, you can see the clear like, is this affecting my biomarkers or not?

Yeah. And your trends are fantastic. When I go through and look at my data from my Cyphox results. Cause I've been doing it now for. Gosh, I can't believe we're just now doing the podcast. Because I've been testing, I think for almost a year now, maybe a little less with the Cyphox. But back to the APOB thing. One of the main ways that I've been tracking my heart health during this heart health journey, I've been bringing a lot of my listeners on, initially influenced by my concerningly high levels of plaque that I discovered on a CT angiography, later verified with a carota carotid intima media thickness score. And so I've been taking a deep dive into heart health and tracking it. Like I told you, my APOB used to be very high. My lp, my plaque was elevated. My cholesterol, although I think it's necessary but not sufficient for heart disease, was very high. And if I open my Cyphox dashboard right now, my lipids are pristine. They look fantastic. So I've been doing, I have a list here because somebody asked me last night, I've got on my phone because I don't have it all memorized, but basically I've been doing nitric oxide support. So I use a supplement called Vasconox by Calroy. I've been doing what's called endothelial glycocalyx support. So I use another product called Arturacil. That one's also by Kalroy. I take vitamin E in the form of coquinol from Designs for Health vitamin K. And then I use a.

PCSK9 inhibitor, which is a twice monthly injection that downregulates LDL receptors. And after having done all of that, not only is my plaque dropping, but everything just across the board looks fantastic on lipids. So that's an example of. And I've been doing Cy Fox probably once a month to track this. And every time the results come back, they just get better and better.

Oh, that's great to hear. Yeah, I think that's apob. And heart health in general is one where it's like a boring is in some ways boring. It's not as cool as testosterone, for example, which a lot of people want to get their testosterone measured. But I think it's one that it's very high impact. Like we have some, you know, trust pilot reviews that are like, okay, I was running half marathons, my LDL was normal, never had my APOB measured. I took a Cy Fox test, found out my APOB was very high. I went and got, you know, he got I think a CT angiogram or something similar to that, maybe a CAT scan and he ended up with getting two stents because he was literally about to have a heart attack. And now he's back, this guy's back to doing half marathons and whatever and he's fine. But I think that that's like a very low hanging fruit thing. Like if somebody hasn't had this stuff measured, they should just at least get it measured once because it's really like if you take 100 people that haven't had it measured and you measure them, you're going to find this. So that's one that I think is, I mean, it's starting to get very popular. Right. But just five years ago it really wasn't being discussed.

Yeah, I think Peter Attia did a podcast series with Thomas Dayspring which was excellent. And that kind of catapulted a lot of my deeper knowledge of lipids than what I learned in college. So that was like a 5 part, 12 hour series that was really good. On this whole Apple B lp, LDL particle size type of discussion. I wish the guy had gotten the stance. Obviously I'm not a doctor, I don't mean this to be misconstrued as medical advice, but there's a book called Prevention Myths. I just finished it. Gosh, I'm blanking on the author's name, but he goes into all the different tests. CT angiography, calcium scan score, the carotid intima, media thickness score the cimt, some different bloods and makes a pretty strong case for stents being a very last ditch effort considering the other arguably more natural or less invasive things you can do to reduce APOB and potentially get rid of plaque. Now, I'll admit if there's hefty plaque, let's say in the left ventricle ascending or the lva, and you're on the verge of a widowmaker, you have to do something about it. But in many cases, I think especially after reading this book, Prevention Myths, I'm not convinced stents are as necessary as they seem to be indicated to be with their frequency of use.

Yeah, I mean it's from our perspective just catching these things early, right before they get to the point where you're in a position where your doctor's saying you have to get a stance and then you know, you're thinking, okay, do I want this? Ideally, you know, as many people as possible, you get catch them before that and they can just reverse it with lifestyle or you know, low dose, like low dose statin or something else. Right. It depends, you know, kind of depends on them. But there's many ways to, to slow down or even potentially reverse these things. But I think like the way we view it is, you know, it's our position just to like get people the information.

So this, this blueprint, I think this is interesting. Tell me about what you guys have for this, this Cyphox blueprints.

So I think what we realized basically from doing thousands and thousands of tests over the last year and a half with our mail in test kit is that.

In the end the testing is very valuable. But once people discover they have an issue or whatever.

Some of them can go off and solve it on their own or they're going to find some way to deal with it or go to their doctor. But there's a good percentage of people that want like an all in solution. They just want a solution.

Right.

So let's say I think APOB is a good example. You have high apob. What do I do now? Right. And we basically saw an opportunity. It actually came along a little bit. I mean we wanted to go in this direction, but we accelerated it because one of our users, one of our customers who was testing for about a year approached us. So he's a MD, PhD, also based here in Boston. And he had been working in clinical trials in pharma drug development for his whole career. But he's himself a biohacker, so he's like trying to live to 120. He's always every biomarker super optimized, whatever. He's tried every single thing out there and he said, okay, Cyphox has the best product and I want to work with you guys on basically doing preventative medicine somehow. So we told him, okay, we've been thinking actually about doing programs based on specific, you know, areas of health that are out of range. And we ended up launching this, what we call the blueprint program, which is a combination of testing. So you get frequent testing, plus there's a coaching component and even prescriptions. So basically not everybody wants a prescription, a drug prescription, but basically having the whole toolkit, right? So we'll actually connect the person to like an asynchronous telemedicine visit and they can get their prescription as part of the whole thing. But the way we see it is actually it's getting people on a prescription to get them off. So rather than saying, okay, you have to take this statin for the rest of your life, it's all right, you have super high apob, let's get it down. And then work together on getting your lifestyle to the point and your diet to the point where you don't need this statin anymore. But even if somebody's going to be on a statin, for example, right now, the way it works, your doctor just gives you kind of like the average dose. But our perspective is, okay, we're doing frequent testing, so we can actually give you like a titrated dose. You start with the lowest. See how it affects you see how it affects your liver markers. Also, like, are you getting side effects? All these things rather than just the way it's done now. It's just like with a hammer, right? So you have high ldl, they don't even care what's your metabolic state, whatever. Just, you know, get the stat. And a lot of people say no. And that's kind of it, right? Or if they say yes, they take it, the dose is too high, there's a, there's side effects. So, so kind of our view is, can we build a program that takes 80%? So if you go to concierge medicine, right, Like Peter T. Whoever, that's not scalable to the whole population, right? You can't have Peter Tia for every, every person. But maybe, you know, 50% of that, 80% of that can be turned into a program that's partially automated, still has that super high expertise team behind it, that's designing it. But a lot of it is based on automation, based on software, based on blood biomarkers, rather than having it, like literally you're paying for the best doctors to be spending 10 hours on you a month, because most people can't afford that. So we kind of try to find a way to build something that carries a lot of that value of concierge medicine, but that can be scaled to millions of people. Because that's really. We're chip company, we want to build things that for semiconductors, 1 million is like the beginning of quantity. Think of phones, they're made in the billions. So our thought is how do we scale up something to millions and millions, maybe a billion people? It has to be mostly software and something like blood testing, other scans that are scalable. And that's what the blueprints program is about.

It seems like the major sticking point in that funnel for concierge medicine because if you look at an executive screening panel, you highlighted some of the issues there. Right. Huge expense.

The need if you're going to deliver good care for frequent testing and frequent adjustment of supplementation or pharmaceutical protocols based on that testing. But the one on one interaction, whether telemedicine or in an office with a physician, you know, that's the most difficult part to scale. So I'm curious for you guys, from an AI standpoint, would you be able to take a lot of these really good doctors, a lot of their advice articles, books, et cetera, and create an AI engine that could provide pretty decent advice and analysis of this blood work?

Yeah, so we do it in kind of two parts. So basically on one side we have.

Our in house team, including Phil, who's running this program as our head of clinical product and then advisors. So we've managed to bring on a couple of really good advisors for heart health and then we're actually looking to the next program already.

That way we can take what is the world class information. Somebody like Thomas Dayspring. Right? Like somebody who's really the expert in the field. We've actually talked to him quite a bit about this, although he's too busy to specifically advise on this program. But we're talking to the best people in the field, getting a lot out of them and also out of what's the latest research, everything else. And our in house team is working with those advisors to build the protocols. Right. So that's step one. Step two is actually using our own data. So we have a ton of data on our existing users and we know like what are the trends and their lipids and all these things. And the second thing that we're doing is everybody that's doing the blueprint program today. So so far we just launched it as a beta. It's nowhere near the size of our normal testing subscription, but we have 50 people in it already and every single person, when they get a test report, what's going on behind the scenes there is, there's two hours of Phil and you know, other other scientists and clinical people on our team looking at that data and trying to figure out, okay, what do we do with this profile, right, like how do we bucket this person? And right now it's like very manual, but we're going from taking that two hour analysis down to like five minutes. And that's the part that you can do with automation. So once you've seen enough cases and you've built enough rules and enough analysis, you've brought in enough data, you can actually get the time down quite a bit. And that's something that we're actually very confident will work. Especially for heart and metabolic health where there's a couple of profiles that you see that start to emerge of what's going on with the person. You can see that in their blood work and their medical history. We actually ask a lot of questions about their medical history as well to be able to pull that data in. So we do that, build the analysis. But if they actually want medicine, so meaning like prescriptions, an actual like patient doctor relationship, we have a third party that we work with where they have like, you know, it's a typical telemedicine startup thing where you get connected with a physician by sms, but they're working from the protocols that, that we built out of the, you know, best available data. But, but the actual relationship with the doctor is, is separate. We do separately have like a coaching service which is more about understanding your data. So if you look at, okay, here's, here's a report that came back. You can speak to a coach and they'll actually, they'll walk you through it, answer all your questions. And that's very important because people want to have like a face to face conversation at least once because this is, I mean, this is serious, right? It's their health. So they usually have a ton of questions. So that's kind of how we deal with it. We do the one coaching session and then we have a lot of automation to produce these reports as you go. And one of the things that's automated that I think is pretty cool is there's actually you can get a 10 year and 30 year risk score of like your chances of having a heart attack, cardiovascular event, whatever. That's. Yeah, yeah. So we're able to actually deliver that score. And that's built by the, I mean literally by the American Heart Association. They have a calculator that if you get enough data in there, it'll tell you like for an average person, you know, across the population, you have a 3% chance of having a heart attack in 30 years or in 10 years or whatever it is. And then you have stratification of like, what's a normal risk, what's a high risk? And so on. So we provide that based on the first assessment. And that's because we're doing, you know, we actually test like 17 markers of heart and metabolic health. So across like liver, kidneys, heart and cardiovascular, and then metabolic, like, you know, your insulin, HbA1c, like sugar control. So taking that all in, we're able to provide risk scores which grounds the person like, okay, this is kind of on average where you're at. And then they can work on that.

I didn't know about the risk scores. Are those only on the beta blueprint or are those on the general app right now for anyone?

No, that's just very specific to heart disease and that's only in the blueprint today.

Okay, but you guys do have these. I think I saw it on my app. Like a biohackers report or like kind of like a weird deeper dive. Is that correct?

Yeah. So we have a. Basically, when you look at your blood work in our app, what you can do is what you're seeing is kind of like the, we try to show what do we call clinical ranges. So these are reasonable ranges that if you're in the green, you're doing better than most of the population.

Right? Absence of disease ranges, Right?

Yes. But if you select the biohacker toggle, what it does is it actually compresses the ranges to the ones that are considered optimal. So it basically allows you to see, okay, if I'm really targeting to optimize my body, like not just for my age. Right. But like actually like, what can, what is the best thing that I, that I can achieve? You know, that's where, that's where you actually see optimal ranges. And then all of your scores, like your inflammation score, everything changes based on that as well. So it allows you to kind of see like, okay, if I'm just trying to stay healthy, this is where it's at. If I'm trying to, you know, be in the top 5% or whatever this, this is, this is what it looks like.

I have a hunch most of my listeners are automatically going to switch over to the biohackers view. Have to learn that. The part about payment. Tell me what the industry looks like for home blood testing as far as coverability by insurance or the use of things like FSA or HSA tax deferred funds to pay for something like this.

Yeah, so we're covered by hsa, fsa, which is great. And it's like straightforward to do it but insurance is a long way away for I think most of these optimization services because it's.

What's the reason? I mean it's interesting. Everybody complains about the healthcare industry. One of the reasons is that most people stay on their insurance for only, I think the average is like two and a half years. And so if it's anything that's going to benefit you more than two and a half years away, it doesn't make sense for them to cover it. So that's what I've heard. I mean this is not my theory, but this is the one that I've heard that makes the most sense for why insurance doesn't cover more blood testing if your employer typically has more interest in like your long term health. Because let's say you might work there for five or 10 years and they're sometimes more open to covering things like this. So like you can talk to your employer and ask them to add it to their employee benefits, for example. But HSA and FSA does cover what we do in most other like home test kits. I think the benefit of Syphox is that if you wanted that 17 marker panel and you go to your typical marketing company that's selling test kits, like if you Google like lipid test or whatever, you're going to have to get like five or six boxes from them to cover that 17 marker panel. And that's where we really shine. So when you want a big panel at home from a finger prick, that's where we have a big cost advantage. Blood volume, convenience, everything.

Yeah, it's a lot that you can get out of a small amount of blood. Yeah, exactly. So I'm sure some people are going to ask, but there are things you can't test on blood like let's say parasites in a stool evaluation or maybe a cortisol awakening response paired with how it might fluctuate throughout the day. Unless you're going to do multiple blood measurements throughout the day. Some people will use saliva or urine for something like that. DNA would be another example. Do you guys ever want to roll out other fluids that can be tested or other testing protocols for looking into some of these things that you might not get from these Cyphox tests?

One of the things that we do is we're pretty conservative about the biomarkers. So we use. We don't want to be like, we're more about the blood testing technology and access and cost. We try to stay conservative about what we offer to test. We're like very evidence based. We're probably not at the cutting edge of every test that you can get, we did add a couple of saliva tests carefully, that we think we believe in.

I. Yeah, I actually forgot about that until you just said it. I did one at that event in la. Yeah, okay, cool. And what's that? Looking at the saliva.

So basically we do a three point cortisol test, which is like you can use it as a follow up to the blood cortisol test because that's just one point. You know, whenever you're, let's say you're taking your test in the morning, if that's out of range, you can get a three point and see like, what does my curve look like? Or even if it's in range, but you're just not, you don't feel good. Like maybe you're waking up in the middle of the night or whatever. So that'll allow you to actually see your profile, like, are you getting the correct diurnal cortisol profile? And then we do the grimage methylation test for just. It's a biological clock, which we think that probably grimage is one of the better ones. And that just allows people to say, okay, here's the biological clock data, here's how it correlates to my blood data. So they can get a feel for, if they want to start tracking that, they can get a feel for how these things actually correlate in their body.

In terms of microbiome, I'm very bullish on microbiome. I think it's actually very important. But we don't offer tests on that now. But that's something that might come down the pipe once we find a partner that we think, okay, this is very evidence based. We also offer, I mean, this is just something that's convenience again. But let's say if you think like you want to improve your metabolism, one of the best tools is a cgm. Like I saw you're wearing one. I'm actually wearing one right now. I do it once in a while while just to keep myself honest about where I am with my metabolic health. And so we do that at cost. We make it easy to buy one because in America you actually need a prescription to get a cgm, which I think shouldn't be the case, but we help our users out with that just to make it easy.

You tie the CGM data into the Cyphox app, right?

We do, yeah. So we'll give you summaries of your CGM data alongside your blood test. And we do, we kind of, our philosophy is like, whatever we can do to make it like just, you know, you want to optimize your health, but you only want to spend like X time a month. Like, okay, we make it as just as easy as possible. And then obviously some people are going to want to spend way more time and they can go. Like, for example, levels is probably a better cgm, you know, experience than ours. Right. So we don't try to match levels. But if you're just, if you just want to throw on a CGM and see what's going on, that's like, we offer that just for convenience, right?

Yeah. And some of them do get pretty fancy. Like, levels lets you run experiments on steel cut versus regular oatmeal or cold bathing versus hot showers, et cetera. But you guys are kind of keeping things scalable and simple as far as the data and the markers that you looked at. So if you want to know if you have a tapeworm, then maybe you wouldn't get a Cy Fox panel. But if you're one of those self quantified nerds who's constantly trying stuff out, you want an inexpensive and scalable way to test things using just a little bit of blood in your home. This is a pretty good solution.

Yeah, exactly. And I think there's a lot of, if you look at like the surface of this, there's definitely like a core of people that are very serious about optimizing their health. But we're actually, we think we can serve those people very well. But we're actually looking like, how can we get the people that are on the fence, like, maybe they kind of know about this, they've heard about it on podcasts or whatever, but they've never actually gotten any of these markers tested. And we're trying to just decrease the barrier where they can start doing it and getting the benefit. So that's our goal is like to basically increase the size of the tent where make it very easy for people to get started.

Awesome. Well, if folks are listening or watching, or if you're listening or watching, you go to the show notes. BenGreenfieldLife.com SciFoxPodcast I'll link to some cool articles and videos that I have about Cyfox and how it works. They even have a little walkthrough of their lab, which is kind of cool. And then if you have questions or comments or feedback for Michael or I or you want to order a Cyphox test, I'll put all that in the show notes again@bengreenfieldlife.com Cyphox podcast S I P H O X Podcast. Michael, this is really cool. I've been digging the test, doing a little bit of experimentation. I like that it's quick, convenient, especially now that I'm doing it on the sauna. And I appreciate you, man. So thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Michael Dabrowski from CY Fox Health, signing out. Have an amazing week. Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, My weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more? Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it's all there. BenGreenfieldLife.com See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings. And the bigger the Ben Greenfield Live show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review. If you got a little extra time, it means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.