A probiotic culture experiment in the laboratory.
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Seed Health has been dedicated to scientific breakthroughs in the microbiome field since its founding in 2015, but perhaps its greatest success to date has been becoming profitable as a bioscience startup. The popularity of the company’s original product, DS-01, a daily probiotic and prebiotic supplement and its pediatric equivalent — sold directly to consumers in a 30-day supply in sleek green containers via a subscription model — now allows the company to invest in cutting-edge science related to probiotics and human and environmental health.
“We are one of the few biotechnology companies that can boast profitability, and one of the most impressive aspects of profitability is that you can reinvest in future innovation and cutting-edge science,” he said. said Ara Katz, co-founder of Seed Health and who was named to the inaugural CNBC Changemakers list earlier this year.
On Thursday, Seed Health launched CODA, a computational biology platform funded by profits from its consumer business. “I always thought about building a sustainable business model that would allow us to continue to pursue cutting-edge scientific research,” Katz said.
The company’s SeedLabs division also works on environmental applications for bacteria and the microbiome, such as probiotics for corals and honeybees, bacteria to break down plastic, and the use of volcanic bacteria for carbon capture.
Offering subscriptions to consumer products in increments of one, three or six months allowed the company to bet on riskier scientific discoveries.
Katz said one of the benefits of the company’s revenue-generating subscription model is greater flexibility and insight into financial decision-making, “and ensuring that we can actually make these investments at long term. science that we can accelerate the translation into real-world impact,” she added.
Co-founders and co-CEOs of Seed Health, Ara Katz and Raja Dhir.
Seed health
At its core, CODA is a computational tool that uses AI to process massive amounts of phenotypic and genomic data from the Human Phenotype Project, a massive collection of human data points spanning decades.
Advised by top researchers, including Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science and Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute, the Human Phenotype Project has a global sample of more than 11,000 participants – and a goal of reach 100,000 participants – cataloged each year over 25 years, including several biological measurements, from genome, proteome, transcriptome to microbiome.
Raja Dhir, co-founder of Katz and co-CEO of Seed Health, said CODA and its accompanying dataset will help standardize microbiome scientific methods, which has long been a problem in the field. Previous studies have drawn conclusions based on smaller samples, using sampling, analysis and storage methods that are not standardized across the industry.
“What is healthy control? You can’t just take a random person and assume they’re healthy or not. But when you have 10,000 people and you have all this data on them …let’s compare our least healthy people to our healthiest people and develop a lot more tools,” said Dhir, who oversees Seed Health’s environmental research and has a expertise in the application of scientific research for product innovation.
As an example, Dhir cited a study of 500 people that might conclude that the presence of a certain bacteria predicts, say, weight gain, but another study of 500 different people conducted by an organization or a different institution might draw a completely different conclusion. conclusion. CODA’s large sample size and numerous data points offer the potential for standardization that has not yet been achieved, according to Dhir.
“We found that the whole probiotic field, and certainly the whole obsession with gut health, didn’t really reflect the scientific approach that we really thought, that we really wanted to take and pioneer,” Katz added .
Independent experts in the field agree that the science needs to improve. “I see a lot of probiotics out there, everyone is jumping on the probiotic bandwagon, like you see probiotic drinks, probiotic food, and I’m like, really? Does this really work? And this “For me, as a scientist, and someone who wants to improve health, it’s frustrating. So I think increasing the scientific rigor, the testing, doing these clinical trials, I think that’s going to be really important.” said Dr. Arpana Gupta, associate professor at UCLA and co-director of the Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. “There’s definitely promise.”
Initial applications of CODA are in metabolic health, brain health, longevity, and menopause, areas of research chosen because they have already been identified as areas of human health for which early CODA data presented the strongest evidence. solid.
“Taking these results (from CODA), and eventually translating them and bringing them to the billions of people who could benefit from them, I think that would be the greatest contribution and that excites me, because then, without CODA, all these results would end in, maybe really nice articles, but just articles. And that way, they could eventually be translated into people,” said Segal, who has studied metabolic health and the link between the microbiome and body composition.
Segal said the Human Phenotype project included the collection of food diaries and medical histories, as well as blood glucose monitoring records and DEXA (bone densitometry) scans, much of which spans more than two decades and provides a insight into the evolution and aging of the human microbiome. .
“It’s a huge step forward not only in the standardization of data, but also in the different types of data. That’s why it’s called deep phenotyping, because phenotyping means all of these things come together to form the phenotype of a person,” Dhir said. “That’s what CODA opens up. … There are things that before were drowned out in noise, in the noise of bioinformatics data, that are now coming out as such clear signals.”
Seed Health has worked on several efforts around pioneering microbiome science for human and planetary health.
Many in the field believe this approach is intended to have broader applications.
“I think the biggest areas right now are cancer,” said Dr. Joseph Petrosino, a Baylor College of Medicine professor and director of the Center for Metagenomics and Microbiome Research and a member of Seed Health’s scientific advisory board. . “The ability to use the microbiome as both a diagnostic tool and a potential therapeutic tool to help respond to various cancer treatments, as well as avoid some of the side effects of these treatments,” Petrosino said.
Seed Health says it is not currently considering using CODA for cancer-related research.
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