Drugs From Bugs: Why Gates, Zuck And Benioff Think The Next Blockbusters Will Come From Inside Your Gut

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Drugs From Bugs: Why Gates, Zuck And Benioff Think The Next Blockbusters Will Come From Inside Your Gut

https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams ... 3a038757de


Welcome to the most promising new frontier in medicine: poop. By focusing on what’s coming out of patients’ rear ends, a growing body of scientific research over the last 15 years has highlighted the crucial role the microbiome plays in human health. That new understanding could lead to breakthrough treatments for a huge range of illnesses, from obvious ones like digestive ailments and food allergies to surprising ones like cancer and autism. A microbiome-derived drug is already in the works to prevent childhood asthma.

“It’s only in the past 15 years that we’ve come to understand the incredible diversity of the microbiome. It’s almost like a rainforest inside our bodies. There are 100 times more bacterial genes than human genes,” says Smith


Four years ago, former InfoSpace billionaire Naveen Jain, 60, launched Bellevue, Washington–based Viome, which sells a $119 “gut intelligence test” online. After analyzing a pea-sized stool sample, it sends customers a customized 60-page report with dietary recommendations “aimed at balancing your overall microbiome.” It might recommend, for instance, increasing consumption of “superfoods” like alfalfa sprouts and anchovies or avoiding green beans and kombucha. Jain says Viome has sold more than 100,000 kits and banked more than $15 million in revenue last year.

“Viome’s claims are not supported by any scientific literature,” says Jonathan Eisen, a medical microbiology professor who directs microbiome research at the University of California, Davis. “What they’re saying is, in fact, deceptive.” A dozen former Viome staffers say they believe the company was selling a product of dubious value. Six of those ex-staffers describe the food recommendations as “pseudoscience.”

“Anyone who says this doesn’t understand how our science works and how we make recommendations,” Jain counters. “It’s not my job to convince everyone; it’s my job to continue to help make the world a better place.”


A nonstop talker prone to enthusiastic, stream-of-consciousness self-promotion, Jain immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1982 and worked at Microsoft from 1989 until 1996, when he founded InfoSpace, also in Bellevue, which delivered internet content to early cellphones. His net worth ballooned to $8 billion, then crashed to $220 million when the first internet bubble burst. A flood of shareholder suits followed, and the InfoSpace board fired him as CEO in late 2002. Before he left InfoSpace, he bought a $13 million stucco mansion on the shores of Lake Washington not far from Jeff Bezos’ and Bill Gates’ pads.

Despite having no background in science or medicine, Jain has managed to raise $75 million from investors including Benioff and Khosla. Both declined to comment on their microbiome investments. But Alex Morgan, a Khosla Ventures principal with an M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford, suggests Khosla’s decision to back Viome has nothing to do with nutritional advice. Instead, he says, the firm invested because Viome hired a team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. In addition, Viome had made a deal with the lab to license a valuable tech platform that has a unique ability to sequence the biochemical activity in microorganisms.

“The goal is to scientifically show that it’s not voodoo stuff or a placebo,” says Jain

So even if Jain is selling snake oil, Viome might have significant value. Indeed, British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline struck a royalty deal with Viome in November 2019 to use its tech to help develop microbiome-derived vaccines. Jain’s investors could make out handsomely.



Put crudely, the idea is to use gut bugs as drugs. More than 50,000 scientific papers in the last five years have explored the microbiome’s effects. Various kinds of gut bacteria appear to stimulate or suppress immune responses in the body, while others seem to fight off disease-causing microbes. A groundswell of cutting-edge research has the potential to deliver a burst of new therapies that will vastly reduce human suffering—and generate huge paydays for the field’s pioneers.



Billions of dollars are pouring into microbiome medicine. Gbola Amusa, a medical doctor and partner at Chardan, a health care–focused investment bank in New York, pegs the total amount invested since 2014 at more than $5 billion. Techie billionaires including Bill Gates, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla are funding microbiome startups, and Gates, Benioff and Mark Zuckerberg have all made donations to support microbiome research at institutions including Stanford, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California, San Francisco.



Chris Howerton, a biotechnology analyst at Jefferies, a New York investment bank, is less shy. “If every single microbiome paper turns into a proven therapy, it could impact the drug markets for most major categories of disease, which together were worth $350 billion in 2018 in the U.S. alone,” he says. “The breadth of the microbiome’s potential application is really tantalizing.”