Bringing Truth, Transparency, and Trust to the Supplement Industry

In this Pharmacy Times interview, Leena Pradhan-Nabzdyk, PhD, MBA, CEO and co-founder of Canomiks, discusses how the company is leveraging genomics, bioinformatics, and preclinical research to bring greater transparency, scientific validation, and consumer trust to the dietary supplement industry. She explains how their new platform, WhatToTrust, helps consumers make informed purchasing decisions by evaluating the quality, safety, and efficacy of functional foods, beverages, and supplements at both the product and ingredient levels. By scoring products based on scientific evidence and providing accessible, educational resources, Canomiks aims to empower consumers, reward companies that invest in rigorous research, and raise industry standards for truth and accountability.

Pharmacy Times: Can you walk us through how WhatToTrust works and what makes it different from other verification or certification platforms?

Leena Pradhan-Nabzdyk, PhD, MBA: So, before I even talk about WhatToTrust—our company is called Canomiks. We actually work normally with other companies. Before we launched WhatToTrust, we worked, and we still work, with finished product companies or ingredient companies to help them validate the efficacy and safety of their ingredients or finished products.

What we do is use genomics and bioinformatics to see how a given product or ingredient affects human gene expression and thereby human health and wellness. Basically, we do preclinical-type research. When these companies want to do a clinical trial, it’s ethical to do preclinical research first, but you also understand the mechanisms of action and get a bigger picture of how those products work. That’s what we have been doing at Canomiks for many years.

We are also funded by the National Science Foundation to standardize the biological effects of botanical ingredients, so we can test biological effects in a batch-to-batch manner. This has never been done before. We are the first company to do this, and we call that technology Bio B2B.

While we were doing all of these things, our customers always asked us, “We ultimately have to sell the product and convince the consumer about all the science and all the money that we are spending. Yes, we can do marketing and all of that, but how do we really get the message across to the consumer?” That’s what sparked us to launch WhatToTrust.

WhatToTrust is again a Canomiks solution. This time, we are actually helping consumers make informed buying decisions. What we do at WhatToTrust is take a dietary supplement, functional food, or functional beverage product—it could be a multivitamin, a shake powder, a tea, or anything that has a functional effect—and evaluate what kind of science has been used in the development of that product.

Was there a preclinical trial done? Was there a clinical trial done? And not just at the product level, because a lot of these products have more than one ingredient. We also look at the individual ingredient level. Let’s say there are three or four different ingredients: ashwagandha, green tea, vitamin C, and magnesium. We will look at each one of those ingredients and check: Is this ingredient undergoing batch-to-batch testing for quality, safety, purity, and potency? Those are the tests required by the FDA.

Then, on top of that, we look at whether the ingredient has undergone any kind of efficacy trials—preclinical or clinical. And then, when you put all those ingredients together—because sometimes people think one ingredient is known to do A, another ingredient is known to do B, so when we mix them together, the result will be A plus B—a lot of times, we see it doesn’t happen that way. Sometimes we see one plus one equals negative two. Sometimes we see one plus one equals three.

We want to make sure that these ingredients and products have undergone research, and then we score them. We have an algorithm and give a score between 1 and 10, with 10 being the best score.

If you go to WhatToTrust.com, it’s free to sign up. All we ask is your name and your birth year and month, and that’s it. Then you can start looking for your favorite product and see how that product scored. You can compare products and compare them at the ingredient level.

We also have consumer-related educational information on the site. That is what excites me the most. Again, I’m a scientist—how can I convey or break down the science in simple terms? Our team, especially our marketing manager, Liz Beckman, has done a phenomenal job of converting the scientific jargon into simple language.

We really want to help consumers get the best products. We don’t get paid by these companies. The only time we get any money is if you buy a product through our website via Amazon—Amazon gives us that money. And if a company has done their preclinical work with us, we have an absolutely transparent site where we state, “Yes, this company underwent Canomiks’ preclinical testing.”

Other than that, we don’t get paid for a company to list their products. We want to be transparent. We want to bring truth, transparency, and trust to this industry. This is how we think we can educate the consumer and make sure that the most ethical companies—those that do all these science-based, expensive studies—also get rewarded.