Poop for the Cure with Stephanie Culler, Co-Founder and CEO at Persephone Biosciences

On this episode of Building Biotechs, we're talking about poop.

Mm.

Stephanie Culler, co founder and CEO of Persephone Biosciences, just educated us on all things poop. It is so fascinating what they're doing and she first of all gives a great overview of the company, but she has a couple of different great partnerships and it was just such a fun conversation and I learned so much.

Welcome to Building Biotechs, a podcast by Reeconomics Consulting.

We've helped over 75 biotech, life science and venture capital firms strategize, hire and retain thousands of employees to scale companies that bring life saving drugs to patients.

We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground floor to the C suite.

We're your host, Karina and Allison.

Thank you so much for joining us. Stephanie, it's such a pleasure. We always ask our guests the same question to start. So we love to hear about your career path. What did you want to be when you were 7? What are you now? And how did you get there?

Great question. So when I was growing up, I wanted to actually be a concert violinist and studied very rigorously and played violin and taking lessons with multiple teachers, even going to interlock in academy over a summer. And it was kind of through that journey that I realized actually that I didn't want to become a violinist. I had started maybe a little bit late when I was in elementary school, whereas everybody who was going to Juilliard started when they were three years old. So I couldn't make up for that lost time. I also felt that given my interest in high school and even before the elementary school in science, in math, that I knew I wanted to become a scientist. I think the turning point for me really was in that transition was when I lost both of my grandmothers to cancer when I was a young teenager. For me, I promised them I would do something about cancer. But as obviously as a young teenager, you don't really know what that means. But what that led me to do was actually become a scientist. And my PhD work at Caltech really focused in some early applications of synthetic biology for gene therapy in cancer. And obviously today, now an entrepreneur. So things have changed quite a bit.

It's really interesting that you say that everyone has started at 3 and you were late to the game because you started in elementary school. That is just. That blows my mind. But you do hear that story about these music musical prodigies. It's like they could, they couldn't even walk, but they were playing the banner.

And they were practicing 10 hours a day. And I knew that just wasn't kind of for some people that's what they want to do. But for me, my passion just wasn't there.

Yeah, how did you get exposed to science and math so young? Because that's also really unique.

Yeah, I mean I am the only scientist in my family, so it didn't come from the family side. But really in school just, you know, I really gravitated towards that and I think for me it started to click really early on in elementary school. I remember just really loving math and I couldn't get enough of it, you know. And I would finish the exams first in the class and I was like, I want more. And that was for me kind of like the first starting point. And then we just started to have science experiments and I really love that and I love them taking the science experiments home and tinkering. And my parents really fostered kind of that intellectual curiosity by things that they would get me.

So that brings us to today. And today you are the co founder and the CEO of Persefoni Bioscience.

So I'll tell you a little bit about why I named the company Persephone and how we came to starting the company. So Persephone is the Greek goddess of the underworld and she was lured actually by pomegranate. She was really fascinated by pomegranate. And it turns out you need gut microbes to make the anti cancer antioxidant metabolites associated with pomegranates that we've all heard for thousands of years, kind of the properties of pomegranates. And it turns out most people don't have those gut microbes. And so Persephone was really founded to develop a technology platform going from human data to discover what's missing in the microbiome and to put it back and kind of the journey that we took. You know, I mentioned my work at Caltech, my PhD and you know, I was really always interested in becoming an entrepreneur. But I realized at Caltech when I was kind of transitioning that I really didn't know what it would take to be an entrepreneur. So I needed industry experience before starting a company which became Persephone. And so I came down to San Diego where all of us are based and I worked at a company called Genomatica and I met my co founder there and other folks that work at Persephone and there this is an industrial biotechnology. So quite different than what I was doing at Caltech. But we were focused on engineering microbes like what we have in our gut, but to produce chemicals or other useful products through fermentation, so renewable process. So we were aiming to achieve and quite successful commercially at replacing chemicals made from fossil fuels. But could we make that renewably through plant based feedstocks? And so after that success, you know, myself, my co founder, were ready to move on. But we really wanted to leverage this deep expertise that we had in, in understanding how microbes function, their metabolism, how to manipulate them through synthetic biology tools or genetic engineering tools, and how to develop scalable, commercializable technology platforms around that. And so that's why we founded Persephone was that we wanted to bring this expertise to the gut microbiome space. Something that we saw so important for human health. The gut microbiome impacts virtually every disease that we know of, impacts how well cancer patients, for example, respond to treatment. It impacts how as infants, our immune system develops. But for us as scientists, what was surprising given how important the gut microbiome was, we just saw there was a lack of real quantitative rigor being applied to unlocking that. Persephone was founded really to unlock the potential of the gut microbiome for the prevention and treatment of the disease.

I realized that we talked to a lot of people who have founded a biotech, but we've never really talked about the first six months. What does that look like when you give your notice to your job and you're like, well, I'm gonna go do my own thing, bye. Like, I mean, that's a huge leap. And I don't think we've ever really dug into what does that look like.

So I think the first step for me was a few years, actually about a year and a half before we decided to found for Stephanie. I knew I was kind of interested in that next step and, you know, got together with my co founder one night actually over beers and said, hey, would you be interested in starting a company? I don't know, I don't have an idea yet. I'm thinking about it. And it was kind of through that discussion, at that first discussion that I started to recognize, okay, he's interested in doing something with me. Let's start thinking about what that could look as a next step. But you know, those first six months, it was, it was kind of like a honeymoon phase. Really, really excited, you know, and a little bit scary because, you know, I had to take a sa. No salary for a while, so I had to save a lot of money to do that. I actually cashed out a lot of my personal savings to be able to start the company and launch it, but very quickly. I think a couple things that really helped us be successful for the rest of the journey of the company was kind of frameworks that we had that was accessible to us. And I know this is not accessible everywhere around the world, but down the street from us was jlabs, which is Johnson and Johnson's incubator. No strings attached, they're just the landlord, but gave us, you know, our initial bench space as well as just mentors that helped us really with kind of what that next path is. And getting into jlabs actually elevated our profile to the point that I was able to get financing, you know, from friends and family, angel investors. And then the network around Persephone started to take hold, getting the right advisors in place and mentors. And then from there the kind of scary path further was like, okay, I got a little bit of money in the door. How do I get enough to actually have a proof of concept here? Initially we were focused on understanding how to unlock the microbiome for improving response to cancer drugs, namely immunotherapy drugs like checkpoint inhibitors. And we needed capital essentially to do our initial experiments. And within the first six months we got into an accelerator called Y Combinator, which is really famous in Silicon Valley for tech startups, but really now starting to be interested in biotech. And it was really through that that I learned to pitch to investors and brought in our initial seed financing and kind of the network of investors that we have today. But I would say that those first six months are absolutely critical and the rest of the, of what you, you build on, but, but really scary because you don't have a blueprint. You know, in the early days, you know, we didn't have any equipment for the company. We were actually driving around in my car picking up used equipment from wherever we could. Many of them broke, so they weren't that helpful early on, but it is, it is scary. But finding the right, I think mentors in the right kind of front framework really helped us kind of to be successful and get over some of those key pain points.

Can you tell us a little bit about how Y Combinator, which you're right, has historically been tech and now we're seeing more biotech. How did that actually really set you up?

I would say it's one of the most important things that we ever did, you know, for, for me and I know that many folks in biotech starting companies, you know, in, in Grad school, you don't learn how to communicate to investors, it's a very different proposition. You know, how I communicate my science, my story, and Y Combinator really helped break it down to what are the basic elements. I didn't know any of that. Right. I never had met an investor. You know, that was a key struggle for me was that, you know, I was a scientist prior to starting this company, a bench scientist. I don't know investors. Right, I know. So I know Nobel laureates, but I don't know actual investors that could help us. And so that was kind of the biggest. That was the biggest challenge. But why Combinator? And being in that ecosystem, first of all, it's just absolutely incredible. The talent and entrepreneurs. And I felt like this, the energy there was on a whole level that I had never seen even, even going to Caltech, and just the innovation in the way they think about solving business problems was truly creative. And one thing about Y Combinator, beyond learning the pitch to investors and also helping us to figure out what are the right investors for us, how to do that kind of matching process, was the exposure to, I would say, the trials and tribulations of other entrepreneurs before us. Like, we got to meet with and hear the story of the founding of Dropbox, for example, Reddit, many others very successful, you know, Y Combinator companies, they come back and the founders tell their story, you know, and there are a lot of, you know, rough patches many of these companies have. Have had. And, you know, we got to learn about all those things. And so one of the things that I loved about Y Combinator was you get to see all aspects, the success, but the raw elements. And so much of the education every week that we went through was teaching us what not to do and how to survive. You know, don't die was kind of the biggest thing. Do not die as a company. Do whatever you need to do to not die. And that really resonated. I know it resonated with my co founder. And for both of us, being in that process together was really instrumental because we were both on the same page and we were both understanding of all the kind of pain points and things to not do as we started to scale the company and grow outside of Y Combinator. And that network is the network that keeps on giving. I still have a lot of YC investors and they keep making introductions to new investors, advisors. So that network just keeps growing, growing as well as my, my fellow YC alum.

That's fantastic. Can you give us sort of the landscape of Persefoni today you went through the startup journey, you built the thing and now where are you guys?

I had always had the vision that eventually we could go into consumer health. And microbiome is one of the really cool modalities that you could do that. You can make therapeutics and you can make consumer products. Like you could go to CVS and grab a probiotic that is a microbiome product. But I recognized in consumer health there's just a lot of stool education with regards to gut health. I think that's growing. But then there are a lot of products in the space that don't really have an impact and there's a lot of noise, I would say in this space on what's real and what's not. And I recognized if we were really going to be credible in this space, especially consumer facing, at some point we needed to have very solid science. And I would say third party buy in, namely from pharma is what we were thinking. And so, you know, for the first five years of this company we were only focused in oncology and what we were been working on and what we'd like to achieve, which we're definitely on the path now we've been building our platform to really decode. How is the gut microbiome impacting a cancer patient's response to treatment? CAR T checkpoint inhibitors made lots of, lots of clinical studies demonstrating this. But the exact mechanism and the microbes and their metabolites that engage the immune system are still unclear for us how to elucidate that was really putting on large scale observational clinical studies where we collect stool samples through our poop for the cure campaign, blood samples to look at the immune system. We use machine learning or AI to really understand what's damaged in the microbiomes of these patients so that we could replace that with engineered microbes, so genetically engineered microbes that target those biomarkers so that we can enhance response to treatment. And along the way we have gained several partners, including Johnson and Johnson, where we are partnered on our study called Argonaut, which is the largest ever done in the United States to map the cancer gut microbiome. This is specifically in colorectal cancer where we're looking to see how could we through the microbiome improve response to treatment. But also people today who are healthy but are maybe at risk for colorectal cancer. How could I develop a therapeutic that prevents colorectal cancer? Is kind of the vision, could I give somebody a pill in their 20s and they outright prevent cancer and you know, this program is going quite well. You know, the goal here is to have the therapeutic in the clinic in the next few years. But it's a long term vision. You know this, the next five to ten years of the company. Tremendous data is needed and we're only kind of at the. I would say we're halfway there in finding the right cancer biomarkers to develop a robust therapeutic as well as the genetic tools that are needed for these microbes. About a year and a half ago, we started having some large pharma discussions actually around consumer health. A group of scientists came to me actually and said that obviously we know the work that you're doing in oncology and you're mapping the microbiomes of the cancer patients to find out what's wrong and to repair it through your therapeutics. We think your technology platform could be hugely impactful for infant gut health. This was a big deal for me. I have a daughter who's 2, she was 6 months old at the time and first time mom, new mom dealing with all of that. I think it struck a chord not only personally but also professionally because here we are, this company that's an expert in the microbiome. We've been only focused in oncology and therapeutics, but neglecting some of these areas. True unmet need, even though that's consumer. We dug into the literature science for several months and what we found out is that indeed infant gut health is a massive global problem. The microbiome of infants basically impacts how well their immune system develops. So if they have the wrong microbes, their immune system develops improperly. And that's one of the reasons why we see such a huge increase in food allergies from the last few generations, atopic dermatitis, and even has implications for chronic disease like down the road, irritable bowel disease, colorectal cancer and other conditions like Asthma and type 1 diabetes. What we saw worldwide, there are some great data sets, but none of the data sets had suggested how to develop a product. What are the species and specific strains of bacteria in the baby's gut that are needed. We decided to launch a very large study in the United States called My Baby Biome, the largest ever done to map the infant microbiome to understand this better. The reason why we have such a big problem in mainly western populations is modern practices like C section births, formula use, poor maternal diet and antibiotics are wiping these microbes out. And when we're born, we're supposed to get our microbes from our mother. But if our Mother doesn't have it, we don't get it. And so we wanted to understand that specifically in the United States as well as how does this compare globally. And what we found out from our study was through very aggressive, I would say, sophisticated omics analyses is that only about 10% of babies in the US have the right microbes and at the right amounts we know what they need from non western populations like the Amish in the United States. They have high levels of certain bacteria that thrive in the presence of sugars only found in breast milk. They're called human milk oligosaccharides, human milk sugars. What this suggests is that 90% of the US population, the infant population, needs supplementation of these key bacteria. And so through our AI platform we were able to discover the species and then the particular strains of bacteria that are needed for these babies. We isolated them and now we are in manufacturing to commercialize next year an over the counter dietary supplement for infants that's composed not only of these very novel strains of probiotics, but those human milk sugars that I mentioned. So we call this a symbiotic and for us this is a big evolution of the company. You know, not only do we have kind of a pharma focus, but now really expanding into consumer. And that's where we see a huge focus for our company for the next several years building a pipeline, you know, with infant products. First maternal, we'd like to get into menopause, women's health and maybe more broadly GI and other aspects. That data coming from our other studies.

So you mentioned AI and I am just as you're talking, I'm imagining a world where you're poop for the cure. You have so many samples. We expand this out to all different populations, ages, demographics. And then any question that we have going forward, we can just ask that question of your data set and think, okay, we see this problem in this one area of the country, with this one population. What are they missing? What is wrong?

That is my 10 year plus vision that microbiome and microbiome health is democratized in the same way as getting your blood tested. When you go in to get your yearly exam, they're looking at certain markers in your blood. Well, why can't we do that in the gut? And I know it's going to be a huge change in even how physicians practice. There are a lot of physicians interested in this. But since we're just still trying to understand how the microbe functions, there's going to be this huge gap but that is really the vision. And a partnership I didn't mention earlier is with Kroger in food is medicine. So we kind of have three verticals at Persephone Pharma, you know, therapeutics, CPG with the infant product, and then a food is medicine vertical. And with Kroger, we're really trying to connect the dots between diet and the gut microbiome and overall health. You know, how can we use food as medicine? How can it change the microbiome to reduce chronic inflammation that, for example, somebody who is diabetic could get off their medicines? Could we do that with food? And that's. That's really the vision. And so I see with Pooper, the cure, having all that data of the microbiome, but then somehow you know, overlaying that with these aspects of diet, what are they taking? What kind of medicines are they taking, what kind of chronic issues do they have? So that over time, with AI, we build this massive, I call the Google mapping. Google mapping of the gut microbiome so that we can target specific functions on a personal level.

Now, Stephanie, when you say you partner with Kroger, you mean Kroger the grocery store, Correct? Okay. We're in the Northeast. We actually. I don't know if there's any Kroger's up here, but I'm. I grew up outside of Atlanta, so lots of Krogers. So can we talk about that partnership? Because that sounds unique to me that a large grocery store chain is getting very involved in this, and I'd love to learn more about how that came about.

So we have been working with a side of their of Kroger called Kroger Health, which is really focused as food is medicine. And they have many, many pillars focused on food as medicine and namely kind of reducing diabetes, obesity, even cardiovascular disease in the country. They've been really active with the White House in the Nutrition Council, helping improve and reduce food insecurities. How can we work harder on that? And with Kroger, the vision here for our work together is how can somebody essentially walk into the grocery store, pick up a microbiome kit, and start to connect the food that they bought at the grocery store and their diet to the microbiome. Obviously, this would all be in an easy app and eventually through AI getting to the point where on a personal level, we can make a food prescription. So, like, hey, you have diabetes. I see that you're eating this, and your microbiome looks like this. But I think if you can adjust your diet in this way, we may be able to really reduce your aspects of diabetes for you. You know, reduce your A1C levels, potentially even your medications that you're taking in. The ultimate vision here is that when you go to potentially pick up a prescription at their pharmacy, that there's a food prescription there as well in the dashboard of what the pharmacist is seeing. So they really want to integrate your health in terms of the grocery store, because the grocery store is a very trusted place. You know, everybody that works there. It's probably your pharmacy as well. Kroger also has clinics inside of their grocery store, so you could potentially take care of a lot of your health needs all there at once.

Hey there. Just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast because you are exploring careers in biotech, which it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are, you might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace.

And.

But we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show notes or search for the Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show. I am really, really into food as a medicine based on my own experience, and I bet you hear this a lot. But a few years ago, I did one of the tests, the microbiome tests, because I couldn't figure out why I felt so crappy. It was one of the, um, you know, commercially available one, so it wasn't very detailed. But they were able to tell me that processed gluten, so glutens that come from processed foods were. Were going to be a problem for me. I cut those out of my diet and I felt. I feel great. I feel amazing. And so I just wonder. And then when I went to Europe, I went to Portugal, and there's a lot of regulations around processed foods and things there. I feel great there. And so I wonder too, if that. Is that something you're seeing in your research is some of our, our dietary patterns here in the United States, all this processed junk that we eat?

And it's, it's that. That's a huge part of it that we're seeing and also the kind of impact that it's having. You know, we talk a lot about climate change and biodiversity of our planet. Our microbiome is, you know, I think of it as the coral reef. And, you know, western diets and especially processed foods are actually starting to shift. What we have in our microbiome, we're actually losing diversity. And that's why one of the reasons why the infant data set was so concerning to us is that babies, many babies, are just completely missing these microbes that are even called infant microbes. They're associated with infants and they're not, they're not there at all at zero, and they're just disappearing. We think they're going extinct, which is hugely concerning. But we see that in the adult population as well. And so, yeah, specific food in those aspects are what you're just starting to understand and how to kind of tweak that. For, for example, your, your story on how that can really help you. But then we see the kind of macroscopic lens here and how that's, it's becoming very detrimental and we're now seeing it in the next generation on how that's impacting that.

I know that one of the questions people are probably going to be thinking about as they're listening to you is like, well, what can I do to protect my microbiome? Like, are there any actionable things that people should be aware of?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing is that we've learned from the western diet is most people's microbiome are suffering because of a lack of fiber. So the best thing to do to protect your microbiome is to eat fiber. Fiber is essentially a prebiotic. Prebiotics feed the microbes or the probiotics in your gut, and we just don't eat enough of that. Whole grains, fruits and vegetables are all containing these prebiotics. These are special fibers that essentially the gut microbes break down into food that they eat. They don't normally get absorbed by our own human cells, unlike processed sugar. Right. And so we see that that's kind of a trade off. And so the more fiber you have, the more encouraging it is to maintain the right microbes in your gut. That's kind of their ammunition to keep everything all good in the gut. And the minute you start to shift that no fiber and only eat processed sugar, for example, you're really encouraging the opportunistic pathogens or the really bad bacteria to have an advantage. And over time they can overtake the gut. And we see that a lot with folks that have advanced stage cancer unfortunately, we see that even within infants that they're born with the wrong microbes, those potential pathogens, inflammatory microbes. And so really, to keep the balance of the gut, to keep and reduce inflammation as much as possible. Fiber. Fiber. Fiber is what I recommend. And on top of that, I think, you know, eating a really well balanced diet that includes obviously fruits and vegetables and whole grains and. But also fermented foods like kefir, kimchi, tempeh, sauerkraut. All of these kind of fermented foods are really healthy for you. They contain the natural probiotics. And going to the farm, for example, to get fruits and vegetables, you know, straight from the soil, that's another way that we get our microbes as well.

That's awesome. Thank you. That's really actionable for people. Can we dive in to poop for the cure? And sort of all of the many facets of that.

So poop for the cure came out of. It was really a. It's always a challenge to get poop, by the way. I wish it was kind of, you know, the poof emoji has helped us extensively in kind of demystifying getting poop. Right. It's very cute. It's cool. You know, there's a lot of people who are all about that. There's still a group that will never give us stool samples, and that's okay. But I think what happened to us, why we came up with poop for the care is out of necessity to get poop. So when we first started, we, you know, the company and we had a partnership we still do with UC San Diego, Moores Cancer center down the street from us. We were getting stool samples from advanced stage cancer patients who are receiving immunotherapy. We were using another company's stool kit because again, we just started. So we purchased their stool kit and we quickly started getting feedback from these cancer patients that, hey, I would love to be in your study, but I'm not going to give you stool samples. This kit is horrible. It's very difficult to use. It had this strap that goes on the toilet. It was messy. I may not be physically able to do any of that. I need something that's easy. I'm sorry. And literally a few months went by, no stool samples. And at that point I was just like, how do we move forward to your point? I have to get stool samples to do our research. And so that's how for the care was born. We wanted to, one, make it fun for people. We wanted to completely forget. Essentially, it was A stool sample that you had to give us. We made the kit look like a Gucci handbag. Literally, it's cardboard, but it looks like a Gucci handbag. And the kit, super easy to use. It has like a bracket that goes on the toilet. Any toilet can be used. A little container, like a Tupperware container. You do your sample, close the lid, and then ship it to us. All you do is call FedEx, overnight it to Persephone, and comes here, and our scientists work on it. So it was really reinventing and making the kit super easy to use. It was just having a real call to action. We need you to help us to fight cancer. And that's how for the cure, the name and the branding kind of came out. And I kid you not, after that, I mean, it's like 100% compliance. And so we solved that huge barrier. The second barrier was then how do we even get people to be in our studies? So initially, we had a lot of success with just organic word of mouth. We were featured in Scientific American. I gave a TED talk. So we had a lot of just like organic communication that was bringing in Sam people to participate. And then, since then, we knew that was just getting us hundreds of people. But really to come up with a robust cancer therapeutic, we need thousands. And so that's where we went to big Pharma and said, can you help us? Can we partner? Because we need to work together to scale. And that's how we had this partnership with jnj, which is now about almost two years in, and, and things have been going really well. And the study is now scaling and we're getting really great data in terms of the microbiome population. And so it's been a challenge. But I think fixing some of these key barriers and making it easy for people has been really important. And I would say that in just kind of on the last point, patient engagement and just having almost a personal relationship with everybody is super important. Everybody here is valuable for research. And so many of the cancer patients always makes me cry when I think about it. Know that they may not be alive to see our innovations, but they want to help others. Right? And so, you know, we are so grateful to that and really respect that. And, you know, we, we send them, you know, handwritten thank you letters and whatever we can do to, to help them, you know, and that's just something really important to us, is making sure that everybody who participates, no matter, you know, where they come from, is really, really valued for what they're doing.

I mean, that's just incredible. And I think that I'm like getting all choked up because like. Yeah, that's so, that's so moving. If someone wants to participate in this, do you allow volunteers still? Does it have to have to funnel through jj?

Yeah. So we have two active studies right now that people can participate. It's the J and J study, Argonaut. So if people are Interested, they can LinkedIn me, direct message me there or even on the website to go there. And then we have the second study with Kroger right now that's actively recruiting, called the Embrasure study. This is our Food is medicine study that I mentioned. Four different cohorts and one of them receiving medical nutrition therapy through Kroger, for example. Four months medical nutrition therapy. Basically they can go to our website and all the clinical studies are listed there to and how to sign up for them.

We'll link that in the show notes for anybody who's interested in checking it out. So when you're thinking about gathering samples, how are you thinking about this in terms of the population at large and making sure that there's equitable representation in that population and how does that then affect what you're thinking about doing with your platform?

Yeah, so you know, for us at Persefany, health equity has always been really important since day one. You know, we want to develop medicines for everybody. And so we need to make sure that as we do our science and learn about what's wrong microbiomes of these populations that is really representing the population. And so all of our studies have that health equity lens or Argonaut study aims to recruit 50% ethnic and racial minorities. And we're there. In that study then our infant population had about 35% ethnic and racial minority, quite substantial, really reflecting the population of the US for us, that's really important because when we use machine learning and AI, we want to make sure that everything gets designed in a way for our therapeutics and consumer products are designed in a way that can work for everybody. And so having that kind of inclusion is very important to us.

We're hearing a lot right now about how you train big data, how you train AI and you really have to train it on data sets that are appropriate. So let's talk a little bit about the operations of your company because you have a really interesting company with your hands in a lot of different pots slash collaboration. So tell us about how you work that internally and the communication and all the things.

We aren't a big company. You know, there's nine full time employees at Persephone right now. We have a lot of consultants. That's what helps us in, in the different areas. We have kind of, I would say three specific areas at the company. One is data science and computational biology. Those are all the folks that doing AI. We have a microbiology team. Those are the ones studying our therapeutics, isolating them, developing our infant probiotics. And then we have a third team which are clinical operations that manage poop for the cure and all of our clinical studies. While we are a small team at times, it is pretty challenging from a communication perspective because we are doing so many different things. We do have different programs. And now that we're getting into commercialization for our infant, I find myself now having to bring on a whole new set of expertise. People who have commercialized in this space. And so while we're small, I think communication is still fairly fluid. But I am surprised and something that we have to grow better and learn more on is sometimes some of the team feel siloed because they don't know everything that's going on. And sometimes we make a public announcement and they said, I didn't know you were doing that. So I was like, oh, I had said that to you. But I guess they didn't know that we finished a deal, for example. And so sometimes I need to be maybe better about communication. So that's definitely something. As we scale and grow, which we aim to do in the next year, how do I really minimize that? How do I continue to have that deep communication with everybody, make sure everything is transparent to the team? I think that's definitely going to be a challenge moving forward for us.

It's hard to believe that your company is what, five years old? I mean, that's a rapid amount of innovation in a short period of time. It's incredible. Do you mind if I ask, you said you're leveraging a lot of consultants. What are you using consultants for?

So I would say there are kind of two types of consultants that we've been leveraging. One is really on the business side, you know, for our go to market strategies initially we leveraged a lot of them to help us in oncology. And how, what does that look like? What does the clinical trial landscape look like? And then now moving to the consumer. Well, what's the path to market? Are we going direct to consumer? Do we want to think about retail? How do we do that? And all the market analysis that goes along with that as well as branding and marketing and then the other set of consultants we have are technical in nature, high, you know, real, real deep experts like those that are immuno oncologists to now on the infant front, folks that are experts in manufacturing, clinical trial design for pediatrics, kind of, you name it. So I would say those are kind of the, the key buckets that we've employed consultants for.

Yeah, we're hearing a lot of that from companies recently, which is great. I think there's been a big shift because 10 years ago when I started this company, we weren't seeing startups use consultants in the same way we are today. And I think some of that came from the pandemic and the decentralization and people realizing, you know what, I actually really enjoy not working for one company. I love spreading my expertise around and being that fractional expertise. And I think then companies accepted that because we were all remote for a while. And I hope that that really helps small companies to grow more efficiently. Because I do remember in the early days of my company watching companies say, well, we need this expertise so we're going to hire this really expensive person in house. And that just burns through your budget.

Exactly. And I think what we have noticed is that's why we've stayed really lean is that we have this need for core expertise. We're always going to need them 100%. Right. But then some of these advisors and consultants, you need them for three months, for example. Right. As we figure out something in our roadmap. And some are multi year consultants and some have been for just six months because then we kind of grew what their expertise was.

And it lets you test different things too. Like do you want to go direct to consumer? That is a really good question to ask. And maybe eventually you hire a team that does that because that is the direction.

How different is persefone today than what you envisioned when you were starting this? You know, those first early days.

It's just slightly different. It's not as different as I thought it would be, to be honest. I thought we would be in the clinic for oncology. So that's kind of the surprising thing for me it just has taken a long time and it's the pandemic really had an impact because we couldn't get stool samples from anybody. And then it took a while. Once we did start getting back to the lab, you know, we do a lot of sequencing and at the time still things got better this year it was still impacted last year on all the reagents were being used for that. And so we couldn't actually get sequencing reagents for a while or they were backordered and then the cost went up like 25%, like substantially. So it like killed our budget. At the same time we couldn't get things done. So it was. It was kind of tricky. But we. We eventually navigated through it. So that was a good two years of kind of a gap in what we could do. And so we had to kind of get creative on that front. So I. I would say it's just a little bit different in the sense that I. We may not have been in the clinic or as far as long as I thought we would have been in therapeutics, but now we are. Our technology platform has been fully built and we're moving very quickly and we are in consumer, which I always thought we would be. I just didn't know when.

Where do you see yourself in the next 10 years or the company? Because I see you still at Persefoni for sure.

But like what.

What are you doing then?

I think at that point, you know, definitely have grown the company extensively, have multiple products in the clinic, hopefully an FDA approval by then. On the consumer side being really well established and becoming actually a household name in consumer health with the infant, maternal menopause and many other products that I see in the next decade. I think for me personally is really growing into this role and being able to grow the company. Have really increased revenue and returns to the company to continue to grow and make an impact on society.

When you have free time, which I assume is limited. What books do you like to read? We are make. We have a big list of all of the books have been recommended by everyone who's come on the podcast.

Yeah, well, I'm becoming a business nerd so I'm trying to understand how to run the company and build the company. I've been reading a lot of Jim Collins's books from good to great to Built to last. Those are actually what I've been and I've been read list. I actually have to. You know, I don't have time to actually read because I listening in the dark so audio books but I replay them. I just not. I don't only listen to them once but I replay them. And on the microbiome side, one of my favorite books to recommend is Missing Microbes by Martin Blaser and kind of the pandemic of antibiotics and what that has done so the microbiome and. And. And causing obesity and other aspects. So definitely an interesting read. But Jim Collins, I'm. I'm really. I I've been really, you know, get digging in into those books lately.

Awesome.

We'll add them to the list. Yeah.

So we are going to link in all the good things into our show notes, your website, your link.

I think those are the, the best, best ways I check my LinkedIn. So that is, that is, that is a great way to connect with me.

Perfect. Well, this was so we could talk and talk and talk, but this was so great and maybe we should Plan A Part 2 Once you are, you know, have rolled out something, whether it's this Kroger relationship or, you know, or a therapeutic. I would love to reconnect. Awesome.

Thank you so much, Stephanie. This was great.

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