Genetic-based dating app works to find true love using your DNA
Genetic-based dating app works to find true love using
your DNA
By Maggie Gordon December 26, 2017 Updated: December 26,
2017 3:18pm
The first question out of Asma Mirza's mouth when she
makes a new acquaintance these days is, "Are you single?" If she gets
a yes, the 27-year-old CEO quickly follows up with a request to swab the inside
of her new friend's cheek, in hopes it will help them find true love.
Often, people look at her like she's crazy. They'll ask,
"What does my DNA have to do with love?"
According to an ever-growing body of scientific research,
the answer is: quite a bit. That's why Mirza and 26-year-old geneticist
Brittany Barreto have spent the last year huddled in their downtown Houston
office, working steadily to launch the nation's first genetics-based dating
app, Pheramor.
Their phone-based app, which they plan to officially roll
out in February, combines genetic information with data gleaned from social
media posts to create user profiles.
"Scientists can actually predict who's attracted to
whom," Barreto explained. "It has to do with your pheromones."
And the genes that control those ever-important
pheromones can be analyzed through a simple cheek swab.
Barreto first learned this as a sophomore in college,
during a genetics class at Drew University in New Jersey. And for her, the
world stopped spinning for a moment as an idea was implanted in her mind. She
raised her hand and asked, "Could I make a GeneHarmony.com?"
She wasn't met with as much enthusiasm as she felt
herself.
"The professor was like, 'Yeah, I guess so.' Like,
'You could. That's a thing,'" she said. "And everyone kind of looked
at me and was like, 'That's so Brittany. She's just strange.'"
She tuned out the eye rolls, and tucked away the idea for
safe-keeping.
"Over the past seven or eight years, I've just told
friends or boyfriends, and my mom. And everyone has always been like, 'You
should do it.' But it was always, like, fear and timing, and not knowing
how," she said.
Then last year, while finishing up her doctorate in
genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, she pitched the idea of a DNA-based
dating app at an accelerator program, where Mirza, who had just graduated from
Duke University, was also in attendance.
"Brittany went up, and she pitched this. And I think
we were like, the only women at the accelerator," Mirza said. "And
so, she looked at me, and she was like, 'I want you on my team.' And I looked
at her, like 'I want to be on your team.' And that's how we met. Brittany
brought in the genetics, and I have a background in expansion and capacity building
- taking a project and scaling it."
Also at the accelerator was Bin Huang, a doctoral
candidate at Rice University, studying computational biology. Mirza and Baretto
brought him on as Pheramor's third co-founder, putting him in charge of
developing an algorithm for their idea.
Mirza and Barreto are optimistic about their endeavor,
but it's not a sure thing. While the Pew Research Center reports that 15
percent of American adults have used online or mobile dating apps - up from 11
percent in 2013 - there are a handful of big apps that attract the largest
share of daters. And tapping into the online dating market isn't easy. Two
dating apps that utilize DNA in slightly different, less streamlined, ways than
Pheramor have previously launched in Canada, with little success. But Mirza and
Barreto remain optimistic.
And while their idea for Pheramor may sound complicated,
the science is actually pretty simple.
"Genetic-based human attraction has to do with
pheromones. And when we smell pheromones, what we're actually smelling is how
diverse someone's immune system is compared to our own," Barreto
explained, matter-of-factly.
"Evolution is very strong. So we're smelling each
other, trying to figure out who is the best person to mate with," she
continued. "And that's what love at first sight actually is. It's smelling
someone's pheromones from across the room, and your brain says, 'Oh my Gosh,
that's the most perfect pheromone profile I've ever smelled in my entire life.
I love them.'"
When someone swabs their cheek with a Pheramor kit, the
lab Mirza and Barreto work with isolates and scans 11 genes, which scientists
have linked to factors for attraction. (Mirza and Barreto declined to share
which exact genes they're analyzing; they'd rather not give away their
algorithm's secret sauce.)
"That's it," said Barreto. "I won't know
what you look like, what your heritage is, what your disease status is. I won't
know any of that. All I know is the 11 genes for attractions, from which I'll
know who you think is hot and who you won't like."
That data then heads to Huang's team, and is dropped into
an advanced formula, along with a variety of personality traits pulled from a
user's social media profile.
"All the research shows that initial attraction
through your genetics is what will get two people together," Mirza said.
"But what fulfills a longtime relationship is commonalities. So the way we
account for both of those is through your genetics, and then through your
social media."
Rather than asking users to fill out their own profiles,
Pheramor will pull details from someone's profiles, like favorite bands and
books. Even political affiliations. This will save time for Pheramor's target
demographic - young professionals, between the ages of 18 and 44 who are
constantly looking for efficiencies. But perhaps more importantly, it will
remove some of the self-reporting bias that comes with creating your own dating
profile.
Dating apps are big business these days: The market is
estimated to be worth about $2 billion. And more than 40 million Americans rely
on dating apps and websites to help them find love. But, according to a report
from eHarmony.com earlier this year, 53 percent of people lie on their
profiles. And that's not counting the people who enter such bland answers that
they fail to stick out from the pack.
"A lot of our research comes from me using all the
apps and coming back to the office, saying, 'We need to solve this problem.' So
many profiles, people just write, 'I love adventure, and I'm super laid back.'
And it's like, 'Who are you? What does that mean?'" Baretto said,
exasperated. "And then you meet them, and they're not even adventurous. So
us building the profile for users takes away the idea that someone has a standard
profile that they write to put up on a dating app. Instead, it's a reflection
of how you show yourself on social media."
Pheramor hasn't officially launched yet. As of now, the
three co-founders are trying to reach a critical mass of users - hence Mirza's
proclivity to swab everyone in arm's reach. While they'd like to tackle world
domination in the future, the co-founders are currently focused on hitting the
3,000-member mark, which is all it will take to create a viable sample size to
officially launch in Houston.
And the founders have high hopes that their home city is
the ideal place to begin their venture.
"Houston is a place for a lot of med-tech start-ups,
and we're a social technology start-up, and we feel like this is something that
we really created a space for in Houston," Mirza said.
And the demographics here sync perfectly with Pheramor's
market: about one in three people inside the city's limits is between the ages
of 25 and 44, according to data from the U.S Census program. Additionally, the
App-analytic firm SmartApp recently ranked Houston as the city with the largest
saturation of dating app users in all of the U.S., with 16 percent of residents
swiping for love on their phones.
"We want to help the ones who don't have time to go
on seven bad first dates," Mirza said. "For us, with this app, our
data will be able to tell you whether you're wasting your time or not."
Sound cynical? It's not meant too. Barreto constantly
emphasizes that while data may be run in labs and on computers, the crux of Pheramor
is just as romantic as an adorable meet-cute, in which someone bumps into an
attractive stranger on a train, or in a coffee shop.
"I'm a hopeless romantic. And for us, the romance is
still there," she said.
"But there's metrics behind this," Mirza added.
"So, yes you can meet someone on a train and have that initial attraction.
But what if you never met that person? What if the only way you could meet them
is through our app? The way I see it, we're helping you find those missed
connections. Because we're bringing those metrics for what that spark would be.
And most people see that spark once or twice in their life. But if you actually
knew where that comes from, maybe you'd find more sparks."
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