Shownotes
There is a move towards probiotics that has resulted in a so-called yogurt craze: people are stocking their fridges with pints of yogurt and with bottles of Yakult, a Japanese probiotic drink. But isn’t probiotic food just traveling through your system without sticking to the wall of your gut? How do we know that probiotics is even doing anything? These are logical questions that microbio research is trying to answer. Martha Carlin, CEO of The Biocollective and Biocollective Research, says that we’re actually more microbial than we are human. The ratio now is about two to one cell count of microbes versus human cells. They focus on gut health and the human microbiome composed of trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and archaea living in and on our body. The Biocollective connects their membership and the collected sample with the research world in order to accelerate discovery in the microbiome space and create solutions for gut health overall.
The Human Microbiome And Gut Health With Martha Carlin, CEO The Biocollective Research
We’re incredibly fortunate we have Martha Carlin on the show. She’s the CEO of the BioCollective and the BioCollective Research. Martha, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Tell me a little bit about your company and who you serve?
The BioCollective is a company that’s focused on gut health and the human microbiome. For people who don’t know what the human microbiome is, that’s the trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and archaea that live in and on our body. We’re actually more microbial than we are human. The ratio now that they’ve agreed on is about two to one cell count of microbes versus human cells. The BioCollective connects our membership and the sample that we collect with the research world to try to accelerate discovery in the microbiome space and solutions to gut health overall. We have both a business to consumer side of the business and a business to business side.
I did a bit of homework before we did the show and for the audience that go, “Tell me more so I understand,” but before we go into the why of understand about the BioCollective, how did you get started? Are you a biologist by training?
I am not a biologist by training. I’m actually an accountant by training, but accounting is one of the original systems and I’m a systems thinker. In 2002, my young, 44-year-old husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and I looked at how science and medicine was approaching that problem. I said, “That’s never going to solve the problem or understand why. This is a complex problem and you have to take a systems approach.” I started teaching myself science on the side and over thirteen years, I started with the food supply, how we grow our food, nutrition, and then I moved into the human systems and got back into chemistry and biology and molecular biology and genetics and epigenetics. In 2014, I read a book by Dr. Martin Blaser of NYU called Missing Microbes and that was a big light bulb for me. He was talking about the age of antibiotics and how we have seen this rise in chronic diseases since antibiotics have been ubiquitous in the environment either from human prescribing or through use in animal feed and animal husbandry.
About two or three months after that, I met a young man who was looking for an investor in a company called Pure Cultures. His background was fermentation chemistry. I thought, “I’ll invest in that and I can learn a little bit about fermentation chemistry.” He had spent twenty years in the human nutraceuticals business, which most people won’t know. Most of the vitamins you buy off the shelf are actually fermented by bacteria and fungi in big vats in industrial operations. That was his expertise, but he was focused on the animal side of things. About two months after that, the first paper was published that correlated specific gut bacteria to the symptoms of Parkinson’s. I said, “Eureka, this is it. This connects to all this science I’ve been studying all these years.” I quit my job and started funding a research project at the University of Chicago with Dr. Jack Gilbert, who’s now my co-founder, and bouncing ideas back and forth with him. He has a son with autism and we started talking about how there were connections in the patterns in the gut with autistic children and people with Parkinson’s.
Then I met my third co-founder, Dr. Suzanne Vernon, who has a background in infectious disease and seventeen years at the CDC and working on complex disease like chronic fatigue. We saw patterns there as well. We said, “What’s holding back the research and discovery and our ability to solve these complex diseases?” Jack said, “It’s access to samples from the broad population and this is a difficult sample to get.” That’s because it’s a stool sample and people don’t want to think about that or deal with it, but if you go back to Hippocrates who said, “All disease begins in the gut,” I think that’s right. That’s the inspiration behind founding the company was building this in order to help find a cure for Parkinson’s for my husband, but also to connect the dots across complex disease.
Biocollective Research: We’re more microbial than we are human.
I think about that moment and there’s a couple obviously, one, you get the diagnosis and then you’re down the trail of trying to figure out an A-ha moment. What was the reaction from your husband when you came home and say, “I think I’ve had my a-ha moment and I’m going to quit work and chase this full time?”
He’s always been very supportive of me and also believes that I am capable of finding a cure. When he saw that I was going to take all the energy that I had devoted to my previous careers that I was very successful in, he was pretty excited because he thought, “All this energy is now going to go into figuring out how to save me.”
Describe a little bit about Parkinson’s, at least as you understand Parkinson’s?
It’s a very complex disease. It’s a gradual decline of all the systems of the body, but at the core, the neurons and the dopamine system in the body that produces the signals that work the muscles in the body, all of those little pieces stopped working. Often, people will start with a tremor or something like that. There’s a loss of sense of smell, loss of taste, difficulty with vision sometimes, and focusing. Then over time the autonomic nervous system will slowly shut down. They’ll have trouble walking and talking. About 30% have a difficulty with cognition and memory. It’s pretty complicated and they often will call it a designer disease because one person could have these three symptoms and another person could have these five symptoms and they might only have two that overlap.
One of the most visible people that we know is Michael J. Fox.
He’s the poster child that everybody knows a lot more about it because of Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali. Head injury can also be a risk factor for Parkinson’s disease.
When you first started going down this path of discovery and you started getting connections to gut health, what changed in your household as far as diet or effect?
Back in 2002, when my husband was first diagnosed, I instinctively knew that food was part of the problem. I didn’t have the knowledge about the gut that I have now. Even back then, I cleaned out the pantry and everything that was processed went away and I tried to go all organic, but in 2002, it was pretty difficult to go all organic. There’s much more choice and availability now than there was back then. I’m a cook fortunately, so that helped. Then I started looking and saying, “If I can’t go all organic, then I need to understand the food supply that we have and try to make better choices around that.”
We eat a lot more fresh vegetables and things that we’ve cooked ourselves. We don’t eat processed food unless when you’re traveling sometimes that’s all there is available. We eat a lot less meat because there’s lot of antibiotics in the meat supply. We still do eat meat, but we’re very careful about making sure that that is meat from a source that doesn’t use antibiotics in the animals and it’s a healthy, clean diet of fruits and mostly vegetables and whole grains. We don’t eat bread much anymore because the preservatives in most of the bread on the shelf, there’s something called calcium propionate that is actually harmful to the gut and can cause a number of brain on fire issues because you will be making too much of a certain short chain fatty acid. That may actually be more of the problem people have with bread than gluten.
I’m fascinated the more I read and the more we talk, the more I’ve gotten fascinated. I started digging around and looking more. For some of the things that you’ve observed, there’s the move toward probiotics or eating yogurt or many of those approaches that people recognize and want to try to do something. What are your observations about the probiotic space and the yogurt craze?
Generally, I like yogurt, but what we’ve done in industrializing our food supply has limited the number of strains of bacteria that are used in those cultures in order to do large-scale industrial production. If you look back 100 years ago, people were making their own yogurt and they were using wild fermentation. There was a lot more variety in the strains of bacteria in the yogurt. What you find now on the shelf is most yogurts will have just a handful of tightly-controlled strains that are used for industrial production. I don’t eat a lot of the industrial yogurts. I actually make my own yogurt.
On the probiotic strain, you have the similar thing. If you walk into a store and they’ve got all these probiotics on the shelves and people will tell me, my eyes just glaze over and what I tell them is most of the probiotics on the shelf now are about the same. Two-thirds of them come from just two global manufacturers. One is Chr. Hansen out of Europe and the other is DuPont. Then there are some more boutique groups that provide some different strains, but the bulk of the things on the shelf are the same, which is part of our mission at the BioCollective is bringing back diversity and developing new strains for the probiotics market. We actually have one.
We were talking about that. It’s something that’s coming up. Before I go too far down that road, if folks are interested in learning more, how do they find you and your company?
They can find us on the web at www.TheBioCollective.com. They can also find us on Twitter @TBCMicrobes. You can find me on LinkedIn, Martha Carlin, and the BioCollective is also on LinkedIn and soon we’ll be on Instagram.
There are some things that you can do to help the audience and one of them is something you’re excited about and you’re in the patent process.
We have what we call a functional probiotic where we’re putting back a system. It’s different from the probiotics you see on the shelf now, which will maybe be a bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus, which if you’ve looked at probiotics, those are the common genus that you’ll see. We have actually added some other strains of bacteria that are from the food industry, so they’re generally regarded as safe, but you don’t typically see them in a probiotic formula. This particular formula has shown to improve regularity. It’s a nice probiotic if you have a problem with constipation and it’s also effective in helping with glucose metabolism. It takes a both fructose and glucose, which we get way too much of in the western diet down a different pathway to make a different sugar. We think that it’s going to be quite popular because it’s very different in the feedback from the people who’ve tried it has been great.
If somebody wants to find out when it hits the market and they’re interested, they can find you or find that where?
If you’re interested, we can follow up with you when it’s on the market, which we believe will be in November. If you just email us at Info@TheBioCollective.com, we will send you a coupon to buy it when it’s available.
All disease begins in the gut.
I’ve read few things about probiotics, coming in one way, coming in refrigerated and so on. What are the general misconceptions out there about probiotics and what they do and what they don’t do?
There’s a lot of misconceptions or just lack of understanding. The research on a couple of strains is pretty extensive showing how effective they are in triggering the immune system. They help with your immune system. There’s a group in Japan that makes the liquid probiotic Yakult. They’ve got a lot of research behind the strains in Yakult and what that does. I actually know somebody who was having some serious digestive problems and took it and within six hours of taking it was gone.
There’s also this misconception that just because it’s traveling through the system and it doesn’t stick to the wall of your gut that it’s not doing anything. If you know anything about fermentation science, there’s this virtuous cycle in the world of microbes where one dies and feeds the next one. That’s what we’re starting to learn in the microbial world with probiotics is even the dead cell wall of the probiotic after it dies going through your gut, it is sending signals to your immune system.
Stepping back, we were chatting before and for folks that there’s a great deal of interest in this field, you’ve got some projects potentially with some research groups. Can you talk about them?
We developed this kit. One of the ways to understand what’s going on in your gut is to take a look at your stool sample. It’s a difficult sample to collect because people don’t want to deal with it. Actually for the first six months after we founded the company, we spent our time working on and designing a kit that would make it easy, ick-free, and even a little bit humorous, so that you can collect your sample at home. We have a little hammock that sits on your toilet and it gets the entire sample.
You pick up the arms and drop it in the two bags. We have an ice brick. You FedEx it to us on ice, and then we that sample and divide it up into sub-samples. One of those samples goes off to sequencing and we provide data back to you about what’s in your gut and how you might be able to adjust your diet or do some things or where some risk points might be for you. It’s not a diagnostic of anything, we’re careful to say that, but it is a pretty extensive learning tool and something that you could take to a physician and talk to them about.
We take your sample that’s been divided up and we sell those subsamples to different researchers. One sample could have many different kinds of research done on it. More data to be able to learn faster. That’s one of those benefits. Then we share back with you the net profit off the sale of your sample. What we’re also doing in those samples is isolating and culturing new strains of bacteria. From our larger membership group, if we discover a new strain of bacteria that might be interesting in a probiotic and we take that through the regulatory process of what’s called generally regarded as safe and take that to market, we would also be sharing those revenues with our membership.
Our kit, because it is so easy to use and people are a lot more compliant with providing the sample, we’re actually working with academic institutions to use our kit for their larger research projects. We’re currently selling kits to the University of Chicago, the National University of Singapore, and we’re in discussions right now with Harvard to do some of the components of our kit. We’re starting to take the kit to the world as an easy way to be able to collect that sample.
The reason we bring up education is there’s a great deal of interest. As everyone might imagine, collecting a stool sample usually looks like a plastic jar and a tongue depressor. I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do with either, but neither paints a good picture, the reluctance to take and furnish When you were talking about membership, how does one become a member?
To become a member, you just come to TheBioCollective.com and join. There’s a two-step process where you complete the first step and there’s a consent to be involved in research. You complete the consent and once that’s done, you’ll get an email confirmation. Once you confirm your membership, then you can go into your dashboard, you can order a kit, and they’re available for purchase. They are a fairly high-end kit. The mid-point kid is $549. The high-end kit is $899. Then we have a low-end kit that’s $189. You don’t get as much information with that lower-end kit.
What you can do, you can become a member and you don’t have to order a kit. You answer the survey questions. We send out life and health history survey questions. If in your survey data, you qualify for one of the studies where we have a researcher who’s interested in some of the characteristics that you have, then we will provide you with a free kit. If you’re willing to wait for some period of time until there’s a researcher interested in somebody like you, then you can get a kit for free.
We were talking to and you were generous to offer for the mid-level kit that if you have a code, and it’s BLP250, that qualifies the first 200?
The first 200 people can get $250 off that midpoint kit.
I think about the whole process, you guys are collecting this data and there hasn’t been a robust amount of data collected, has there?
There was a project in the United States called the Human Microbiome Project that went from 2008 to 2012 if I have the dates right, and a similar project in Europe where they did a larger scale population study. There’s been a large population study in Belgium and another one in China. We’re starting to get larger data sets, but this is I’d say twelve to fifteen years ago. There wasn’t even the term the microbiome. It’s the fastest accelerating area of research around the globe, not just the human microbiome but also the earth microbiome, and the built environment microbiome. We are surrounded by this microbial world and we’re...
