TimeTeller Pitches Circadian Testing as a Timing Tool for Cancer Care

The long-term goal is to establish when cancer treatments are best tolerated and most effective, and to do so at a finer level than simply identifying someone as a morning person or a night owl. Relógio cautioned, however, that the direct-to-consumer kit will not let patients work that out on their own. Determining the right timing for a given medicine requires calculations carried out in the context of clinical studies, she said.

TimeTeller began accepting direct orders in response to demand from longevity clinics, which focus on healthy aging and use individual circadian data to offer personalized advice on sleep, nutrition, light exposure and physical activity, according to Relógio. Cancer remains the core mission. The company says the same approach could also apply to metabolic diseases such as diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, athletic performance and women's health.

Relógio is a physicist-engineer and molecular biologist who spent years researching oncology, circadian biology and systems medicine in Germany before leaving academia. She traces the company's origin to an observation from her cancer research: many patients stopped or started their treatment because of side effects. "As a scientist, that was just impossible to watch, particularly when I was convinced that part of the problem might not only be what treatment we give, but when we give it," she said. That conviction led her to develop the circadian rhythm test at TimeTeller's core and to conclude that it had to become a company. She personally funded the first patent, saying she strongly believed the discovery should not remain in scientific publications.

TimeTeller spun out of Berlin's Charité university hospital and has since moved to Medical School Hamburg, which provided access to patients and funding. It also offered a fallback: backup employment for the company's team of 10 if it could not pay them. Biochemist and market access specialist Benjamin Dose joined as a cofounder, and with him on board the startup secured a partnership with Techniker Krankenkasse, one of Germany's largest health insurance providers. The partnership began as a reimbursement deal under which the insurer pays back the cost of the test for a subset of cancer patients, and Relógio said both sides are now ready to expand it to more of the insurer's 12 million members.

TechCrunch reported that at-home health testing has been dogged by overblown claims and outright fraud, and that Relógio's public care about what her test can and cannot do today sets her apart from Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Even with those caveats, TimeTeller has become a product that cancer patients can actually access, while the company's ambitions extend further: a future in which asking "when" is central to precision medicine, because, as Relógio put it, "almost every process in our body is timed."