What happens when the architect behind one of the world's largest consumer genomics platforms decides to build what comes next? In this episode of The DNA of Things, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Mike Polcari — former Chief Architect at 23andMe and now founder of Haplotype Labs — to talk about what the $100 genome actually unlocks, why genetics has been stuck in research labs for too long, and how a new infrastructure layer could finally bring polygenic risk scores into everyday clinical care.

If you've ever wondered why your DNA report sits in a PDF collecting digital dust instead of actively guiding your health decisions in real time, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Mike: https://www.haplotypelabs.com/contact

Key Takeaways

🧬 The genome is no longer expensive — interpretation is the bottleneck. Sequencing just crossed $100, but having data and knowing what to do with it are two very different things. Mike estimates we're still about five years from fully understanding an individual's germline genetics.

🔬 Polygenic risk scores make genomics useful for everyone. Most people won't carry a dramatic single variant. PRS aggregates thousands of small signals to give meaningful risk predictions for things like heart disease and cancer — making DNA actionable for the masses, not just edge cases.

🏗️ Haplo Hub eliminates the infrastructure tax. Building a genomics pipeline used to mean 18 months of engineering and millions spent before offering a single DNA insight. The Hub lets any lab or health brand go from raw data to validated risk scores via a clean API — no bioinformatics team required.

🤖 AI chatbots can't replace validated genomic models. Ask ChatGPT for a PRS score and it'll confidently give you a wrong answer. Mike's vision is your omics data living in a secure, continuously updated cloud that health AI platforms can actually query accurately.

📡 Your DNA should follow you — not stay locked with whoever sequenced you first. The personal omics cloud means your genome gets reinterpreted as science improves and integrates contextually into every health decision you make.

🌐 Telehealth legitimization opened the market. COVID forced mainstream adoption of telehealth, creating national-scale infrastructure for preventative health services — exactly the kind that can finally incorporate genomics into care at scale.

🔓 Open science needs a commercial on-ramp. Researchers publish better genomic models every month. Most never reach a clinic. Haplo Hub closes that 15-year translation gap.

LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Here's the link for this week's episode: https://drjeremykoenig.substack.com/.

In this episode, Dr. Jeremy Koenig talks with biotech leader Vijay Vaswani, co-founder and CEO of Omniscope, about how decoding the immune system at single-cell resolution is changing how we define true health and extend healthspan.

✨ Key takeaways

🧠 True age vs birthday age: Your “real” age is your immune age, and elite athletes and centenarians often have surprisingly youthful immune profiles.
🧬 From fuzzy maps to HD biology: High-resolution immune sequencing replaces low-resolution lab tests with a much more detailed view of how cells drive health and disease.
🏃‍♂️ Athletes as health models: Profiling the immune systems of pro athletes reveals what low-inflammation, high-performance biology looks like in practice.
🤖 Immune GPT & cellular avatars: Omniscope’s immune-focused AI and “cellular avatars” help design new drugs, personalize immunotherapies, and give people agency over their biology.
❤️ From sick care to healthspan: Longitudinal immune profiling (OS Lifetime) monitors immune age, inflammation, and resilience to shift medicine toward prevention and extended healthspan.

Episode Overview:

In this episode, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with biotech leader Vijay Vaswani, co-founder and CEO of Omniscope, to explore how decoding the immune system at single-cell resolution is reshaping our understanding of true health and aging. They dig into why your “real” age is your immune age, what we can learn from elite athletes and centenarians, and how high-resolution immune maps move us beyond traditional, low-resolution lab tests. The conversation also covers Omniscope’s immune-focused AI, “cellular avatars,” and longitudinal immune profiling platform, and how these tools could power earlier detection, personalized immunotherapies, and a shift from reactive sick care to proactive, healthspan-focused medicine.

LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Here's the link for this week's episode: https://drjeremykoenig.substack.com/.

In this episode of The DNA of Things, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Travis McDonough — serial entrepreneur and CEO of Wellnify AI — for one of the most honest conversations about the future of preventative health you'll hear. Travis spent decades inside professional sports, helping build Conduct Technologies into a human performance platform that supported 650+ pro sports organizations and 25 world championships before its 2020 acquisition. Then came the bigger question: what if everyone had access to those same tools? That became Wellnify AI — a platform fusing behavioral science and gamification to build healthy habits at the community level, not just the elite level.

They get into the childhood roots of it all — dyslexia as a competitive advantage, a father's belief as rocket fuel, and sport as the only thing that ever cleared the noise. Travis is refreshingly honest about the entrepreneurial toll: from laying off 25 people after Intel scrapped a chip overnight, to throwing his house keys on the boardroom table to keep his team employed. And then the pivot — bringing tools once reserved for LeBron and Brady to municipalities, school boards, and everyday people across North America, including a landmark partnership with the Healthier Texas Foundation reaching 3,200 organizations.

Takeaways:

🧠 Dyslexia, ADHD, and slow processing forced Travis to think differently — and that became his edge. Pattern recognition, creative problem-solving, and deep listening aren't soft skills, they're the whole game.

💡 The Pygmalion Effect is real — you rise or fall based on the expectations of the people around you. His father's belief in who he could become shaped everything.

🏥 We're living in a healthcare paradox — the most advanced medical technology in history, and we're still witnessing what Travis calls a "self-inflicted serial killing" of our own wellbeing through sedentary behavior, screen addiction, and outdated wellness education.

🏔️ Build fences at the top of the cliff, not more ambulances at the bottom — the trillion-dollar shift in healthcare is moving toward upstream prevention, and Wellnify AI is built entirely around that bet.

🎮 Gamification isn't just for entertainment — Wellnify AI redirects the same mechanics that keep people scrolling toward movement, mindfulness, learning, and community acts of kindness.

🤝 The most-used feature on the platform is the community section — rewarding users for volunteering, donating blood, picking up litter, and supporting local. People want to do good. They just need a structure that makes it stick.

📊 The Community Wellness Score could change how governments measure what actually matters — aggregating individual data into a community-level metric that reveals blind spots and drives smarter public health investment.

📱 Your attention is your life — Travis closes with a direct message to the 19–21 age group: the algorithm doesn't love you back. It's designed to capture, not to care. Knowing that is the first step.

LINKS:

https://www.drjeremykoenig.com/
https://www.instagram.com/drjeremykoenig/
https://www.youtube.com/@drjeremykoenig

Here's the link for this week's episode: https://drjeremykoenig.substack.com/.