MIGUEL TORIBIO-MATEAS
Atlas Biomed UK/Europe

Most entrepreneurial ventures in direct-to-consumer (D2C) healthcare and health technology (health tech) are driven by an opportunity to change consumer behaviour, aiming to introduce alternative business models that disrupt pre-existing market practices and offer creative, future-oriented products and services aimed at overcoming market constraints (1). Performance of health tech firms depends on their ability to serve the needs of their customers in often volatile market ecosystems characterised by rapid shifts in customer preferences. In the consumer genomics health tech space – and particularly in the gut microbiome space – a huge amount of knowledge is shared every week. Some of it is formal, e.g. such as the content of peer-reviewed studies, increasingly disseminated through open access publishing models and bibliographic databases like PubMed Central. However, most of the information that’s shared in 2021 is delivered unfiltered, i.e. without the scrutiny of peer review. Think about the hundreds of microbiome blogs, videos and podcasts that populate websites and social media platforms daily.

The advantage of having such agile distributi ...