Viome Life Sciences has snatched up Naring Health to build out its personalized nutrition offerings and further its goal to bring at-home diagnostics to the masses.
The acquisition of digital health and wellness company Naring will provide Viome with access to clinical and molecular data to fuel its efforts in personalizing health and medicine, according to the company.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Under Naring, both health monitoring and personalized care company DiscernDX and food science company Foodome will also join Viome. Naveen Jain, Viome founder and chief executive officer, told Fierce Healthcare that Naring’s work in multi-omics is complementary to Viome’s efforts in microbiome medicine.
"We're entering a groundbreaking era of precision health, an era where every individual has the power to manage their unique nutritional needs effectively,” Jain said in a press release. "By acquiring entities whose visions align and complement ours, such as Naring Health, we’re advancing our commitment to making unprecedented health insights and actionable solutions increasingly attainable to all and with greater accuracy. We are driven by the goal to transform the paradigm of health through personalized nutrition, unveiling extraordinary insights that hold the key to preventing and reversing chronic diseases using food as medicine.”
Since its founding in 2016, Viome has largely looked to RNA to tailor diagnostic tests for gut and oral health. Through analyzing the microbial composition of saliva, blood and stool samples, the company is able to make both food and supplement recommendations for patients with the goal of improving overall health.
DiscernDX, on the other hand, looks to DNA to glean insights regarding consumer health and wellness. Naring overall focuses its work in multi-omics, or the approach of incorporating many “-omics,” such as genomics, epigenomics and metabolomics, into research. With a new layer of genetic insight, Jain said Viome will be able to increase the accuracy of its health solutions.
Through integrating Naring’s key patents and intellectual property, Viome expects to further expand its offerings of personalized healthcare offerings.
The company’s microbiome testing kits can be found in some CVS stores and online, currently for $99. Viome also launched tests for oral health in September of this year. Consumers can directly purchase the company’s Oral Health Intelligence Test while dental professionals can use Viome’s Oral Health Pro with CancerDetect to help identify oral and throat cancer.
“RNA can predict what protein is going to be created but it doesn’t know if it’s actually being created but it can have a very good indication of what is going to happen because we know the amino acids, we know the enzymes that will be produced,” Jain said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare. “DiscernDX is looking at the actual protein. So that’s another technology that we can now combine efforts with.”
Both Viome and Naring trumpet the same cause of employing a personalized perspective to health in order to enable the use of food as medicine.
Viome’s Gut Intelligence test, combined with algorithms accessing what the company calls the world’s largest gene expression data pool of over 600,000 samples, seeks to unveil the root cause of health issues. Customers are informed on which food they should avoid along with being provided health products like probiotics, supplements and oral biotic lozenges.
Foodome focuses on identifying the bioactive compounds in foods to understand the connection between diet, genetics and disease. According to Jain, Viome was focused on 10 bioactive compounds while Foodome has multiplied that number to 250.
Foodome is working to map out all of these compounds in the human diet, an endeavor that has been compared to the Human Genome Project.
"For years, I’ve studied how bioactive compounds in food impact the expression of human genes and trigger chronic diseases," said Foodome co-founder Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, M.D., in a press release. "This partnership with Viome, a trailblazer in the world of precision nutrition, accelerates the industry by a decade and enables Viome users to benefit from this research in an actionable way. By integrating Viome's technology with our research, we're poised to unlock the intricate link between individual dietary patterns and health, setting us firmly on the path to preventing and reversing chronic diseases.”
The deal came on the heels of Viome’s series C funding round which closed at $86.5 million in August. That haul brought its total raise to $175 million.