Zoe is a Boston and London-based company which builds software for tracking individuals' nutrition response patterns, as well as a mobile application for tracking COVID-19 symptoms.
Nutrition response tracking
Zoe working with scientists and thousands of volunteers – combining large-scale data and machine learning to predict personal nutritional responses to any meal. The company says it is working with some of the world’s leading scientists from academic centers including Harvard, Lund (Sweden), Massachusetts General Hospital, Oxford (UK), King’s College London (UK), Tufts and Stanford.
The company uses blood tests and stick-on glucose monitors (originally developed for people with diabetes) to see how the levels of chemicals such as fat, insulin and sugar change in each person’s bloodstream after eating a set of identical standardized foods and their own regular meals. We also gather data on activity, sleep, hunger and gut bacteria (microbiome).
The company intends to use this data to build machine learning models to figure out what’s going on when people eat specific foods and predict with high accuracy how they’ll respond to any meal.
COVID-19 Response
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoe developed and launched a COVID symptom tracker, which was created by doctors and scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, King's College London and Stanford University School of Medicine.
Zoe publishes COVID-19 symptom data for the United Kingdom on its website.The company announced on March 28, 2020 that it had gathered data from over 1 million volunteer contributors.
Timeline
People
Ana Valdes, PhD
Associate Professor, Medicine and Health Sciences University of Nottingham, UK
Andrew T. Chan, MD MPH
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School & Chief of Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA
Christopher Gardner, PhD
Rehnborg Farquhar Professor of Medicine, Stanford University, USA
Curtis Huttenhower, PhD
Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, USA
Jose Ordovas, PhD
Director, Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory, USDA-HNRCA at Tufts University, USA
Leanne Hodson, PhD
Professor of Metabolic Physiology, University of Oxford, UK
Linda M Delahanty, MS RDN
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School, USA
Mark McCarthy, PhD
Professor of Diabetes, University of Oxford, UK
Nicola Segata, PhD
Associate Professor of Computational Metagenomics, University of Trento, Italy
Paul Franks, PhD
Professor of Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology, Lund University, Sweden
Sarah Berry, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Nutritional Sciences, King’s College London, UK
Tim Spector, MD FRCP FRSB
Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, King’s College London, UK
Further reading
Overview of The ZOE Scientific Project For Researchers & Clinicians
Whitepaper
Personal metabolic responses to food predicted using
multi-omics machine learning in 1,010 twins and
singletons: The PREDICT I Study
Dr. Sarah Berry
Presentation
Postprandial lipemia and CVD Does the magnitude, peak concentration or duration impact intermediary cardiometabolic risk factors differentially?
Dr. Sarah Berry
Presentation
Predicting personal metabolic responses to food
using multi-omics machine learning in over 1000
twins and singletons from the UK and US:
The PREDICT 1 Study
Tim Spector
Presentation
