Solving the "What Next" Problem in Health Diagnostics

Vero co-founder and CEO Paul Coletta sat down with Scott Nelson Live to talk about a gap he sees across most health-diagnostics companies: they hand people a number and leave them stranded, with no path to act on it.

A kidney that standard labs missed

Coletta's own path to Vero started with an early version of the test he'd go on to commercialize. It flagged accelerated aging in his kidney — even though his traditional bloodwork looked completely normal. A follow-up ultrasound found a renal cyst. Benign, but a real sign of aging his standard panel had missed entirely.

Closing the loop, not just flagging risk

That gap is what Coletta calls the "what next" problem, and it's the premise behind Vero Compass: pairing an organ-level finding with a targeted, evidence-informed intervention, then remeasuring to confirm whether it actually worked.

"It's what's going to be sort of game-changing about what we're bringing to market." — Paul Coletta

From Stanford research to clinical validation

OrganAge reads roughly 11,000 of the body's ~25,000 gene-coding proteins from a single blood draw, trained on a 45,000-person UK Biobank cohort followed for 17 years. The underlying science is already published in Nature as a validated surrogate biomarker — a distinct bar, Coletta notes, from full clinical validation, which Vero is now pursuing through IRB studies with clinical partners including Biograph, correlating its results against benchmarks like VO2 max and brain imaging.

Vero is targeting a fall 2027 direct-to-consumer launch, with several thousand people already on its waitlist.

Listen to the full conversation on Scott Nelson Live, including Coletta's take on building a founding team, why "capital follows trust" when fundraising, and what he looks for in a board member.