Our First Clinical Study: Unfiltered Story
Blood logistics, dropouts, a Saturday delivery run. What we learned trying to run clinical research from scratch as a small team.
👋🏼 Hi, I’m Shan. I run Xandro Lab, a longevity science brand in Singapore. Every Sunday I write these notes. Part building diary, part thinking out loud.
A year into building Xandro, we made a conscious decision. We could keep launching products built on commodity ingredients: safe, proven, relatively easy to market. Or we could innovate. Build formulas that don’t exist yet. Take positions on emerging science. Push the boundaries of what a supplement brand can stand for.
We chose the harder path.
But here’s what nobody tells you about being an innovator in longevity science. When you develop a novel product, you don’t just get to point at existing research and say “the science backs this up.” The science backs the individual ingredients. What’s missing is evidence for your specific blend, your specific formulation, the way these compounds interact in the human body together. That evidence doesn’t exist until you create it.
In some ways, we operate less like a supplement brand and more like a mini pharma company. Every new product is effectively a new compound that needs its own body of evidence. That’s the cost of innovation. You don’t just build the product. You have to lead the scientific dialogue around it.
Which brings me to this Sunday’s topic. We are currently running what I believe is Singapore’s first privately funded human clinical study on NAD+. No government grant. No CRO handling the heavy lifting. Just us, piecing it together ourselves. Acting as our own clinical research organisation, building the protocol, managing the logistics, and figuring it out as we go.
Last Saturday, I left all my plans to deliver blood samples to the lab because there was no delivery rider available. I genuinely wondered for a moment: am I the CEO, or the delivery rider, or just the Chief Everything Officer? That’s the reality of doing this as a small team. And that’s the story I want to tell today.
In this post:
Why we committed to research from day one
What the study actually is
How it actually got built
Why this matters
1. Why we committed to research from day one
When we decided to build Protocol X, we made a commitment early: the individual ingredients have solid science behind them. That part we were confident about. What we didn’t have, and what nobody has, is research on how this specific blend performs together in the human body.
That gap matters. Anyone can take a dozen well-studied ingredients, throw them in a capsule, and call it a formula. What’s harder to answer is: what happens when they work together? Does the effect compound? Does it change? That’s what we needed to find out. Our Scientific Advisory Committee, who reviewed the formula back in 2024, made this point clearly. If you’re building something novel, you have to back it up.
So almost from the day Protocol X was conceived, a clinical study was part of the plan. We didn’t launch first and then decide to do research. The intention was always there.
2. What the study actually is
NAD+ is one of the most important molecules in longevity science. It’s involved in cellular energy production, DNA repair, and dozens of metabolic processes. As we age, NAD+ levels decline, and that decline is linked to many of the things we associate with aging: fatigue, reduced resilience, slower recovery.
NMN is one of the most studied compounds for boosting NAD+. Protocol X includes NMN as part of its blend, but also includes other ingredients that may influence how the NAD+ pathway functions.
So the question we’re asking is simple: does Protocol X raise NAD+ levels differently than pure NMN alone?
We’re measuring NAD+ and NADH at five blood collection points across 12 weeks. Participants are split between Protocol X and a pure NMN group. We’re keeping the focus tight, just this one pathway for now. Future studies will look at other markers. Beyond this human study, we’re also working with NUS on in-vitro work on senescence and other longevity markers. The research pipeline is broader.
3. How it actually got built
Here’s where I want to be honest, because this part doesn’t get talked about much.
We began working on the study design around July 2025. I was keen to get it off the ground by September. It finally launched in February 2026. That’s a five month delay, and every week of that delay was a lesson.
Finalising the protocol took far longer than I expected. We’re not a CRO. We don’t have teams of people who do this for a living. Getting the methodology right, what to measure, how to structure the timeline, how to design informed consent that would also hold up for IRB approval down the line, required real help from people who knew more than we did. Professor Jorming Goh and Researcher Kamil Pabis were instrumental in shaping the protocol. Our in-house lead scientist Toby led the execution. And we had strong support from our lab partner who offered the testing at no cost, which made the whole thing viable.
Still. If you had handed this to a CRO, they would have charged somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 to run it. We’ve done it scrappily, by figuring out each piece ourselves.
Finding a blood draw clinic willing to work within our study structure was harder than I anticipated. The clinic and the lab are two different locations, operating at different hours. Getting fresh blood samples from point A to point B within a narrow processing window, on a consistent basis, with no dedicated logistics partner, is difficult.
That Saturday I mentioned in the intro is a good example. No Grab. No Lalamove. I picked up the samples myself and dropped them to the lab. And the lab owner, and I want to acknowledge this, came in on his weekend to process them. These are the kinds of things that don’t show up in any grant application or research paper. People extending their goodwill to make something happen.
We also had a case where a participant’s product box was left outside their door. They were unhappy about it. I get it. We sent a replacement without much debate. Is it possible someone took it? Maybe. But you don’t run an investigation over one box. You move on.
We started with 30 participants. We’re now down to about 17, and I expect we’ll finish with around 12. People’s schedules change. Someone missed their day 7 blood draw, came on day 8, and it creates a protocol problem. An intern who was helping us manage coordination got a better job offer mid-study. I couldn’t match it, and I wouldn’t want him to turn it down for us. We found someone else, and things kept moving.
What this will likely produce is a pilot study, not a large-scale trial. The numbers are smaller than planned. But as a foundation for what comes next, it’s meaningful. The learnings from just running this thing have been enormous.
4. Why this matters
We are not the first company to sell NMN. We are not even close to being the biggest. But we might be the only supplement company in Singapore that has run a human study on NAD+ in this way. When we reached out to the community for participants, we had 50+ signups in the first few weeks. Nobody else had done this here. People were curious because the molecule hasn’t been studied widely, and they wanted answers.
Most supplement companies rely on the science of individual ingredients. That’s not dishonest. The science on NMN, for example, is real. But it’s different from studying your specific product, your specific blend, in real people. That gap is where most of the industry quietly sits.
We chose not to sit there.
Week 6 and Week 12 blood collections are still ahead. We expect results by end of May. Whatever those numbers show, we’ll share them. Because that’s the point.
That’s it for this Sunday. I will you next week with a new update.
Cheers!
Shan