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- [Olaf] I'm Olaf Schneider, the CEO and founder of Cerascreen.
I founded Cerascreen in 2012 as a spin-out of a biotech company that is located
in the north of Germany.
And there, we had access to a unique technology for measuring energies.
With Cerascreen, we try to help people to manage the health and to stay healthy,
and therefore, we provide diagnostic test kits.
Our customers are mainly people who want to manage their health actively,
proactively, and who are very keen in prevention.
And yeah, we provide them with tools to assess the health, vitamins,
hormonal status, and then find measures to even optimize the health.
In the beginning, we focused on developing and extending our portfolio,
and then we started growing into other countries, especially
in the European region.
And last year, we started looking into genetics and epigenetics.
And that was the beginning of our cooperation with Fraunhofer.
Together with Illumina and Fraunhofer, which is a research organization
in Germany, we developed a very unique epigenetic test kit,
where we can measure genetic age.
- [Dr. Gul] My name is Sheraz Gul.
I work for the Fraunhofer Institute.
The Fraunhofer Institute is Europe's largest applied research organization.
I work within the Life Science division, which employs roughly 600 people.
And we're involved in research around this 4D concept which is drugs, data,
devices, and diagnostics.
We've been working with Cerascreen for the past few years in terms
of developing the product.
Our role specifically was to develop the algorithm, which is used to analyze
the CpG markers.
So donors provide saliva samples or swap.
There's a laboratory in Kiel which has the Illumina platform which analyzes the
various saliva samples in terms of the DNA extraction, and then measuring
the CpG profiles.
That data is then given to the Fraunhofer, and then we apply our algorithm,
which has been refined over the past few months.
And then that algorithm can be used to closely predict the genetic age
of an individual and we can correlate that with the actual biological age.
- The Genetic Age Test is a very good starting point for analyzing health,
because it takes a broader look at your health, and then you can use other
test kits, for example, Vitamin D or other vitamins stages to go
more into the details of your health, and then you will find out more about the
measures that you can take to improve your health.
- When we were developing the genetic age test with Cerascreen,
we looked closed at the Illumina EPIC array platform.
And what we wanted to do was to develop a proprietary algorithm which is different
from what's already available in the public domain.
The Genetic Age Test that we developed would not have been possible without input
from the Illumina EPIC array.
The fact that this product allows us to cover a very large CpG profile is the main
aspect of why the algorithm that we developed is good and reliable.
- Our experience working with Illumina was really great and inspiring.
They really helped us develop a new test kit and gave us access to their
knowledge base, and then we could use it and match it with our needs and our
customer needs to create this very unique product.
What I really appreciated working with Illumina was that they really respected us
even so we're only a startup, so we are seven years old now, but still,
it was really interesting to see how serious they are in that area and how
willing they are to help even startups to develop amazing or new technology.
Consumer genomics is growing field of testing from my point of view.
Yeah, I think we're only getting started in that area.
It gives us an indication of how well we are adapted to our surroundings.
And I think in the future, we will be able to analyze much more
of the data and get even better results and even better recommendations.
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