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.
šš¼ Hi, Iām 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 donāt exist yet. Take positions on emerging science. Push the boundaries of what a supplement brand can stand for.
We chose the harder path.
But hereās what nobody tells you about being an innovator in longevity science. When you develop a novel product, you donāt just get to point at existing research and say āthe science backs this up.ā The science backs the individual ingredients. Whatās missing is evidence for your specific blend, your specific formulation, the way these compounds interact in the human body together. That evidence doesnāt 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. Thatās the cost of innovation. You donāt just build the product. You have to lead the scientific dialogue around it.
Which brings me to this Sundayās topic. We are currently running what I believe is Singaporeās 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? Thatās the reality of doing this as a small team. And thatās 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 didnāt 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. Whatās harder to answer is: what happens when they work together? Does the effect compound? Does it change? Thatās what we needed to find out. Our Scientific Advisory Committee, who reviewed the formula back in 2024, made this point clearly. If youāre 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 didnāt 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. Itās 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 weāre asking is simple: does Protocol X raise NAD+ levels differently than pure NMN alone?
Weāre measuring NAD+ and NADH at five blood collection points across 12 weeks. Participants are split between Protocol X and a pure NMN group. Weāre keeping the focus tight, just this one pathway for now. Future studies will look at other markers. Beyond this human study, weāre 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
Hereās where I want to be honest, because this part doesnāt 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. Thatās a five month delay, and every week of that delay was a lesson.
Finalising the protocol took far longer than I expected. Weāre not a CRO. We donāt 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. Weāve 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 donāt show up in any grant application or research paper. People extending their goodwill to make something happen.
We also had a case where a participantās 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 donāt run an investigation over one box. You move on.
We started with 30 participants. Weāre now down to about 17, and I expect weāll finish with around 12. Peopleās 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 couldnāt match it, and I wouldnāt 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, itās 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 hasnāt been studied widely, and they wanted answers.
Most supplement companies rely on the science of individual ingredients. Thatās not dishonest. The science on NMN, for example, is real. But itās 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, weāll share them. Because thatās the point.
Thatās it for this Sunday. I will you next week with a new update.
Cheers!
Shan