Venture Vanguard:
Kian Sadeghi
Founder/CEO, Nucleus
The founder and CEO of Nucleus shares how a personal loss inspired him to build a platform that helps parents reduce the risk of hereditary disease for the next generation.
Every parent wants the best for their children. So why not the best genetic insights? But while advances in genetic testing now make it possible to reduce the risk of passing on hereditary disease, few parents have the tools, knowledge, or guidance to use this data when planning their families.
As founder and CEO of Nucleus, Kian Sadeghi is working to change that. By offering genetic testing and insights for parents undergoing IVF or conceiving naturally, Nucleus helps parents understand their genetic information, surface their future children’s DNA data, and identify their risk for passing on genetic conditions that can lead to fatal diseases.
Sadeghi spoke with Riviera Partners about his personal journey into genetics, the challenges of bringing preventative genetic screenings to the mainstream, and why he believes every person will one day carry their genome on their phone. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What is the idea behind Nucleus?
Nucleus is the generational health company. Our mission is to help parents have healthy children that live longer. We do that through genetic technology that can reduce the risk of disease in future children, or help select embryos for traits like IQ, eye color, or height.
Our primary focus is on genetic testing for parents either undergoing IVF or conceiving the natural way to help them make sure they don’t pass on a hereditary disease to their child. We analyze both parental genetics, as well as embryonic DNA for couples undergoing IVF. In the case of IVF, for example, we might analyze the DNA of up to 20 embryos at a time to provide insights on everything happening in the ‘genetic stack,’ from schizophrenia to cancers to heart disease. Parents can see all of the data laid out in front of them, determine what’s important to them, and then use that information to select which embryo(s) they would like to implant first.
This brings data and parental choice to the very first moment of family planning. Parents will spend years investing in their kids’ education, nutrition, sports, and opportunities. Genetics is just another tool in the toolkit to help give your child the best possible start in life.
What inspired you to start Nucleus?
My interest in genetics goes back to when I was almost seven, when my cousin unfortunately passed away in her sleep from a rare condition that causes irregular heartbeat and sudden death. When I asked my dad how it happened, he told me it was “bad genetics.” I didn’t understand what that meant at the time, but eventually I realized disease isn’t always some unavoidable property of being human, but the data of our DNA has always existed and can be viewed as a problem to be solved.
Later on, I joined one of the first DIY genetics labs in the country, where we engineered yeast and bacteria. I started thinking about how you could combine the beauty and depth of biology with the iterability of programming, so I went to UPenn to study computational biology.
When I saw how fast the cost of genome sequencing was dropping, from a billion dollars to about $1,000 in two decades, I thought, oh, this is crazy. Obviously, the price is going to converge on zero. Obviously, there’s going to be a rapid proliferation of this data. Someone needed to build the software to prevent what happened to my cousin from happening to anyone else. Why don’t I just do it?
I dropped out of Penn, moved back to Brooklyn, and spent a year teaching myself genetics, filling 18 notebooks with material. I had to lie to my parents and tell them I was actually working in a lab. Thinking about it as a company, I kept coming back to this idea that preventative medicine really starts at life’s inception, at the embryonic level, which is what led to the founding of Nucleus.
That sounds like a long year. Did you ever doubt yourself?
Almost 100% of hospitals we talk to respond to these risks the same way: they create committees, which is very hospital thinking, right?
They all recognize this is a new surface area of risks. However, they haven’t been able to increase their capacity to evaluate these tools in an efficient and consistent way. As a result, most of these AI committees are taking 12 to 18 months to evaluate a single tool. There’s no consensus framework yet like we have in information security, no equivalent of SOC 2 or HITRUST for AI, so every hospital is building its own process from scratch. The industry is moving towards a consensus, but we’re still a long way off.
Are there any misconceptions about healthcare AI that you keep seeing?
Absolutely. People underestimate how much you get pushed to the brink in a situation like that. You’re out of school, alone in your room, no mentors, your parents have no idea what you’re doing, it’s COVID, you’re just by yourself every day making your own curriculum.
It’s like being in a cave with a little flashlight, and you just have to have faith that eventually you’ll find something interesting. You can see in my notebooks, I would write “Just keep going” over and over.
And once you did that, you still had to come up with the idea for the business.
Right, you have to balance investigative depth and diving deep into scientific literature with the enterprise side of actually getting out into the world and finding a commercial demand for a product. Those are usually opposite skill sets. You can make cool products from great science, but that doesn’t automatically make a business. Navigating that paradox is critical.
Think of it like an intellectual journey where you’re flying over a forest. As you come lower, you start to see small clearings where you can plant your own seeds. The founder’s job is to take an advancement from the lab and productize it in one of those clearings.
Given your personal inspiration for pursuing genetics, how does that influence your decisions as a founder?
There are moments when I see a patient’s test come back with a genetic marker for long QT, the condition that killed my cousin, and I think to myself that maybe we just saved that person’s life. It’s deeply emotional in that way, and I feel as if I’m putting good karma into the world.
Where do you see genetic testing headed in the next five years?
I think it will be ubiquitous. You’ll have your genome in your pocket, on your smartphone. Every couple in the world will use genetics to understand their DNA and have healthy children.
We could see hereditary diseases become a thing of the past. There’s no reason, if we test and act, that debilitating conditions like cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s should keep showing up in new generations.
What’s standing in the way?
It’s not the science. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends genetic screening for every couple looking to conceive. That’s as strong an endorsement as you can get from the medical establishment. Yet very few couples actually do a screening before they have children.
Another example is BRCA, the breast cancer genetic marker. Angelina Jolie famously tested positive for it in 2010. It’s established medicine. And yet many preconception panels don’t even test for it. Why? Often because of old assumptions or outdated cost concerns that no longer apply. So if anything, it’s a communications and marketing challenge.
What’s standing in the way?
Know what you’re a carrier for. If both parents are carriers for the same genetic marker, there’s a 25% chance their child will have the condition. It’s so simple to check. A cheek swab, a one-time test, and you’ll have that information forever. The saddest thing I see is when parents come to us when their child is born with some really bad condition that could have been avoided.
About Riviera Partners
Riviera Partners is a global executive search firm specializing in technology, product, and design leadership. With over two decades of experience and a proprietary platform that combines deep recruiting expertise with data-driven insights, Riviera is the go-to talent partner for venture capital, private equity, and public companies.