TimeTeller puts our internal clocks at the center of personalized medicine

At-home health testing has been mired in overblown claims and outright fraud. But German startup TimeTeller, which has developed a saliva test kit to help anyone understand their circadian rhythm, is led by CEO Angela Relógio, who is the polar opposite of Theranos’ disgraced founder Elizabeth Holmes.

居家健康检测一直深陷于夸大的宣传和彻头彻尾的欺诈之中。然而，德国初创公司 TimeTeller 开发了一款唾液检测试剂盒，旨在帮助人们了解自己的昼夜节律。该公司由首席执行官安吉拉·雷洛吉奥（Angela Relógio）领导，她与 Theranos 声名狼藉的创始人伊丽莎白·霍姆斯（Elizabeth Holmes）截然不同。

Relógio is a physicist-engineer and molecular biologist who spent years researching oncology, circadian biology, and systems medicine in Germany before leaving academia to build TimeTeller. She is careful about what the test can and can’t do today.

雷洛吉奥是一位物理工程师兼分子生物学家，在离开学术界创立 TimeTeller 之前，她曾在德国从事肿瘤学、昼夜节律生物学和系统医学研究多年。她对该测试目前能做什么和不能做什么非常谨慎。

It would be easy to oversell: Relógio’s last name means “clock” in her native Portuguese, and TimeTeller has the potential to reduce side effects from cancer treatment and improve outcomes by timing treatment to each patient’s internal clock. That’s also why she’s careful to warn that TimeTeller itself operates on two timelines.

过度宣传很容易：雷洛吉奥的姓氏在她的母语葡萄牙语中意为“时钟”，而 TimeTeller 有潜力通过根据每位患者的生物钟安排治疗时间，来减少癌症治疗的副作用并改善疗效。这也是她谨慎提醒 TimeTeller 本身在两条时间线上运作的原因。

The long-term goal is to determine when cancer treatments will be better tolerated and most effective, and doing so much more granularly than just telling whether someone is a morning person or a night owl. But its direct-to-consumer kit won’t help patients figure that out on their own.

其长期目标是确定何时进行癌症治疗能获得更好的耐受性和疗效，且其精确度远超仅仅判断某人是“百灵鸟型”还是“猫头鹰型”作息。但其直接面向消费者的试剂盒无法帮助患者自行得出这些结论。

“That is something that we need to calculate for every single medicine; we do that in the context of clinical studies,” Relógio cautioned. According to Relógio, TimeTeller started accepting direct orders because of demand from longevity clinics, which focus on healthy aging and understand that individual data on a person’s circadian rhythm can be used to offer personalized advice on sleep, nutrition, light exposure, and physical activity.

“这是我们需要针对每一种药物进行计算的事情；我们是在临床研究的背景下进行这项工作的，”雷洛吉奥提醒道。据雷洛吉奥称，TimeTeller 开始接受直接订单是因为长寿诊所的需求，这些诊所专注于健康老龄化，并了解个人的昼夜节律数据可用于提供有关睡眠、营养、光照和体育活动的个性化建议。

TimeTeller could also apply to metabolic diseases (such as diabetes) and neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s), performance, and women’s health, but cancer is its core mission. It was while studying cancer that Relógio made the discovery that led her to leave academia.

TimeTeller 也可能适用于代谢疾病（如糖尿病）、神经退行性疾病（如阿尔茨海默病）、运动表现和女性健康领域，但癌症是其核心使命。正是在研究癌症时，雷洛吉奥做出的发现促使她离开了学术界。

She noticed that many cancer 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,” Relógio said.

她注意到许多癌症患者因为副作用而停止或开始治疗。“作为一名科学家，这简直让人无法直视，尤其是当我确信问题的一部分可能不仅在于我们给予什么治疗，还在于我们何时给予治疗时，”雷洛吉奥说。

This led her to develop the circadian rhythm test at the core of TimeTeller — which she knew had to become a company. “I personally funded our first patent because I strongly believed that this discovery should not remain in scientific publications,” she said.

这促使她开发了作为 TimeTeller 核心的昼夜节律测试——她知道这必须成为一家公司。“我亲自资助了我们的第一个专利，因为我坚信这一发现不应仅仅停留在科学出版物中，”她说。

The startup spun out of Berlin’s Charité university hospital but has since moved to Medical School Hamburg, which provided access to patients and funding. It also offered a fallback: backup employment for TimeTeller’s team of 10 if the company couldn’t pay them.

这家初创公司从柏林夏里特医学院（Charité）分拆出来，但后来搬到了汉堡医学院（Medical School Hamburg），后者提供了患者资源和资金支持。它还提供了一个后备方案：如果公司无法支付薪水，为 TimeTeller 的 10 人团队提供备用工作岗位。

That’s a safety net TimeTeller may not need. Having enlisted biochemist and market access specialist Benjamin Dose as a co-founder, the startup secured a partnership with Techniker Krankenkasse, one of Germany’s largest health insurance providers.

这是一个 TimeTeller 可能不需要的安全网。在聘请生物化学家兼市场准入专家本杰明·多斯（Benjamin Dose）担任联合创始人后，该初创公司与德国最大的健康保险提供商之一 Techniker Krankenkasse 达成了合作。

The partnership started out as a reimbursement deal in which the insurer pays back the cost of the test for a subset of cancer patients, and both sides are now ready to expand it to more of the insurer’s 12 million members, Relógio said. Despite her caveats about the direct-to-consumer test, TimeTeller has become a solution that cancer patients can actually access.

雷洛吉奥表示，这种合作最初是一项报销协议，保险公司为部分癌症患者支付测试费用，目前双方准备将其扩展到保险公司 1200 万会员中的更多人群。尽管她对直接面向消费者的测试持保留意见，但 TimeTeller 已成为癌症患者真正能够获得的一种解决方案。

Ahead of her appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt, where Relógio appeared onstage today in San Francisco as part of our storied Startup Battlefield competition, she made clear that the company has broader ambitions: a future in which asking “when” is central to precision medicine, because “almost every process in our body is timed.”

在出席 TechCrunch Disrupt 大会之前（雷洛吉奥今天在旧金山作为我们著名的 Startup Battlefield 竞赛的一部分登台亮相），她明确表示该公司有更宏大的抱负：一个将询问“何时”作为精准医疗核心的未来，因为“我们体内的几乎每一个过程都是有时间规律的。”