| Richard Lin: |
00:06 |
One calorie in for me is going to be completely different for you, and we’re all using outdated nutrition facts for all these products. In the future what we see is microbiome facts that looks at your entire microbiome profile from your skin to your mouth to your genitals to your gut, and so forth. Every single product that you interact with in the future is going to be personalized for you, based on your microbiome signature. |
| Kendall Kendrick: |
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HumanOS. Learn. Master. Achieve. |
| Dan Pardi: |
00:26 |
We tend to think of ourselves as completely distinct organisms, separate from others, but all animals and plants form vital symbiotic relationships with microorganisms, and we are no exception. That includes the organisms on us and within us. One example is the gut microbiome, or the collection of bacteria and other microbes living inside the gastrointestinal tract. The number of microorganisms inhabiting the gut has been estimated to be 10 times greater than our own cell number that makes up our body. We are, in a sense, a giant super organism. It is only in the last decade or so that we have come to fully appreciate the influence and the potential of the gut microbiome in human health. We now know that the gut microbes play a critical role in many aspects of their host’s physiology, including the immune system and metabolism, and even brain function and health. The changes in microbial communities in the gut may contribute to an astounding array of human disease. |
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Individuals who follow this area of research, like me, have become interested in finding ways to understand and optimize our own gut microbiome, and tools have emerged that purport to help us enhance the composition and function of our own gut microbes. For instance, commercial probiotics or live microbial cultures meant to colonize the gut with good bugs have exploded in popularity. It is now estimated to command a worldwide market of 37 billion US dollars. In parallel, companies have emerged that offer a personalized analysis of the microbial contents of fecal samples, which is a way to understand the composition of your gut microbiome. |
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00:39 |
But the human microbiome remains a bit of an enigma. For instance, by what criteria can we conclusively identify what is a healthy versus an unhealthy gut microbiome? Furthermore, even if we can make such determinants, can we really do anything about it? Today on humanOS Radio I speak with Richard Lin. Richard became more deeply invested in his health when he developed a problem that failed to respond to conventional medical interventions. He eventually realized that a disruption in the gut microbiota was the likely cause of his illness. This inspired him to start the company Thryve Inside. Thryve helps individuals test and learn about their own microbiota by providing at-home microbiome test kits. But here’s what sets Thryve apart: they don’t just give you information, they also endeavor to provide solutions. Thryve offers personalized probiotics to their customers, which are formulated based on their individual microbiome composition and their individual health goals. So, let’s delve into this subject more deeply with a conversation with the man himself. Richard, welcome to humanOS Radio. |
| Richard Lin: |
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Thanks for having me on the show. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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What inspired you to start the company? |
| Richard Lin: |
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The company’s called Thryve Inside, and we’re the world’s first gut health company that incorporates both microbiome DNA testing, as well as personalized probiotics, and so our product provides a testing kit that you can order directly from our website. You do it at the convenience of your home. We look at the bacteria in your stools, just a little piece off your toilet paper. In about two weeks you get a report back, and in that report you see all the different bacteria in your body, how they relate to your health, and then what foods you should eat to improve the ratios of good and bad bacteria in the body. We also send a personalized probiotic supplement that we worked with multiple different manufacturers and research companies around the world to catalog a large amount of strains in order to personalize probiotics for each person. |
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03:32 |
Started this company because about two years ago I took antibiotics, ended up getting really sick from them and hospitalized, and I went to multiple different opinions asking, “Why do I feel so sick?” Why was I going to the bathroom so much? How come I couldn’t sleep and getting cold sweat, and so on? Pretty much every doctor told me, “Hey, you’re too young and you look healthy. There’s probably nothing wrong with you and you’re just a hypochondriac, you’re depressed, so here’s some antidepressants.” It was after that interaction that I started saying, “Okay, I need to take control of this situation. I need to learn a little bit more and not just go off my doctors.” So, I started researching and came across this very serious gut infection that is caused by antibiotics. Going back to my fourth opinion, asked my doctor to prescribe a PCR DNA test for C. diff, which is a very serious gut bacteria. It came back positive, got treated for that, and then I felt much better. |
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So, it was during that interaction that I realized this is a pretty common thing that happens to a multitude of people, and so in this journey I was in different forums, different closed Facebook groups where different people were dealing with different types of chronic illness from, say, Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis, to digestive issues like IBS, Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, to weight issues, diabetes, prediabetes, being overweight, and so on. They were all looking toward how the bacteria in our bodies actually affect their disease state, and there really wasn’t a product out there that could help them understand all the scientific jargon and technical literature. I wanted to build a product that could make that easy and accessible for everyday people, so that’s how Thryve came about. |
| Dan Pardi: |
03:34 |
It looks like you’re doing a very comprehensive approach, so there’s education, there’s learning about yourself, and then there’s a solution. Talk to us a little bit about that process. How many different formulations of probiotics do you have, and then how many different variables are you looking at in order to make that determination of what might be a better choice for someone A versus somebody B? |
| Richard Lin: |
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Sure. So, just at high level, our probiotic personalization is based off of two things, the first one being a questionnaire. It’s actually 80% based on a questionnaire. The first kind of step is we ask you about your health goals. What kind of symptoms do you have? We dive deeper into different areas of your health, and that helps us catalog the right amount of strains for you. The second part is a testing kit, and so the testing kit’s about 20% of the algorithm, if you will, and if we find any overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria, we’ll incorporate different strains and different prebiotics and vitamins and minerals in order to combat that. So, that’s how our decision tree works. Right now we have about 30 plus different strains that we can use, and that personalizes the experience for each individual. |
| Dan Pardi: |
03:37 |
How quickly can you see the effects of the probiotic take hold within a secondary sample of feces from that same individual? |
| Richard Lin: |
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When we look at the microbiome profile after a person’s been on our program, on our probiotics and our food recommendations, we do see the strains attach to about 30 to 40% of people. The other 60% that have more transient nature with the probiotics, they still feel the benefit, so the probiotics still pass through the digestive tract, they still produce the enzymes, the vitamins, the chemicals, and so on and so forth in the body that help improve health, but they don’t necessarily stay in the gut. We have seen the ones that do stay in the gut see a longer lasting effect, even after they stop taking the probiotics. |
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We’re still trying to figure out exactly why that is. Everyone’s body is pretty unique and the biology is different. One of my theories is that some of these probiotic strains that we have are similar to different strains that the successful cohort may have had as they were growing up, so be that in the first three years of life when the microbiome is being shaped that there was different kind of probiotics in their gut that the body recognizes is not foreign and is part of the immune system. So, we think the theory of why some people actually have probiotics that stick within the gut, for some, they just have more of a transient nature. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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In an ideal scenario for somebody who’s really invested in the subject and just wants to fully capitalize on what you guys do, how frequently would you actually do a fecal test? |
| Richard Lin: |
05:40 |
Our protocol is to test every quarter. The reason why we see that is because, based on our customer data, every three months it seems to be the most changes that happen, especially for people that don’t necessarily do any crazy life events like take an antibiotic or travel halfway across the world, or try a new diet, and so on. So, the majority of our customers we encourage to test every quarter to track the progress of how your microbiome is going and be able to find trends, whether trends to potentially have symptoms, or trends that show that you’re approaching better health. That’s what we would encourage. We do have customers that test every month, a little bit crazier ones that like to get as much data as possible, and we also have customers that try every six months. But I recommend using it every quarter. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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That’s reflected in a lot of health initiatives, so you’ve got people that are just looking to optimize, and then you’ve got the what I call unsatisfied sick. They’re really trying to solve a specific issue for those optimizers. Is there a wellness approach? Is there anything that you’ve identified in the non-sick that has been an area of opportunity to feel even better or to perform better? |
| Richard Lin: |
05:58 |
Yeah, absolutely, a couple. The first one is energy levels. People aren’t necessarily sick, but they lack energy; they’re more fatigued. We’ve seen, with certain bacteria in the body when they increase certain foods that increase those good bacteria, that they do optimize their energy levels. Now, one could argue is it placebo or is it actually the changed microbiome? We do track the biome and that bacteria actually increasing, but we’re still trying to discover on more of those areas. People with digestion and those issues, not necessarily sick people, but people that want to optimize their nutrition, be able to take in more vitamins, utilize their proteins and fats and carbs better, there are certain bacteria in studies that have shown to help with that as well. So, more like performance recovery. One is skin. I would venture to say that everyone that’s healthy wants to have clear skin, and we’ve seen a lot of those as well with certain bacteria increasing with the right foods, and then that improves skin for our customers as well. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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It’s also interesting, the fact that you’re using machine learning, which it has utility in a lot of different fields. Describe what machine learning is, and then how you guys use it to create a better product. |
| Richard Lin: |
06:39 |
The way we’re using machine learning is there’s two phases, so the first phase, we look at all the research articles that’s available right now and we pull in all the rich metadata, [inaudible 00:10:07] which looks through all the texts and the scientific journals. We pulled out the information because these programs aren’t necessarily perfect. Sometimes the metadata that’s taken out is not accurate, and so what machine learning does is it keeps finding the right path to get the right answer, and over time the machine learns, based on this bacteria that we pulled out from the study, here’s all the health benefits and here’s the error and the success of this actually being the right answer. |
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So, that’s the first phase, that we pull in all the scientific literature, we use natural language processing to summarize, and we use machine learning to ensure that we continue to get the right texts and the right information, the right output for our reports. The second part of our machine learning is using the customer sample data, so customers that actually buy all their health information, what kind of diets to eat, how they feel, symptoms, and so on and so forth, we incorporate that with the microbiome data and we start mapping. |
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06:46 |
So, we start correlating. If a person has irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhea, how can the machine map out those specific symptoms to specific microbes in the body? Based on predicting, you can get a high level accuracy of saying, “Hey, someone with diarrhea may specifically have this type of clostridium type of bacteria.” That’s the second phase of how we’re using machine learning. Now that we’re getting more and more data about ourselves, especially our health, it’s really interesting seeing the different technologies and tools that we’re using to be able to make more insights out of it, and so the good thing is we have a lot of data, but mining it and making sense of it is the next hurdle. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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What are some other things that you’re looking to do with the product? There, of course, are other ways to intervene within the gut, not just probiotics, polyphenols, things like that. Do you intend to capitalize on that, or do you just want to stay really focused on helping people identify the right probiotic strain for whoever they are and their goals? |
| Richard Lin: |
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What we see in the next three to five years is a complete shift of how we view our health, and I’ll give you more specific examples. When you think about all the products that we interact with, whether it’s the food that we eat, the supplements that we take, the medications we take, the lotions, the shampoos, the toothpaste that we put on our bodies, food we feed our kids, formulas, and so on, even our pet food, one calorie in for me is going to be completely different for you. We’re all using health data nutrition facts for all these products, and in the future what we see is microbiome facts that looks at your entire microbiome profile from your skin to your mouth to your genitals to your gut, and so forth. |
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07:49 |
Every single product that you interact with in the future is going to be personalized for you, based on your microbiome signature. We’re still going to be focused on the probiotic supplementation, but that helps us get to a point of… The testing portion is really huge, and gathering the data from the entire family, from the husband, the wife, the kids, and the pets, and being the data platform that is able to tell each customer what products they should interact with and so forth. So, that’s where we think the future is going to be at, and part of that process is gathering all that data through testing and being able to provide that to our customer base in the future. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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Right now there’s been a rapid appreciation of the importance of the microbiome over the last just 15 years, and increasingly, there are now products out there that do an assessment, and then recommend a product. How are you guys different from them? How do you distinguish from the others that are out there that are doing what you’re doing? |
| Richard Lin: |
07:59 |
Yeah, it’s a great question. So, when we think about our space, especially the fusion between the microbiome test, food recommendations, and a personalized probiotic, from my knowledge, we don’t really know of any company doing the same thing. The ones that are trying to come in this space don’t have a product to market yet, but we would like to think there’s two camps. There’s probiotic-only companies, and then the one-size-fits-all, the ones you find in Whole Foods and so on and so forth. Then, you have the microbiome testing only companies. |
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Kind of the biggest difference between our tests and others is… The first one is our testing kit. When we’re developing and doing the research and development on that, we realize that every other kit on the market were either using a dry swab, or they’re using antimicrobials in the liquid buffer to preserve the stool. The reason why they use antibiotics in their buffer is because when you ship off a sample and it’s in the mail, it’s hot, the bacteria within that tube could actually overgrow and you can actually have an overgrowth of pathogens within the sample, so when you sequence, it’s not even the same sample anymore. |
| Dan Pardi: |
08:40 |
It’s not representative of what was shipped. |
| Richard Lin: |
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Exactly. But the problem with that method is that when you lyse the cells, when you break down the cell walls and the DNA falls out of the bacteria, when you try to extract and pipette it out of the tube and then you put it into sequencing machines, it causes a lot of noise in the sequencing process. So, we developed our own proprietary liquid buffer that preserves the bacteria, doesn’t kill them, and it provides 28% more depth in terms of picking up species and having more accuracy. So, our kit itself is already superior than every other testing company out there. The second part is, like I mentioned, the machine learning and the NLP that we do with the research articles. If you use any other microbiome testing service, they’ll tell you what bacteria is in your body, which is pretty much written in Latin, and they’ll tell you what percentages. |
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08:58 |
So, they’ll say, “Hey, you have Bifidobacterium longum at 12%,” and as a consumer you’re wondering, what does that even mean? So, you have to copy and paste that into Google, you have to go on PubMed. You get maybe 5,000, 10,000 articles on that one bacteria, and you’re supposed to read through all the articles to figure out why that bacteria matters. We’re the first company that actually has the largest microbiome database with really rich metadata on each bacteria. So, what are the health benefits? Do they create biofilms? What kind of foods do they digest? So on and so forth, and we map that to 1,000 food ingredients so we know exactly which food, based on current research, increases X, Y, Z bacteria. |
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We go even a step further with their testing, where we have something called a research confidence algorithm, and based on if the studies were in vivo, whether they’re in vitro, whether they’re human clinical studies, how long of a duration were those studies, how large was the sample size, and so forth? We create each article based on strong, medium, mixed, or emerging research. So, every recommendation that we give to the customer is completely graded for them to see, and that transparency allows them to know how far is the science, really, on each of these recommendations? We’re the first company that actually exposes these methods to the consumer so you know exactly if eating broccoli is a strong recommendation, then I know I’m in a good place and I’m going to follow through with that. So, that’s one part of the reporting that really makes it competitive and differentiated compared to everybody else. |
| Dan Pardi: |
09:50 |
This is a really tough field. It’s also very important, and I think you’re doing it right, given what technology can do today. I don’t know the space well enough to know if there’s other opportunities that you are missing, but I’m impressed with how thorough the approach is to get at personalization in a way that’s going to be different than just the luck of getting something off the shelves. If you were to put together, let’s say, a commercial probiotic that you could buy at Good Earth or Whole Foods or something, or go through the personalization approach, do you think that for a lot of people that are not necessarily sick, do you think that there’s really a difference that we can eke out through your process? |
| Richard Lin: |
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If we were to approach retail and have a product that fits all, or people that are healthy, generally, there’s areas where healthy people want to actually increase their health versus more serious issues. So, for instance, improving your skin, improving your immunity during wintertime. Constipation is huge, even though you’d be surprised how many healthy people are constipated. So, there’s these different areas where we believe that we have strains in our catalog, and we’re adding more as time goes on, that could potentially be productized in a way that can just be offered off the shelf versus… The current trend of probiotics seems to be a little bit less scientific, where they throw in as much CFUs, and if your audience isn’t familiar with CFUs, it’s colony-forming units, so the total amount of bacteria per serving or per capsule. |
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09:59 |
For them it’s more marketing. Let’s have very, very high CFUs, because when the number’s bigger, people just think it’s better. Let’s have as many strains as we can, so let’s throw 50 different strains in there, not knowing how they all interact with each other and if they actually even help. So, they’re taking a huge shotgun approach where we think, for us, as we break down the different cohorts if we were going to productize it for the mainstream, that would probably be the approach that we’d do. I don’t know if we would ever sell our testing kit at a Whole Foods. Yeah, I know 23andMe, I think, sells kits at Target, so maybe Target would be a better avenue. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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Have you noticed an area that distinguished itself as the biggest impact, from your probiotics |
| Richard Lin: |
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Digestion is huge, specifically with ulcerative colitis, with Crohn’s, with irritable bowel syndrome, some acid reflux, constipation, so on, are large in that area. The second one is autoimmunity. With eczema, Hashimoto’s, and certain types of autoimmune diseases, I have seen less frequent flareups, and their flareups are vastly reduced in terms of pain and so on. So, those two areas are pretty big. Mood is something that we’re seeing upcoming. Obviously, that’s a little bit more subjective and a little bit harder to track. When you talk about digestive issues, I can actually see how many times I’m going to the bathroom, I can see if my stool is shaped. With autoimmunity, with Eczema, I can see the patch of that rash. Is it getting worse, or is it getting better? Mood is a little bit harder to gauge. We’ve seen the mood cohort, as well as sleep, pretty much related to each other. So, when we track sleep, people do sleep deeper sleep, fall asleep easier, stay asleep longer, based on some of the reported feedback, and so that’s another area that we’re pretty excited about. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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As a [inaudible 00:18:38] I can tell you that there’s a lot more research looking at the effects of sleep next to eating behaviors, but there’s much fewer studies looking at the effects of food on sleep itself. But there are a few, and one of them was done by Marie-Pierre St-Onge, who showed that fiber intake across the day was a determinant of increases in slow-wave sleep and sleep continuity, which is less arousals over the course of the night. So, that would resonate with what your findings are with probiotics and sleep. |
| Richard Lin: |
11:26 |
Interesting. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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Do you plan on expanding outside of the gut microbiome? |
| Richard Lin: |
11:43 |
We’re pretty focused on the gut microbiome right now, but we do see ourselves and we have plans in our roadmap to branch out in a multitude of ways. So, just in the gut microbiome, when you talk about the microbiome, it’s not just bacteria. There’s yeast, there’s viruses, and so that’s an area that we need to conquer as well, just in the gut. We do want to expand to the skin, to genital health, and so forth. That’s just human health. We also are looking into children health as well. It’s a little bit different the first three years of life and how the microbiome is rapidly shifting is a complete different use case than, say, an adult gut microbiome. |
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Finally, veterinary, so with pets, different dogs, cats. It’s interesting, people probably care about their pets sometimes more than their kids, funny enough. I think there’s actually a large opportunity there to improve veterinary health through personalization of food and probiotics, and things like that. We’re starting to see a trend of how people are taking care of their pets, straying away from generic dog food, since they’ve been seeing a lot of different types of symptoms coming up with their dogs and going to more whole food sources for their pets. So, we think there’s a little bit of opportunity there as well. |
| Dan Pardi: |
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Do you recommend any other wellness advice in combination with your probiotic, whether it’s certain types of foods to eat or other sources of probiotics through fermented foods? |
| Richard Lin: |
12:50 |
Yeah, so obviously, we personalize the food recommendations. We have all types of foods, from vegetables to fruits, meats, and so on. We don’t have this yet, but we’re building out a supplement recommendation as well, so all the research based on what supplements increase, what bacteria, that’s something that we want to get involved in. Whether or not we actually sell those vitamins is another story. We may potentially get more into the vitamin business, just depending on the market data, but it wouldn’t be far-fetched to see us referring customers to different vitamin companies based on their microbiome results. But in terms of the microbiome, we definitely see it as one part of the toolkit of your health. We still have human genes, we still have different blood markers and hormones, and so on and so forth that interacts all with each other, and we try to be as holistic and comprehensive as possible. |
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If there’s something that we can’t find in the biome that’s relating to a person’s symptoms, we’ll try to partner with other companies. One company we love working with is EverlyWell. They do at-home diagnostics for all kinds of labs that you would find normally at your doctor’s office, so they’re tracking, say, CBC, CRP, different hormones, testosterone, thyroid, and so on. We do see ourselves branching out into human genetics, into basic lab work, and incorporating all that data back with a mic around it to give you a more comprehensive picture. Whether we build those tests or we work with other partners is still up in the air, but we think about our product eventually getting to that point. |
| Dan Pardi: |
13:05 |
Is there anything that I’m forgetting asking that’s critical to what you guys are doing now? |
| Richard Lin: |
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Maybe the current stage of where we’re at. As your audience may know, we’re an early stage startup, growing quite rapidly, built a very strong team of scientific advisors, professors from MIT to Harvard, Stanford, UC Davis, all geared in the microbiome, nutrition with probiotics, with disease interaction in the microbiome, and so forth. So, that was one of our key things, was just build a very strong, scientific advisory board, bring on strong scientists to validate all the information I’m providing. But it’s really interesting, because our business is multi-disciplinary, if you think about it. There’s the marketing-brand side. How do you make something super technical and scienc-y sexy? At the end of the day, if you want to advance this area, it has to be sexy. People will need to want to do it, especially the mass consumer, and the more people that we get, the more data we get, the better it is. |
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So, there’s the marketing-branding side, but then there’s also the computer science and programming side in order to build this product, and so that’s another discipline, and then you have the life sciences. How do you validate the data that you’re giving customers as accurate and as helpful and useful? That’s been a quite a journey to build together the team, build a foundation in order to get this product to market and execute on it, but super excited about that and glad to be able to share this with your audience. |
| Dan Pardi: |
14:00 |
By the way, can people engage with your services without doing that fecal test? |
| Richard Lin: |
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Absolutely. So, we have three different price plans. We have just the probiotic personalization. If you just want to do the questionnaire and get a semi-personalized experience, we can do that. We also have the testing kit if you just want to buy a testing kit. We realize a lot of quantified self people don’t necessarily want to take probiotics, they just want to get the data and learn about themselves. There’s also that option, and we have a gut health bundle that incorporates both the testing kit and the probiotics as one offering that provides both the prebiotic recommendations from the test, as well as the personalization of the probiotic working in conjunction for improving your gut health. We always encourage customers to do the program, but some people have different tastes. |
| Dan Pardi: |
14:02 |
I have experienced your product. I think it’s superior and I look forward to continuing to benefit from it in its old version and as it advances over time. So, thank you. |
| Richard Lin: |
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Thank you for having me, and for your audience, if they want to find us, they can go to www.thryveinside.com. That’s T-H-R-Y-V-E inside.com. All our social, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, @ThryveInside. So, thank you so much. |
| Kendall Kendrick: |
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Thanks for listening, and come visit us soon at humanOS.me. |
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