This article was taken from the April 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Biochemist Ayub Khattak and his business partner Clint Sever spent a month in 2011 monitoring their biology. To achieve this, they came up with Cue, a molecular health tracker that monitors vitals such as testosterone and inflammation levels to see what effect exercise and diet has on our biology. "We saw a direct effect between input and output," says Khattak. "Clint would eat burgers and fries and his inflammation would spike. On the other hand, two hours after consuming green vegetables, my inflammation levels would fall."
The idea for Cue came to Khattak, then a biochemistry researcher at UCLA, in 2009 during the swine flu crisis. "In the lab, we regularly sequenced bacteria to identify what was in biological samples," says Khattak. "I thought that if this technique could be applied to the swine flu epidemic, the response would have been very different."
The San Diego-based startup has raised £1 million in seed funding and expects to start selling the device, priced at $199, later this year. "People are innately interested in the data in their body," says Khattak. "We provide a data stream at the molecular biology level."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
