Personalized nutrition is expanding beyond simply recommending different health functional foods or dietary supplements to different people. It is becoming a data-driven healthcare field that looks at an individual’s nutritional status, lifestyle habits, questionnaire data, and long-term patterns of change.
Gunsei Bio Tec interprets hair mineral testing through the lens of Hair Ionomics, or hair ionomics. By combining mineral data with lifestyle information, the company is building a personalized precision nutrition platform.
In this DIOTIMES Leaders Interview, Myung-il Chung, CEO of Gunsei Bio Tec, discusses the company’s founding background, the meaning of Hair Ionomics, system balance and integrated interpretation, its AI-based precision nutrition platform, and its strategy for global expansion.
Could you first introduce yourself? Please tell us about your role at Gunsei Bio Tec, your career path, and your main areas of expertise.
Hello. I am Myung-il Chung, CEO of Gunsei Bio Tec, a company focused on personalized precision nutrition.
I earned my Ph.D. in nutrition research integrated with molecular biology from Rutgers University in the United States. After that, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Seoul National University, and later conducted cancer-related research using gene therapy techniques at a Korean pharmaceutical company and at the Henry Ford Hospital research institute in the United States.
For many years, I have studied the biochemical metabolic network of the human body, integrating both the microscopic molecular level and the broader perspective of whole-body nutrition. Based on this research background, I am now working to realize a vision of approaching individual differences in nutritional status and lifestyle habits through a systematic framework called personalized precision nutrition.
What led you to lead Gunsei Bio Tec, and why did you decide to focus on personalized nutrition?
During the years when I was deeply focused on cancer research, I found myself facing a personal health crisis. My own health and daily life had begun to break down. I was dealing with uterine fibroids, my child was suffering from severe atopic dermatitis, and I felt physically and mentally depleted, almost to the point of burnout.
To overcome that situation, I tried various approaches, including meditation. However, when the body’s fundamental energy was not being replenished, the comfort I gained was temporary. Through that experience, I realized that medical treatment for visible lesions may need to be accompanied by everyday nutrition and lifestyle management in order to look more deeply at quality of life and sustainable well-being.
I came to believe that it is important to maintain and manage the body’s ability to produce energy and recover, in other words, its metabolic function. I also concluded that one of the most practical ways to support this in daily life is personalized nutrition, which is directly connected to everyday diet and cellular metabolism.
My family’s experience with health challenges, together with my scientific background as a researcher, led me to establish Gunsei Bio Tec. I wanted to contribute to society by combining nutrition and health technology. Rather than simply selling health functional foods or dietary supplements, our goal is to help people better understand and manage their metabolism and lifestyle habits through a more precise, data-driven approach. We aim to turn this philosophy into an innovative business model that supports healthier lives for more people.
Why do you think personalized nutrition has become such an important business keyword in today’s healthcare market?
To understand this, we need to look at the historical development of the healthcare and food industries.
In the last century, one of humanity’s most urgent priorities was to solve absolute poverty and hunger. As a result, the industry naturally focused more on mass production and calorie supply than on nutritional balance.
Today, many people consume more than enough calories, yet may still experience imbalances involving essential regulatory nutrients such as vitamins and minerals. These nutritional imbalances are one of the important lifestyle and nutritional factors that should be considered in relation to metabolic and inflammatory conditions such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, and dementia.
In the earlier stages of the healthcare market, general multivitamins and mineral supplements could contribute to public health to some extent. However, as the market has matured, the limitations of a one-size-fits-all approach have become clearer.
A nutritional solution that works well for one person may not be sufficiently helpful for another. Even if something appears useful at first, a different management approach may be needed over time depending on the individual’s condition and intake environment. Both consumers and the market are increasingly recognizing this reality.
Ultimately, just as every person has a unique fingerprint, each individual’s metabolic network and nutritional needs may also differ. Market demand is now shifting away from standardized products based only on averages or surface-level symptoms. Instead, consumers are looking for personalized solutions that can better reflect biochemical and genetic individuality.
For this reason, personalized nutrition is not simply a temporary trend in the healthcare market. I believe it is part of an inevitable evolution in how humanity approaches health management, and it represents a major paradigm shift.
How is Gunsei Bio Tec different from general nutrition consulting companies or testing service providers?
Many nutrition consulting services still follow a business model that is close to symptomatic support, focusing mainly on visible symptoms or areas of concern. For example, when someone feels tired, they may be recommended a high-dose vitamin B complex. When blood pressure management is a concern, magnesium may be recommended. When gut health is a concern, probiotics may be suggested.
This kind of approach is easy for consumers to understand and can be useful for general nutrition management. However, simply matching a symptom or area of concern with a specific nutrient may not fully explain the broader context of a person’s lifestyle habits, nutritional status, stress, sleep, and other complex factors.
Recent personalized testing services are meaningful in that they provide data. However, when a service focuses only on a single marker or a specific category of data, it may not fully reflect how the human body functions as an interconnected system, or what we call system balance.
Gunsei Bio Tec does not stop at fragmented symptoms, single numbers, or partial interpretations. Using refined ionomics data as a foundation, we aim to understand an individual’s nutritional status and lifestyle habits more holistically through integrated interpretation that looks at the metabolic network from a broader perspective. By examining the relationships and context shown by multiple types of data, we focus on designing a sense of overall balance that can guide personalized nutrition and lifestyle management.
This is where Gunsei Bio Tec’s core competitiveness begins. We do not limit ourselves to responding to a single symptom or adjusting partial numbers. With precise data analysis as the framework, we look at the body’s metabolic network from an integrated perspective and connect it with personalized nutrition guidance. This allows us to consider the body’s energy system and everyday health management direction together.
Rather than simply filling a perceived nutrient gap, our systematic approach is to use the relationships and context shown by multiple types of data to provide guidance for nutrition and lifestyle management. This is what we see as Gunsei Bio Tec’s Super Gap: a level of integrated interpretation that is difficult to achieve through a simple test report or a general recommendation algorithm alone.
You interpret hair mineral testing from the perspective of Hair Ionomics. What does this concept mean for Gunsei Bio Tec’s business model?
From a business perspective, Hair Ionomics is an important moat for us.
Measuring a single mineral level alone can become relatively common. However, building an ionomics-based interpretation system that examines how more than ten nutritional mineral ions and more than ten toxic mineral ions may interact, create synergistic or antagonistic patterns, and connect with complex metabolic networks is difficult to build in a short period of time.
This is the result of accumulated research achievements, related SCI-level publications, patents, and diverse field data coming together organically. Gunsei Bio Tec aims to develop this into a core foundational asset for the AI-based precision nutrition platform it plans to build.
At the same time, these research achievements and experiences do not mean that the same effects are guaranteed for every individual. Gunsei Bio Tec uses them as a research and interpretation foundation to better understand each person’s nutritional status and lifestyle habits.
Therefore, our technology does not stop at simply providing test results. It is an important core asset and source technology for the subscription-based health management model and advanced AI-powered personalized nutrition platform that Gunsei Bio Tec plans to develop.
When Gunsei Bio Tec says it looks at the whole rather than isolated parts, how is this reflected in the company’s technology philosophy and operating model?
Our technology philosophy is not simply a slogan that says, “Let us look at the whole.” We aim to make that approach scientific.
Systems biology emerged in the 1960s because researchers needed to overcome the limitations of fragmented approaches. In the 21st century, various omics technologies, such as genomics, have also emerged to examine the human body more comprehensively.
However, in our view, omics models that can show the “whole” in a meaningful way and connect that understanding reliably with everyday health management are still evolving. For example, genetic analysis can decode fixed inherited information, but it still has limitations when directly linking that information to current physiological function or changing lifestyle habits.
Most importantly, it is not easy to create a real-time feedback loop in which personalized nutrition guidance is provided based on genetic testing and then objectively adjusted through follow-up testing to see how that guidance is being applied to each individual.
In contrast, hair mineral analysis has practical strengths as an omics-related approach from a commercialization standpoint. Among the more than 100 minerals found on Earth, around ten nutritional minerals that play key roles in the human body have been studied in relation to physiological changes associated with intake levels and imbalance.
Hair mineral analysis can be connected with practical nutrition management guidance, and follow-up testing is relatively accessible. This gives it potential for practical application in the market. We have studied hair mineral data from an ionomics perspective, published related findings in SCI-level international journals, and use this research as a reference in developing nutrition guidance.
A healthy organizational culture that respects employees as whole people
This philosophy of looking at the whole rather than the part is not limited to our technology. It is also deeply reflected in Gunsei Bio Tec’s organizational culture.
I believe that healthy and comfortable team members can provide better service to customers. To respect employees as whole individuals rather than as replaceable parts of an organization, we discourage the use of informal or hierarchical speech in the workplace. We also pay close attention to work-life balance through practices such as early dismissal at 4 p.m. on Fridays and efforts to reduce unnecessary evening gatherings and overtime.
Of course, we still have areas to improve. But I believe that an organization must first support the physical and mental well-being of its own team members in order to responsibly support the health management of others.
An integrated service flow and a holistic guidebook
Based on this organizational culture, we also try to break down boundaries between departments in our service flow. When handling a customer’s nutritional data, we operate an integrated system in which perspectives from nutrition, molecular biology, and lifestyle experts are cross-reviewed so that the guidance does not become limited to a single ingredient recommendation.
As a result, the guidance provided to customers does not end with handing them one supplement. It takes the form of a multidimensional and holistic life guidebook that also considers sleep patterns, diet management, stress management, and other lifestyle factors.
What kind of business competitiveness is created when mineral data, lifestyle information, and questionnaire data are combined?
Hair mineral levels may be influenced by everything we eat, see, hear, and do in daily life. In particular, the intense stress many modern people experience should be considered in relation to biochemical data changes. Therefore, even if two people show the same mineral level on a report, the background factors that may have influenced those results can differ depending on age, sex, and personal lifestyle habits.
In the era of hyper-personalization, the true value of data does not come from a list of numbers alone. It comes from the context behind those numbers. When the cold framework of mineral data is combined with the living context of lifestyle habits and questionnaire information, it becomes data connected to a person’s real life.
Even if two people show the same pattern of mineral deficiency, the direction of guidance may differ depending on whether that pattern is related to chronic sleep deprivation, intense work stress, or another lifestyle factor. By considering not only biochemical characteristics but also the accumulated influence of daily habits, we can provide more realistic and practical guidance for personal health management.
From a business perspective, this creates strong competitiveness. Beyond analyzing isolated test results, high-quality contextual data combined with multidimensional lifestyle variables, together with algorithms that can interpret them in an integrated way, represents an important asset that Gunsei Bio Tec has built through years of research and service experience.
The sophistication of these solutions, which cannot be easily replicated in a short period of time, is one of our important business strengths.
As the personalized nutrition market grows, simple recommendation services are also increasing. What is the core asset that will allow Gunsei Bio Tec to differentiate itself over the long term?
As the market becomes more mainstream, many convenient recommendation services based on statistical probability, such as age, sex, or surface-level symptoms, are helping expand the industry. Gunsei Bio Tec goes one step deeper.
We focus on biochemical individuality at the cellular level, beyond what is visible on the surface. Rather than simply filling nutrients that appear to be lacking, our first core asset is to provide a true form of hyper-personalization that considers an individual’s metabolic characteristics and lifestyle habits together.
An even stronger differentiator is our system of periodic retesting and follow-up observation. The human body is not a fixed machine. It is a living organism that continuously changes according to environment and nutrition.
For that reason, we do not stop after a single test and one-time guidance. We periodically analyze the current state of the body after personalized nutrition guidance has been applied, and then provide the next stage of personalized guidance based on those changes.
In the long run, testing technologies will likely become more standardized, and the cost of collecting data will decrease. The future of healthcare business will ultimately depend on who can translate large amounts of data into insightful and practical solutions that can be applied to customers’ lives.
Gunsei Bio Tec is working to implement into algorithms the deep understanding of metabolic mechanisms and the ability to interpret many exceptional variables that we have accumulated through research and field experience. This is a durable foundational asset whose value can grow over time.
You emphasize that data should not merely be analyzed, but interpreted within each person’s metabolic context. How is this interpretation capability being accumulated as an organizational strength?
No matter how outstanding an expert may be, knowledge that remains only inside one person’s mind cannot become a lasting corporate asset or a scalable business model.
That is why we have been working to structure and document many personalized interpretation cases and feedback processes that I have handled directly in the field. We have also shared this knowledge through lectures for medical professionals and received professional feedback to refine our interpretation framework.
Through this process, we are building a standardized interpretation system so that external medical professionals as well as internal expert groups can generate consistent-quality solutions within the accumulated knowledge framework.
Gunsei Bio Tec is now going a step further by building a large multidimensional dataset that combines hair mineral data with detailed questionnaire data, or lifestyle context.
Once this integrated data is developed further, we plan to apply both supervised learning and unsupervised learning so that AI can identify patterns that people may miss and support expert interpretation. Through this, we aim to evolve our service into a more advanced personalized nutrition management platform.
The greatest strength of this interpretation accumulation system is that it does not stand still. Through periodic follow-up testing, we continuously feed customer change data back into the system.
As a result, we are building a flywheel structure in which organizational collective intelligence and AI algorithms are continuously supplemented and improved. Over time, accumulated data and interpretation systems will become an increasingly important source of competitiveness for Gunsei Bio Tec.
Among Gunsei Bio Tec’s research, patents, data, and interpretation know-how, which element best represents the company’s future value?
Without question, it is the synergy between data and interpretation know-how.
Research capabilities and patents serve as the strong foundation of the company. However, the key driver of sustainable business expansion will ultimately come from high-quality integrated data.
A multidimensional dataset that combines biological indicators with the living context of customers’ daily lives will be an important foundation for Gunsei Bio Tec to grow into a meaningful player in the global precision nutrition market in the era of AI healthcare.
You are planning to expand into an AI-based precision nutrition platform. How can AI change Gunsei Bio Tec’s business structure?
The introduction of AI can give Gunsei Bio Tec greater scalability.
Traditional personalized nutrition business models have depended heavily on the interpretation and management capabilities of individual experts. Because of this, even when demand increases, there are limits to how much the service can scale due to time and personnel constraints.
However, when AI is integrated into the platform, the situation changes. The advanced know-how accumulated by experts over many years can be systematically converted into algorithmic structures. More importantly, as customer data continues to accumulate, the interpretation framework can be continuously refined.
This intelligent AI engine can help conduct initial analysis of complex biological networks and generate draft personalized solution guidance. As a result, cost structures may improve, and service processing speed may become faster.
These improvements in operational efficiency and cost structure can lead to broader market access. High-quality personalized precision nutrition solutions that were once limited to a small number of hospitals or premium B2B expert markets may eventually become available to a wider B2C market in a more reasonable way.
In this sense, AI is not merely an auxiliary technology. It can become an important business engine that enables Gunsei Bio Tec to scale up.
Why do you see AI not as a replacement for experts, but as a tool that expands their interpretation capabilities?
As the technology paradigm changes, the role required of experts must also evolve.
Before AI, experts had to spend a great deal of time and energy on calculation, logical reasoning, accurate interpretation, and management of data. In the AI era, experts can differentiate themselves in higher-level areas such as empathy, motivation, genuine care, and counseling.
AI has strengths in the “calculation” side of work, including large-scale data analysis and creating draft roadmaps. However, when it comes to supporting real behavioral change in health management, human empathy and human touch remain essential.
In particular, understanding the deeper context of a person’s life, where many variables such as age, sex, and long-accumulated lifestyle history are intertwined, is an important area for human experts with real field experience.
When AI quickly organizes data analysis and draft personalized guidance, experts can reduce the burden of data interpretation and focus more deeply on the customer’s life context. This allows them to concentrate on the role of a running mate who helps the customer steadily apply the suggested direction in real daily life.
In other words, AI does not replace experts. It is an important tool that expands their capabilities.
If Gunsei Bio Tec expands into personalized nutrition guidance, meal plans, health functional food development, and a data-based platform, which area will you focus on first?
We will first focus on building a data-based precision nutrition platform that can serve as the hub for all related services.
Once this platform is established, health functional food development and subscription-based personalized meal services can naturally grow on top of it, using customers’ metabolic and lifestyle data as a reference.
At the same time, the development and recommendation of health functional foods must be carried out within the scope of recognized product functions and applicable labeling and advertising standards.
In other words, our goal is not to launch products first. Our goal is to secure a larger ecosystem, or operating system, that can contain and connect different products and services.
What conditions are necessary for Korean companies in precision nutrition to enter the global market?
There are common foundations in human biological and metabolic mechanisms. However, actual nutritional status and lifestyle habits can vary depending on ethnicity, country, food culture, and living environment.
The final piece needed for global expansion is the ability to localize cross-border lifestyles. This requires technical flexibility to map country-specific and population-specific dietary habits and living environment data into the AI engine, as well as an understanding of each country’s regulations related to healthcare, food, health functional foods, and personal data.
With this localization capability, I believe Korean healthcare companies can contribute to building meaningful standards in the global precision nutrition market.
What kind of company do you hope Gunsei Bio Tec will become in five years?
In five years, I hope Gunsei Bio Tec will be the company people think of first when they want to understand and manage their nutritional status and lifestyle data. In that sense, we aim to become a personalized health operating system.
Beyond hair testing, we hope to integrate various inputs such as wearable devices and genetic data, based on user consent, and support everyday health management decisions through integrated analysis.
Our goal is to become a central company in the precision healthcare ecosystem.
Finally, why should Gunsei Bio Tec be seen not simply as a testing company, but as a precision nutrition healthcare platform company?
Gunsei Bio Tec should be seen not simply as a testing company, but as a precision nutrition healthcare platform company because our essence is not testing itself. Our essence is a data-driven personalized health management system.
Testing is the starting point. Through hair mineral analysis, heavy metal analysis, and saliva hormone testing, we obtain data that can be used as a reference to understand an individual’s long-term nutritional status and lifestyle habits. But our real focus is the next step.
We interpret that data and connect it with personalized nutrition strategies, dietary direction, lifestyle improvement, lifestyle management programs, and customized product recommendations.
The healthcare market is moving beyond hospital-centered post-treatment care and toward everyday health management and personalized health management. Complex issues such as fatigue, weight management, menopause, sleep, and stress cannot be fully explained by a single number or a single product recommendation. A platform is needed to understand and continuously manage each person’s nutritional status and lifestyle data.
Gunsei Bio Tec is connecting testing, data interpretation, personalized nutrition solutions, expert education, digital reports, and AI-based analysis support systems into one structure.
Once this structure is established, the business will not end with a one-time test. It can become a repeatable and scalable healthcare model that accumulates and manages health-related data over the long term.
Therefore, Gunsei Bio Tec is not simply a company that provides testing services or recommends supplements. Based on individual nutrition and lifestyle data, we aim to understand the body’s metabolic network more comprehensively and build a Precision Nutrition Healthcare OS that supports sustainable health management.
This interview is intended to introduce technology and business trends in the precision nutrition and healthcare industries. The views and projections expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee. They do not mean that DIOTIMES guarantees, endorses, or recommends the medical efficacy of any specific test, product, or service. This content does not provide medical information for the diagnosis or treatment of disease.
