Comment by Imnimo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Imnimo | Hacker News Reader

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Some bits of the website really set off my alarm bells.

Having Stanford Medicine and Cornell University logos front and center on the landing page gives the impression that these organizations endorse the product. I know it says, "made by scientists from" right there, but still. It gives me the impression you want to trick me into thinking you're actively affiliated with these institutions.

The example advice of "avoid bell peppers and consider adding arugula" strikes me as unrealistically precise. I am skeptical that there's really research to support that narrow of a recommendation. Under what circumstances does a patient truly need to be told to avoid bell peppers for medical reasons?

"Vitamin D - insufficient, view our recommended brands" makes me think this is a vector to push supplements on people under the guise of personalized recommendations. Do people really need a recommended brand of Vitamin D? How many supplements are you recommending people take?

"Also, only 15% of age-related diseases are genetic. The other 85% are related to your blood metabolome." Is that really true, that there are zero age-related diseases that are neither genetic nor "related to your blood metabolome"?

"use state-of-the-art AI to create your personalized health report and recommendations." Any time someone tells me they use "state of the art" AI, I assume it's a scam. How do you even measure that? Is there a standard benchmark for metabolome-based personalized health report generation?

The overall idea seems perfectly reasonable, but this website gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I am an MD/PhD academic who studies biomarkers of human disease in a related field.

I think some sections of the Terms bear attention:

"You should not change your health behaviors solely on the basis Metabolomic Information from iollo."

"While we measure many hundreds of thousands of data points from your metabolome, only a small percentage of them are known to be related to human traits, age and/or health conditions."

"...many of the Metabolomic discoveries that we report have not been clinically validated, and the technology we use, which is the same technology used by the research community, to date has not been widely used for clinical testing."

Ah, that sounds better.

This (first point)!

In Europe with its public universities this logo placing would have been completely unacceptable unless the universities were involved as stakeholders. As far as I know in Europe at least it's a complete no-go (at least from an ethical point of view) to even use the logos on your personal page if for example you are a physician and you post online your CV.

Again, unless you have specific written permission of the uni in question.

It’s probably a complete no go in this case too unless they have written permission from those institutions.

Appreciate the level of scrutiny, which is important for products like ours.

Re the affiliations, it is correct that these institutions aren’t directly endorsing iollo. Though both Jan and I are actively affiliated with said institutions and are translating what we have learned through our metabolomics research into iollo.

One thing to clarify here is that currently, we don’t treat patients and our tests are only intended to improve wellness. That being said, we do see biomarkers for specific food intake. Coffee is one example, where if someone has an unusually high levels of the biomarker for it and has difficulty sleeping during the night, reducing coffee intake may improve their sleep level and quality. We also have metabolites that associate with specific food, like beer, meat, vegetables and other that we can already use and that have been published. Also as our database grows, we’ll be able identify new food intake markers and will also publish and use them.

At our current stage, we don’t recommend any supplements. It is a part of our roadmap and once we do, we will only give supplement recommendations if we identify solid research that support their health benefits that can also be detected through metabolomics analysis.

Re the age-related diseases, what we mean on the website is that the genetic population attributable fraction for age-related diseases is around 15%, and that biological layers that captures the interactions between genetics and the environment which are related to these conditions is ~85%, which includes the metabolome. Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... We’ll work on further clarifying the language in a way that it would still be understandable from people outside of the research field.

Daniel, you are working in a field that has a low tolerance for doublespeak.

Parent has politely pointed out that the website needs revision. 85% of disease is related to the blood metabome? No. You will be detecting early disease signatures in a clincally actionable manner? No, you will almost certainly not be, and you know this.

The data isn't actually PHI. Stanford isn't actually a partner. AI in this field isn't actually real. Nature Medicine isn't actually Nature. Ect.

For historical reasons the benefit of doubt with regard to the scientific credibility of your startup is low. In my opinion, it would be better if you made an effort not to prove this assumption correct.

> Re the affiliations, it is correct that these institutions aren’t directly endorsing iollo.

You may want to talk to the relevant departments in the universities you list, their "innovations" or "spin-out" teams. Typically they have very specific terms under which you can use their logos and mention any form of association. You may well be in breach, and if you work in those universities this could land you in trouble.

> Coffee is one example, where if someone has an unusually high levels of the biomarker for it and has difficulty sleeping during the night, reducing coffee intake may improve their sleep level and quality.

This doesn't seem like something you need a blood test to figure out...

A quick counter point to the parent comment: I'd actually love to have supplement recommendations from a trusted source. I've heard on multiple occasions that many supplements found in large retailers don't have the ingredients they claim to have. So that would be highly valuable to me.

That just moves the trust from the supplement brand to who recommends it. You are still left with a problem of trust.

The problem of trust is never removed. But what must be trusted can be made explicit, the burden of trust can be shifted to more trustworthy parties, or to parties who have less problematic incentives.

What makes you think Iollo is more trustworthy or has better incentives?

They are using enough shady language that my trust level is pretty low, and I suspect one of the major incentives to recommend one supplement over another is financial.

Nothing. I was commenting generally about what is achievable in endeavors like this. Normally it's a parry for blockchain bros (who are stupidly enthusiastic) or cynics (who are often blind to vulnerabilities in existing trust relationships).

I've heard https://www.consumerlab.com/ recommended a few times - they run a membership based service that reviews supplements.

No personal experience with them, though (and I am skeptical about supplements in general).

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