Each and every person is walking around with a large community, up to 10 million,
bacteria both in and on our body.
If you want to think about that in terms of weight, your brain is probably around 6 pounds,
and you probably have at least that weight of bacteria in you and on you.
So it’s a significant amount of what we walk around with everyday.
This is uBiome in San Francisco, the first BioTech Company to be started with
a crowdfunding campaign.
Their big bet, that people will want to pay to find out what’s in their microbiomes,
kind of like people pay for DNA tests.
The microbiome is the community of microorganisms that live on us and in us.
They digest our food, they synthesis vitamins, they drug us with chemicals that
they make, they prevent us from getting diseases.
So they are as integral to our health and wellness as our own bodies.
This area of science is still very new, but uBiome has found enough interest to create
a line of products.
One for people who are simply curious who can take a basic test to find out more about
how their diet is affecting their gut, that’s called Explorer.
And then there is a more intense version that only a doctor can order for you, called SmartGut.
You can tell people medical information, you can involve their doctor, you can turn
what was interesting information about the microbiome into sort of hard medical data
that you can use to make medical decisions.
The kits range in cost.
From $89 to $399 depending on how many kinds of tests you want.
You can also get a subsidized test if your doctor prescribes it.
The kit comes in the mail.
You keep it in the bathroom so that when you’re ready to give a sample it’s right there
with all the instructions.
You mail it back without ever having to go to a lab or the doctor.
But, let’s be clear, this is a little more intense than a DNA test.
The majority of samples that we receive come from the intestinal or the gut microbiome.
And in that case, a patient will take a sample of a small bit of stool from
their toilet paper.
So each of our robots is set up to do one or more specific tasks.
This one is extracting DNA from our samples.
So we have laid out 96 poo samples and we’re breaking down those samples and extracting
the genetic material.
Breaking down the poo.
When sequencing is complete, that sequence can go into a series of computer
programs that process the sample and we can then give a report back to our customers
that tell them about the bacteria in their sample.
uBiome has an argument for why this is an important test and potentially a better
business than genetic testing.
The company says that impowered by the information you may actually be able to change the makeup
of your gut by adjusting your diet.
It detects specific pathogens.
It helps people know which commensal bacteria they have in their gut and whether or not
it makes them more likely to have IBD versus IBS.
You can actually do something about it.
You can actually influence your own health and improve it and I see us having a really
big role in that ecosystem.
One of the things that having our tests allows us to do is so we can partner
with collaborators around the world to start to generate a lot more information around
how to interpret the microbiome.
We have over 150,000 samples in our data set now and we should have half a million
by the end of 2018.
Microbiome research is in its infancy but the uBiome founders think one day tests
like this will be just as common as blood tests, or maybe even more.
They think every time you have the flu or get food poisoning, every time you start a
new diet plan you’ll want one.
If they’re right, we might all have to get comfortable swabbing our toilet paper.