Scaleup Garage 2020: MedBiome
As diseases and illnesses evolve with the times, so too does modern medicine and medical science, in an effort to combat both newly discovered and long-known illnesses. Bill Cheliak, CEO of MedBiome, explains that “We’ve come to realize that there are 40 to 60 trillion microbes that live in our gut, which we call microbiomes.” — that’s about 1.5–2.5 kilos of microbiomes in the average person. “This mass of microbial ecosystems is important for our overall health,” he continues. “We’ve seen so many connections between the gut and the brain. A number of disease states, be it mental, physical, or neurological, has to do with the microbiomes in our bodies.”
Cheliak’s organization, MedBiome, seeks to “develop a system to very accurately culture the human microbiome in specialized conditions to accurately represent what’s happening in our own gut.” MedBiome uses a technique called RapidAIM (Analysis of Individual Microbiomes), where they replicate special and protected environments in test tubes in order to analyze microbiomes under different environmental circumstances in order to better understand the environment’s impact on microbiomes.
RapidAIM allows MedBiome to do three things: First, culturing microbiomes allows MedBiome to better understand the body’s metabolic pathways by observing the sequence composition of microbiomes. This enables researchers to see the differences in the metabolic pathways of those with and without certain diseases.
Second, MedBiome is able to understand not only how metabolites are produced, but where they go after production. “If there is a metabolite involved with certain diseases, we can follow the metabolite to understand it specifically,” Cheliak says. This can help researchers uncover what certain metabolites may result in after being produced in the body and following certain pathways.
Finally, RapidAIM allows for a deeper understanding of how different drugs (e.g. antibiotics) affect microbiomes. Researchers are able to better understand the interactions between different drugs and microbiomes, and how they influence each other. “Taking a drug to treat a condition can be modified by the microbiome,” Cheliak explains. This means that different people can react differently to the same drug — it all depends on their microbiomes.
MedBiome came about from research interest in the disease condition IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease), which then expanded to diseases including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. A major project being conducted by the team involves a clinical trial conducted around IBD in pediatrics (children through age 17), and has determined that there is likely a large environmental factor in the development of IBD. “Treatments for IBD today are not curative in any way,” Cheliak explains, “but instead dampen the effects of the disease.” Cheliak believes that it’s important to find better, longer-lasting solutions to treat these diseases that are easier on the body than current drug treatments. “Young people with these diseases develop physical and mental developmental delays, and we want to provide the best paths forward for these children that we can.”
“In its broadest sense, we want to be able to show that it is possible to influence through therapies that the microbiome can fundamentally improve health and disease conditions,” Cheliak says. Medicine used to follow the same procedure for a disease every time it was encountered: “From the thirties until the seventies, it was believed that stomach ulcers were caused by too much stress, or too much booze.” Intervention therapy for a stomach ulcer was all surgical — it wasn’t until the late 70s that this methodology was brought into question, and upon further research it was discovered that ulcers were actually brought on by bacterial infection. This discovery has led to further questioning of medical approaches, and has opened the eyes of the people to change the course of medicine.
“We want to achieve serious positive benefits for the patient population we work with. A key component of what we’re doing is we want to explore and develop new approaches to develop cost-effective therapies that benefit our patient population. We’re on the precipice of being able to understand the microbiome is an important part of our overall health.”
*This feature was published as a part of the Scaleup Garage Company Series, 2020.
