Podcast - Making Disease Optional, Rewriting the Future of Human Health

Patrick Driscoll: Welcome everyone and thanks for tuning in to "The Innovation Imperative." My name is Patrick Driscoll and I'm the Director of Client Development for Emerging Companies and Venture Capital at Holland & Knight where we work closely with founders, venture capital firms and investors navigating the full life cycle of innovation, from company formation and early fundraising through growth, scaling and ultimately that exit. A big part of our work sits at the intersection of law, capital and strategy: helping innovators and investors think clearly about how they build, fund and protect durable businesses. "The Innovation Imperative" is really about that journey. Each episode, we sit down with founders, investors and operators who are shaping the innovation economy, often behind the scenes, to unpack the real stories, lessons learned and inflection points that don't always show up in pitch decks or press releases. We focus on VC, early-stage companies and the decisions that matter most when the stakes are high.

I'm absolutely thrilled by our guests today. The episode focuses on innovation at the intersection of health, life sciences and artificial intelligence, and what it takes to build and scale a company in a category where everything is complex. The science is super complicated, markets are evolving and the expectations from regulators, investors and consumers are higher than ever before. Joining me first is my colleague at Holland & Knight, Adam Matherly, who's a partner based in Seattle. He's going to lead today's interview. Adam works closely with emerging companies navigating scientific, commercial and regulatory complexity. He brings thoughtful and grounded perspective to these conversations. And we're very thrilled to be joined by our guest, Naveen Jain, who's the founder and CEO of Viome. Naveen has built multiple companies across sectors, and with Viome, he's helping redefine how we understand human biology, aging and personalized health. So with that, Adam, I'll pass it off to you.

Adam Matherly: Thank you, Patrick. And I'm really pleased to be here with my friend and longtime client, Naveen Jain. Naveen, just to kick things off, could you give us the brief version of your background? What originally pulled you into health and science?

Naveen Jain: Well, Adam, as you said, in life, you look at not just the opportunities where the biggest trend is or where the biggest money is. In life, when you're going to dedicate 10, 15 or more [years] of your life, you have to find something that you care enough about, something you jump out of the bed [for] every single morning. And that's a really simple thing I realized, that when you wake up in the morning and you're not jumping out of the bed, then you should quit whatever it is that you're doing because that's not your calling. When you find something that you are willing to die for, then you have to spend every minute of your life living for it. So to me, starting a company, is really creating businesses that gives you enough high, simply because you believe the things you're doing [are] going to improve the lives of fellow humans. And having done, you know, six, seven companies, I use a framework that starts with why this, why now, why me?

And the "why this" is really simple. And every entrepreneur who's listening to it or anyone who's listening to it, ask yourself, what are the problems you're trying to solve? God forbid you are actually successful in solving that problem. And when that problem does get solved, would it help a billion people live a better life? Because it's not a philanthropic thing to do. It is a capitalist thing to do, because any time you can build any product, any service that can help a billion people live a better life, you can create a $100 billion company. But you never wake up in the morning and say, what should I do to create a $100 billion company? Making money is simply a byproduct of doing things that improve people's lives. You have to stay focused every day. What can I do to improve the fellow human's lives? And one day you wake up and see you have this amazing company that you created because you stayed focused on your goal of making lives better.

And the next thing really is "why now" – the timing. And the timing is the number one predictor of the success of an entrepreneur. Now, the way you look at timing is not to have a crystal ball and it tells you what to do. There are very tangible things you can do, which is what has changed in the last two to three years. More importantly, what do you expect to change in the next three to five years that will allow you to solve this problem at scale in three to five years, and this problem could not have been solved five years ago. And that's the key, is that if you're using yesterday's technology to solve tomorrow's problem, some other entrepreneur is going to come along, use the latest technology, and by the time you're ready to scale, they completely disrupt you. So you have to intercept what is actually happening and to be able to actually go out and scale as the exponential technology is bringing the prices down, performance up, and you know you'll be able to actually scale it now.

The last part is the most important part. You have to ask yourself, "why me?" And "why me" is a very simple thing. What questions are you asking that are different from what everyone else in the industry is asking? Because the questions you ask are the problems you solve. So if you say, look, there are 8 billion people on planet Earth. What if in the next 20 years there are 20 billion people on planet Earth? How will you ever solve the world hunger when there are so many people to feed? And every expert will tell you that means you have to grow more food, you have to reduce the wastage in transportation, they're going to continue to focus on how to take care of getting more food to these people. Instead of asking this different question that says, why do we eat food? Because when you ask the question "why do we eat food? " you realize it is because you need energy or you need nutrition. What are the different ways you can get energy? And suddenly you open the problem to the solution that was never even possible or visible to you. And that's really why changing the question changes the perspective, and it really changes how you look at that problem.

Now, to answer your question, why I started Viome, was really that as I was working on this company for space exploration called Moon Express, we became the first company ever to get permission to leave Earth orbit. So here we were looking to mine for Helium-3 to build the fusion reactors. We became the first company to get President Obama to change the law that anything we bring back, we get to own it as a private company, not the country. And we became one of the six companies to get a $2.6 billion NASA contract to mine the moon. And then my dad was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. I didn't even know he was sick and let alone he has a disease that [nothing] could save him. We got a few months with him, but it really got me thinking that, here I am thinking we can colonize the moon and Mars, and we have no idea when our fellow humans, our loved ones, are actually suffering and dying right on the planet Earth. And I switch course and I say, what if? What if we can actually understand what changes in the human biology that causes you to develop diabetes, depression, anxiety, heart disease, cancer or even aging? And if you can understand that biochemically, at a molecular level, what is changing, we should be able to diagnose these diseases early. We should be able to prevent them from happening. And God forbid, I'll try to reverse them. And that was a journey restarted, and then apply the same three rules. Is this a problem that could help — if we can solve [it] — a billion people? And the answer is every one of us in our lifetime is going to suffer from one of these diseases, if nothing else that which is aging. What if we can actually understand what changes in the human biology and we change it? Would it help a billion people? And the answer is 8 billion people, check mark. Why now? And we realized to solve this problem, you have to do three things: digitize the human body, process massive amounts of data and then use AI to solve the problem. And it turns out the cost of digitization is coming down, cost of processing is coming down, AI is becoming more and more powerful. We realize the time to solve this problem is now.

And the best thing really was "why me?" We noticed that everyone in the industry was focused on asking the same question, which is, I want to know about your DNA, your genes. And we realized that your DNA never changes when you gain 200 pounds. Your DNA doesn't change when you become diabetic. Your DNA didn't change when you have depression or anxiety. As a matter of fact, your DNA didn't even change after you die. If you can look at the DNA of dinosaurs, it's still the same DNA. So DNA can't even tell you you're dead or alive. How will it ever tell you if you're healthier or sicker? And we thought the thing that's constantly changing is your RNA. And what if your gene expression can be measured, not just your genes, then we can solve this problem. And the second part was 99 percent of all the genes in our body don't come from a mom and dad, they come from these microbes, 100 trillion microbes that live in our gut, in our mouth and all over us. And again, we realize that every single chronic disease from Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, to cancer, to cancer therapy, diabetes, to heart disease are connected to these microbiomes. And what if we can understand what these microbes are actually doing in your gut, how it is interacting with the human immune system, how it's interacting with each other, how it is interacting with mitochondria, we can solve this problem. And that is fundamentally what Viome set out to do. And Adam, as you've seen us in the journey over the last 10 years, you will see now we have done one and a half million tests, collected over 400 quadrillion, 400 quadrillion, biological data points.

And what we are able to do is really simple. For every single person who gets a Viome test, we analyze the spit of their saliva, a touch of their stool and four drops of their fingerprint blood at kit that is delivered to your home. We analyze, we look for 100 million biomarkers. And based on that, we can tell you what is happening inside your body: your biological age, your cognitive health, your heart health, your oral health, your gut health. And then we can go as nerdy as you want from your uremic toxin production to your LPS production. But for most users, what they care about is, what do I do? So we tell them, don't eat this food — don't eat avocado because your uric acid production is too high and here is the science paper if you want to learn more. Or in addition to, eat these foods, here's why, here's the science paper, we tell you every food you need to eat and why in a science paper, every food you shouldn't eat, and then we walk you through every single nutrient your body is lacking. Take 22 milligrams of lycopene, take 89 milligrams of amylase. So every vitamin, mineral, herb, digestive enzyme, amino acid, and we custom formulate that for you, individually, every month. There is no pre-made formula, there is no pre-made capsule. So we give you personalized supplements, personalized probiotics, personalized oral lozenges, personalized toothpaste, and then you follow this routine. In 90 days, we did double-blinded placebo control studies that showed people who followed it for 90 days, their HbA1c, their pre-diabetic, became healthy, HbA1c went down by 0.42. If you had IBS, which is 15 percent of population that suffers from constipation, bloating, stomach ache, 64 percent of the people became healthy compared to 10 percent on placebo. And 57 percent of the people who had depression or anxiety became healthy compared to 28 percent on placebo. So when someone says, is food the medicine that Hippocrates says, we can now prove that food is indeed the medicine that can help you with all of these chronic diseases. So that's your long answer to your short question.

Adam Matherly: That was fantastic. That is where Viome is today. I just took the test for the first time, remarkably, towards the end of last year. And the breadth of insights is almost overwhelming, if you look at each individual piece. But I want to go back to the very beginning. Given where you are now, what were the biggest challenges that you faced early on?

Naveen Jain: The first thing was, you know, even though it sounded really easy to say, let us analyze RNA, I thought that, I'm not a scientist, but that has got to be the easiest problem to solve. And it turns out there's no one in the universe who had done it before. There was no private company that had actually analyzed RNA of human body. And we were going out and breaking this new ground. I thought it'd be really easy. I'll go to Stanford, I'll go to MIT, and then someone would have solved that problem. I went to Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, I went to NASA, and nothing was done. And finally I found myself at Los Alamos National Lab. And obviously it's famous for the nuclear bomb, building the Manhattan Project, and they were working on a biological defense project where they had to solve something similar. They needed to understand if there was ever a biological terror in our great country, how would we protect ourselves? And they knew the only way they could do that was to understand not what was inside the biological bomb, they needed to know what it does inside the human body, what are these organisms expressing, how it is reacting to the human body, so they can create an antidote for it. Now, that was, to me, an identical problem, even though they didn't think that was the same problem. So I managed to get an exclusive perpetual license to the technology, hired up scientists who actually developed the technology for over 10 years, spending multibillion dollars. Now he's our chief science officer. Hired the head of IBM Watson research to actually build the AI for us.

So the biggest challenge really was how to go find this amazing technology that can solve the problem and then build a team around you so that you don't have to be the scientist or the M.D. So the best advice I can tell you is that every entrepreneur who struggles to see how can I go out and do something in an industry that I know nothing about? And what I'm about to tell you is that that is your biggest asset. That's not the liability. The day you become an expert in any field, you become incrementalist. That means you can be 10 percent better than someone else, but you'll never be 10 times better. To be 10 times better you have to challenge the foundation of everything that experts have taken for granted. And that's the reason I get to challenge these amazing human beings. Why can't we do this? Why can't we look at the problem this way? And that new perspective is what allows us today to not just help people prevent the diseases, but we are able to now build a diagnostic test. And this is what I am most proud of, if you ask me. Having analyzed 400 quadrillion biological data points, now we can detect stage one oral cancer, stage one throat cancer, 95 percent specificity, 90 percent sensitivity. In the next three months, we're going to be doing a complete breakthrough for humanity. For the first time, we'll be able to detect stage one pancreatic cancer. Imagine, this is how I lost my dad, and because there was no way to detect early-stage [pancreatic] cancer.

So the fact — all this thing coming from a person who knew nothing about human biology — to be able to come here and tell our fellow humans that we are able to detect stage one pancreatic cancer, that will save millions of people's lives because it's the deadliest cancer that absolutely cannot be detected early and most times detected in stage three and four and the life at that point is six months at the most that you can live. And by detecting early we could save these people from suffering and fellow humans whose lives matter, their families' lives change when you lose someone. So to me, these are the kind of things that I would have never thought when I started the company, that we'll be able to go and detect early-stage IBD, the colon polyp, seven to 10 years before you develop a colon cancer. And these breakthroughs are only possible because we took it upon ourselves that every problem can be solved when you really believe in it and you're willing to dedicate 10, 15 years of your life to solving this problem.

Adam Matherly: A lot of entrepreneurs are interested in the intersection of AI and life sciences, and it would be great to hear how you think AI will create the most meaningful change in biology and health and how is Viome looking at that?

Naveen Jain: We are probably living in the most innovative decade in the human history. The next five years, fundamentally, will change how we look at humans period. Who are we? What makes us humans? What at the biochemical level is changing that causes us to develop cancer, aging or other chronic diseases? And I think there's just no doubt in my mind that aging is a solvable problem. And here's why: Every part of our body ages at the same time, it's a single clock. You rarely will see a person who says my left hand is really aging and my right hand is not aging, right? So there has to be something that's synchronized. And once you find that, you'll be able to, in fact, reverse all of that. The fact today that is really interesting is that I'm now 66 years old. Eighteen months ago, I did my biological age test — I've been running Viome for seven years — and my biological age, third party, not just Viome, because they will always tell me that I'm really young. I went to a third party and did the biological age test just to make sure that my guys were not just sucking up to me. My biological age 18 months ago turned out to be 33 when I was 64. Now, 18 months later, I thought I would have been aging slowly and maybe in 18 months I would've aged at least one year. It turns out actually it was minus one year, and six weeks ago when I did the test again, my biological age came down to 32. And the only reason I'm mentioning that is at any age — because I started my health journey when I was 58 — now imagine anyone who's listening, too, it doesn't matter how old you are, you can, in fact, get your body back into homeostasis by reducing the inflammation in your body. It doesn't matter when you start. When you're healthy at 60, you'll be healthy at 80. When you're healthy at 30, you will be healthy at 50. The point is it doesn't matter where you start, you can still go out and actually do the things that you want to do.

Adam Matherly: My test revealed that my biological age is the same as my actual age. So at least I'm not worse for wear, but it sounds like I have plenty of improvement to achieve.

Naveen Jain: Yes, as a matter of fact, and you will.

Adam Matherly: Naveen, what emerging trends in health and life sciences excite you the most, right now?

Naveen Jain: I think the biggest trend is really understanding the human biology, which is only possible because of the amount of data that we are able to collect, because cost of digitization has come down. That means for the first time in human history, we're able to take our analog body and completely digitize it. Once you can digitize the human body, you can use all the digital tools, including AI, that is now able to analyze this data that humans could not have possibly done. Imagine, Adam, looking at 100 million biomarkers in an Excel spreadsheet, one by one, and trying to make sense out of it. There's no way the human mind is capable. Every single day, there's more research papers that are being published than humans can read in 24 hours, but AI can. And that's the beauty, is we are able to now leverage the latest set of technologies. And now imagine if you can build, instead of a large language model, if you can build using the language of biology, you can build a large biology model. And suddenly you are able to, instead of prompting by text, you can say, here is a person who has these biomarkers and boom, the AI says, here's what's going on, here's the disease you're looking at, right? Or here are the 100 people who have this disease and it can now come back and say, here's the diagnostics for this test that you can now measure for anyone, whether they have this disease or not. All these things are for the first time possible. And once you know what is causing the disease to happen, now you can look at every pathway that is implicated in a disease, and now you look at building a drug that can actually implicate the pathways. And the fact we are able to look at the food to impact these pathways, that means you're able to do the human trial, whether your hypothesis is correct or not, by using the food and the medicine, and then you can build a drug that can be even more effective in a higher concentration when you know this thing actually works, right?

So the point is, this is the first time in human history the human body will no longer be a mystery. We will understand what causes us to become conscious, what causes us to have this feeling of "I'm in love," what causes us to believe that this is what is happening. And as we start to understand these emerging phenomena of what causes us to develop diabetes or heart disease or cancer or aging, we will be able to, in fact, prevent it from happening and reverse it. And that to me is the biggest thing you're seeing, is that healthcare is going to be completely changed. And here's my prediction: that more and more of the healthcare will be delivered at home and not at the hospitals, and the medicines of the future are not going to come from pharmacy, but are going to come from a farm. That means what Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, that all diseases begin in the gut. "Let food be thy medicine, let thy medicine be the food." And the biggest thing you're going to change would be, instead of one size fits all where people say here's a food pyramid, everyone should eat spinach, everyone should eat broccoli, everyone should eat avocado, it is going to be personalized. So going back to one man's food is indeed another man's poison. And everything has to be personalized to you. And that's going to be the biggest change.

Adam Matherly: Naveen, I wanted to talk just a little bit about financing. Obviously, you've built several companies. You've helped raise a lot of money from investors locally and internationally. What are the challenges when the science itself is complex and difficult, maybe, to convey to investors?

Naveen Jain: Actually it is easier. So the thing is, at the end of the day, investors invest in one simple thing: Is this problem big enough that if you succeed, it would be a trillions of dollars company? So if we can solve human chronic diseases, just in the U.S. alone, that's a $3, $4 trillion market, right? Now, what if you can actually solve it. So they look at how big is this market. Number two is, do you have unique technology? And do you have the right team that can actually have a shot at solving the problem? So do you have a unique way of looking at the problem? So everyone says, I'm going to build another large language model. People say, eh, this is not a commodity, there are 10 people doing it. But someone comes along and says, I have a new way of building the model that says it's not going to be just large language models, but it's going to do reinforcement learning, it's going to do this, which is a unique way of looking at it. Oh my God, that could fundamentally disrupt everything. So they look at this stuff and say, look, you have a unique science, you have a team of people that have been successful in their life. These are the people coming together. And the last thing is, they look at the stuff and say, do we have an edge here? Are we getting in early? Some people who are early investors are looking at the step and saying, oh my God, if this is successful, I can get a one to one million return on investment and they're willing to back it.

So the interesting thing is people invest in people and people invest in the story. So what story are you telling them that the world would look like if you're successful? So as an entrepreneur, when you're raising money, don't tell investors what you do. Tell investors what would happen when you succeed. So when we started the company, we started one simple belief that says, "what if?" What if you could actually understand human biology that will allow you to diagnose the disease early, prevent the diseases from happening, making the disease optional. And yes, today we are going to do a gut test, but tomorrow we will do the oral test, we'll do the mitochondria test, we'll do the immune test. We will get there and here are the steps of how you're going to get there. So tell them what the world would look like at the end, and then you tell them the steps from where you are and how you going to go get there. That is what people invest in.

Adam Matherly: That's excellent advice. I want to maybe put you on the spot with a question about legal partnerships and how a founder should approach assembling their legal team and using their legal team. What advice would you give to a founder, especially in a highly complex scientific field, about forming their legal partnerships?

Naveen Jain: I mean, I tell you, this is actually one of the smartest questions you could have asked me because most people look at the legal as an expense and something they have to deal with, rather than thinking that your legal partner is actually your partner strategically. Because their job is not to tell you what you can't do, their job is to protect you from the things you want to do. And they actually become your strategic partner at both the board level and at a CEO level, because you should be discussing everything with them. To say, this is what I want to do, what are my risks here? How do I protect myself in this thing? And a good legal partner actually is worth 100 times more than what you pay them. And in fact, if you use them right, they actually will one day save you more, not only money, the more grief and potentially a company that could shut down if you were not doing it right. So to me, having a legal partner is one of the most important things you do as a CEO. And the fact that I've had the same legal partners for the last five or six companies in the last 25 years tells you that it is one of the most important things you do, is to make sure that you stay with them because they understand who you are, how you think and they can continue to guide you rather than stop you.

Patrick Driscoll: Thanks so much to Naveen and Adam here. That was a fantastic conversation. And I love that ending note and figuring out a legal partner. I did want to double click on some takeaways as I tend to do for these episodes. And the three things that I kind of found were, number one: Timing is super important. Perspective also matters more than industry experience. I love that you kind of talked through that, Naveen, where if you're an outsider in an industry, it actually could be a superpower. Founders oftentimes get a little nervous about entering into sectors where they might not be seen as technical experts or where they haven't been operators before. But this gives you perspective that's unique and you can actually push back against what the norms currently are that exist. And that will allow you to actually be differentiated and solve some problems.

The second takeaway is: The most impactful companies start with a calling, not a revenue model. So if you start with the exit in mind, you're not really doing it correctly. You have to be aiming to have a problem-solving mindset to help humanity, and then inevitably the money will follow if it's truly scalable, which I appreciated that point.

And the third thing is AI is finally unlocking the human body. So we have access to so much research and data that's historically been unable to be computed by the human brain. Now we have AI to do that all for us. We can take a look across the board into all these great studies and map out what the actual human body looks like to control disease, to figure out how we can do preventative care, cure things, reverse diseases and digitize the human body with these new AI tools.

And those are my key takeaways. Remember, finding a legal partner is very important — that you trust — and I love that you've had the same one for multiple decades. Thanks again to Naveen and Adam. For any founders, investors and operators building in this complex and highly regulated area, feel free to reach out to Holland & Knight's Emerging Companies and Venture Capital team. You can find us via our website, hklaw.com. Check out Naveen and Viome. I definitely recommend their product. Help get your body mapped out and get healthy. And I think aging is something that's solvable. So I'm very excited to see where Naveen takes this and what's next. And thanks again to all of our listeners, the most important folks, and we'll be with you next time.