Biology is never simple. As researchers make strides in reading and editing genes to treat disease, for instance, a growing body of evidence suggests that the proteins and metabolites surrounding those genes can’t be ignored.

The MIT spinout ReviveMed has created a platform for measuring metabolites — products of metabolism like lipids, cholesterol, sugar, and carbs — at scale. The company is using those measurements to uncover why some patients respond to treatments when others don’t and to better understand the drivers of disease.

“Historically, we’ve been able to measure a few hundred metabolites with high accuracy, but that’s a fraction of the metabolites that exist in our bodies,” says ReviveMed CEO Leila Pirhaji PhD ’16, who founded the company with Professor Ernest Fraenkel. “There’s a massive gap between what we’re accurately measuring and what exists in our body, and that’s what we want to tackle. We want to tap into the powerful insights from underutilized metabolite data.”