At-home health testing has been mired in overblown claims and outright fraud. But German startup TimeTeller, which has developed a saliva test kit to help anyone understand their circadian rhythm, is led by CEO Angela Relógio, who is the polar opposite of Theranos’ disgraced founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Relógio is a physicist-engineer and molecular biologist who spent years researching oncology, circadian biology, and systems medicine in Germany before leaving academia to build TimeTeller. She is careful about what the test can and can’t do today.

It would be easy to oversell: Relógio’s last name means “clock” in her native Portuguese, and TimeTeller has the potential to reduce side effects from cancer treatment and improve outcomes by timing treatment to each patient’s internal clock. That’s also why she’s careful to warn that TimeTeller itself operates on two timelines.

The long-term goal is to determine when cancer treatments will be better tolerated and most effective, and doing so much more granularly than just telling whether someone is a morning person or a night owl. But its direct-to-consumer kit won’t help patients figure that out on their own. “That is something that we need to calculate for every single medicine; we do that in the context of clinical studies,” Relógio cautioned.

According to Relógio, TimeTeller started accepting direct orders because of demand from longevity clinics, which focus on healthy aging and understand that individual data on a person’s circadian rhythm can be used to offer personalized advice on sleep, nutrition, light exposure, and physical activity.

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