If you’ve met me, you’ll know I’m a skinny thing and absolutely NOT a hot tip to appear in Gladiators.

But if I was an athlete and wanted to make sure I was putting the right nutrition into my body, Myoform would want to make sure I was on the right track. Read on for full details…

But first:

• Global accelerator brand Techstars has increased its standard investment offer to $220,000 across most of the world, up from $120,000.

– Martin

Myoform wants to get personal with athletes’ nutrition

The precision nutrition market in North America alone has been pegged at around $6 billion, with a prediction that it could reach $12.89 billion by 2029.

As the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health explains:

Myoform is a new startup entering this space with a focus personalised supplements for athletes of both the professional and serious non-pro kind.

As co-founder and CEO Theo Wiley puts it, Myoform wants to take the principles of precision medicine and apply them to consumable health products.

“Most people don't know what supplements to use, how much to take, and who to buy them from, because they're lost in the supplement aisle. It's like you're just taking whatever you can see and what's marketed to you,” Wiley says.

How it works

A Myoform customer starts begins with a genetic test. They spit in a tube and send it back to the startup, which orders a whole-genome sequencing from the sample. The customer also fills in a questionnaire about their personal details and objectives.

Once the sequencing is done (this currently takes up to six weeks, depending on how busy the labs are, Wiley says), an algorithm Myoform has developed figures out what specific nutritional support the customer might need, based on their genetic profile and their questionnaire responses.

“We’ve developed polygenic risk scores across about 75 different effects, looking at vitamin A through E, calcium, magnesium, creatine, and the ability to metabolise those nutrients based on the genetic profiles that we looked at,” Wiley says.

“We use whole genome sequencing rather than a smaller assay, partially because we get the ability to continually update the individuals’ reports and our algorithm over time as new data comes out, but also because we want to allow customers to reuse that data.”

This information is then used to offer personalised nutrition products that the customer can order on a subscription basis.

“They come in a bagged format, rather than specific pills… We provide them in a scooped based, protein powder format and then the user just continues to use them until they feel like they don't need them.”

In the future, Myoform plans to offer the option for customers to provide blood samples, so the personalised offerings to them can evolve over time.

The story so far

Wiley says that he grew up with a genetic form of hearing loss, which led to him going completely deaf in one ear. As a result of this, he developed an interest in genetics and obtained a degree in the subject.

After that, he spent several years working in commercial roles in the health and genetics space.

But he says the specific idea for Myoform came from his experience as a teenager taking supplements alongside his exercise regimen. Scarily, the supplement he was taking, Craze, was found to a contain chemical similar to methamphetamine.

“There's a real lack of regulation in the supplement space, and that led me down this path of thinking ‘why is it possible to sell me this product?’, and shouldn't there be some more consideration to the ingredients that we're putting in our bodies?

“If you're 220 kilo rugby player versus a 45 kilo female ultra marathoner, you will need different dosages, or different products.,” Wiley says.

Myoform has been in the works for around three years, developing patent-pending IP. Wiley started the journey on his own, later joined by Sacha Attiach as co-founder. Attiach has a background in neuroscience and software development.

Wiley says the startup has been beta testing over the past year.

“We took 20 athletes across multiple different areas and we assessed them on a 12-week basis over seven different performance domains, and we saw a 23.5% improvement over the course of those 12 weeks,” WIley claims.

The next stage is to obtain more clinical data, while Myoform continues in on an invite-only basis for now, and then go to market officially in the coming months.

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