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Naveen K. Jain, excellent business entrepreneur, executive and the founder and former CEO of InfoSpace, is also known as one of the co-founders of Moon Express, and moreover, he is the current chairman of it. He is all set to release his next audacious venture named Viome, which will prove to be The Groundbreaking Revolution in the field of Healthcare.
Viome is promised to be a health care company, which aims to utilise the artificial intelligence in order to improve its customers’ health. Artificial intelligence will help to make dietary recommendations, like which nutrient rich food should a person intake as well as other suggestions related to vitamins and supplements intake after proper tests.
Launched on Wednesday, it is released by a Washington-based company, Bellevue. It plans to apply the machine learning to intrigue biological data from metabolome to microbiome in order to promote its users with personalised diet & nutrition recommendations for a healthy life. The disruptive technology for Viome is said to have been originated at Los Alamos National Lab by various scientists including Momo Vuyisich, the company’s chief scientist and the co-owner. It is the first subsidiary of BlueDot, which is another company founded by Jain, mainly focussing on licensing technology from research labs. BlueDot has $10 million in funding from investors including Gold Ventures, CerraCap Ventures and a variety of entrepreneurs.
In the near future, the company is planning to add an A.I.-based feature, which will give its users several recipe suggestions based on their needs and preferences. Gradually, it will come up with a feature advising people about their dietary needs and accordingly suggesting meals from the menu at a restaurant or any eating point. It will require customers to invest from $999 per year up front or $99 per month and they will be able to use the kit, which will be sent by the company in each quarter to take stool, blood, urine, and saliva samples, and then send them to labs for testing. Using microbiome analysis technology it will try to combat disease warfare; the company takes the samples and creates RNA and metabolic profiles for each user.
This start-up recently hired Guruduth Banavar, the former head of cognitive computing at IBM Research who spent years working on Watson, to pay attention to A.I. efforts. Helen Messier, a doctor working for a healthcare named Human Longevity, is the startup’s chief medical scientist Down the line, Jain says, it will be seeking FDA approval so it can use its technology to diagnose diseases.
Adam Drewnowski, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Washington’s epidemiology department, says, “It’s very new and very controversial.” He adds, “There are some very interesting links, which are currently being established. But to [suggest] that microbiome imbalance causes something like Alzheimer’s at this point, I would think, are something of an overstatement.” He appreciates the value and achievement of the gut microbiome but there is little hard science on how it might influence some conditions.
While at the conference, in response to Drewnowski’s comments, Naveen showed and explained two recent studies that claim that microbiome ‘may’ be an important factor in the development of degenerative diseases. Jain adds that it will be an exciting and small interdisciplinary team where you will be working with experts in medicine, big data, machine learning and genomics.
Clearing the air he added, “People said Moon Express was a crazy idea, and we’re within months of going to the moon for under $10 million. Every single idea, the day before the breakthrough, seems like a crazy idea.” This explains his confidence in the new start-up. We hope him all the best!
