A probiotic culture experiment in a laboratory.
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Seed Health has been within the business of microbiome scientific breakthroughs since its founding in 2015, but its biggest success to-date could have been becoming profitable as a bioscience startup. The recognition of the corporate’s original product, DS-01, a day by day probiotic and prebiotic complement and its pediatric equivalent — sold direct to consumers in a 30-day supply of sleek green containers through a subscription model — at the moment are allowing the corporate to take a position in frontier science related to probiotics and each human and environmental health.
“We’re considered one of the few biotech firms that may say they’re profitable, and considered one of the awesome elements of profitability is that you could reinvest in future innovation and frontier science,” said Ara Katz, Seed Health co-founder, and who was named to the inaugural CNBC Changemakers list earlier this yr.
On Thursday, Seed Health launched CODA, a computational biology platform funded by its consumer business profitability. “I’ve at all times type of thought of constructing a sustainable business model that will allow us to proceed to pursue frontier science,” Katz said.
The corporate’s SeedLabs division also works on environmental applications for bacteria and the microbiome, corresponding to probiotics for coral and honey bees, bacteria to decompose plastic, and the usage of volcanic bacteria in carbon capture.
Offering consumer product subscriptions in one-, three-, or six-month increments has helped to place the corporate ready to bet on riskier scientific discoveries.
Katz said one good thing about the corporate’s revenue-generating subscription model is bigger flexibility and understanding into financial decision-making, “and really ensuring that we are able to make these investments for the long term. The through-line for us is at all times fascinated by frontier science that we are able to speed up the interpretation of into real world impact,” she added.
Seed Health co-founders and co-CEOs Ara Katz and Raja Dhir.
Seed Health
At its core, CODA is a computational tool which utilizes AI to process massive amounts of phenotypic and genomic data from the Human Phenotype Project, a large collection of human data points ranging across a long time.
Advised by top researchers including Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science and Eric Topol from Scripps Research Institute, the Human Phenotype Project has a worldwide sample of over 11,000 participants — and a goal of reaching 100,000 participants — cataloged annually over 25 years that features multiple biological measures, from genome, proteome, transcriptome to the microbiome.
Katz’s co-founder and co-CEO at Seed Health, Raja Dhir, said CODA and the accompanying data set will help to standardize microbiome science methods, which has long been a problem in the sector. Previous studies have drawn conclusions based on smaller sample sizes, using sampling, analytical, and storage methods which are usually not standardized across the industry.
“What’s the healthy control? You’ll be able to’t just take a random person and assume that they are healthy or not healthy. But when you could have 10,000 people, and you could have all this data on them… let’s contrast our least healthy people to our most healthy people and develop far more tools,” said Dhir, who oversees Seed Health’s environmental research and has expertise in the interpretation of scientific research for product innovation.
For instance, Dhir pointed to a study of 500 folks that could draw a conclusion that presence of a certain bacteria predicts, for instance, weight gain, but one other study of a distinct 500 people by a distinct organization or institution could draw a very different conclusion. CODA’s large sample size and diverse data points offer the potential for a standardization that has not previously been achieved, in line with Dhir.
“We saw that the entire field of probiotics, and definitely a lot of obsession with gut health, was not actually reflecting the scientific approach that we actually thought, that we actually desired to take and pioneer,” added Katz.
Independent experts in the sector agree that the science needs to enhance. “I see lots of probiotics there, everybody’s jumping on the probiotic train, like you will see probiotic drinks, probiotic food, and I’m like, really? Does it really work? And that, to me, as a scientist, and any person who wants to enhance health is frustrating. So I believe increasing scientific rigor, tests, doing these clinical trials, I believe goes to be really necessary,” said Dr. Arpana Gupta, an associate professor at UCLA and co-director of the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. “There’s definitely promise.”
CODA’s first applications are in metabolic health, brain health, longevity, and menopause, research areas chosen because they’ve already been identified as areas of human health where early CODA data displayed the strongest evidence.
“Taking those findings [from CODA], and eventually translating them and bringing them to the billions of folks that may gain advantage from that, I believe that will be the largest contribution and that excites me, because then, without CODA, all of those findings would find yourself in, possibly very nice papers, but just papers. And this manner they may be eventually translated into people,” said Segal, who has studied metabolic health and link between the microbiome and body composition.
Segal said the Human Phenotype project has included the gathering of dietary logs and medical histories, in addition to glucose monitoring records and DEXA (bone densitometry) scans, much of it covering over twenty years and offering insight into the changing, and aging, human microbiome.
“It’s an amazing step forward in not only the standardization of information, but in addition the different sorts of information. That is why it’s called deep phenotyping, because phenotyping means all these items come together to make the phenotype of an individual,” Dhir said. “That is what CODA unlocks. … There’s things that before were just drowning in noise, in bioinformatics data noise that now come out in such clear signals.”
Seed Health has been working on several efforts around pioneering microbiome science for human and planetary health.
Many in the sector consider the approach is destined to have wider applications.
“I believe the highest areas right away are in cancer,” said Dr. Joseph Petrosino, professor at Baylor College of Medicine and Director of the Center for Metagenomics and Microbiome Research, and a member of Seed Health’s scientific advisory board. “The flexibility to make use of the microbiome each as a diagnostic in addition to a possible therapeutic to assist with the responses to numerous cancer treatments, in addition to to avoid a number of the uncomfortable side effects of those treatments,” Petrosino said.
Seed Health says it has no current plans to make use of CODA for research related to cancer.