Name: Is Gut Sequencing the Future of Health Testing?
Uploaded: 2020-03-25T16:23:09.000Z
Duration: 4 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Each and every person is walking around with a large community, up to 10 million,

Adverbs of manner

If you want to think about that in terms of weight, your brain is probably around 6 pounds,

and you probably have at least that weight of bacteria in you and on you.

So it’s a significant amount of what we walk around with everyday.

This is uBiome in San Francisco, the first BioTech Company to be started with

Their big bet, that people will want to pay to find out what’s in their microbiomes,

The microbiome is the community of microorganisms that live on us and in us.

They digest our food, they synthesis vitamins, they drug us with chemicals that

they make, they prevent us from getting diseases.

So they are as integral to our health and wellness as our own bodies.

This area of science is still very new, but uBiome has found enough interest to create

One for people who are simply curious who can take a basic test to find out more about

how their diet is affecting their gut, that’s called Explorer.

And then there is a more intense version that only a doctor can order for you, called SmartGut.

You can tell people medical information, you can involve their doctor, you can turn

what was interesting information about the microbiome into sort of hard medical data

that you can use to make medical decisions.

From $89 to $399 depending on how many kinds of tests you want.

You can also get a subsidized test if your doctor prescribes it.

You keep it in the bathroom so that when you’re ready to give a sample it’s right there

You mail it back without ever having to go to a lab or the doctor.

But, let’s be clear, this is a little more intense than a DNA test.

The majority of samples that we receive come from the intestinal or the gut microbiome.

And in that case, a patient will take a sample of a small bit of stool from

So each of our robots is set up to do one or more specific tasks.

This one is extracting DNA from our samples.

So we have laid out 96 poo samples and we’re breaking down those samples and extracting

When sequencing is complete, that sequence can go into a series of computer

programs that process the sample and we can then give a report back to our customers

that tell them about the bacteria in their sample.

uBiome has an argument for why this is an important test and potentially a better

The company says that impowered by the information you may actually be able to change the makeup

It helps people know which commensal bacteria they have in their gut and whether or not

it makes them more likely to have IBD versus IBS.

You can actually influence your own health and improve it and I see us having a really

One of the things that having our tests allows us to do is so we can partner

with collaborators around the world to start to generate a lot more information around

We have over 150,000 samples in our data set now and we should have half a million

Microbiome research is in its infancy but the uBiome founders think one day tests

like this will be just as common as blood tests, or maybe even more.

They think every time you have the flu or get food poisoning, every time you start a

If they’re right, we might all have to get comfortable swabbing our toilet paper.