INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Y Combinator backedZbioticshas spend two years developing what they&re billing as theworld first genetically engineered probiotic
The startup initial product isn''t exactly world-changing but it might just save your day — given they&ve invented an elixir of ‘next
day& life: Aka a hangover cure.
Although you actually have to take it beforemdash; or, well, during — drinking rather than waiting until
the moment of regretful misery when you wake up.
How have they done this For their first product they&ve bioengineered probiotic bacteria to
produce more of the enzyme that the body naturally uses to break down a toxic chemical byproduct of alcohol which is in turn responsible for
people feeling awful after too many alcoholic drinks
So you could say they&re hoping to put probiotics on steroids
(NB: No actual steroids are involved, obviously.)
While probiotics themselves aren''t at all new, having been in the human diet for
thousands of years — with wide acceptance that certain strains of these live ‘friendly& bacteria/microorganisms can be beneficial for
things like human gut health — the team approach of using gene editing techniques (specifically fiddling with the bacteria DNA) to enhance
what a probiotic can deliver to the person who ingested it is the novel thing here.
So new they haven''t yet conducted the placebo
controlled,peer-reviewed clinical trials that will ultimately be necessary to back up the efficacy claims they&re making for their biotech
enhanced hangover cure.
Nor are they therefore in a position to defend their forthcoming hangover elixir from accusations of supplementary
‘snake oil& — and, well, the supplement industry as a whole often has that charge leveled at it
And yet people keep buying and popping its pills
(Therein lies the temple rub, vitamin potion and wellness capsule
And, well, also the investor appetite for carving a fresh chunk out of a very large pie.)
Zbiotics co-founders Zack Abbott and Stephen Lamb
freely admit it going to be a challenge to stand out — and be considered credible amid all this, er,goop noise.
This consumer space is
rife with pseudo science,& agrees Abbott, who has a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Michigan
&Everybody is banging the drum of real science
And so we have a huge challenge to differentiate ourselves
And really convince the consumer that we&ve built something specific.
And it really is a first effort to invent a product to specifically
address their problem, as opposed to grabbing vitamins off a shelf, putting them in a bottle and labelling it.
There are some companies…
[that] address dehydration [for hangovers]; that not enough
There are other companies they just put [vitamins] into a bottle, that not enough
There so much noise out there
How do we break through that It could take some time,& admits Lamb
&And it could take a lot of work.
Tested in vitro — and on birthday beers
At this pre-launch stage, the founders say they&ve tested their
beefed up probiotic on themselves — and will go so far as to say they&ve seen &promising results&.
I had the fortune of having the final
prototype built just a week or two before my birthday and so I ended up trying it out for my birthday and it was great,& adds Abbott.
They
are also keen to say they don''t want to encourage irresponsible drinking
So don''t expect their future marketing to talk about ‘a biotech license for your next bender&
Product pricing is tbc but they say they&re aiming for widely affordable, rather than lux or overly premium.
With hangover results that
could speak for themselves, their hope is that people will feel confident enough to have a pop and see whether the idea of a biotech
enhanced probiotic that pumping out extraalcohol-metabolizing enzymes stands up to several pints of lager and a few chasers (or not).
Though
— when asked — they do say they also want to carry out clinical trials to glean data on the efficacy of their hangover cure.
We are a
very science-first company and so we don''t want to be making any claims about anything that we don''t have data to back up,& says
Abbott.
At this point… we&ve done significant testing in a test tube, in vitro, and shown that the bacteria we&ve built do perform the
function that they&re supposed to perform
Which is to break down acetaldehyde
But we can''t make further health claims until we do clinical trials
And we in the process of drafting up a protocol for a human clinical study with one of our scientific advisors — Dr Joris Verster — a
world expert in academic hangover research
But in the meantime we can''t make those claims until we have that.
They are also planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign later this year
— in order to start making some of their own noise and trying to drum up interest and, well, willing guinea pigs.
Though they are also
adamant the product is entirely safe
It just the efficacy vs hangover misery that yet to be stood up in human clinical trials.
While a hangover cure might seem a trivial problem
to focus high tech bioengineering effort on, they say the unmissable fact of a hangover — or indeed the lack of one — was one of
thereasons why they selected such an &everyday problem& for the first application of their technique vs going for a more fuzzy (and, well
forgiving on the efficacy front) generic goal like ‘wellness&
Or indeed targeting an issue where a ‘cure& is pretty subjective and hard to quantify (like anti-aging).
Absolutely no one is going to
mistake a hangover for feeling great
Though of course the power of the placebo effect working its psychological magic cannot be ruled out — not until they&ve clinically tested
their stuff against it in robust trials.
On the other hand, even if it ends up that a placebo effect is what making people feel better,
given that the target problem is (just) a hangover there aren''t likely to be too many consumer complaints and cries for money back.
One of
the reasons why we chose this use-case was that it would allow people to try it and feel the advocacy for themselves
That was very important,& says Abbott
&It something you can feel the results of
So that was really important
Having a visceral read-out of efficacy
People can experience the product working for themselves.
The other reason for choosing a hangover cure was more practical: They needed a
problem that could be solved with an enzyme and therefore which could be helped by genetically engineering bacteria to produce more of the
sought for substance.
The whole point here is that we&ve engineered a bacteria to express an enzyme specifically that can solve a problem,&
&Enzymes are these really powerful complex molecules that are not easy to deliver to people
So it has to be a problem that you can solve with an enzyme.
There has to be a nice fit with the technology
So we look for things where parts of the body where bacteria has access to you; you have a lot of bacteria in your gut, in your skin, in
your mouth, in your nose… places were we can deliver bacteria and they can express these enzymes to solve problems of everyday health.
We
start with probiotics that have an extremely good safety profile, have been used in regular food by humans for centuries
And we identify those because we know that they&re going to be safe, and we know that they&re going to be able to interact with your body in
the way that we want them to
And then we engineer those bacteria as oppose to choosing something that your body may never have seen before,& adds Lamb, who brings prior
experience helping food companies enter new markets to the startup.
He says they&ve been safety testing their prototype probiotic for the
past year and change at this point — &making sure that this is ready for market before we actually launch anything&.
We are not going to
launch any kind of product until it completely safety tested according to every regulatory framework here in the U.S
— and we&re totally comfortable with that,& he adds emphatically.
They do also intend to move beyond hangover cures, with the plan being
to develop additional probiotics that target other use-cases
And say they&ve been building a gene editing platform that flexible for that purpose
Though they&re not disclosing exactly what else they&re working on or eyeing up — wanting to keep that powder dry for now.
I spent over a
year building the first product, and the lion share of that time was spent making sort of a genetic platform… that was adaptable to
multiple use-cases,& says Abbott
&At first I just engineered the bacteria to be able to make a lot of enzyme generally
Whatever enzyme I put into the platform
And so the first enzyme I put in was to break downacetaldehydes
That being said it could be easily switched out for an enzyme to break down… a different toxin that your body has to deal with
So the platform is very adaptable and it was designed to be that way.
That being said there are certain use-cases we&re really excited about
that may require additional optimization techniques in order to make them work specifically for that use-case
So, generally speaking, some may require more work than others but the platform we started with gives us a good launch pad,& he adds.
As
well as YC standard startup deal, the team has raised an additional $2.8M in seed funding this year for RD and the initial product roadmap
They&re hoping the forthcoming crowdfunding campaign will give them the additional lift to ship the consumer product into the US
market.
Investors in the seed round aren''t being disclosed at this stage
Abbott also notes that he previously got a small amount of pre-seed funding, early on, to fund building the prototype.
It fair to say that
biotech as an investment space isn''t a bet for every investor — given product development risks, timeframes and perhaps also some of the
deflated hype of past years
Which perhaps explains why Zbiotics investors aren''t ready to shout all about it just yet
Even if they&re feeling great about not having a hangover.
We&ve found different levels of success with different investors,& agrees Lamb
&Where we&ve found the most success is in investors who see the vision for the technology and understand it as something that is and can be
truly innovative relative to what on the market today
So probiotics themselves — traditional probiotics — are a $40BN industry, and the fact is that most of those probiotics don''t do
anything or are inconsistent at best
So we found investors who have a mindset where they can see how a novel probiotic, something that actually is engineered to work and is
based in a high level of biotech is something that can really disrupt that area
And that may or may not be traditional biotech investors
Oftentimes it investors who are really looking to push the envelope.
We definitely had to find the right investor and the traditional
biotech investor often is looking for different things than we had to offer,& adds Abbott
&And different pathways — more traditional pathways
We&re going not conventionally I think with bringing this hard biotech to market quickly
So it definitely is threading the needle and finding the right investors.
