 Welcome to Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill, your go-to podcast for the most cutting-edge insights and functional and integrative medicine. I'm Dr. Jill, and today with me is a special guest, Colleen, and we're going to dive into gut health like you've never heard it before. I'm going to introduce her in just a second, but I just want to give a background because this is really special as we were just talking before we got on the recording. I for 20 years have been teaching docs about gut health and the microbiome and how critical this is for all aspects of our health. So you've heard me talk about this before. And one of the things, if you're a physician, you've probably heard me. If you're not, you maybe don't know this, but I was telling Colleen here, I have been saying acrimancia. If anyone could ever come up with a probiotic with acrimancia, this would be such a game changer. Well, guess what? Today, we are going to talk with the founder and CEO of a company called Pendulum that actually has found a way to bring this to the public. And I will say there is not many times in my podcast or career that I've been so excited to talk about something that I feel like will really change the landscape of health care. So stay tuned. You're in for a real treat. Let me introduce our guest and then we'll get on with the show. Colleen Cutliffe, PhD is a microbiome scientist and the CEO and co-founder of Pendulum, a company that creates microbiome products. Dr. Cutliffe received her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University and her bachelor of arts in biochemistry from Wesley College. She has over 15 years of experience leading and managing biology teams in academia, pharmaceutical and biotech. Prior to starting Pendulum, she was a senior manager of biology at Pacific Biosciences and a scientist at Elon Pharmaceuticals. So welcome, Colleen, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. So I'd love to start with story and we talked briefly, but I would love for our audience to really hear your background, like how did you get into this and how did you discover that this was a worthy pursuit in finding out to create a probiotic with acromancia? Well, I think so we started this company about 10 years ago and at that time the microbiome was really just in an emerging academic space, which is confusing for a lot of people because things like probiotics and yogurt have been around for a long time. But microbiome science is really the study of all of these different microorganisms that's been enabled by DNA sequencing technologies. So if you've kept track of DNA sequencing, that really became affordable and usable in the early 2000s. That's when the American Gut Project was run where we could really look at all these different people and their microbiomes. And what we discovered was that gut health and probiotics have a lot more potential than just helping you with an upset stomach. It's really at the core of all of the systems in your body. And as a scientist and somebody who was working in a DNA sequencing company, that really fascinated me. Could we bring a whole new category of products, next generation probiotics that could really target diseases and really help people improve their health beyond just kind of the traditional GI issues? And then on a personal level, I really wanted to be able to understand how we could help people who are lower deficient in these strains because my first daughter was born a preemie. And she spent the first month of her life in the ICN receiving multiple doses of antibiotics. And we know that antibiotics completely decimate your microbiome. And so I felt like there was this very personal reason to also want to be able to figure out what strains are really important, how can we replenish our microbiome to set my family up for future health success. And so we just started the company hoping we could find something interesting. Wow. And you did. Clearly. And I like I said, I don't know when I've been so excited about a company and a product because I've been waiting for you. And I didn't even know. And I didn't know you were waiting. I mean, you've actually known so much about this field even before I joined it, which I think is pretty awesome. Yeah. It's and I love that personal like so often the greatest entrepreneurs and the greatest people who really make changes in medicine and life and sciences. There is this piece of ourselves that's our family or ourselves or someone we love who's suffered at the hands of whatever issue. And we're like, how can we solve this problem? And I love that you come from it from a very sweet place with your daughter and how to optimize your whole family's microbiome. I personally as well had Crohn's at 26. So I had, excuse me, I had breast cancer 25 and Crohn's at 26. So I had a definite interest selfishly on my microbiome. And I remember years and years ago, finding a spore probiotic at first and thinking, OK, there's something different here. But then as I really dove into the research, I found, oh, there's these keystone strains. So I'm going to kind of let you run with that and say, what is a keystone strain? Why are they so critical? And then we'll dive into why is it so hard to create acromance in a probiotic? Absolutely. Well, the microbiome is really an ecosystem. You know, we think about it like a garden. There's lots of different components. They kind of feed each other. They collaborate with each other and they need each other in order to survive. But within this ecosystem, it turns out there are certain strains that have an outsized role compared to the other ones. And they've started to become called keystone strains. And acromance has really emerged as one of these keystone strains. And I would say initially one of the reasons people got really excited about it is because it is the only strain. And actually to date, it's still the only strain that we know of that is responsible for regulating the mucin layer. And so we talk about having a strong gut lining and, you know, making sure you don't have leaky gut. The core of that is making sure that you have a good mucin layer. It's basically the glue that holds everything together. And acromancia is really responsible for maintaining that glue. And so when you are low in that glue and when you're low in acromancia, all of a sudden you have this gut barrier integrity problem and you don't have the strongest gut lining that you could have. And that's related to all these other diseases. So the first super interesting thing about acromancia is it's the only strain that we know of that can regulate the mucin layer. And that's important for gut lining. But then the second thing that got discovered about it was that when you look at healthy people versus people with various diseases, you start to see this pattern emerge, which is that all of these different people with diseases appear to be low or entirely missing acromancia. And that ranges from things like obesity and type two diabetes to people with GI issues to people with neurological issues to people with immune deficiencies. And so all of a sudden you're starting to realize, wow, this strain is depleted across all these different diseases. It must be doing something fundamental. And so over the last decade, there's just been a ton of research to really unlock what is this strain doing and why is it so fundamental to our health? And so it is the the keystone strain that we know of right now. Yeah. So you've just done a great job of kind of the overview of why this is so important. And I'll just tell you clinically when I'm testing patients with which I've been doing with PCR, so he actually knows the strains in the gut, in the stool. I always am like, oh, no, when I see one with like non detectable levels of acromancia, because just like you said, it's one of those clues to me. The number one, they're probably having some trouble with mucosal barrier, maybe even SIGA or mucosal immune system. And then it's going to be, you know, like because before this, I didn't have an acromancia strain to give them. And I'll tell you what, I'd love to hear your research, but the typical strains, I don't see a change in acromancia or keystone strains with our with our other probiotics. Maybe let's talk about that, because I was really amazed when I looked at the research about how little research there really is about things like lactobacillus and bifidobacter. Tell us about why that might be in the industry. Well, I think that, first of all, most of the probiotics out there, if you start looking at the labels on the shelves, are lactobacillus and bifidobacterium strains. And so they kind of became the strains out there because they were easy to culture, they were easy to grow. And I think that all of us have always believed that gut health is really important. And so these are the strains that were able to be manufactured and grown. And so that's kind of what's out there. But actually, and I should say that many people experience benefits from taking those strains, but actually the science underlying them and the clinical trials behind them are relatively sparse. And and there's a lot of conflicting evidence. And in fact, you know, the AGA came out with a statement saying that probiotics don't help with GI, you know, with with IBS specifically. And I think people were sort of taken back by that. But but it's really because the data is not that strong. It's not strong enough to support protocols to include them. And I wonder, I've heard you talk about this before, but I think some of the post-biotics like butyric acid, which is a short chain fatty acid produced by some of these good guys, maybe some of the reason why there's conflicting, because certainly like fermented foods and things actually have any thoughts on how the short chain fatty acids in the post-biotics might be playing into the data about, like, say, again, fermented foods, because that's much more of a big picture than just one strain of probiotic. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think just a quick definition of terms, you know, that the prebiotics are the foods that feed the probiotics. The probiotics are the bacteria. So we think about prebiotics are like fibers and polyphenols and things like that. Those feed our bacterial strains and those are the probiotics. And what these probiotics do is they're generating these post-biotics. So you named a few of the ones that we know really well, the short chain fatty acids, acetate, butyrate, propionate. And so it's really these things that they're spitting out that have also a lot of health benefit. And so there've been a ton of animal studies really showing that those post-biotics, particularly butyrate, are incredibly important for human health. And one of the challenges has been that we've been able to help so many animals with their, you know, GI issues and even metabolic issues, but that hasn't really translated into humans. And I think it's really boils down to a delivery problem. These are small molecules that are absorbed all along the way. And so you're asking to ingest something and hopefully it gets to, you know, where it needs to get to. And I always say this is sort of like, you know, if I was going to give you a million dollars, would you rather I put it into a suitcase, knock on your door and hand you the suitcase? Or is your other I called you and said, hey, I just dispersed it all over Highway 101. You can go pick it up there. Of course, you would rather have the first because if I put it all over Highway 101, everyone would pull over and grab your money. And that's kind of what's happening when you take a butyrate pill, all the colonic cells use butyrate as their primary source of energy. And so while the butyrate is trying to get to the receptor you wanted to get to, all these cells are basically absorbing it. And so it never gets to the target. And so delivery of those short chain fatty acids via the probiotics is a much better way because the strain will go and live where it's supposed to be producing that post biotic. And then it can be delivered exactly to the receptor that it's supposed to be delivered to. And foods are another great way to deliver them too, because your foods are part of your natural system knows how to digest them and get them to the right location. And so I think that's all part of, you know, how do you deliver the goods to where they need to get to? What a great analogy because that makes just a lot of sense because I really feel like clinically we're using a lot of things and sometimes we don't have all the evidence or the evidence really doesn't support what we're claiming in clinical practice. And this is where again, a company like you who is really bringing out the data before we go into one of the products that is used to treat and decrease A1C and diabetes. I want to talk about acrimancia because there's some real things that make it very difficult and why I hadn't seen it for years and years. Tell us about this anaerobic and what is the difficulty with creating it into a, you know, pill form? Sure. Well, I think, you know, I hadn't I think I said this to you earlier. I hadn't realized how many people were excited about acrimancia when we got excited about it. And I think, you know, to your point, there have been a lot of publications showing this important role and a lot of animal studies kind of showing that there was potential benefit. But it turns out that because it's so special and unique, it's actually really hard to grow. So it lives in the mucin layer in your gut. And in that part of the gut, there's actually no oxygen. And so what you're doing is you're trying to recreate this thing outside of the human body, where it's like kind of housed in the middle of a mucin layer with no oxygen around it. And we obviously have a ton of oxygen in the air around us. And usually when you grow bacterial strains, you grow them in media, they're not embedded in a mucin layer and some three dimensional structure. And so it turns out to be an incredibly hard strain to grow and to maintain its viability. And then after you're able to grow and to maintain its viability to deliver it to a person and have it then be able to grow inside that person. And so I think to be totally fair, I don't think that I even appreciated how hard this is going to be when we started it. But I think that once we've really unlocked the ability to grow the strain, and we were able to show that we could deliver it and that it could have all these benefits that we all sort of believe that it might have. It has been incredibly rewarding to be able to see how many people are benefiting from it. Hey everybody, I just stopped by to let you know that my new book, Unexpected, Finding Resilience through Functional Medicine, Science and Faith is now available for order wherever you purchase books. In this book, I share my own journey of overcoming life threatening illness, and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience I found along the way. This book includes practical advice for things like cancer and Crohn's disease and other autoimmune conditions, infections like Lyme or Epstein Barr and mold and biotoxin related illness. What I really hope is that as you read this book, you find transformational wisdom for health and healing. If you want to get your own copy, stop by readunexpected.com. There you can also collect your free bonuses. So grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through functional medicine in finding resilience. Yeah, and as we talked before, I'm starting to use your probiotics and clinical practice and really seen amazing results. So I can vouch for that in the small time I've been using them really, really good stuff. So it's interesting. I love that you said that I was going to ask you. So before, if you would have known what you know now, would you still have pursued this? Either way, it sounds pretty amazing what you've done because you really had to create like raise massive funds in order to just create a specialized lab to grow this, right? Absolutely. I mean, honestly, it's a question you should probably ask my investors if they had known because I think you all sort of thought, well, we'll just grow these strands and then we'll do these studies and it'll be fine. It did take, it's taken a lot of investment dollars and one of the things that we've been really lucky on is the kind of investors that have gotten behind us. These are not people who are trying to figure out, how do I make a quick buck? You know, what's the quick turnaround? We've never had discussions about, you know, how fast are you going to exit this company for me? What they really got behind was our mission and our vision that there's a new paradigm of health through the microbiome and we can create products and create a company that is going to capitalize on that paradigm shift and we're going to have the support not only of individuals, consumers are going to use the product, but also physicians and healthcare professionals and people who really understand holistically how disease and health should be tackled and that's a big vision. You want to change the way we approach health with natural products through the microbiome and it has taken a lot of money. We raised about $150 million to build this company out and it's been, but it's been a labor of love and like I said, at the end of the day getting to hear your story and other people's stories about the benefits they get, that's why we started the company so it feels really good. Yeah, I really, like I said, I'm a huge supporter because I love what you're doing and I love that your background was in pharmaceuticals because really to get a new way of doing medicine we have to take some of that industry and shift it into these things like maybe it's official or a super unique probiotic or whatever because I think that the interaction with the immune system and these new kinds of more natural molecules are much more important than just a chemical, right, that the old school maybe like a sledgehammer, a lot of these chemicals, old medicines are such a sledgehammer where this is actually working with your system in a much more cohesive way. Yeah and just to, you know, add to that I think pharmaceutical companies do an amazing job of identifying things that have incredible efficacy and they there is an incredibly high bar for demonstrating that these small molecules are working but one of the big differences as you're pointing out is that because these are chemicals and they're not things that are naturally found in our body, we are disrupting a system in an unnatural way and so you might get amazing efficacy and these drugs do have amazing efficacy but there's a lot of other side effects because this is something that your body isn't used to seeing, it doesn't really know how to metabolize it, it can get into places it's not supposed to get into, but you get this immediate, you know, real effect. On the other hand, the natural products are doing what you said which is that they are enhancing your body's natural capabilities to improve health but the downside that I think a lot of people kind of don't really love is that it takes a second so it's not going to be this immediate effect of a chemical entity, it's going to take a little while to see that benefit but then you're really teaching your body how to fish as it were, it can keep doing it but it's not kind of that immediate bang. Yes, gosh and I love and I feel like as we're shifting and our environment is more toxic and our guts are more messed up in our immune systems, we have to shift in our thinking so this to me is just a beautiful way to introduce a company like yours that's really making a difference. So let's shift because you have one particular product called glucose control, right? Yes. I want to talk about the making of that product and then I want you to tell the story of the study that you did and you really put yourself out there because as doing a study it could come back with no efficacy, right? So take us through like why, how did you design that product, why is it unique and effective and then we can talk a little bit about the study and the results that you guys got from that study. Sure, well we got really interested in the gut metabolism axis and a lot of times when we think about our metabolism we aren't thinking about our gut but actually when you think about your food it's getting a ton of it is getting digested by your gut and so you have all these microbes that are there that help you digest your food and help you with your metabolism and what we observed was that people with metabolic syndrome so all the way to type 2 diabetes but also pre-diabetes and obesity were low or missing some of these strains and when you look at these strains you start to look at their functions mechanistically it all started to make sense and it actually wasn't just our studies it was studies across the world where people were sharing their data and you could look at it and you could see the same pattern emerging and basically when you looked at what these strains were and what they were presumably able to do is they are able to metabolize fiber into these short chain fatty acids which are the way that you naturally stimulate GLP1 production and so it became really clear to us that okay well we know that a high fiber diet can help you with your glucose control and we certainly know that things like GLP1 and insulin can help you with your glucose control but this middle part this microbiome that is metabolizing that fiber and stimulating these short these small molecules nobody knew what those were and these are the things that were missing in people and so the theory was actually pretty straightforward but what if we could give them back to people could we enable them to do this digestion and metabolism better and would we be able to see that in terms of lowered a1c and lowered blood glucose spikes and so that was sort of the premise of the product and we actually started with a list of about 40 different strains and then we had to go figure out how to grow them and just from a very practical standpoint you know we're a startup company there are literally three of us doing this wow you know and an incubator lab alongside a bunch of other startup companies with very little money and so we had to make really tough choices early on which is you know which ones are able to grow which ones do we really believe in and we're going to put the effort into help to grow them how many of these things are redundant so maybe we don't need all of them we just need one and so there was a lot of that going on until we got it down to five strains in this formulation which do this multi-step reaction of metabolizing fiber and debuterate and then of course acrimancia was part of that formulation as well and then we were off to the races to do pre-clinical trials and then clinical trials so you actually looked at the data took all these strains and said what's the most likely to benefit and got it down to this nero which i'd love to talk about those species but acrimancia was just one of those it wasn't necessarily that your company said oh we know the power of acrimancia we're going to make that in lab right okay that's no and the crazy thing is that we had no idea i mean there's been data that's come out subsequently that shows how acrimancia is able to stimulate L cells to secrete GLP we were just like this thing that probably does something with the musin and and it's low and so we want to give it back and so it was we really had no idea you know transparently we really stumbled upon the go like yeah to me i'm just like wow because that has been more of a cool story because it was like this not accidental because clearly to the research but it wasn't like a pre-planned i'm going to go after acrimancia which is i love i love that um so tell us how this works together and why you think um because there's a mechanism behind this um and i want to just stop for those of you listening if you're a doctor you know what glp one is if you're a patient that's on succenda or wagovi or lyric glutide or any of these drugs you know what this is these are the weight loss drugs that are taking the nation by storm but i want to emphasize we're talking about our body naturally makes this peptide it's glp one and it helps us uh use less insulin with the bolus and actually metabolically be more healthy basically reversing the process of diabetes and you're saying that this probiotic combination actually has a potential to increase levels naturally yes and and just to like take a moment to sort of differentiate um the the wagovies of the the glp one analogs and then your body's natural glp one you know when you take these drugs you're you're basically injecting directly into your bloodstream this this glp one analog and it is um and most of these are sort of a timerly so it's maintaining your glp one levels you know at at high levels um constantly and glp one has a few known benefits one is that um it stimulates your your body to secrete insulin and so it helps you metabolize the sugars that you've just consumed and then the other is that it somehow tells your brain we just ate we're full we don't need to eat anymore and so people experience this um satiety they're not hungry anymore they don't have that food noise and their body's metabolizing all the sugars that they're eating at very high levels now your body naturally makes glp one as you said but actually the way it's supposed to work is you eat food your microbiome digests that food and then it tells your l cells we just ate food and so let's make glp one and so after you eat your glp one levels actually spike in your bloodstream tells insulin to go metabolize all the sugar in your bloodstream tells your brain we're full and then it goes back down and you're supposed to be on this cycle of glp one going up and down you know as you eat food and so the difference with the drugs is that it's kind of keeping it at a high level all the time and so you're getting this constant hammering of this messaging and the natural way is through the food that you're eating and the digestion by the the microbiome and to date there are two strains that have ever been published that have shown that they can increase glp one one is acrimacia and the other is a strain called clostridium butyricum and you know there's a lot of hard work and and and science and data that went into this but honestly as in anything in life there's also a fair amount of luck those were two of the five strains that that we happen to decide to put into the formulation and so we know that you know these strains have evidence showing that they can stimulate glp one production and this is sort of the natural way that your body's supposed to do it wow thanks for explaining that because like I said obviously people are very you know listening for those kind of products a lot of people are taking them but I love the idea of getting back to nature and again this is why because those drugs are very successfully they were first used in diabetes not in weight loss they found that they had that effect so let's talk about then your formulation and the study that you did and the amazing kind of surprising outcome maybe not surprising I was pretty impressed with the data that came from this study the preliminary work that you've done thank you yeah well so the formulation is has acrimansia which we thought was just going to be there for the mucin although obviously it has a broader role in metabolic syndrome and then we have these what's called primary fermenters and secondary fermenters and it's really just that the metabolism of fibers into butyrate and into short chain fatty acids is a multi-step reaction and so we have strains that can do each of those steps in the formulation and we we essentially grew each of the five strains we grow each of the five strains independently and test them and make sure that they've got the right viability and then we combine them into a pill together and so the the study that we did initially the study we wanted to do was okay let's find people with type 2 diabetes because they're all the way at one end of the spectrum of metabolic syndrome so you you it's hard to see improvements in somebody that's already healthy and so if you really want to see is this thing helping with A1C and blood glucose spikes let's go all the way to people who've been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and originally I want to do the study in people that were on no medication and just had type 2 diabetes at which point my chief medical officer said there's really hardly no such thing because when someone gets diagnosed with diabetes they walk out with a prescription for metformin you know at least if not other things and so so and anyway if you wanted to have something that worked you'd have to work on top of metformin because everybody's pretty much on it and so he said all right fine so that was a little scary because we don't exactly understand how metformin works honestly and and there have been multiple studies showing that it might work through the gut microbiome so we were actually a little bit afraid that if we had people who were on metformin maybe they were already getting the microbiome benefits and they were gonna it's gonna mask what our product is doing but you know it's kind of wanted to get into people with diabetes and they were on metformin and so we did this trial and it was a placebo control double-blinded randomized trial and so one arm was placebo one arm was this full five strain formulation and then one arm was a three strain formulation so it's just a subset of those strains and it didn't have acrimansia in it because as we've discussed acrimansia was actually really hard to grow and so we were kind of hoping that the subset of strains without acrimansia would work and we wouldn't need to figure out how to really scale up acrimansia oh this is kind of funny because you got the cheaper three strain version it's like well maybe this will work yes maybe this will be just fine but that's not what we found what we found in fact was that you really did need the five strains so the three strain formulation had some efficacy but the five strain formulation really demonstrated that compared to placebo it was able to lower A1C by 0.6 points and was able to lower blood glucose spikes by 33 percent and so those are pretty dramatic numbers for a probiotic that's actually never been demonstrated before and it was I just want to pause it's phenomenal and I'm just curious like when you first got this in an email or a call like some of the data the preliminary how did you feel that had to feel so good for well first of all you know you're banking the whole house is banked on this you know one plate and so you sort of in some ways have to like turn it all off and say now it's a little bit in God's hands we'll just see what happens on the other side but and it was a double blinded study so we had no idea what people were on what product but I will tell you we could see the data coming in but we just didn't know what product people were on and so we would we would see data and be like oh this person got better I wonder if they were on the product or this person got worse oh my gosh I hope they were on placebo and so there was just this constant roller coaster every day as we started to see the data but we were blinded we didn't know what people were on and so when we finally got the analysis back and it was really clear that we were seeing these results I mean it was a celebration I mean you you rarely kind of get the first shot on goal and we were really prepared to to not have seen efficacy and what we were really trying to understand is well what we need to do to improve the formulation to get to efficacy so we were taking stool samples we were taking lots of measurements we were trying to you know what would be our next step if this didn't work mentality and and when it worked you know it really brought into question whether we did want to bring this directly to consumers so we had always sort of said we want to bring these directly to consumers because it helps to enable everyone to have access to them but when you see results like that it does kind of call things in a question like well should we go down the drug path instead well and especially because part of the issue here is this cost a lot to make I mean my first thing before I knew any of the data behind was like oh this is an expensive probiotic but now that I understand I'm going to be your biggest fan because I understand what went into it and understand why to create accurate you know to grow acromance it cost a lot and I kind of want to just say that publicly because if people see this and we're like oh that's a lot try it right try it for a month and see if you don't see results or two months or what was the length of the trial we had people on product for 90 days so three months and then they did a wash out period so then they went off of the product for a month and so that was the so all the results happened within 90 days okay that's so so if I'm going to tell patients give it a try try it for 90 days that's a real fair assumption did you start to see things at 30 60 days like if you look back at the data could you see patterns before that or would you recommend that if people really want to see a change they try it for minimum 90 days well as you know it depends on on the person you know if you're somebody who is extremely low in acrimancia you might see a benefit almost immediately and we get those kinds of reports or people report you know within days they're already seeing changes in their in their continuous glucose monitors but you know generally speaking your a1c first of all takes 90 days to turn over so if you're looking for an a1c change you you got to give it at least 90 days just because physiologically that's how long it takes to see anything but I would say with continuous glucose monitors some people see it see it sooner but I always tell people give it at least 90 days because and if you don't see anything after 90 days then maybe the microbiome wasn't your problem but give it at least 90 days to see something that's really wise so then when was the study when did you get the results how long ago was that oh boy now you're testing my memory it was a few years ago and then and it was published in BMJ and then we launched product basically right on the heels of it got it well we will be sure and link that BMJ journal and of course your website and everything so if you are watching or listening in your car don't worry we'll have this all in the show notes you don't need to take notes but I'll include all of that there so obviously this is called glucose control and we're going to talk at the end if you want to get your own you can purchase that yourself we'll give you a codes for discount and everything but the big deal was obviously that we talked about costs just so people are ready this is an expensive probiotic but part of it is because the manufacturing is so intensive but you also created alternative tell us about that for people who maybe say I can't afford that but I still want to try something that's similar what's the alternative yes so thank you for pointing out how expensive it is to make and I will also say about glucose control is that it has to be maintained cold so we literally are cold shipping it overnight to your home and then you throw it in your refrigerator so there's a lot of things about that product that are less than ideal let's say and in fact when we first launched it we were losing money on every bottle we sold because it really is expensive to make um so we got a lot of feedback of people saying look uh I I can't afford $165 a month that that's what the membership is and um but but I really want to benefit from this or people saying I don't have type two diabetes I have pre-diabetes or diabetes runs in my family like I really need this like full potent formulation and then other people saying gee I this is really annoying to have to keep something in the refrigerator I just want to keep it on my shelf so so we were getting all all this feedback and information from people and and then we had people who were on product and said oh my gosh there's been a life changer for me but I can't stay on it I can't afford it so what we decided to do was to go back and look at the data and to test out the idea of a lower dose and and this happens all the time in the pharmaceutical industry where it's really a dosing game where you're trying to figure out for each person what's the right dose for them and what we found was that you could infect lower the dose and for a lot of people they would still get the same benefits they didn't need the full clinical dose that is for people with type two diabetes and so we launched Metabolic Daily really as a response to the feedback they were that we were getting so it's the same formulation but just a lower dose and so this is and it's at a $49 price point and it's really for people who are trying to metabolize their sugars and carbs better but they're not really kind of full on I've got diabetes I'm trying to lower my A1C I love that and I hopefully in a year so we'll give you like just my small little clinic what's happening and what we're using because I plan to be using this briefly we talked about acromantia it's grown anaerobically which means no oxygen can get in and even I'm sure like everything about your lab is protecting that molecule from oxygen but tell us just briefly about like why is it cold how do you actually take that bug out of this anaerobic environment put it in a capsule and then get it into the body tell us just a little bit about that mechanism because I'm sure that took a lot of work too sure so it all starts if we can remember back to you know middle school biology it all starts with a petri dish so you basically you know grow these strains on a petri dish and you pick a single colony and then we're growing them in these really large kind of metal tanks and so if you've ever been to a brewery or a vineyard you've seen these really big tanks where things are being fermented and so we have our lab you know our manufacturer plant looks like that with all these big tanks and what you're doing is you're basically growing these strains helping them divide in a media that is rich with sugars and nutrients and amino acids and so they grow and they're very happy in that anaerobic media environment and then you want to give them down into a pill so what you have to do is you have to we use centrifugation so we spin the cells down we throw away the media we take this cell paste and then we literally freeze dry it and the freeze drying process turns it from these you know live cells into lyophilized freeze dried powder and then that powder is what can go into the pills and so once it is in a powder format they're kind of in a dormant state and so they're not sensitive to oxygen anymore and so you can get it into a pill you can have it in your fridge you can have it you know outside of that and it's fine it's really during the growth that you have to keep all the oxygen out when it's alive and growing and then and I think I heard you say before that moisture is a bigger indicate like then temperature is a big deal but moisture is even a bigger deal because that's what activates it into the active state is that right yes so the first challenge is how can you grow the strain the second challenge is I got to give it to you and it's got to then re you know come back in your gut and so one of the primary ways it does that is that when it gets exposed to the water the moisture in your gut that's what revives center brings them back to life and of course in your gut microbiome there's all the nutrients and all the things that that they want to they need in order to to grow and thrive so the problem is when it's in the pill format you don't want it to get exposed to moisture and you don't want it to come back alive and say like here we are but not and they're just this oxygen and so it'll all die and so what we worry a lot about is keeping moisture out and so we have you know desiccant packets like the kind you see in food to keep everything dry and actually we just launched on full script a pro line which has desiccant lining in the in the bottle itself in order to keep the moisture out one thing I see in the future is like you guys at the company and you as part of this brain child is really creating new procedures and processes of even how do we think about studying probiotics and how do we bring them to market and because I'm seeing a lot of innovation already and what you guys have done and that excites me so great work as we kind of you know wind down here I want to go back to just practical first of all if people want to get this well like I said we'll leave notes and everything as far as where to find it but you started with a story about your daughter and her microbiome and I want to kind of speak to the person who maybe a mother who have a preemie or maybe someone who has Crohn's or colitis like I did or what would you say as far as just the hope with microbiome and some of these interventions with someone who has had issues or has illness related to the gut give us just kind of like a little sound bite for those listening that maybe have suffered because of their microbiomes well I think the short answer is there is hope the science is advancing incredibly quickly there's great research going on and if the products that are out there now haven't been working for you none of them have been targeting the microbiome and so there is hope for a whole new line of therapies that are actually going to work and one of the things that's always been fascinating is that one of the ways in which people try to treat many of these diseases is through actually antibiotic treatment and the idea is that you know you've got these bacteria which are maybe causing inflammation and so then you're just trying to kill them all off and in fact the world that we want to live in is that we're not killing all the bacteria but we're actually giving the ones that do the important work and but that's harder to do because it's easier to just kill everything than to try to figure out like what are the beneficial microbes and how do I deliver them but that's where we're all heading and so I would say that if you've been suffering from these you know chronic illnesses and feel like nothing's worked for you try some of these next generation probiotics and see if they can really help you out you know we did all of our studies in people with type 2 diabetes have been really focused in metabolism but these short chain fatty acids and butyrate and the relationship between these strains and the inflammatory and the immune response all that data is growing and we certainly have patients customers that are using and physicians that are using with their patients these strains for things like IBD and IBS and seeing really great benefit love that love the hope that it brings and it's interesting because I'll comment because like I said before I really understood the price the why the glucose control and all the mechanism behind the thoughtfulness of that product all I knew was acrimancia I love it right so I've been giving that acrimancia and I've been using it in Crohn's colitis IBD kind of the not metabolic patient and seeing good results so I will Oh wow I'll give that yeah and just say that we're and let's just mention that too you do have a product just called acrimancia is that just plain old acrimancia it is and I'll tell you a funny story about that so as I said we really didn't know we had stumbled on when we found acrimancia we decided we wanted to grow it but after we released pendulum glucose control we had a bunch of people calling us and saying hey I just want acrimancia like I have to buy this whole formulation point so expensive and I just want that one strain and we thought to ourselves how small is this subgroup of people that even know what acrimancia is I mean this is a new strain this has got to be like a small group of really educated folks and probably represents a very small percentage of the population but we were getting so much of that request coming in that we just decided all right let's just run experiment let's make 10,000 bottles of just acrimancia and let's see what happens and in less than 10 days every bottle was spoken for I love it we realized oh my gosh there's a market for this let's let's just start selling it and in fact you know you're not alone in sort of having been waiting for this strain to come out and and you know not only did that actually become our number one seller but we then started to get practitioners saying oh well I would like to a high dose version and a low dose version because I have some patients in which I really want to replenish their acrimancia at a high amount and I have other patients that have sensitive GIs and so I want to kind of step them into increasing their acrimancia levels and so we actually just launched these pro versions which have a low and high acrimancia and so who I certainly did not that there's going to be demand for the product but you know if you are trying to if you're sort of a minimalist and you're like thinking it's just acrimancia that I want to increase we do offer just that single strain and and also we also this also offer the single strain of Clostridium butyricum and this is really if you're trying to you know use the minimum viable product wow I just love that and like I said I hope that it was just a tiny little bit of part of getting people excited yeah you might have been one of those probably not but it's just fun to think to think that Colleen, thanks for your ingenuity your creativity your your willingness to put yourself out there because to start up a company like this takes a huge risk and a lot of gall but I'm so glad I'm so glad you're out there doing this work I'm so glad you brought this where can people find you find your company and let's give I think you guys have given our listeners a discount if they want to get some product yes absolutely so you can go to our website pendulumlife.com and we have a bunch of information there too so if you want to learn more about the microbiome and these strains and what they're doing and other studies out there that's where you can buy it you can also buy our products on Amazon and then we also sell them if you're a practitioner on Fullscript and I also just want to encourage people we love to get feedback so please ask us questions and let us know what you're experiencing and then for your listeners to help make it a little easier to trial we have a discount code called Dr. Jill 20 and that gives you a discount off of your first bottle of any of the products on membership and if you're a practitioner we have a different code which is WS Dr. Jill 40 and that is to enable wholesale purchases of the products and we would just love for people to trial and see how the these strains might benefit your health. Awesome so repeat those codes and I'll be sure and put them in the notes the code for consumer first purchase 20% off is Dr. Jill 20 20 okay and the one for practitioners for their wholesale account would be WS standing for wholesale WS Dr. Jill 40 perfect okay just want to get those and we'll have them in the notes if you're driving so don't don't stop and take notes Colleen like I said thanks again for being a pioneer in this work and thank you for all thanks to your daughter for just being an inspiration to I love those stories because that's really where the heart comes in of what we do and I'm just grateful that all of that led you to where you're at now we are so grateful for your work thank you so much for having me and also thank you for sharing all this information with your listeners because it is hard to know what probiotics are doing what and so your credibility and your willingness to take time to really deep dive into these is super helpful and I really appreciate your time thank you so much