The Journey of Macromo Sample
What does it take to build a company that does at-home testing? Well, way more than building just a mobile app. Coming from a software background I was humbled by all of the complexities of logistics and things like wet lab and dry lab.
I often say that building Macromo is like building 3 companies at once. We are not only building the mobile app you see but also the deep tech that analyses your data, as well as the whole logistics around creating the kits and measuring the values.
In this newsletter, I would like to show you the journey that one Macromo sample needs to take. It’s quite similar for blood and DNA tests, with minor differences here and there.
Everything begins with the Kit - watch the video about how we designed it. However, the kit is made of a few different parts. We keep all of them in stock and assemble the kits around once a week. These parts are sourced from different suppliers - for example, the sampling kit for DNA is from a company called iSohelix. When we assemble the kit we give it a barcode with Sample ID and register it in our system. From now on we know who is going to sell this kit (distributor), what is the kit type (specific kit type), and a lot of other useful information.
When a customer orders the sampling kit through our Shopify website we fulfil their order. When doing this we mark that specific kit as sent to the customer, which makes the kit active and our users can register it. Once the kit arrives, people collect their sample and register the kit in our mobile application. The application right now functions as a way to deliver the results, but we have bigger plans for it.
Once the sample is collected it needs to be shipped to the lab. During this process, we create a request for our partner laboratory to tell them what they should measure. We outsource the wet lab to certified laboratories located in the EU. And let me tell you, closing partnerships like this takes time!
The laboratory then sends us raw data for analysis a couple of weeks later. Since most of the laboratories are older institutions, you are dealing with the challenges of connecting old and new systems here. Once we receive the raw data, it is run through our Macromo Engine. It’s a set of highly optimised bioinformatic pipelines, that interpret everything. Here we had to do scientific research and make them production-ready, optimizing the run time and costs. One thing is running a couple of samples locally, and the other is running of them hundreds in the cloud.
When the processing is ready, we attach the results to a specific user. We are striving to deliver the best possible user experience and content. We spend a lot of time designing the right data visualization as well as writing informative articles. We are transparent and we always publish and quote the research we are using for our content.
And things are not ending here. The next important challenge for us to tackle is how can people actively work with their results over time. I’ll let you know about my progress in designing this solution next time!
Thank you for reading,
Eva