Custom Probiotics Specifically For You and Your Gut Needs with Sunny Jain of Sun Genomics

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You want tech and tacos Tacos in tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am thrilled to have you here on the Tacos and Tech Podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I'm thrilled to have on the podcast Sunny Jane, CEO and founder of Sun Genomics. Hey Sunny, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks for having me, Neil. Good to catch up with you again. And I'm excited to share more about Flora and Sun Genomics today.

Yeah, we've gone back a few years. I think we originally met, I know, in the startup ecosystem in San Diego. I feel like it was related to Techos Angels or maybe even earlier, but it was good to catch up again recently through a mutual friend, Ellie Carlson. And here we are to have you on the podcast. Do you want to give us a quick one minute overview of what Sun Genomics is?

Sure. So Fluorite is the world's first fully customized precision probiotic that is based off of your gut microbiome. This is our flagship product. Founded the company in 2016 with trying to find a solution for my son's gut microbiome and found that a custom solution is necessary to modulate the microbiome and make sure he stays healthy. And that was the genesis of Fluoray. And now we are democratizing this and trying to educate as many people as we can about the benefits of fluoride. Oh, wow.

We love a personal connection to a mission driven company. I want to hear how your son's doing, so we'll make sure we talk a little about that. But take us through a little bit how you got here. Like what before, before even the idea came about, were you always in kind of the life sciences world or how did you end up in this kind of environment and work?

Yeah, it's maybe just a little bit of random skill sets and luck that brought me to sun genomics, you know, foremost. I became a father and then I began to have a problem that I needed to solve for my son. And that kind of led me down the rabbit hole. I happened to have experiences in working for biotech companies like Illumina. I worked in reference Labs like LabCorp, developed lots of diagnostic testing like molecular oncology assays. Also was on the forefront of a lot of these SNP assays. And you see those 23andMe like testing companies. I was the guy in the lab processing those samples as they came through early on. And so had some good fortune to be the first clinical lab scientist to process a whole genome in a clinical lab in Illumina and stayed there for about seven years and then started my own venture in 2016.

Very cool. So how long before 2016 did you have the idea itself? I'm curious, because it's always a side hustle or an ideation on the side that you eventually become your full hustle. And I love hearing that kind of story. So take us through kind of that genesis a bit.

Yeah, probably the inception point was as we were doing human genome sequencing, I realized that we were not using the full data off of the instruments. So only 80% of the data would sometimes be used for the final analysis. And that got me thinking, what is the other 20%? And as I started to dig, I found that the other 20% could be bacteria or microbial in nature, and that's from blood samples. And then at one point I started to think, well, what impact does that have on our health? And I just started reading literature about it just to familiarize myself with it. And then in 2016, it all kind of synced up or came full circle and I needed to find a solution for my son's gut, and I applied that same sort of thinking of the bacteria that might be in a person's biological sample and how to analyze that. And luckily, I understood some of these technologies at that time and applied bioinformatics and DNA sequencing and sequenced his stool sample and found that it has tons of bacteria in it and trillions of microbes that are living inside of the gut. So not. It's actually the opposite of the blood sample. Your stool sample is like, 80% microbial and maybe not any human DNA in there at all.

Interesting. Okay, so learning that, how did you find an application for it? Like, how many different ideas did you have to say, all right, this is the one. Because the iteration validation process is amazing for an entrepreneur.

Yeah. So we originally started just testing probiotics. So taking you back to the story with my son, you know, his gut was having issues. We didn't to the doctor, and the doctor says, he's too young for any sort of medications. Why don't you try a probiotic? And that's where I went to the natural food store and saw what I call the probiotic wall of paralysis. You really can't figure out what's the right fit for his particular issues, and he's in pain. So I really felt like I needed to find a solution. So the first things I started to do was to test probiotics. So I would extract the DNA from the probiotics off the shelf and then run that through this bioinformatic pipeline, and I could see if the ingredients or the strains listed on the bottle would match my data output. And a lot of times it didn't, like, there was mismatches or it was calling organisms that were not on the bottle. So as a parent, you can appreciate that this may not be the formula you want to give your child. If there's an inconsistency with the product label and what you just analyzed it for, and that was the first thing was DNA verification. The other thing that we started to work on in the lab, and this is sort of just me having some dumb luck to run into lab fellows here in San Diego and them giving me access to some lab space. Early on in 2016, I put my credit card down, and I was talking to Julio Diamondo. And one day, Julio came over to me, and he's like, sonny, is that your personal credit card? I'm like, yes, I just need lab space. I need to test these probiotics. And he was really nice and got the lab space I needed. And, and so we ran a test called gastric survivability in that lab space. And what that did was to test if you, it would like simulate if you ate the probiotic, the gastric solution in your gut system and if it would survive. And so yes, it's one thing to make sure you're taking the right strains, but the second thing is you need to make sure it actually can survive your stomach acid and get to your intestinal tract where you would actually benefit from it. And so then that became the second part. And so at the beginning I was thinking, oh, we could make this really amazing like verification system. We could help the probiotic industry that way and everyone would have better probiotics. And, and then the idea is moving forward further and further as I started to analyze more and more data and at one point I came to the realization that everyone's got, is so unique, that everyone needs a unique probiotic formulation.

Got it. Okay. So that's an obviously a big jump up. It's hard to, it's a different kind of model from a business model perspective. Right. You think you're building something that's like repeatable per se, and then now you realize, oh, like it's a customization for every person. I guess you're using the same process for analyzation, giving feedback and data and then customizing a finished product. So what's the finished product like for everyone in this scenario?

So the finished product is micromanufacture to the individual. And so, you know, the first thing that sends off is, wow, is that going to be scalable? And you know, the first one cost me $30,000 and took me eight months. But here we are six years later in a T can crank that out for six minutes, I think is the speed right now that they can do it and they, you know, they do it for a hundred dollars a month and so it's way cheaper and way faster and fully scaled. At this point did I know we'd be able to scale it? I don't know if I knew we'd be able to scale it. But I knew that there was a need and that the health part came first for me, solving the need. And then the second part became, okay, mapping out, like, how could it, how could we possibly make this faster? Okay, if we had more people, if we had more machines, we had more instruments, we had robotics software, automation, how do we put this together? And that's, you know, that's been the journey for the last five, six years is really Just making it faster and making it better.

Incredible. So at what point were you able to actually help your son? When did your product was like, yep, this is it solving him and it can go for everyone else as well.

Um, so it took about six months. We put him on, we did the first gut test. He had a high inflammatory microbe detected in his gut. Still haven't seen too many infant gut profiles with that particular inflammatory microbe. And so I'm really happy that we acted it. It took about an encyclopedia worth of clinical literature to convince my wife at the time. But I'm glad I put all that together because that became the foundational literature for how precision probiotics should should be formulated. And the time was well spent. And it now has become a software algorithm and we've developed AI around it and we've been able to automate all these processes that, you know, happened manually at the beginning. So, so it was completely worth it. And then we gave him the probiotic and then retested his gut. And after we retest his gut, we saw that inflammatory microd drop way down to what other children and other adults have gone through the pipeline are at. And we're, we're seeing it stay that low and we keep him on probiotics. And we also started to manage his diet a lot more. We became much more active diet management and vegetables and reduced sugars and other things that need to be in his diet.

Yeah, but, but data is power, that's for sure. And just like that, knowledge is pretty incredible. Take us through some. Flori has a number of products now. What are some other use cases that you're seeing? You know, people come through then using the products for.

Yeah, so not just parents with children. We have found there's a real market for people that are suffering with chronic conditions that are looking for solutions that are on this diagnostic odyssey. They're doing all these tests and taking these different types of interventions, but they're not being able to resolve it and manage the their lifestyle with those types of interventions. So we found people with chronic conditions, whether that be arthritis, ibs, ibd, even autism, that we've been able to benefit. And if you go on trustpilot.com, you can see a lot of really great reviews for FL com on there. Just talking about things that we've been able to make an impact on in people's lives. We also have a lot of sports athletes that use our products. You know, that 1% edge is everything and having a digestive power and feeling good every day that you're going out training really helps them. And so it's been amazing to see the sports team take a liking to this type of customized product.

Oh, that's super cool. You know, obviously in general, personalized wellness is completely on the rise. No longer can we really say like ignorance is bliss around this stuff because it's just too easy to learn about yourself. But so is probiotic and gut health in general. I mean the, you know, the whole, the gut being the second brain, like it's a whole new movement. Where do you see this all heading? Is it really that everyone will know everything about their themselves at all times or what kind of wave are you, do you think you're riding?

Yeah, I think we're at the beginning. The biggest part of the wave hasn't started to form. But there's so much white space, so much opportunity here. We already know there's strong interest, we already know there's high impact. We could be looking at the next biggest molecular diagnostic test to hit the market since non invasive prenatal testing in the microbiome, this microflora analysis, and not only that, beginning to introduce ways to actually create feedback loop for people to manage their gut health. When you're taking tests at different intervals where this testing becomes standard of care. You go in for your routine blood work, you're doing your A1C, you're doing their fasting glucose levels and you're doing your BMI index and you're running your cholesterols and you're running your microbiome to understand if you have gut inflammation or any other things that need to be taken a look at.

Is this something like your general practitioner is starting to ask for, like when someone goes and does labs or is it still kind of, you have to know to go find, you know, Loire and do it yourself.

Right now I'd say the integrative medicine doctors are starting to use this more commonly and you have to kind of be in the right type of insurance tier to take advantage of integrative health medicine and functional medicine doctors, which is somewhat unfortunate, but at least it's in medical. And I think in the next four or five years you'll begin to see that make it to the general practitioner, make it to reimbursement, because today it's still on a cash pay basis. But that is changing very fast as science and more of the technology evolves. We're right at the center of it and we're hopefully contributing to that as well.

Yeah, and you mentioned the center of it. Like the center of a lot of this is San Diego too, right. Where so much of the early genomics work has led to personalized medicine of everything. Talk a little bit about just building this company within San Diego, available talent and that kind of stuff.

San Diego is a great place to build a headquarters for a life science company or any biotech company. You know, one exit away from us is Illumina. A couple exits away are Qualcomm. So tech, software, hardware, biotech, all co localized in the same place. And then you have so many other life science companies in and around the space, Thermo, Fisher and you know, all the other startups. Ecosystem is starting to boom as well. So from a talent perspective, because you have so many of those companies, you have access to amazing PhDs, amazing scientists, amazing technical marketing individuals. Just, it just creates a really nice ecosystem and then it can't beat the weather. So it's not too hard for recruiting and that always helps. I think the, the water temperature here is a couple degrees warmer than the Bay Area, so that also can help. But you know, I think being in San Diego, one of the key things is just being able to engage with that ecosystem and be able to have community involvement from life science professionals.

Yeah. And also you've got a community that from a customer standpoint are kind of wellness forward, you know, a bit more early adopters to trying things that make sure your body health is kind of top of mind. So I think even just from a customer development perspective, it gotta, it's gotta feel like it's a good, a better community than others to test and try new products.

Yeah, absolutely. California in general is Southern California, great place. And then San Diego is just right at the crucible of all that. Right. So it's great, it's great to be in San Diego and it's great to see the ecosystem expand as you. As I mentioned, like we started just in this small lab at Lab Fellows and then we went to Biolabs, which is another incubator off of Genesee. And then we finally found our own space and now we've grown to 8,000 square feet of space. So you can actually start as a smaller entity here in San Diego and not need to close, you know, a massive Series A to even, you know, create space for yourself in San Diego, which I think is fantastic.

Yeah. What also is great about your company is that you're kind of leading the wave of consumer life sciences, which, you know, predominantly a lot of our brands here have been, not have been kind of B2B even on the life sciences side, Illumina being a big one of that. Right. Like supplying devices for researchers, but you building a consumer facing which is really going to, you know, I think put more San Diego life science even on the map to the greater world. So that's gotta be pretty exciting to be a part of as well too.

Yeah, it's fun to see what we spawned or ignited. And you can see precision nutrition companies start to pop up. When we started, we went out and pitched to Techos Angels at one point and one of the feedbacks was, well, if you're the only one, only company doing it, how do I know this is a valid market? And we're now like six years later and the space has really just boomed and there's tons of activity and whether it be personalized vitamins or personalized probiotics, and personalizing it from your DNA, personalizing it from your I've got microbiome perspective. So there's, it's just great to see all of that start to increase. And I think the market size is like 14, 15% CAGR growth. And so we anticipate that to continue in this sort of precision, let's call it precision medicine. And a subcomponent of that is precision nutrition. We think there's a lot of growth there.

Yeah. Well, we're really excited for you. I'm excited to try it for myself soon. And the other piece that we love in San Diego, and these may come at odds on the surface. This is a tacos podcast. We're at tacos town that does not usually jive with gut health. So maybe, you know, pre tacos, you should be taking a flora analysis to make sure that, you know, is this meal gonna be okay for yourself? How do you deal with that? How do you handle the finding the right taco spots for purposely marking, marking with your, with your taco health?

Well, you know, the way I view food in general is we need to continue to enjoy the foods we love. You know, I hate taking like a test that tells me that I need to stop eating the foods I love because that's like the hardest thing to do. And the doctor has already been telling us that for years. Right. And so to start to exclude things is maybe not the way to start to think about our health, but really think about how do we overcome those challenges, those challenge meals. And there's a lot of scientific evidence that now talks about probiotics helping our digestive capabilities, including being able to power through a potentially challenging taco meal. So taking your Probiotics will definitely make you feel better through the day if you're eating tacos. One of my favorite places for tacos is called Moss Veggies vegan and because there's lots of veggies mixed in there, I think it gives you a nice blend of the fibers which are healthy for your gut microbiota and then it has that plant based and eco conscious and gut friendly mix to it.

I love it. It's a new one here on the podcast. We're adding it to our taco database but it sounds like a great spot so. And a healthy spot as well too, which we love. Well, Sunny, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thank you for what you're doing for, you know, for all of us, for our own gut health and general, for our families and as well too. So keep up the great work and thanks for being on the show and sharing your story.

Neil. We we appreciate everything that you do for the San Diego community, bringing awareness and and happy to be here anytime.

Thanks so much.

Appreciate it.

Sonny, thanks for tuning in to Tacos and Tech Podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshbroodtech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also follow Fresh Brewed tech on all of our social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

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