Health-testing company pairs its member data with NYU Grossman’s clinical expertise to try to catch diseases before symptoms ever show up.
Most of medicine still works the same way it did a century ago: something goes wrong, a person notices and only then does the system spring into action. Function Health thinks that order of operations is backward, and on 12 August, it announced a research partnership with New York University (NYU) Grossman School of Medicine built around flipping it [1].
The Austin-based company, which sells subscription access to lab testing and imaging, is pairing up with one of the country’s most established academic medical centers to hunt for what its own leadership calls “the earliest whispers of disease.” The goal is an entirely new way of watching the body over time, using data collected from healthy people long before anything appears wrong.
Two different views of the same problem
The logic behind the partnership comes down to what each side brings to the table. NYU Grossman has decades of clinical data on how diseases actually unfold once people show up sick and get treated. Function has something rarer: a large, ongoing stream of health data from people who are still well, tracked through repeated lab work and imaging over months and years. Put those two datasets together, and researchers get something neither organization could build alone, a fuller picture of the entire arc of a disease, from the moment it first takes root to the moment it becomes undeniable.
“The history of medicine is a chronicle of remarkable advances in technology, but for too long we have used our best tools last,” said Dr Daniel Sodickson, Function’s chief medical scientist and former chief of innovation in radiology at NYU Langone Health. “This partnership flips that script. By pairing Function’s multifaceted view of health as it unfolds with NYU Grossman’s world-class understanding of disease and its treatment, we can build medical intelligence that sees around corners, warning of cancer before it announces itself, flagging changes in the brain before memory begins to fail, and predicting future heart problems while there is still time to act.”
Three specific targets, not a vague promise
The partnership is aimed squarely at three areas where early warning would change outcomes the most: cancer, cognitive decline and cardiometabolic risk – meaning the slow buildup toward heart disease and diabetes. Each of these tends to develop silently for years before a diagnosis lands, which is exactly why they’re the hardest conditions to catch early using today’s standard checkup model.
The idea is to build AI models trained on both datasets that can spot subtle patterns – a slight shift in a blood marker, a small change in imaging, a metabolic trend, that wouldn’t mean much on their own but together might flag risk years ahead of a traditional diagnosis.
Dr Michael Recht, chair of radiology at NYU Grossman, framed the ambition in similarly sweeping terms.
“The future that this partnership could unlock is profound: a world where the expectation is not only that we treat disease, but that we find disease early, and even prevent it,” he said.
It’s worth being clear-eyed here. This is a research partnership, not a finished product. No new test is launching tomorrow, and predictive AI models built on longitudinal health data are notoriously difficult to validate, let alone get right the first time.
Function has real incentive to talk this up: it’s built its entire business model around convincing people that regular, comprehensive testing is worth paying for, and a high-profile academic partnership adds credibility to that pitch. None of that makes the science invalid, but it’s a reason to watch for actual peer-reviewed results before treating any of this as settled.
Riding a wave of expansion
The NYU partnership lands at a busy moment for Function. The company recently acquired Getlabs and SuppCo, and closed a $450 million growth round led by General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. It now offers members access to more than 160 lab tests, plus optional MRI and CT scans, for $365 a year, a price the company likes to describe as roughly a dollar a day. That combination of aggressive dealmaking and consumer-facing affordability suggests a company trying to become the default entry point for preventive health testing in the U.S., not just another wellness subscription.
Why it matters for how we age
Strip away the branding, and what’s actually being tested here is a genuinely useful longevity idea: that the biggest lever for a longer, healthier life is catching trouble earlier, when there’s still time to change course.
If this partnership produces real, validated tools, it wouldn’t just help Function sell more subscriptions. It could shift the broader expectation for what an annual checkup is supposed to catch, moving the entire system a few years closer to prevention instead of reaction. That’s a slow, unglamorous kind of progress, but in the longevity world, unglamorous and effective tend to matter a lot more than flashy.
