The patient sits in a clinic chair, holding the same test results three different doctors have already reviewed. All of them said the same thing: nothing is wrong. But everything feels wrong. The fatigue won’t lift. The inflammation won’t quiet. The brain fog hasn’t cleared in eighteen months.
The usual suspect list has been checked. Thyroid: normal. Blood sugar: normal. Cholesterol: normal. Vitamin levels: normal. Nothing shows up on the standard panels because the standard panels are asking the wrong questions.
What if the body is screaming in a language medicine has never learned to hear?
What if the data that matters most isn’t being measured at all?
Meet Momo Vuyisich
Momo Vuyisich is a microbiologist and biochemist who decided that the future of medicine should not depend on waiting for disease to announce itself. He is the co-founder, Chief Science Officer, and Head of Clinical Research at Viome Life Sciences, a company built on a radical premise: that we can read the body’s real-time biology before it breaks.
Over the past nine years, he has enrolled 16,000 people in clinical research programs. He has built a data lake of over one million samples from more than 90 countries. And he has become obsessed with a single question that most of medicine ignores: what if we stopped looking at what could happen and started looking at what is actually happening right now?
The Twelve-Year Apprenticeship
Momo’s path to Viome was not a straight line. It was a twelve-year education in how to think like both a scientist and a builder.
He spent those years at Los Alamos National Laboratory as an intrapreneur-scientist, leading the Applied Genomics team. His work was rigorous and consequential. His team developed genomics applications for gut microbiomes, host-pathogen interactions, cancer biology, antibiotic resistance, and forensics. They set up genome centers in Africa and Asia. They trained scientists from scratch. They published. They built infrastructure that still stands.
But something was missing. The work was brilliant. The impact was local.
By his tenth year at Los Alamos, Momo had already begun the invisible work of becoming an entrepreneur. He was reading thousands of online resources, attending meetings, teaching himself the language of commercialization. He was learning that a great discovery in a lab is only half the story. The other half is getting it into the hands of the people who need it.
The turning point was recognizing a specific moment: when technology stops being theoretical and becomes real. He calls this timing. It is perhaps the most underrated skill in science. Most researchers never learn to recognize it. Momo taught himself to feel it.
In 2016, he felt it.
He left Los Alamos and co-founded Viome. Five months later, they had their first customer.
The Architecture of Real-Time Truth
Viome’s approach is fundamentally different from everything else in the biotech space, and Momo built it that way intentionally.
Traditional medicine tests DNA. DNA is the instruction manual. It tells you what could happen. It tells you what genetic predispositions you carry. But it tells you almost nothing about what is actually happening in your body right now.
Momo’s obsession is with RNA. RNA is the active conversation. It is gene expression in real time. It is the difference between having the recipe and knowing which dish is currently being cooked.
“DNA tells you what could happen. RNA shows what is happening right now,” he explains. “Traditional DNA-based testing looks at the sequence of human genes or relative amounts of microbes. But most genes are not active at any given moment, so DNA alone cannot tell you which biological processes are actually turned on or off.”
This distinction seems technical until you sit with its implications. Two people can carry the exact same microbial species. In one person, that microbe produces healthy compounds. In another, it fuels inflammation. DNA cannot distinguish between these states. RNA can.
Viome measures metatranscriptomics. At-home samples. Global shipping that keeps biology stable. Clinical-grade analysis in-house. Multiplexed immunoassays from finger pricks. A data science team that finds patterns in the noise.
The infrastructure is expensive to build. It takes years to validate. Most companies cut corners. Momo refuses to outsource anything critical. “A huge part of our success, both in terms of our products and clinical research, is self-reliance,” he says. “Outsourcing anything creates a risk.”
This is not philosophy. This is learned from watching what happens when science meets the real world and the real world demands precision.
The Personalization Heresy
The moment Momo speaks about personalized nutrition, something shifts in his voice. He is no longer describing a product. He is describing a philosophical break with medicine itself.
The industry still searches for universal truths. The perfect diet. The superfood. The one intervention that works for everyone.
Momo’s position is simple: that diet does not exist.
“If there was one diet that was healthiest for all humans, we would have identified it by now,” he says. “The fact is that each person and their microbiome may process and react to micronutrients differently, and the same micronutrient will be beneficial to some people, while harmful to others.”
This is why the literature is so contradictory. One study says eggs are healthy. Another says they cause inflammation. One says canola oil is fine. Another links it to disease. Both studies are correct. Both are wrong. They are measuring averages across populations that should never have been averaged in the first place.
The real insight is not about the food. It is about the person eating it.
Viome’s data science team has analyzed 60,000 meals against the biology of the people eating them. They have built algorithms that can predict, for a specific individual, which foods will reduce inflammation and which will increase it. Not statistically. Biologically. Specifically.
“Personalized diets based on each person’s biology identify the healthy and harmful micronutrients, and their specific amounts, for each person, then map those against the foods we buy at the store,” Momo explains.
The implication is radical. Medicine has been asking: what is good? Momo is asking: what is good for you? Those are not the same question. They have never been the same question.
The Vuyisich Playbook: Five Lessons
Read what is actually happening, not what could happen. Data tells you one of two things. Either it describes potential, or it describes reality. Choose reality. DNA is potential. RNA is reality. Build around what is actually occurring in the system you are trying to change.
Time the leap from research to commercialization with ruthless precision. The technology must be truly ready. The market must be truly ready. Jump too early and you will fail. Jump too late and someone else will have already solved it. Spend ten years learning to recognize the exact moment. That moment is everything.
Hire people who are self-motivated and give them the environment to be efficient. A team of hungry people in a well-designed system will outproduce a team of brilliant people in a broken one. Self-reliance is not about isolation. It is about refusing to outsource the parts that determine whether you succeed or fail.
Never confuse presence with function. Your competitors will count how many microbes are in the gut. Count which ones are active and what they are producing. Everyone can see the players on the field. The game is invisible.
Accept that one universal truth means everyone is getting worse care. The moment you stop believing in one-size-fits-all solutions, you stop believing in averages. You start asking: what does this specific person need right now? That question leads everywhere else.
The Language the Body Speaks
The patient in the clinic chair is still holding those test results. Everything normal. Nothing wrong.
But Momo knows something that most doctors do not. The body does not wait until you can see the disease to start talking about it. It starts talking years before. It speaks in RNA. It speaks in microbial function. It speaks in the composition of compounds in the blood and stool that traditional testing never bothers to measure.
Medicine has been waiting for the disease to show up on the standard panels. Momo is learning to read the whispers before they become screams.
That patient could have a Viome test. Her samples could be analyzed. Her RNA expression could be mapped. The functions that are active in her microbiome could be quantified. The compounds her body is producing could be measured. And instead of being told nothing is wrong, she could be told exactly what is wrong, and exactly which foods and interventions would matter for her specific biology.
She would finally have an answer in a language her body has been speaking all along.
Momo Vuyisich is the co-founder, Chief Science Officer, and Head of Clinical Research at Viome Life Sciences, based in Bellevue, Washington. His team conducts large-scale clinical research and develops personalized health applications using metatranscriptomic analysis and systems biology. To connect with Momo or learn more, visit linkedin.com/in/momovuyisich.
