The Observer.

Hello, I'm Alexi Mostris, and you're listening to the slow newscast from The Observer.

This week, the world of designer babies and cutting-edge genetics.

I hope you enjoy the show.

People take disease as a matter of fact. People die. But why? Why do people have to die?

Kian Sadegh is sitting in front of a typically millennial backdrop of exposed brick and generic artwork as he shares the origin story of his company. It's just never kind of intuitively made sense to me. And so with that, I actually started, I began my quote-unquote career in Jags. Except he's not even a millennial. You know, Nuclease at this point I've been working on for five years. But I like to say that, you know, in my small lifetime, I'm only 25 years old. It's in a way, it's kind of 20 years in the making, in a way. Talking to the Lubo Schmidt podcast, Kian Sadeghie is keen to share his own origin story too. Just understand something more about me. I'm a first-generation American. Both my parents are actually Persian. So they escaped Iran during the revolution. The government of Iran actually tried to murder my dad, literally.

So he had to escape. He eventually ended up in Canada, then America, and he sort of has the classic immigrant story where he's flipping hamburgers and McDonald's eventually becomes an ophthalmologist or eye doctor.

He's the embodiment of the American dream.

And so the backdrop of my life is sort of the determination of immigrants

with the opportunity of America.

The son of immigrants, a boy wonder who, with pluck and ingenuity,

is building a name and a business for himself among the Silicon Valley giants.

But Kean Sadegh's company, it's not just about business. It's personal, too.

Unfortunately, the story of Nuclis begins with a personal tragedy. My cousin actually,

she went to sleep one day and she didn't wake up the next day. She died in her sleep.

She had a, you know, yeah, thank you. She had a condition that can cause a heartbeat sudden death. And so she passed away. We actually didn't know she had this. I mean, it was a complete sudden death. And doctors attributed to a condition actually called Long QT. And Long QT is interesting because it's a condition that if you know you have the genetic marker, you can actually take something called a beta blocker, which is a drug that reduces your wrist 10 x of time. And so, from tragedy, an idea is born. That's kind of the power, a great example of some of the power of a genetic test. But if you don't know, obviously then you can't prevent the condition. There's no other phenotypic signal that would make you know.

And so I asked my parents in the time, I was very young, I said, how does this happen? How does this happen? They said, oh, bad genoenix, badgenex. I kind of identified that you can basically provide this kind of the, you can combine over 70,000 genetic tests into one, one swab, one test, over 1,000 different conditions. you can provide the most comprehensive assessment of some of genetic risk for disease that's ever been available.

It's pretty competitive. one, one swab, one test over a thousand different conditions, you can provide the most comprehensive assessment of some of genetic risk for disease that's ever been available.

It's pretty compelling stuff. If people knew about the bad genetics they had,

they could take steps to prevent the diseases they were at risk of. Knowledge is power, after all,

and that knowledge might have even saved his cousin. In his early 20s,

Kian Sadeghi had come up with a way to test and sequence a huge swath of an individual's genes.

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