Your genome isn’t the half of it.

There is a jungle of bacteria inside you.

Hundreds of species, half of them variable from person to person; most unique to the human gut. We inherit them, largely from our parents, early in life: many of the bacteria in your gut are descended from ones that lived in the guts of your ancestors. They are biological heirlooms, passed down across the generations in an unbroken chain stretching back hundreds of thousands of years.

It’s an ecosystem as complex as any macroscopic one, full of interrelationships sculpted by millennia of interactions, tended by your immune system and steered by natural selection toward the ultimate goal of helping you survive and thrive. We’ve been coevolving with our gut bacteria for so long that you depend on them for some surprising things—like protecting you from the heavy metals in food, or producing key vitamins that let you make neurotransmitters like dopamine.

Some of these bacteria are as essential for health and happiness as any of the genes in your genome—but where your genome is more-or-less set in stone, a course of antibiotics and a little bad luck is all it takes to drive a species extinct in the microbiome—effectively deleting its genes from your body.

Just like that, you can find yourself missing bits of biology that were present in every one of your ancestors: the chain of stewardship broken; a flame that had burnt for millennia, extinguished over the course of a week. If those bits happened to be important, you might find yourself with a disease like depression, or Parkinson's, or one of the dozen other disorders linked to antibiotic use.

Isn't this what probiotics are for?

In theory, yes: if a key species goes extinct in your microbiome, reintroducing bacteria of that species can restore those lost genes and help set things right. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the bacteria that make up a healthy human microbiome aren't available as probiotics yet. Every drugstore has dozens of brands of probiotic on the shelf, but take a close look at the labels and you'll find the same names over and over again: Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium, Streptococcus, Saccharomyces—microbes which collectively make up less than 2% of a healthy adult gut.

So why are these the only bacteria you can buy right now? It's not because they're the most important, or the only ones you need to make a healthy gut: for the most part, they're just the ones that are easy to produce, and most supplement companies are happy to sell a placebo at a premium price.

But ask yourself: is your probiotic really doing anything for you?

If it's a living thing, why do you have to take it every day?

We're creating something new; something that doesn't leave you guessing. Going after high-impact targets with molecular-level precision, to deliver clear and persistent benefits from one-time interventions. We're doing the hard work of wrangling the other 98% of the microbiome, so that—if you've lost a part of yourself—we can help you get it back, in a very literal way.

Our first target is reducing high cholesterol; if you want to be part of the study—and potentially help us alpha-test this—sign up here.