Viome CEO Naveen Jain

Startups

Viome Closes $86M to Bring Gut Tests to the Masses

The link between the human microbiome and overall health has been an increasingly hot topic for both researchers and founders alike, and Viome Life Sciences just landed $86.5M of Series C funding to be the first company to bring gut tests to the masses.

Viome’s at-home testing kits analyze the microbial composition of stool and saliva samples through RNA sequencing to inform personalized lifestyle recommendations and supplements, which it provides directly to consumers.

• Using “modern AI and bioinformatics methods,” Viome can reportedly assess the genetic expression of an individual to identify which supplements will have the greatest positive impact on their health – a claim that’s unsurprisingly drawn a bit of pushback.

• These diagnostics can also screen for certain cancers, and Viome recently received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation “for its ability to detect early-stage cancer in the mouth and throat using saliva with 95% specificity and over 90% sensitivity.”

A major distribution deal with CVS was announced alongside the funding, making Viome’s $149 Gut Intelligence Test the first gut test to be offered at 200 CVS locations and through its website.

• These tests are provided for “close to cost” to CVS customers, with the true value lying in the data that flows into Viome’s gene expression data pool – apparently the largest of its kind – and the downstream D2C revenue.

Although Viome has a handful of peer-reviewed studies and some heavyweight investors like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, some researchers remain wary of microbiome kit companies due to the lack of evidence-based guidelines for translating the data into clinical practice.

• One of Viome’s former competitors, uBiome, was indicted for defrauding payors and misleading investors over the effectiveness of its microbiome test, a scandal that cast a lingering Theranos-shaped shadow over the category.

The Takeaway

Viome is walking an interesting line between alternative medicine startup and AI diagnostics trailblazer, but that same intersection also seems like a natural sweet spot for success with consumers. On top of that, the CVS partnership probably gives Viome more exposure than any microbiome company has ever had, and it isn’t too hard to picture that advantage snowballing into a significant chunk of market share.

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The Wire

• BSCA Drops CVS Caremark: Blue Cross Blue Shield of California dealt a heavy blow to CVS after announcing that it’s dropping CVS Caremark as its pharmacy benefit manager and replacing it with a lengthy list of alternative partners, including Abarca (primary PBM services), Amazon Pharmacy (mail order), and Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs Company (generics). Once the new program is fully in place by 2025, BSCA expects it to reduce costs by $500M annually – roughly 10% to 15% of its current drug spending.

• The Massive Value of Cancer Screening: A study in BMC Health Services Research found that screening for common cancers (breast, cervical, colon, lung) has generated at least $7.5 trillion in economic value over the last 25 years, a major rebuke to screening exam critics that usually cite drawbacks such as overdiagnosis and unnecessary patient anxiety. Cervical cancer screening had by far the biggest impact ($5.2T-$5.7T), followed by breast ($0.8T-$1.9T), colorectal ($0.4T-$1T), and finally lung ($40B – a paltry number the reflects a screening rate of just 5.7%).

• Definitive + Populi Acquisition: Definitive Healthcare scooped up fellow data analytics firm Populi for $52M as it looks to build out more custom visualizations for providers. Although Definitive’s scale easily dwarfs Populi (Definitive did $61M in Q2 revenue and Populi has only raised $6M since launching in 2020), Populi has found more success in the provider-facing segment that Definitive is looking to as a new arc of growth beyond life sciences.

• Epic Product Names: Epic CEO Judy Faulkner’s latest blog post gave a peek into Epic’s product naming process, which revolves around creating a “feeling” for each solution with simple and upbeat monikers. Some of the products that definitely live up to that ethos are Beans (kidney solution), Wisdom (dental, naturally), and Stork (obstetrics).

• Less is More for Home BP Testing: Seven days of home blood pressure monitoring is usually advised to confirm hypertension diagnosis, but a new study finds that three days or less is usually enough. Among 361 patients not on BP-lowering drugs, home monitoring confirmed high blood pressure in 38% of patients. The vast majority of those hypertensive patients would have been confirmed in one, two, or three days (63.7%, 80.8%, 91.3%), while only 1.4% would require more than 6 days.

• GE Portrait Mobile Clearance: GE HealthCare landed FDA 510(k) clearance for its Portrait Mobile wireless monitoring wearable that helps untether patients from their hospital beds during key recovery windows while continuously capturing vitals to detect early signs of deterioration. Portrait Mobile tracks pulse, oxygen saturation, and introduces some new tech to measure respiration rate, one of the most sensitive vital signs for early deterioration detection.

• Lindus Health Series A: London-based startup Lindus Health locked in an $18M Series A round to develop “the world’s first full stack clinical trial platform.” Lindus enables healthcare organizations to offload the entire process of running clinical trials, from protocol design and recruitment to regulatory submission and data capture. Although Lindus initially focused on non-drug trials with inherently fewer hurdles, the fresh funding is earmarked for new drug services and expanding into conditions such as tinnitus, insomnia, and menopause.

• Missing the Mark on Stroke Guidelines: When someone having a stroke arrives at the ER but needs surgery at another hospital, current guidelines say that no more than 120 minutes should elapse between arrival and departure – also known as door-in-door-out time. New research in JAMA found that nearly 2,000 US hospitals miss that mark by almost an hour, with the median door-in-door-out time clocking in at 174 minutes. Black, Hispanic, female, and over-80 patients all experienced longer times, with COVID also tacking on an extra 16 minutes between 2019 and 2021.

• Orbita Acquires Wellbe: Workflow automation startup Orbita acquired Wellbe’s specialty care navigation assets to create a combined offering for end-to-end patient engagement. Orbita provides turnkey conversational AI assistants that engage patients across web, text, or voice at critical points throughout their care journey, and Wellbe’s navigation software / customer base should immediately help accelerate Orbita’s push into specialty care (particularly bariatric surgery and orthopedics).

• YouTube Misinformation Crack Down: YouTube is ramping up its efforts to combat medical misinformation, starting with a crack down on misleading cancer videos. The new policy will remove content that promotes harmful or ineffective treatments, and YouTube Health Director Garth Graham told STAT that the focus is on cancer because it’s an area where misinformation is particularly prevalent and damaging. “If a video was to claim garlic cured cancer, or you should drink this special water or take vitamin C instead of radiation therapy – that’s the kind of content we will be removing.”

• Does ART Damage the Heart? A large Nordic registry study suggests that it doesn’t. Analysis of 2.5M women who gave birth and were followed for 11 years, including 4% who received assisted reproductive technologies (ART; fertility treatments), found that the ART cohort didn’t have significantly increased CVD risks and actually had lower risk of heart attack (AHR 0.80). The ART cohort also had no greater risks of stroke and ischemic and cerebrovascular disease, although there was weak evidence of a link between frozen embryo transfers and stroke.

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