Founder’s Spotlight: Robert Thong from Multiomic Health

1 in 3 adults suffer from metabolic dysfunction. Conditions like diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and heart failure are driving the health crisis on an international scale. MultiOmic Health is tackling this issue, but how?

By using advanced AI and multi-omics data, they are discovering new biomarkers and treatment targets for these complex conditions.

Our 5 biggest takeaways with Robert Thong, CEO of Multiomic Health:

1. What’s the issue with metabolic diseases?
For most patients, metabolic disease isn’t just about genetics – it’s caused by their lifestyle, old age, and environmental exposures since birth.
And there are hundreds if not thousands of different subdiseases for which multi-omics data is key to unraveling.
The challenge? Current medicine for metabolic diseases adopts a one size fits all approach for symptom control.

2. How is MultiOmic solving this?
MultiOmic is using custom assembled rich datasets generated from real world patient medical records and biosamples.
By analyzing patients’ conditions over time and grouping them by similar disease trajectories, they are actively discovering drug targets and new treatments with precision and edge.

3. How’s it going so far?
Many doubted the return-on-investment of building real-world patient datasets, saying it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
But nearly $7 million in platform building, data investment, persistence, and flexibility proved otherwise, yielding phenomenal results at the core of the success of their research.

4. What drives Robert’s passion?
Robert’s motivation comes from personal experience: his aunt’s struggle with dialysis, seeing a diabetic friend losing her eyesight despite 10+ years of dysglycemia treatment and his mother-in-law survive cancer with modern precision medicine
“This all motivated me to come out of retirement to do something in cardiometabolic disease,” said Thong

5. Lessons learned as a founder
“Many investors’ decisions are swayed by the current hot topics,” said Robert, “but you have to start building your platform and assembling the corresponding data before it becomes fashionable, so you need investors who can appreciate your foresight”
For him, flexibility and not feeling constrained by earlier plans was key to success – “Initially we wanted to look at post cardiac event patients to find treatments for preventing recurrence, but we ended up proving our case in diabetic nephropathy.”