DNA Testing & Health Coaching: How Genetic Insights Enhance Personalized Wellness

Featuring Dr. Sandra Scheinbaum and Kian Sadeghi, CEO of Nucleus

Genetic testing is no longer just for scientists and specialists—it’s becoming a powerful tool for personal wellness. With platforms like Nucleus, understanding your DNA is easier and more actionable than ever. But what does this mean for health coaches?

In this exclusive FMCA webinar, Dr. Sandra Scheinbaum is joined by Kian Sadeghi, founder and CEO of Nucleus, to explore how genetic insights are reshaping the future of personalized wellness. Watch as Dr. Sandi’s own DNA results are reviewed live, and gain practical takeaways on how health coaches can ethically and effectively apply genetic data to support client transformation.

Whether you’re curious about DNA testing, expanding your scope of knowledge, or looking to stay on the leading edge of wellness, this session offers insights you won’t want to miss.

What You’ll Learn:

• Tips for using genetics to promote behavior change and client empowerment
• How genetic testing works—and what your DNA can (and can’t) reveal
• Real-time insights from Dr. Sandi’s own whole-genome report
• Ways to integrate DNA-based information within the health coaching scope

About Nucleus:

Nucleus Genomics offers a clinical-grade, whole-genome sequencing test that analyzes 100% of your DNA to provide comprehensive insights into your genetic risk for over 900+ conditions. This test aims to help individuals understand their predisposition to various diseases and traits, including those related to cardiovascular health, cancer, and rare genetic disorders.

Watch the Replay

DNA Testing & Health Coaching: How Genetic Insights Enhance Personalized Wellness, With Kian Sadeghi of Nucleus Genomics:

Transcript

Dr. Sandi: I’m going to introduce our special guest who is Kian Sadeghi. Did I pronounce it correctly?

Kian: Yes, it’s great.

Dr. Sandi: All right. And he has a fascinating story to tell how he started a company called Nucleus. So, I am going to turn it over to Kian if you would tell your story and then he’s going to share his screen and share my own DNA test results. So, take it away, Kian.

Kian: Thank you so much, Dr. Sandi. First off, thank you, guys. I’m so excited to be here. It’s been several months in the making. Let me introduce myself and say a little bit about my background. So, I just want to confirm everyone can hear me okay. Dr. Sandi, I just want to make sure everyone… Just makes sure there’s no audio issues at all.

Dr. Sandi: Looks like we’re all good. And you will get a copy of this recording so no need to take notes and there will be a replay.

Kian: Amazing. So, I’m a first-generation American. Both my parents are actually Persian. They escaped Iran during the ’79 revolution. My dad actually spoke against the Iranian government, and they tried to murder him, and he came to America. My dad’s actually a physician, so he was flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s. Eventually he went to Harvard Medical School where he became an ophthalmologist or an eye doctor.

And I was raised in Brooklyn, and I think my interest in genetics began with a personal tragedy. My cousin, she actually went to sleep one day and she didn’t wake up. She was almost 15 years old and she actually basically suddenly died in her sleep. Obviously, at the time, I was almost 7. I just didn’t really understand. I went to my dad and I said, “How does this happen?” And he said, “Oh, bad genetics.” I said, “Bad genetics? What does that even mean?”

Eventually, I started realizing that disease can be thought of as more of a problem to be solved than something that’s a part of everyday life because other 15-year-olds, in my 7-year-old mind, were alive and well, but my cousin wasn’t. And so, with this idea of disease as a problem, I actually joined one of the first do-it-yourself gene editing laboratories where we engineered yeast to make limonene. We added bacteria to make them resistant to antibiotics. And I sort of loved the wet lab. Actually, I’m sharing my screen now. This was actually in the Wall Street Journal at the time. This was in 2017. Here’s a picture of me, even younger, if you can believe it, gene editing. I loved the wet lab. I loved, sort of, hacking biology.

But in my mind, one problem with it was it wasn’t very iterable. And so I wanted to work at the intersection of atoms or biology but also in the world of computers. And so I started studying computational biology. I went to the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied computational biology. And I remember one day I was in genetics class, literally genetics class, and the chairman of the biology department brought up what is my personal favorite chart in the world, which is the decreasing cost of sequencing a human genome.

So, as you guys can see here, if you think of your DNA, you can think of it as a 1,000-page book, okay? It used to be $100 million to actually read all 1,000 pages. In 2020, it was about $1,000. So, from $100 million to $1,000, and today it’s just a couple hundred dollars on Nucleus’ website. And so you can see a profound change.

If you think about first-generation genetic testing companies like 23andMe, they got started in 2006. What can you see here? Well, you can see something pretty fascinating. The cost of reading all 1,000 pages of your DNA book was about $10 million per sample. So, instead of being able to use this technology and bring it to everyone, they used technology that looks at a small fraction of someone’s DNA less than really 0.1%. Now, though, this cost has gotten considerably cheaper. It’s possible to bring what’s called whole genome sequencing to everybody, and that is exactly what we’re going to go over today via Dr. Sandi’s results. And so I think the thing to appreciate here is what we’ll be looking at is actually the result of literally decades’ worth of scientific and technological progress that made it such that we can use people’s DNA to empower them to live longer and healthier lives and also have healthier children.

And a little bit more notes on Nucleus. We are a physician order test. So, we’re like Myriad Genetics or Natera. We’re HIPAA-compliant. We’re CLIA-certified. We’re CAP-accredited. So, we can be used in the clinical context. And unlike 23andMe, we’re actually not DTC. You can go on Nucleus and order through the website. I’m just going to quickly show you that. Oops, this is results. I’m going to show you that here. You can go on Nucleus and just order a DNA test. It is actually reviewed by an Independent Physician Network and signed off by doctors. And as a business, at this point, we’ve raised over $30 million, and we’re basically the most well-backed genetic testing company in the world.

And you can see here we have three main products. We have the Healthy Kids product, which is for families undergoing and preparing for having a family. You can actually flag if anyone has rare genetic markers that they can pass on to their children. You have the Healthy product, which we’re going to go over today, more focused on longevity. And then we have, of course, our Embryo product, which was recently also featured in the Wall Street Journal, which lets parents undergoing IVF actually pick their embryo that has the lowest disease incidence.

Without further ado, I’m going to now show Dr. Sandi’s results. So, for some context here, we basically gave Dr. Sandi a DNA kit. It’s a very simple process. I actually have a DNA kit right here next to me. The DNA kit looks like this. Basically someone opens up this kit. It arrives in their home, and they take out a swab. And basically, it’s a buccal swab. They swab their cheek and that’s it. They swab their cheek, stick it in a tube. Completely non-invasive. It’s very simple, very fast, very easy. It goes to our laboratory, which then processes the DNA. And then, in a couple of weeks, you get a portal that looks like this.

So, this is actually Dr. Sandi’s results, which I think is very, very cool that we’re actually going to be walking over today. The first thing I want to highlight in the application is something that’s very dear to me as the founder of this company is we strove not just to do the highest quality clinical and genetic science but moreover to make an application that was actually beautiful and understandable for people. As you can see, the cost of examining a human genome used to be so expensive because it’s just so much data. And so, it’s not just a problem to build great models that analyze the data but also build a beautiful application that empowers patients to take next steps in their journey.

And so, here, I’m going to highlight a couple things. You can see the left nav bar. You have the homepage. You have Traits. You have Family. The homepage contains the disease results. Traits is a little bit more things like everything from height to IQ. And then Family is how your DNA affects your future children. And that is mostly for if someone is in the context of family planning, though hereditary markers can actually be familial like a BRCA variant, for example.

You can see here that we have a very simple…basically a beautiful little, kind of, dashboard where we highlight the conditions someone is at extremely low risk for, average, and elevated. It’s possible someone has a very high genetic risk for a condition, which we can talk more about. In this case, Dr. Sandi does not. It’s also possible someone is at below-average risk for genetic conditions. In this case, Dr. Sandi is not. I’m going to focus most of this talk on what Dr. Sandi is actually elevated for. And then I’m going to go from there.

And so the first thing to understand is I’m actually going to click into one of these reports and walk through what kind of analysis we did. And then after I do that, I’m going to explain different appropriate next steps that someone with similar results to Dr. Sandi would take. So, I’m going to click into coronary artery disease. This is heart disease. You can see not just the beautiful illustrations but the rigorous explanations. So, I’m going to fast-forward a little bit before I come back to this tab.

I’m going to say that there’s two main kinds of analyses we do. The first is called classical Mendelian analysis or also known as monogenic DNA analysis. What this analysis does is it looks for really bad genetic markers in your DNA. These are markers that dramatically increases an individual risk for a disease. One of the most famous examples of this is someone like Angelina Jolie. She had a BRCA variant, which you may be familiar with, and I think in 2008, once she identified the BRCA variant, she actually then took next steps—specifically, a double mastectomy—to reduce her risk of breast cancer from about 80% to 90% to a negligible amount.

And that’s the power of DNA. Using genetics, you can actually identify what genetic markers someone has, if any, and then use that to provide some sort of downstream medical or lifestyle guidance. The thing with rare genetic markers or monogenic analysis or what is traditionally done in the clinic is that, actually speaking, most people don’t have these rare genetic markers. I put it at about 5% to 10% of our patients do, and they get potentially a life-saving result. About 90% don’t.

And so traditionally in genetic testing, most people get a negative result, and then the physician, let’s say in the context of breast cancer, for example, would say to the patient, “Well, you don’t have a BRCA variant. You don’t have a BRCA1 variant. You don’t have a BRCA2 variant. So, your risk is about 15% as a woman.” But here’s the thing, that risk is actually very much incomplete because it turns out, and this is one of the innovations of the Nucleus Genomics Platform, it turns out there are other genetic markers that also materially shape not just breast cancer risk but heart disease risk, Parkinson’s risk, and many, many other conditions.

So, I want to highlight that right now. So, this is actually called a polygenic score. It’s a new kind of genetic analysis that will help your patients better stratify their risk, then take appropriate downstream next steps. So, here you can see that Dr. Sandi’s genetic score is above average. It’s 2.46. She’s actually in the 99.3 percentile. This does not mean that she has a 99.3% chance of heart disease. It means her genetic risk is greater than 99% of people who share her ancestry. Her risk for heart disease we estimate to be about 50%, barring of course any lifestyle adjustments that she will make or has already made.

So, here you can see… You might be wondering, “Okay, there’s a lot of numbers. What do these numbers actually mean?” The power of polygenic scores and our technology is they can sort people into different groups. So, you can see here, for heart disease, for example, Dr. Sandi is above average. So, you can see people in her cohort have around a 35% chance of having heart disease. Meanwhile, people the other end of the bell curve have about a 6% chance. So, that’s the power of these models. They can meaningfully stratify an individual risk of getting disease, which then we can talk about how that changes different next steps.

So, I’m going to scroll down here. One cool thing about what we do is we don’t just look at DNA when we do these analyses. We look at a whole host of variables. We look at age and sex and BMI and cholesterol levels and A1c levels and more to consider people’s combined risk. So, when you think about Nucleus, it’s actually not just a DNA test. It’s really the first integrated health platform that can consider someone’s genetic and non-genetic information to basically ascertain their risk.

I’m going to come down a little bit here and make a couple points. One is we can actually speak to our genetic counselor so someone can get further following guidance as well as someone can importantly consider the implications these results on having their children, because DNA is always shared with your children and so you might have an above average risk for heart disease. That doesn’t necessarily mean your children has it as well. That’s why it’s really important to do genetic screening for many, many, many individuals in your family.

And so, I’m just going to come down here. One question I get often is, “Where do these models come from?” We basically use… You might be familiar if you’re a health coach with a SNP or genetic marker. Old ways of analyzing DNA, which is still unfortunately done today, is people will look at a single SNP or a single marker. They’ll look at your genotype, then they’ll look at the risk and non-risk genotypes, and then depending on how many of the risk genotypes you have, they’ll make some assessments about your risk for a condition. However, it turns out that each of these different SNPs, which stands for single nucleotide polymorphisms, they actually has very little effect on a disease risk.

And so the way everyone was thinking about this is to get meaningful risk assessments, you actually have to combine up to a million—literally a million—of these SNPs together. And then you can start getting really meaningful stratifications of risk and downstream assessments. So, if you’re a health coach and you’re ever looking at a single SNP, remember that a single SNP actually has very little effect. and you have to use something called a polygenic model that actually combines up to a million of these markers together into these scores. And then what happens is these scores are combined with someone’s lifestyle information. In this case, you can see we actually factor in someone’s cholesterol levels, blood pressure, diabetes status, smoking status, sex at birth, and their entire genome to calculate this result. And so this is part of the kind of sophistication of our application.

Now, you’re probably wondering, “Okay, Dr. Sandi has an elevated risk for heart disease. Now what?” So, the way I think about genetics and, kind of, next steps for patients is in various ways. I like to divide it into earlier, more aggressive screening, drugs, metabolites, and macronutrients and supplements. And so depending on the specific disease because so many diseases are so different and depending on what the patient’s risk is, the recommendations really, really vary. In this case, there’s a couple things I want to highlight for something like coronary artery disease. We see patients coming all the time saying something like, “Oh, I have such high cholesterol. For some reason, I can’t bring my cholesterol down. I’ve been working out so hard. Should I actually take a statin or not?”

What you find—and this is a really important point that I cannot overemphasize—is that when you go to the doctor, they’ll look at, let’s say, your cholesterol and they’ll say two people have the same, let’s say, high cholesterol. Let’s say they have over 200 in their total cholesterol. And the physician will say, “Well, you guys have both high cholesterol, therefore you have a high heart disease risk.” But in reality, because of genetics and other factors, two people can have the exact same cholesterol levels but very dramatically different risks for heart disease, because someone with elevated cholesterol might actually have average or below-average risk for their genetic risk for heart disease. Similarly, someone with high total cholesterol levels might be above-average risk for heart disease, in which case for that patient, they should probably look beyond just lifestyle interventions and consider more aggressive next steps like, for example, whether or not they should take a statin.

So, one of the first things that genetics can do is it can help you isolate whether it’s a lifestyle factor that can be changed with diet and exercise, or whether genetics is driving this and, as such, whether a drug, for example, makes sense. And so that’s one thing to consider in the context of something like coronary heart disease. Something like a statin, whether or not it makes sense for your patient. Another, of course, is tracking cholesterol levels. This is so important. There can be so much data when people do a blood test. They often don’t actually know what should I look for.

And so what you find is that when someone actually knows they have a higher genetic risk for heart disease, they can pay attention to their cholesterol numbers dramatically more closely, and it really helps provide a much more refined and personalized experience for the patient. And on that point, you can reduce someone’s cholesterol levels on the Nucleus platform, and you would see their overall risk for heart disease change. So, now through Nucleus, you can actually help your patients measure, “Hey, if you can bring down your total cholesterol levels by this amount, you can see your risk for heart disease come down dramatically.”

And so statins, we spoke about. We spoke about more aggressive tracking cholesterol. We spoke about how two people can have the same cholesterol levels but dramatically different risks, which is why it’s so important to get as much information, specifically genetic information, as possible. Another thing I would mention on earlier screening is oftentimes we get a question from patients saying, “Should I do a CT scan?” which is basically a way of checking your heart more closely. And I think, depending on someone’s genetics, a CT scan may or may not be worth it. In this case, with such a dramatically higher genetic risk, it may be worth it just to double-check as an earlier preventative health measure to ultimately ensure—and I know Dr. Sandi is very healthy, especially much healthier than a general person population—but still, to make sure, given this higher genetic risk for heart disease, that there’s absolutely no blockage in the heart.

And so I’ve been talking a lot now about heart disease. I want to keep moving forward to another condition here. So, you can see that Dr. Sandi is elevated for Parkinson’s, migraines, arthritis, anxiety, hypertension. We have some time here, so let’s dive into a little bit more some of these conditions. Parkinson’s is an interesting one. As you can see, Dr. Sandi has an elevated risk relative to the general population, but it’s, you know, around still 7% so it’s still relatively lower. If I come down to our genetic score here, you can see she’s negative for any of the kind of really, really bad markers like BRCA, but she has a 2.14, which is quite high, around 98th percentile. Still, though, that puts her at an elevated risk, yes, but still overall relatively low risk. You can see here that she’s an elevated risk but still 7% chance is still pretty low.

That said, there are still different things that Dr. Sandi should be aware of regarding Parkinson’s. So, Parkinson’s is a later-onset condition. It’s not a condition yet that’s entirely understood. One thing I want to highlight here is the AI health tips. So, across every single disease, we actually factor in the genetic and non-genetic piece of information into different AI recommendations. Our health coaches that already use our software usually like to take the results we give patients and take them even further and even deeper into an AI that we actually have that isn’t yet on the production side. But this also provides a great first pass for you to provide your patients. One thing I want to highlight here is the supplement. So, there is a specific supplement of coenzyme Q10 or CoQ10 that actually supports mitochondrial function, which can be beneficial for those at risk of Parkinson’s. So, this is a great example of a specific supplement that someone can take based off the elevated risk for Parkinson’s.

Another thing that you’re going to see highlighted here is sleep. Different people end up having very different reactions to sleep. It’s actually in part genetic as well. Given this higher risk for Parkinson’s, I would really emphasize to your future coaching patient that making sure you get sleep is extra important because you are even more susceptible than a typical person to develop a later-onset condition. The last thing I want to point out about Parkinson’s is advancing research. Sometimes physicians will say that they don’t want to give patients insights into later-onset conditions where there’s not a clear preventative measure. I think as many I imagine on this call agree with me, there’s always something you can do for your health. And once you know you’re at risk for something, there’s always more expanded research you can do to different supplements, diet, early screenings, different metabolites you can track as well to ensure that your brain is, kind of, developing appropriately, that there’s no sort of abnormalities in your mind. In other words, we really believe that more information is always better and that you can actually better target and better understand your, kind of, long-term health trajectory by starting with your DNA.

Let me get going here. I think migraines is one that’s very near and dear to me. So, you can see migraines. Dr. Sandi is actually more than double the population risk. And you can see here she doesn’t have one of these rare genetic markers. She does have an elevated polygenic score. This time she’s in the 95th percentile. I’m similar to Dr. Sandi actually. I’ve had migraines my entire life. We never knew why. It turns out it was genetic. And I actually learned that when I did Nucleus. I wish I had done it sooner. You can see that people on our cohort have about a 16% chance compared to people the other end of a 1% chance. So, literally a 10 times difference based off someone’s genetics, which is pretty amazing.

I’m going to click the AI health tips here. And there’s a couple of recommendations that I think can be highlighted. Sometimes people don’t know, you know, why do I have migraines? Oops, oops, okay. One thing I would highlight is magnesium supplements. So, studies have shown that magnesium supplements will actually help reduce a patient’s propensity for migraines. So, that’s something that I’d recommend to your patients. Another thing is actually different dietary triggers. So, like aged cheeses, for example, processed foods, excessive caffeine, you know, especially because you really want to be mindful of those in heart healthy foods like omega-3s. I think the thing that I learned the most was that, you know, migraines are really triggered by different aged foods, which was very interesting to me. And I actually personally use that. I actually personally started changing my supplement regime as well when I saw these different recommendations. So, there’s magnesium supplements. Omega-3 is so critical in your diet. And then of course, also avoiding aged food like cheeses really plays a strong role in providing what you should do given your genetic predisposition.

Let’s keep going. Arthritis is actually a good one. Let’s look at Dr. Sandi’s arthritis levels here. You can see she’s elevated, still low overall chance, but it’s good to know that she’s at higher genetic risk. You can see again, 0.3 to 4.1, again, dramatically different. Arthritis is interesting because it’s a condition that would really help shape what exercise people choose to do. And so different patients, you know, sometimes we get this all the time, “Should I run? Should I do strength training? You know, what should I do?” If you’re a higher propensity for arthritis, especially as you get older, you want to be mindful of, you know, exercises that can be tough on the joints, perhaps swimming, for example, or a kind of more aggressive walking can make sense depending on who you are and what kind of brings you joy. But this one is good because it’s kind of a physical recommendation. And you can see across all these recommendations, we start forming kind of personalized stack between medical recommendations like a drug, lifestyle recommendations like different supplements, diet, and even exercise recommendations. That’s sort of the power of genetic testing.

I’m going to go now to hypertension. Hypertension, you can see how prevalent hypertension is in the population. A typical female of 60 or older has a 75% chance of hypertension. Based on Dr. Sandi’s results, she’s actually elevated for that. I’m going to come down here. She doesn’t have any of these bad markers, but she does have elevated polygenic score. You can see again, and dramatically, it’s crazy how many people in this country actually have hypertension. You can see she’s elevated compared to people. You can see that we adjust for both sex. Obviously, Dr. Sandi is a female, so the results are adjusted for sex as well as age.

Hypertension, I like to always go back to some of the foundations of what I said at the beginning of this webinar, which is you want to think about are there more aggressive earlier screening measures? What drugs could I take, if any, if appropriate? What metabolites or different biometrics should I track? And of course, macronutrients and supplements. Hypertension, if you have elevated hypertension, it is so important to track your blood pressure more aggressively. I see patients sometimes miss out on this. They simply forget about blood pressure altogether. They don’t measure it. Obviously, if you’re a high risk for hypertension, you want to be tracking your blood pressure.

You want to be reducing your sodium intake as much as possible. So, you can start seeing a diet here that has magnesium supplements, that has coenzyme Q10 supplements. You see a diet that is low sodium, high in omega-3s. All these things will help the different conditions that Dr. Sandi is at elevated risk for. One thing also to consider when people think about hypertension is different medications. Again, if appropriate and as designated by your physician, but often sometimes people get frustrated when they make lifestyle recommendations and don’t see a change and they wonder, “What am I doing wrong?” But they’re doing nothing wrong. It’s actually driven by genetics, which can help them consider whether a drug like an ACE inhibitor, for example, would make sense for the patient to consider.

And so that is a variety of different conditions from courtyard disease to Parkinson’s to migraines to arthritis to hypertension. You can see how genetics here can help inform the different kind of lifestyle stack. One thing I’ll say that’s very important is DNA is not destiny, and DNA will never be destiny. But DNA is a very, very critical… Especially a whole genome, it’s a very critical piece of health data that providers and coaches and individuals use for their entire life to help not just stave off disease and do any appropriate medical intervention but also adjust for someone’s lifestyle. I’m going to go back to the homepage for a second, highlight a couple other things here.

You can see that we actually… You can organize each of the genetic risk by elevated and more average risk. You can look at things from diabetes to schizophrenia. I’m personally very high genetic risk for schizophrenia. Breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, right, is one that people actually always like to look at. Alzheimer’s, you can see Dr. Sandi here is actually slightly below average, which is quite nice. You can see the APOE gene, which some of you might be familiar with. She’s E3/E3. It turns out the APOE gene is actually one of many genes that impacts someone’s risk for Alzheimer’s. We’ve built innovative models that combine up to 30 of these genetic markers together into scores. Dr. Sandi is fortunate that she is actually about an average risk, you can see here, which is quite nice.

If I come back down here, you can see that we also look for over 900 hereditary conditions. So, for example, some might ask, “Am I at risk for,” what I mentioned earlier, “hereditary breast and ovarian cancer?” You can see different, for example, one of the most famous ones is BRCA1-related hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. You can see here we did not find any genetic markers that put Dr. Sandi at risk for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. That’s awesome result.

Another thing I want to highlight is the rest of the platform. I don’t have too much time here. I love nucleus. I could talk about it forever. We actually do look at traits. Shout out to Dr. Sandi here. All right, she has an above average genetic IQ score. Can we get some chat celebrating that? I think that’ll be fun. Let’s see. She has actually dramatically above average risk here. Let’s see. She’s actually in the 99th percentile. That’s awesome, Dr. Sandi. One fun stuff that we do analysis on, which I always find interesting. We talk about both the genetic and non-genetic effects of IQ. You can see we look at other traits here like BMI, height, left‑handedness, acne, muscle strength, allergies, risk-taking.

I do want to go to the family section though to end things out. So, this is a really fun feature we have. You can see actually my name, Kian, and you can see Dr. Sandi. This is family planning. So, Nucleus is actually all on the same software platform built out to what is really the first ever software for what we call genetic matching. So, anytime a couple is getting married and having children, it’s of the utmost importance that they both screen their genetics to make sure that they’re not carriers for the same genetic condition. For example, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, PKU, these are conditions that can put your future child at basically a very, very high risk for a really severe genetic disease. So, we built out the first what we call genetic matching software where we’ll actually simulate all the different combinations possible based off what people are carriers for and see if you and your partner are a genetic match, or in other words, if you guys will have healthy kids together. And don’t worry if you’re not a genetic match because then you can use Nucleus IVF to screen out the embryo with this specific debilitating disease.

So, you can see here that Dr. Sandi and I are a match. We tested over 900 conditions, which is hundreds more than they test today in the clinic. We didn’t find any risks, which is awesome. That’s awesome. We should congratulate ourselves. I’m going to go back home and show you that Dr. Sandi, pretty remarkably, actually is not a carrier for anything. Good genes. That’s actually quite rare. I am a carrier for cystic fibrosis. Most people on this call are definitely a carrier for something. We find about 90% of our patients are. You can see I actually have a carrier for cystic fibrosis or the CFDR gene. Unfortunately, me and Sandi’s theoretical kids are at low risk for the condition. However, if I go back for a second, I’m going to now stop sharing my results with Dr. Sandi. Oh, and I’m going to look at Dr. Sandi’s results. I just lost my results. I can log into my account.

But if you were in my account, you would actually see… You know, let me actually pull up my account for a second just so people can add this context because it’s so important before we round things out here. So, what I’m doing right now is I’m actually going to log into my personal accounts to give you guys a sense of what most people’s software applications will look like. So, I’m going to do that here. Okay, perfect. I’m just doing the two-factor authentication. Let me try that one more time. My results, by the way, are public in case anyone ever wants to look at my genetic results. If you go on our social media accounts, I always make sure to very loudly and proudly show our genetic results because it’s so important that people know about their underlying DNA because it’s one of the things I find that health coaches, that physicians, they often miss. They often miss, you know, what can be more kind of foundation to someone’s health than their DNA, you know, foundation of who they are and what their health is.

All right. Let’s see. Sorry. It’s taking longer. We are HIPAA-compliant. So, any information that we collect on Nucleus is only used to provide you with better care. And that’s really important because sometimes I get questions from different patients, providers, etc. They ask me, how do you make sure that the information that, you know, we work with, that Nucleus is safe? And the answer is we treat your genetic information like your hospital or your doctor’s office. We do not share it by default with anyone, any third-party. Period. I have my results up here. So, I’m going to share my screen one more time before getting over to questions. And so I’m going to share my screen.

So, these are my results. You can see my results look a little bit different. I’ve high risk for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is interesting because, you know, there’s a reason why… For me personally, I’ve never done any drugs, but this was very interesting because, you know, if you give two people the same drug or specifically a psychedelic, there’s a reason why someone gets one-shotted and maybe lose their mind but someone else doesn’t. It’s actually because of genetics, which is why, you know, if you’re at a higher risk of schizophrenia, it’s important. You also see Dr. Sandi and I share quite a bit in common. We have both migraines and arthritis elevated. And of course I have MS, gastric cancer, and depression too.

I want to go to my family results to show you guys what most of your application will look like. You can see I’m a cystic fibrosis carrier. So, if I click on this, you can see that my kids are at higher risk. So, the way this works is if my partner is a carrier, our kids have a 25% chance of getting the condition. If my partner’s not a carrier, like for example, when Dr. Sandi and I matched, they are in the clear, so they will not have the disease, which is why it’s so important to do a genetic screening and especially a whole genome test because it doesn’t just empower you to know about your own disease but also empowers you to know about the genetic markers that will impact your future children.

For example, without a partner, I’m at chance of passing down a very severe genetic disease, but after matching with my partner, I might not have any risk. If I do have a risk, that’s no problem. We can consider doing IVF, for example, and I can… screening out the baby with the severe inherited genetic disease, instead of the parents coming after their baby has been born with a severe genetic condition and asking us to help. And at that point, we’re powerless to the biology. This is why it’s so, so important to do these preventive screening measures, not just for yourself but your future family.

And that’s why we call it generational health. This idea that when you do a genetic test, you know, the results aren’t just for you, they’re also for your future children. So, know as you consider things and you do a Nucleus, you do a genetic test, know that the results don’t just impact you, they impact your future family. Your future family does not have the same DNA as you have, and it’s very possible they have materially different results than you. If you look at my results and my siblings, for example, I’m a carrier for one thing. My brother is actually carrier for four things, right? That’s sort of the way that, you know, biology works and getting 50% of your DNA from mom and dad. So, I would be mindful and, kind of, thoughtful as you do genetic testing to make sure you also try to help your family get tested as well so they can live as long and as healthy as possible. I think we’re coming up at the 2:40 mark here, Dr. Sandi, so maybe I’ll stop and open up to questions.

Dr. Sandi: This has been so wonderful and of course, eye opening for me. And I knew I had a family history of heart disease, knowing so many people die of coronary artery disease and all my cousins are on statins. So, I see that as well, which is why I have lived my life with prevention and focusing on VO2 max and managing triglycerides and high HDL, for example. So, it is so empowering to know these results because you then can address lifestyle.

But we have some great questions that have come in. I think you already answered the first one in terms of HIPAA, that it is protected under confidentiality. And then you can just see the next question has to do with screening for phase I, phase II detoxification alleles. Is that something you do? And yeah.

Kian: Yeah. So, one thing to know… We get a lot of questions. I see a lot of questions about MTHFR, for example, and a lot of different alleles that are associated with different, sort of, oxidative pathways, etc. One thing to know is that Nucleus is very much… We focus on disease risk assessment and also family planning. That said, because we’re a whole genome test, we screen for all those alleles. So, people always ask us about MTHFR specifically and a bunch of other markers as well. We screen for all of that.

So, one thing to know is that some of these people run a microarray chip, which looks at a small fraction of DNA and a portion of genetic markers. We look at literally speaking every genetic marker that exists in the genome. And so any analyses or any insights that you want, you can always do two things. One, you can just email us, and we’ll just give you. Two is you have access. Let me show you my screen. This is really, really interesting. I think people love this feature of Nucleus. Let me share my screen. Anything you don’t see on the front end, you can actually go to the settings page, you can actually scroll down, and you can actually download your raw DNA data. And the power of that now is there’s many other applications that you could also use to basically flag different genetic markers. You can look at… We’re actually going to be pushing a homocysteine genetic report very soon to the front end. If you look at any genetic report, you can scroll down and you can see the different SNPs. So, if people look at different alleles, they probably recognize these different SNP IDs, so you can actually look into these and see what the different genetic markers people have. If not, you can also download the genetic data and you can just email us, and we’ll help you.

We do plan on adding more and more different genetic models for kind of different metabolites like homocysteine, as mentioned, and LDL, for example as well. And so know that because we’ve done the whole genome test, it’s expansive. You can do everything. And so if there’s anything that’s not yet on the application, we can do it and/or you can look at your own DNA data or your clients.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. I’m going to take this question about the coach. So, you are absolutely correct. So, a coach, that’s your territory, helping clients with increased anxiety from these results. And that is you talk about epigenetics, the promise of lifestyle changes, and how genes load the gun, diet and lifestyle pull the trigger. And so that is an area that is absolutely critical. That’s why it is so important for coaches to be involved and to help people through Nucleus to reassure them how much is in control. So, I’ll turn it back to Kian.

Kian: Yeah, I mean, 100%. I was showing you guys the AI feature. What’s so interesting is that even a lot of stuff that I was… As I walked through Dr. Sandi’s results, I was getting a bunch of different thoughts and recommendations. As you see, some of the recommendations I gave, the AI didn’t include, right? And that’s the beauty and the promise of what you guys do in your craft and your expertise. You guys are really enabled by and helped by the AI. It’s really this beautiful, mutually beneficial relationship where the AI and the human work together to provide the patient with more insight and more power.

On that point, too, I didn’t have too much time to go very deep into each condition. But if you look at something like Parkinson’s, for example, there’s a whole host of things you can do that isn’t yet well understood by the medical establishment. But as coaches, you know there are so many different ways both diet and lifestyle and different tracking you can do for your mind to help delay some of these later-onset conditions, that maybe as a physician, they’ll say you shouldn’t have access to these insights because there’s nothing you can do. We all know the power of nutrition, the power of actually diving deeper into our own bodies, and the different ways that we can, kind of, mitigate or prevent a later-onset condition, even like Parkinson’s.

And so that’s where your job comes in, using these insights. Because again, DNA is always one piece of the picture. It’s not everything. It’s not obviously nothing. It’s material, and it’s important. But then the lifestyle and environmental factors is combined to the DNA to give this completely holistic and personalized assessment.

Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. Yeah. And for Parkinson’s specifically environmental toxins. So, I’m not going to live on a golf course, for example.

Kian: Yeah. Oh, exactly. Exactly.

Dr. Sandi: And the role of… Yeah, detoxification.

Kian: I love that.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, exactly. And that is a role coaches… It is huge, helping people to detoxify and to reduce as much as possible their toxic load. So, yeah, I know we’ve got a lot of questions, and we may not get to them all. But, Kian, any jump out at you that you would like to address now?

Kian: Let me flag some. Okay. So, is it possible… Does it make sense to test a child’s sample? What age is appropriate to do so? So, a couple things here, which is obviously a whole genome DNA test contains critical health information for someone at any age. Today, at Nucleus, we do testing for at least 18 years old to submit a sample. We obviously do embryo testing, but right now, if you’re under 18, you’re not eligible for our testing. That said, again, I would emphasize that genetic insights can be consequential at any age, right, because obviously if you’re at 18, you discover some sort of genetic marker… I think about my cousin, for example. I see it happen with long QT. So, my cousin, for example, she died of long QT. Sometimes long QT is a condition that you can be 25 and we’ve actually found who did Nucleus who’ve identified…they had no idea. And that’s a ticking time bomb. It can literally kill you.

And so what we find is the earlier you find the genetic markers, the better, because then you can give someone with a long QT genetic marker a beta-blocker, and a beta-blocker would dramatically reduce the risk of dying from the condition. And so I would say, generally speaking, the faster you can do genetic testing, the faster you get these insights, and the more targeted your approach can be. So, it’s always generally better.

Dr. Sandi: This has been absolutely fabulous. Thank you. I learned so much. This is wonderful, and it’s wonderful to be able to have our health coaches guide people once they get these reports. So, thank you so much. To be continued. Bye, everybody. Thank you for attending and you will get the replay.

Kian: Yes. And thank you, guys. Everyone, please reach out to me. Thank you, guys. Thanks.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you.

Kian: See you later. Bye.

Dr. Sandi: Bye, everybody.