Imagine what would happen if we read your DNA to find the best possible nutrition guide between the lines.
In this episode of Bite the Orange, Sherry Zhang, founder and CSO of GenoPalate, talks about how they use technology to analyze a person’s genome and guide them toward the best healthy diet plan based on the results of their different products and services. By leveraging nutrigenomics technology, GenoPalate can use DNA information for nutritional and metabolism insights, so users can make foundational and impactful nutritional choices daily. Sherry presents the company's current products and services, like the at-home DNA Analysis Kit; GenoVit, personalized supplements; and GenoJump and GenoGo, health-outcomes-oriented one-on-one programs guided by a registered dietitian. She also discusses how she is working to form new alliances focused on technology that share a preventative care approach to health in her new role as CSO.
Tune in and learn how GenoPalate plans to take your nutrition to the next level by personalizing it with your DNA!
FULL EPISODE
BTO_Sherry Zhang: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
BTO_Sherry Zhang: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Welcome to Bite the Orange. Through our conversations, we create a roadmap for the future of health with the most impactful leaders in the space. This is your host, Dr. Manny Fombu. Let's make the future of healthcare a reality together.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of Bite the Orange. And today we have a very special guest that is transforming the way we look at nutrition and health. And today we have no other than Dr. Sherry Zhang coming all the way from the beautiful, warm, or cold state of Wisconsin. Welcome to the show today, Sherry.
Sherry Zhang:
Hi, Manny. Happy New Year. How are you?
Emmanuel Fombu:
Happy New Year. Happy New Year and welcome to the show. So tell us something about yourself for those that don't know you.
Sherry Zhang:
Yeah, sure. You just say Happy New Year and thank you for being so sensitive to other cultures. Some people may probably notice we also have a Chinese New Year, just happened a few days ago. So from my ancestry, I really appreciate that and people are acknowledging that. And then 2023 is going to be a beautiful, hopefully, healthy year for everybody, as you, as I know how passionate you are about health, and so am I. A little bit about my background. I grew up in northern China. If you hop on the speedy train from Beijing, you get there like in 30 minutes, and had a wonderful time growing up. Always want to study some sort of life sciences. I just love animals, love people, love problem-solving, so that's the origin of why I'm becoming a molecular biologist and trying to find novel way to access health. So got my bachelor's degree in microbiology in my hometown, which happened to have one of the top ten universities, and then for life sciences, and got several offers like in school senior year to come to America to further my graduate education. And the first offer came through is from warm and cold state of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, great, fabulous, small-sized faculty and programs, but absolutely love what I've observed from there. So I actually accepted, it's a full fellowship scholarship offered by Marquette University, which is on the beautiful lakefront of Milwaukee. Yes, championship now. So yeah, love the people. It's cold. It's, it just, I grew up in colder climate and that's not a problem, it's just a little bit too long here. It takes several months to melt the snow, some days, some years, but this year we're pretty good. But love the people, love the community. It's all about people. Got welcomed by local people or school or professional, my mentors by open arms, so nurtured me, I always say I physically grew up in Tianjin and psychologically, intellectually grew up in Milwaukee. So these are my two homes.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is a very beautiful story, actually. And like right now, actually, you serve as a founder and CSO of GenoPalate, so was your research on nutrition? Is that something that, did that start something that you did in the US, was it something that grew up in northern China? You know about the China study, for example, there was a massive study on nutrition, which is, I'm a big fan of. So what got your interest in nutrition?
Sherry Zhang:
Yeah, nutrition, all Chinese love food, good food, right? The heritage is, you came from beautiful long heritage and you understand the power of food in the center of a culture. My grandma has always cooked for the community. Everyone just come. She's a fabulous home chef. She will just cook. Everyone just know my grandmother is cooking and will just stop by and bring something or not come and eat and just a beautiful way of engage with your people, and so I love that. That's from daily life perspective, but as I shared, I early on developed this attraction to problem-solving, life science, and animals, and all that, so I just wanted to help people and then observed a lot of issues over the years, the chronic diseases, is all dietary related, right? 95%, they say, can be it's all related and can be reversible, and we know that. So for this medicine, you talk a lot in your book, and I firmly believe that. So I guess the start was really of true foodie with appreciation of what nutrition, food, and people culture can do for you, for your sustainable growth and productivity or healthy. And then the technology, the trade, so to speak, knowledge and discipline. I happen to be interested in mostly in, is also how science, my past, kind of led me to human genome sequencing, right? So my PhD was is in molecular biology where actually didn't, I didn't study human first, I studied a weed called Arabidopsis thaliana. I can still pronounce it. It's a small weed because it's ..., so it's was fully sequenced early on, even when the sequencing was very expensive. But the life cycle is shorter, so we can follow through all these changes. So think it's like manually clone one gene at a time. All the basic skills you have to develop as a kind of hardcore scientist in molecular biology. So I learned all those skills and clone the family of genes that will help the plant to deal with cold situation, because they are sessile, they cannot run away from their problems, they have to deal with it. That gave me the whole foundation, very solid foundation as a molecular biologist. And then the second opportunity as a scientist and researcher came through after I graduated with a PhD and, from Marquette University and then became a postdoctoral fellow at the Medical College of Wisconsin, which I don't know, a lot of people know it's actually one of the most prestigious school or program for research of obesity and metabolic syndrome. The person who co-founded the Obesity Research Society, for our whole society, and also the person coined the metabolic syndrome concept ... happened to be my great mentor for many years before he actually, unfortunately, deceased. So under his guidance and work with two dozen brilliant scientists and we studied obesity and metabolic syndrome for decades. We have one of the largest family-based pedigree population so that we can look at the same family structure. They shared a lot of gene pool, genetic factor, but also they, because Midwestern lifestyle, they don't travel so much or move to different places. So the households is pretty static, so we can control all of the environmental factors as well. So it's a beautiful setting for genetic studies. So I built out my kind of early career research path and competency that way and then led me to independent investigator of NIH-funded research projects. Another concept building on top of whole genome sequencing genotyping, we call it GWAS, genome-wide association studies. I also developed a new program for the MCW campus, it's called Epigenomic Screening. As you probably know, epigenetic is the newer finding, right? It's the key linking your genes and your environment, when you exercise we know our epigenomic patterns change, some are transient, some are permanent. So I got fascinated about that new concept, bring the technology back to our campus, started to study on top of the genetic base we have and biobanks, and so on. Eventually, publish some of the best papers of mine. I really love the Epigenomic story on top of genetics, and then along the line developed the idea to provide, not only study in this research for ten years and on the top of the ivory tower, I want a quicker way to service our people, including myself, my mom, my son, and everybody. And then watching the, one of the drivers to make this happen is really the decreasing prices for sequencing your genome or genotyping it, right, to the fact, to the level where everybody can afford a genotyping-based genome sequencing or scanning for your particular use. Whether you're interested in your ancestry, which is a genealogy like Ancestry.com provided or ... provide health risk evaluation. But at the time there wasn't one focusing on reading your DNA for your nutrition, for metabolic health. So that's really the idea that my company GenoPalate was originated from. Sorry, it's a long-winded answer.
Emmanuel Fombu:
But that is actually a beautiful concept and I really enjoy it. And I like from the name of the company, when you have Geno and Palate, it tells what the story is. Tell me who you are as GenoPalate, right? What is the specific goal that you go about, sets, that you set out to accomplish? Because I love that story and I think, it's there's no rush here, but then the conversation, and I really want to enjoy that story of who you are, because that actually leads to the passion and commitment to building the product that you actually building, right? And so for every listener listening to the conversation understands mentally that GenoPalate is not just another company that just came out of nowhere, right? That the leaders behind this company, or the founders behind GenoPalate actually have a lot of research, a lot of work that you put into this to make you where you are. So to my understanding, GenoPalate is a company that helps individuals identify the best nutrition for them based on their genes, is that correct?
Sherry Zhang:
Yes, at the core, we have this technology called Nutrigenomics. I became a pretty key driver for using DNA information of, everybody have a genome and have the information sitting in your cells. We read it and then apply that to nutritional and metabolism insights so that you could, everybody want to eat healthy today. That is a way to read in, read into your genetic blueprint, to guide you, navigate the very complex nutrition food environment we're living in to find the right one, ones for you. It could be a regimen, it could be a specific food, it could be a nutrient you want to avoid. For example, gluten, for example, lactose for myself, things like that could. Be very subtle, but eventually foundational and impactful for daily choices you're making, the decision you're making. Eventually, we are building one of the large, we are one of the largest databases in personalized nutrition with deep genetic insights for individuals.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I'm actually quite fortunate today, I guess, we're talking to you because I believe you just launched, you just announced today, the launch of your personalized supplement line, GenoVit, and I believe you also have other products like GenoGo. So tell us about the different products that you offer and just give like a brief description of each. That'll be very helpful for the listeners.
Sherry Zhang:
Yeah, thank you, this is a really happy day. We scheduled our call just, right?
Emmanuel Fombu:
... write it down.
Sherry Zhang:
But it's the best, best timing. So we just have a news release about GenoVit and thank you for mentioning that, Manny. So our product line comprises a kind of experience, fit into people's health journey. We all start from, okay, who am I in terms of my identity for metabolism? What do I really need? So it's the what, right? So that provided by, we have our clear lab. You can, it's a swap based, or send you your order, our test. We send you our DNA analysis kit to your home or anywhere, you store the swap, send it in, our lab will analyze it and provide your insights presented in our, across-the-device apps, whether it's mobile app or PC apps, or if you have iPad or have a diversion too, or there's actually growing as a globally 34, probably still growing, million people who have adopted consumer genomics services. Two giants who we'll talk about is ancestry.com, which has I believe more than 10 million or 15 and 23andMe has 10 million, right? So among those two, we cover a lot of early adopters. People are advocating genetics using that for their own use and benefits. So we have a technology developed inside of the GenoPalete team to, with quality control in places, in place, and analyze your existing data with 23andMe or Ancestry, convert what you already done and invested and waited for to something you can use for daily choices of food. So there's two ways of getting in too. The whole analysis, as we just described, we call it the GenoBase. It literally means, this is a foundation, this is the baseline, exactly. Thank you. And then the next level, what do we learn from long-term observing customers, talking to customers, talking to industry that people want, okay, they want the insights, they want the access, but they also urgently need, what do I do? What's now? And then they also need some sort of help and coaching. Different people want different formats of coaching. So it's also a personalization part of it. So what we develop further is, we call it, you mentioned, exactly, right? It's the, we call it Jump and Go. Those are the first health outcomes-oriented, RD-facilitated, one-on-one program for the individual. Everything is built upon our understanding and recommendations from your base results and then pick the ones that work for you, pick the, identify the low-hanging fruits, so to speak, for your health to reach your goal and help you be healthier. And a lot of people want to be losing weight, obviously, and there's energy boosting, there's sleep issues, and general metabolism or allergies to food and nutrition, and so on, or some people just want to be smarter. I'm pretty well, I'm representing probably you and my situation here, but we want to live productively forever, be contribuing into our society. So how can it do that? So we have that smart-eating kind of crowd as well. As I indicated, we have on staff registered dietitian, which is the highly, the highest level of credentials for providing nutritional services. And we have really fabulous staff, RDs, to provide. Everybody just cares so much about their ... patients and celebrating proud of their work of helping people, and in most cases, they do through our Jump and Go. Now you just mentioned, GenoVit is our new release, took us a year. We set the vision probably over a year ago after strategy planning, and industry, and manufacturing, building, and operational. Integration went out today where we really become the leader in providing genetically informed formulation through the supplements and vitamins that people can take daily. So we know over about 60% of American adults will take vitamins in the past 30 days so, as a routine, and our customer base from GenoPalate that I can, 80% of them will take vitamins on a regular basis. So we know people already having this as a part of health journey, right, daily intervention, so to speak, as how I see it. And we just take it to the next level, if you want to personalize it with your DNA.
Emmanuel Fombu:
This sounds quite fascinating and I think it's very informative, right? Because a lot of times in general, people just go to a multivitamin store and just buy any kind of vitamin and they just like, oh, yeah, it's multivitamins. My mom does that actually quite a bit where she just takes sometimes with overdoses of Vitamin B12, and then I don't know if she needs it or not, and then she takes A's and C's and all these random pieces. But this is, in a case where you actually personalize it, you could do your genetic test. And what I find most fascinating about what you said is you could send people DNA kits, right? Or if you already have a test that you've done through ancestry.com or 23andMe, you could also incorporate that or bring that into the table, right? You don't need to start from scratch right in that base period, correct?
Sherry Zhang:
Exactly, yeah, and the majority of our people are, actually came from that route because people, it makes sense, right? These are the early adopter segment, they got, they, it makes sense to them. GenoPalate can use their investment into something they can use daily.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which goes back to our original point at the beginning of the conversation about talking about where everyone is from, like talking about your story, right? ... where are you from, and where everyone, where I think all the stories of ancestry.com, 23andMe, tells you where you are from, right? It tells you things about yourself. But then the question becomes, what do you do about that? The next phase, right? So now I know from an old, my allergies do this and what do I do about it, right? So I know for myself, I did gene sequencing on myself, and I found that I have a risk for hypertension. And so the two things about it, either sit here and eat all the junk and then get high blood pressure, or I could do something about it, right? I could try to be healthy, I could take the right vitamins, and so that's what I really enjoy about what you're doing, you and your team at GenoPalate, what you guys are doing is actually personalizing that experience, making it actionable for me. Do you also offer one-on-one coaching? For example, if I, oh you do, how does that work? Is it like a subscription kind of model or how does this work?
Sherry Zhang:
Yeah, eventually it will be. Right now it's, you can buy one session or multiple session as part of Jump or Go programs because everything has to build upon our reading of your genetics.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Really? So how does that work? So I could, if I do my test, for example, and I sign up to one of your programs, I want a one-on-one, I could set up an appointment with, like a registered dietitian to coach me?
Sherry Zhang:
Exactly.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Oh, this is fantastic. So this is like a whole, like a complete holistic version of doing this. So how long have you been in business? With that being said, because this is a lot you've accomplished.
Sherry Zhang:
Thank you, we try. There's so much we can do for people's houses with so many problems. Six years, over six years. I don't feel, someday I feel it's forever, thousand years. And someday I was like, oh really? That's six years. But it's been probably the best six years of my life.
Emmanuel Fombu:
That's quite fascinating. And how big is your company now? How big is your team? Because I look at your website and I think you have quite a few people. So it's just.
Sherry Zhang:
It's still a small team. Yeah, thank you. It's still a small team. We actually service in the whole country, every state, and our lifetime customer base is over 170,000 today. So it's a lot of lives that we touched in small bigger way. But it's only 15 people. 15 of us, but we're powerful Avengers group, I always call them. Each person has some superpower that, especially augmented by coming together. It's a beautiful thing and they are all very kind, just like yourself, and passionate.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Oh, thank you very much. I'm flattered. So where do you see the company grow in the next year or two years?
Sherry Zhang:
Yeah, it's a good question. And we really want to start, and that's what my new capacity new role as the outward facing, because I ran a company for the past six years, handed it over to a really great operator, our former CO, who will focus, focusing in on building the company inside and performance and so on and product model, where I bridge and connect us further into the ecosystem. You know, this new healthcare, it's not traditional, it's branching out or building out from the traditional capacity or issues, and we're trying to fill the gaps for us by heart and really forming a new alliances, so to speak, to take care of individual health using all the preventative care system approach technology. As we talk about a lot in the past 20 minutes or so, really help people to achieve and maintain optimal health before a lot of bad things happen. And I studied obesity for so long, knowing, it's so important that, and it's very highly achievable that you prevent the onset of chronic diseases' symptoms from happening at the get-go. It just, when it happens, it's usually already too late and a lot of physiological changes already happened. Inflammation and all these, you mentioned the risk for developing hypertension. Everybody has that risk, it's just higher or lower, it's in their genes, and also to do with how you cope with it and how you navigate everyday life, your activities, and so on. And too many people are on medicine, medications. I really have seen people completely eliminate the need for taking 12, 16 pills every day from a healthy lifestyle. So it's reversible, it's preventable, and I think it's the future that, it's going to happen. It's not just a future or, us as innovators will aspire, or see, right? It's going to happen, it has to happen. So we want to be part of that. Two years, still very short time for innovation company for healthcare, but I think you've, through your effort, our efforts, and many others, if we can, really forming a new way of approaching health for people, that will be a fantastic achievement.
Emmanuel Fombu:
This is quite fascinating. I have spent a lot of time doing research on change from baseline, but more on the physical activity side of things, right? Where you could count step counts and you could track how many steps you walk and how much you exercise, that's on a physical side piece, but I really like this approach also because you need both in combination on how you approach this. Well, you could have physical piece of how you actually become healthier, but the idea of nutrition and personalized nutrition, I think it's very key. I have friends right now, actually, that have been diagnosed with cancer, for example, with the diet is completely changed, right? Colon cancer, Ovarian cancer, where they change what they eat, some of them become vegans and vegetarians and eat less meat. And it's a lot of talk today about what's enough foods and what we actually get and the risk for disease. And actually found out, I think yesterday, about some baby formula having lead in there. And I'm like, what? They still have lead, but lead has been discussed for years and years, and this is genetics, right? I think so, living healthy and other people are very self-conscious about this, the way it comes to chronic diseases. I think obesity plays a massive role. Inflammation plays a massive role because of diabetes, even cancers. These are things that are well-established. And so I think the ability to actually look at someone's gene and actually find the perfect nutrition is the best way to go. Do you see yourself down the road actually offering customized meals to users?
Sherry Zhang:
Yeah, diet ... you. We've been talking about it for probably years now. The thing is, you're talking about deliver your meals to you or give you, we do offer recipes today. That's just information, though. But I think what you envision is the one step further.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Yeah, I thinking maybe your grandma or you, someone cooks this food, because I don't mind having some personalized Chinese meals mailed to me in a daily basis.
Sherry Zhang:
Yeah, I bet it will be great. No, I think it's a matter of how, again, we provide recipes tailored by your genetics. People pay money versus you can get a lot of recipes, a million recipes out for free, but that's not for you. So people see value, people use it and well, I don't know. So we build our database just one by one. It's all handmade because people want it. So obviously people want it and need it and use it, but I think from the, it's all behavioral modifications here which is very hard to, towards healthy. It's so much easier to go on unhealthier sometimes, because the human nature. So in order to get people possibly change their behavior, and for a different pattern, modify it, and stick, I think, I see the meal planning service with a delivery is a great way of deliver and then reinforce. Because people are, we're all busy, right? We all want some sort of convenience. Okay, I trust you, I have means to pay for it, can you make it consistent for me? Can you deliver to me? I'll just use it, I'll just consume it. And I think that part, not everybody needs that. A lot of people want to cook for themselves, which is fine, but I think a lot of people can use that one more push, we call the last mile of healthy food behavior, as you probably know. It's important.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Yes, I'm in the last-mile push kind of effort in there, right? I try, I try to eat healthy, but I think having something that's like personalized, customized with vitamins, I'll expect you to have everything in one day, of course, right? The company grows, I'm sure, as demand comes in, but I think what you're doing is quite fascinating. How many users do you, I don't know if you can share that information, how many people are actually doing this right now? I signed up for ...
Sherry Zhang:
Yeah, thousands in a given period, month, weeks. Yeah, just lots of people using it. New people are talking, so lifetime as a shared is one of the largest database of personalized nutrition with genetics or close, we probably will reach hopefully 200,000 lifetime. And again, all these people are accumulating on our database, right? They, a lot of it, by the way, we have probably one of the largest IRB-governed research, ongoing research cohort. When I was, I can share this, as a fun fact, when I was at the CW, which is very good research longitudinal study, at the end when I left there, we have a, we boast about it, it's very right to brag about it because it's accomplishment, we have over 2000 well-characterized metabolic patients, databases, and sets. Do you know how many we have today at GenoPalete?
Emmanuel Fombu:
Yeah, over 3000?
Sherry Zhang:
Over 65,000.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Wow.
Sherry Zhang:
65,000, that's the beauty and the power of direct-to-consumer, provide accessible research and infrastructure, but it's through the direct-consumer relationship. And all these people are, again, opt-in. We have a very sophisticated thought-out, safe, and easy go, easy on, easy cancel system to, IRB govern is the infrastructure we built over the years. These are not just all the customers. It's the whole proportion of customers say yes to, I want to be participating, volunteering in participating a research that potentially will be creating new knowledge for the greater good of the society. So it's, this seems like that is the reason I'm driving every day, right, to work or get up and be excited about our work.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I'm excited, extra motivated. I would love to actually place an order, and I'm your website and I'm going to get one of the kits, and I want to, actually, would love to, actually, do mine, and actually follow one of your programs actually share on the show. It was great having you, Sherry. Is it okay for you to first invite you again to another show to discuss my personal use case on what you do?
Sherry Zhang:
That will be my pleasure. Thank you.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I'll hold you to that. Thank you very much, Dr. Zhang, and welcome, and thanks for being part of the show and we'd love to have you back again.
Sherry Zhang:
Thank you, Manny.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you for listening to Bite the Orange. If you want to change healthcare with us, please contact us at info@EmmanuelFombu.com or you can visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com or BiteTheOrange.com. If you liked this episode and want more information about us, you can also visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com.
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About Sherry Zhang:
Dr. Sherry Zhang is a mother, a molecular geneticist, and the founder of GenoPalate. Sherry has a bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from Nankai University and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Marquette University. She received a Spirit of Marquette Award from her alma mater, a Milwaukee Business Journal 40 Under 40 Award, and was named a HealthTech Innovator of Wisconsin.
From the moment Sherry saw living creatures under the lens of a microscope, she has been in love with biology. She grew that passion and launched a startup that became GenoPalate. Today, Sherry is still excited to learn more about how life works and what the best fuel is for each of our bodies.
Things You’ll Learn:
A lot of health issues, like chronic diseases, are dietary related, and 95% of them can be reversible by adopting a healthy diet.
Epigenetics is the science that studies how changes in environmental patterns can impact a person’s genes.
GenoPalate is one of the largest databases in personalized nutrition, with deep genetic insights with over 65,000 well-characterized metabolic patients, databases, and sets.
There are about 34 million people who have adopted consumer genomics services like Ancestry and 23andMe around the world.
The insights produced with these genomics services can be interpreted by GenoPalate’s nutrigenomics technology to make nutrition and metabolism-related insights.
A registered dietitian has the highest level of credentials for providing nutritional services.
About 60% of American adults take vitamins as a routine.