After more than a decade spent connecting data, telehealth and digital tools, to help food and health-tech players make the right R&D decisions, Qina’s founder Mariette Abrahams aims to bring data intelligence to more businesses and personalized support to more consumers.
“We’ve been watching the industry for years and the problems that companies run into are still the same – lack of real-world and long-term data, cost to the consumer, lack of support, and low adherence, with most people using these platforms for less than six months."
She added: “The other problem is the data collected from users isn’t utilized effectively to deliver the right innovations.”
She argued the rise of GLP-1 meds has created a huge opportunity to innovate in the personalized nutrition arena as it has created an audience of consumers actively searching for long term health and nutrition support.
“GLP-1 drugs have created a huge population of people who aren’t sick but are actively working to improve their healthspan through pharmaceuticals, nutrition and lifestyle changes, and its impacting the entire food and drink market.”
Abrahams predicted the most interesting and useful insights when it comes to innovating for this audience, will come from real-world and long-term data i.e., when people eat, how they choose between brands, why certain people respond better to intervention, and what behavioural techniques encourage long-term engagement.
“I think, in the GLP-1 space, these insights will be particularly important for when people are reducing and coming off their medication to ensure products support them to maintain their behaviour changes. Currently, we have very little data, actually no data, on how to support this.”
Qina’s new service therefore aims to link companies with consumers on their GLP-1 journey, either as study participants or paying customers.
The platform will gather essential consumer insights through analysis of their data and their anonymized data will then contribute to real‑world evidence to help companies improve products, design better interventions, and validate health outcomes.
The Ecosystem will provide three levels of service.
The first level allows companies (nutrition apps, telehealth services, personalized nutrition programs etc.) to pay to view aggregated insights from Qina’s own funded projects and businesses that have signed up to the Ecosystem. GLP-1 clients pay a small monthly fee to access the digital service and experts, and companies get access to generic aggregated, consented and longitudinal data. The program is designed to last 12 months, but users will be able to continue after this period if they fund it themselves.
Companies accessing the second level of service can pay a licensing fee for more specific segmented data and insights.
And level three is for companies who wish to contract Qina to conduct real-world bespoke research projects, a service for which Qina has partnered a CRO.
“A firm might have an ingredient for satiety and they want to understand how that ingredient works within GLP-1 users,” Abrahams explained. “They can pay for bespoke research, we will recruit GLP-1 users, we’ll conduct the study, participants will have dietitian support and nutrition support at costs heavily subsidised thanks to the financial backing of the firm paying for the research.”
The study might run for 12 weeks but the participants can continue to use the services, in which case Qina can continue to collect the longer-term data.
“Combining this data we will be able to say GLP-1 users, after five months on the medication eat like this, they behave like this, they sleep like this, they shop here, and they respond in this way,” she said.
“This will allow companies to understand what works for whom, and why. They can then create better products that actually work for the consumer.”
