Personalized Mobile Intervention to Reduce Exposure to Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) in Women of Child-Bearing Age and their Partners

Project Summary/AbstractExposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have been linked to chronic diseases and conditions including breast cancer, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and infertility. Timing of exposure, especially during pregnancy, may have a lifelong impact on the fetus, including neurodevelopmental problems and asthma. However, there have been no tools to allow those in the preconception, conception, and pregnancy stages to assess EDC exposures to ensure a healthy pregnancy and normal child development.Million Marker (MM) was born to fill this need. MM is a precision health company, built by a team of multidisciplinary scientists who are trained in environmental epidemiology, toxicology, analytical chemistry, biostatistics, data engineering, and business. Our missions are to crowdsource and scale the biomonitoring of environmental chemicals and provide actionable results to consumers in a timely manner in order to empower individuals to proactively assess, track, and reduce their harmful environmental exposures. Starting with a few biomarkers of common EDCs, our ultimate vision is to discover all possible (“a million”) biomarkers of harmful exposures to inform and improve individual health outcomes and advance precision medicine.Less than a year after it was founded, Million Marker developed and sold our first product–a mail-in urine test for BPA and phthalates–and successfully helped users reduce their exposures through personalized intervention plans. Customers are able to order a test kit online, receive the test kit via mail, take a comprehensive exposure survey (via the Million Marker app), send back their samples via mail, view their personalized reports with tailored product recommendations through a secure online portal, make lifestyle changes to reduce their exposures, and retest to monitor their progress. Our initial target audience are individuals of reproductive age, due to the vulnerability pregnancy and preconception to EDC exposures. However, it is unclear to what extent the MM platform educates, motivates, and ultimately reduces EDC exposure in individuals in this age range.Therefore, the aims of the current proposal are to 1) test and validate a this first-of-its-kind mobile EDC reduction program in a prospective longitudinal cohort intervention trial; 2) assess changes in participants’ environmental health literacy, attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors after using MM’s products and services; and 3) evaluate the MM app and platform usability to improve the user experience. Validating this population with our program is a step towards these types of future studies. At the conclusion of the project, we will be well-positioned to begin Phase II and will scale the EDCs testing and personalized intervention plan to fertility clinics and the general public.