German Startup TimeTeller Wins Insurer Deal for Cancer Timing Tests

By Nathan Brooks

Techniker Krankenkasse, one of Germany's largest health insurers with 12 million members, is reimbursing a saliva test that reads a patient's internal clock — and both sides are ready to widen the deal. That's the commercial anchor behind TimeTeller, a German startup that presented at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield in San Francisco today.

The company sells an at-home saliva kit that maps an individual's circadian rhythm. The clinical premise: timing cancer treatment to each patient's biological clock could cut side effects and improve outcomes. In a market still scarred by Theranos, CEO Angela Relógio is deliberately positioned as the anti-overseller — a physicist-engineer and molecular biologist who spent years researching oncology, circadian biology and systems medicine in Germany before leaving academia.

Yes, her surname means "clock" in Portuguese. No, she won't lean on it. She's explicit about what the consumer kit can't do.

What does the test actually change for patients?

Not cancer dosing schedules — not yet, and not on your own. "That is something that we need to calculate for every single medicine; we do that in the context of clinical studies," Relógio cautioned.

What the direct-to-consumer kit does support is personalized advice on sleep, nutrition, light exposure and physical activity. That's why TimeTeller started accepting direct orders at all: demand came from longevity clinics focused on healthy aging, according to Relógio. The company also sees potential applications in metabolic diseases such as diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, performance, and women's health.

Cancer remains the core mission, and it's the problem that pulled Relógio out of academia. She watched cancer patients stop and restart treatment because of side effects. "As a scientist, that was just impossible to watch, particularly when I was convinced that part of the problem might not only be what treatment we give, but when we give it," she said.

How the company is built

The financial backstory is unusually disciplined. "I personally funded our first patent because I strongly believed that this discovery should not remain in scientific publications," Relógio said.

TimeTeller spun out of Berlin's Charité university hospital and then moved to Medical School Hamburg, which provided two things: access to patients and funding, plus backup employment for the company's team of 10 if it couldn't pay their salaries. That fallback may never be tapped.

With biochemist and market access specialist Benjamin Dose as cofounder, the startup converted its insurer relationship into a working reimbursement deal. Techniker Krankenkasse pays back the cost of the test for a subset of cancer patients today, and Relógio said both sides are now ready to expand it across more of the insurer's 12 million members — roughly one in seven Germans.

For practitioners, the signal is that a circadian diagnostic has crossed from wellness gadget to reimbursed medical product, at least within one large payer. That's the hurdle most timing-based diagnostics haven't cleared.

The longer timeline

Relógio frames TimeTeller as running on two clocks. The near-term business is consumer and longevity-clinic testing. The long-term goal is determining, far more precisely than morning-person-versus-night-owl labels, when cancer treatments will be better tolerated and most effective.

Her stated ambition is a future where asking "when" is central to precision medicine, because "almost every process in our body is timed." The next checkpoint is the expansion of the Techniker Krankenkasse reimbursement — if that scales, chronotherapy moves one step closer to standard oncology practice.