Video highlights

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• 01:01: How a DNA test works

  Avi Lasarow: Our DNA test is quite simple, it’s a painless experience. You do a simple mouth swab, you send that back to our office here in Johannesburg, and what we do is we put you on a digital health journey.

   

  Within approximately 10 days, you get a report form our laboratory. The report focuses on nutrition, what’s the best diet for your body for example – I’ll give you some practical examples in a second – and fitness – what’s the best way to exercise to get the best results. Sleep – what sort of person are you? Are you a morning person or a night person? Stress – are you a warrior or a strategist?

   

  So you get the DNA test, you also get a very comprehensive report, an online experience. We have a team of health coaches, all qualified dieticians as well as sports scientists.

• 01:53: The caffeine gene

  AL: So we believe that genetics is only part of the picture – approximately 30% is genetics and 70% is your lifestyle, so if we can use the genetics to nudge customers to change their lifestyle, that’s got to be a great thing.

   

  And these bits of information start to help you think differently about the way you engage with your own health. So to give an example, this morning I’ve already had two cups of coffee. It’s likely by the end of the day I would have had eight cups of coffee because I love coffee. I feel pretty ok from it.

   

  My wife on the other hand, she will have two cups of coffee and she will not touch another cup after 11am. And genetically, my wife is a slow metaboliser of caffeine, I’m a fast metaboliser of caffeine.

   

  So I now know, based on this caffeine gene, how fast I metabolise it, what to do with caffeine on a daily basis.

   

  Now I talk about caffeine but it applies to so many other areas – it applies to salt sensitivity, alcohol sensitivity, fat sensitivity, refined carbohydrate sensitivity, and knowing these bits and pieces of information helps me on a daily basis adjust my lifestyle.

   

• 03:05: What diet is right for me?

  AL: In terms of South Africans having different diet crazes and referencing for example the Banting diet which people were really following and paying a lot of attention to, and now, as I understand, the Ketogenic diet, DNA testing is quite different.

   

  And what do I mean by that? Nutrogenomic testing is a DNA test for the purpose of what diet you should be going on.  We actually use your DNA to tell you that. So let me give you a very practical example for DNA testing with Investec DNAfit Nutrogenomics vs the Ketogenic diet …

   

  So we did a study that’s due to be published… we looked at 200 individuals, in that cohort of individuals, half of them did a Ketogenic diet and the other half did a Investec DNAfit Nutrogenomic diet - so we again tell you what type of diet you should have so low carb, low fat, Mediterranean for example.

   

  Ketogenic dieting in this example clearly works, but over a long-term period the individuals that understood their DNA had better success. Why? Talking to my point earlier, if you understand your body’s genetic blueprint and you know that this is really personalised for you, it increases adherence for the long term.

   

   

• 04:27: What can my genes tell me about my fitness?

  AL: As a company we work with a number of Olympic athletes who are on our team. We have a shareholder Rio Ferdinand, a famous athlete himself, because what’s happening globally is an understanding clearly that from a fitness performance perspective, your genes can make a real difference if you understand how your body responds to exercise.

   

  We’re the first company in the world to do a genetic exercise intervention study. We took 100 people and we did a DNA test for all of them but no one was given their results till the end. 

   

  And in sports science principles what we did for measurement we did two tests – one which is a counter-movement jump, here you sort of jump up in the air and it measures essentially explosive power, and the other test was an Aero Bike 3 test which is an endurance test.

   

  So we measured everybody on those two well-established metrics and we put them on a 12-week programme, but what we did was half of the cohort were given a genetically matched programme, so if you were given a percentage of your power vs endurance, as we do in our report, we would guide your exercise accordingly.

   

  At the end of the intervention programme, we remeasured everybody again and we found that the individuals that were given the genetically guided direction had three times the performance benefit on those two metrics.

   

  That means if you exercise to the way your body is designed, in the way your genetics tell you to, you’re much more likely to get better results. 

• 06:01: The move towards precision medicine

  AL: Talking about the idea of preventative health and precision medicine, the world is fast moving from the concept of one drug for everybody to one drug per person, and that’s because we all respond differently to in this case medication.

   

  I obviously gave examples about caffeine, and I spoke about fitness and nutrition generally, but the same applies from a clinical context, in this case, we talk about something called pharmacogenomics, which is the way your body responds to different drugs.

   

  So Estonia, with a population of about 1.2 million people, in 2001 started creating a national DNA bio bank, that included their complete digital health record.

   

  So to contextualise that, if you were born in 2001, you’d get a DNA test, you obviously have a digital health record and now 18 years later, if I’m an Estonian and I go to a doctor, that doctor knows what my genetic response is to drugs, they understand my complete digital health lifestyle, my history and it starts to actually help that treatment become a lot more personalised.

• 07:08: Data privacy and ethics

  AL: The question always comes up about data, how do insurance companies use this data, are they going to exclude me, are they going to underwrite differently against me, where is it used? And categorically as a company, we don’t share personal information with insurance companies.

   

  Sure we do share anonymised cohort information, that’s important to do, but personal information is kept personal and it’s not shared with the insurer or in fact anyone.

   

  Sinenhlanhla Nzama: The results that we get from these Investec DNAfit tests has no bearing to insurance. There’s no positive or negative, it just tells you how your body responds to different things. So in terms of insurance and how we underwrite insurance currently, it really has no bearing.

   

  Very importantly for us then is that in the long term, if clients are living better lives, it will improve the life outcomes, which to us as insurers is what the biggest benefit is, so there is something in it for us as an insurer, but also as an industry, we believe that if we move towards more personalisation of this insurance to clients, it will lead to better outcomes for the industry as a whole.