Weight loss company Noom is offering an at-home biomarker testing kit for its U.S. members, expanding its platform into diagnostics and metabolic health monitoring.
It marks an expansion of the company's proactive health program, which rolled out in December, offering microdose GLP-1 medications combined with at-home biomarker testing and insights.
The at-home blood collection and lab testing service enables members to establish baseline labs and track improvements in markers such as, HbA1C, ApoB, triglycerides and hs-CRP over time, according to the company. Testing gives users with insights into biological outcomes, such as blood sugar regulation, lipid profiles and inflammation markers. By using the kit, members can skip a lab visit and receive results within about a week, paired directly with access to medication and behavior change programs, according to executives.
Noom says it now provides a platform where members can test, act and track A1C improvement in a single, integrated experience.
The biomarker test kits cost $125.
Noom’s kit tests for 17 biomarkers—what the company calls "clinically significant biomarker-based insights," including cardiovascular (ApoB, Lp(a), LDL, HDL, Triglycerides), metabolic (HbA1c), hormone balance (Total T, Estradiol, LH, DHEA-S), inflammation (hs-CRP), and vitamin levels (Vitamin D, B12).
Lipoprotein(a), or Lp(a), is a genetic cardiovascular risk factor that both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association recommend every adult be tested for at least once. Despite this guidance, only 1 in 1,000 people have been tested.
The launch of the biomarker testing kit reflects Noom's ongoing shift to focus more broadly on preventive health, personalized healthcare and longevity, said Jeffrey Egler, M.D., Noom's chief medical officer, who joined the company about a year ago.
"It's been part of a transition of Noom in general from a wellness company to more of a medical and wellness company over the past few years," Egler told Fierce Healthcare. "I was specifically recruited to Noom as a strategist in terms of longevity, so part of our plan to move from weight and metabolic-based health to more of a healthy aging view, helping our audience with healthy aging and longevity in many domains, rather than just weight and metabolism."
He added, "Our mission is to help people live better, longer. We're thinking about how we can expand our horizons, so help people do that, starting with weight and metabolic health, and expanding beyond that into cardiovascular and cardiometabolic health."
The biomarker testing kit provides members with a better understanding of their baseline health and enables them to track how that baseline changes with meaningful behavior change activity and adherence to prescribed therapies like GLP-1s, according to executives.
"We wanted to provide people more ways of seeing how certain therapeutics or even their lifestyle interventions were affecting their health beyond scale success, so beyond losing weight and seeing that on the scale, by being able to provide them with other types of metrics across multiple domains to help them see that they can actually affect their health in meaningful ways beyond losing weight, or even if they're not losing weight at all," Egler said.
By "bringing the lab to the living room," as Noom refers to it, the company is also reducing barriers for individuals to get blood testing for proactive health screening.
"We work with a lot of hospital systems and insurance companies, and engagement is one of the biggest problems that they have. They know that they have populations that would benefit from their services, but they can't get these people to come in and even get the basic diagnostic testing that needs to be done. So rather than making people come to the healthcare facilities, we are in a revolution. We are now bringing healthcare to the people, so that means being able to serve them diagnostics where they live, sending them at-home diagnostic kits," Egler said.
Noom’s kit uses the Tasso+ blood collection device to collect blood samples in under 10 minutes. Users then mail in the blood sample and results are analyzed by a CLIA-CAP-certified lab. The results are then delivered to members within the Noom app within a week.
Noom's clinical team chose 17 biomarkers to provide a "holistic view across domains," according to the company.
"For me, this is really the tip of the iceberg, but we have to start somewhere," Egler said. "We don't want to overwhelm people with data. There are companies that are providing 150 blood tests, and I think that can be overwhelming for people that are starting to dip their toes into the water of wanting to learn more about their health."
According to research published in 2018, only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. Early data from Noom’s proactive health program found that individuals considered "healthy" can carry significant metabolic and cardiovascular risk factors. Data drawn from participants with a median BMI of 23.8, considered to be a healthy BMI, revealed that 70% had elevated LDL-C (low-density lipoprotein cholesterol), 43% had elevated ApoB levels (Apolipoprotein B) and 36% had suboptimal HbA1c (>5.5%), a marker of pre-diabetes risk.
Noom's biomarker testing can provide members with easy-to-understand insights into their metabolic health to have more informed conversations with their primary care doctors, Egler said.
"We are not trying to take the place of primary care providers, but we are trying to help consumers meet their primary care providers with better education and a more informed pathway to taking more aggressive action," he said. "I think this can be very helpful in helping empower and encouraging people to be in the driver's seat of their own health and well-being, and so they can have those more proactive conversations with their primary care providers."
“Most people know very little about their health until they become sick,” said Geoff Cook, CEO of Noom, in a statement. “Now with biomarker testing a tap away for every Noom member, we can make good on our promise: health you can see, well-being you can feel—and with the simple at-home biomarker test, our GLP-1 members can see for themselves the improvement in their blood sugar and other key benefits.”