UBiome received $83M in Series C financing | Hacker News Reader

UBiome received $83M in Series C financing

techcrunch.com

41 pointsfosco50 comments

The grapevine says this place is a dog and pony show.

I would believe that. I paid for a kit, never got a confirmation. Waited a few months and finally contacted customer service. They said it would be shipped soon. It never was. I cancelled the order, asked for (and got) a refund. No follow up, nothing. Not even a GDPR email during the wave of them earlier this year, something I would expect from such a business. I don’t know, maybe I’m paranoid after reading Bad Blood but something ain’t right. Their marketing machine still churns though. From time to time I still see ads.

Given the health and medical play, I think they're questionable in at least a couple of ways.

- There are no actions to be taken based on microbiome data

- There's no government oversight to the quality of their sequencing or bioinformatics

- The reviews don't indicate the kits are useful https://www.highya.com/ubiome-reviews

Maybe a good comparison would be if Theranos gave you a 'subjective wellness score' instead of standard test results

You summed up my concerns better than I could.

I remember when uBiome launched out of UCSF. I remember thinking “ok, they’ll sequence your microbiome and then...what exactly?”

I gave my data files from uBiome to a microbiologist and was told 'these data are too low in quality to analyze'

Yikes.

To be honest, the microbiome space is interesting and may hold promise for therapeutics - and maybe uBiome will be a leader in it.

But there is a very good chance that nothing will come of this whatsoever.

a fantasy: I get intestinal distress from food/water while on vacation. I take antibiotics to clear the problem. At a later date, I have a fecal transplant [0]. It couldn't be mine, because that was the site of the problem. Instead, I order a culture that matches my previous microbiome distribution.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/probiotics-if-you-do...

I think to do this, you'd need data points that don't yet exist: if your microbiome changes from antibiotic use, will you suffer health effects (beyond infection with a disease causing bacteria like C. difficle)?

My wife and I both got kits (reasonably quickly shipped) and got our results, also reasonably quickly (within a few weeks of sending them back if I recall). But the results were almost identical between us, even though we have very different digestive health systems/symptoms. There was one metric that was totally out of normal range, but the reading was exactly the same between the two of us. We were definitely left not being able to get any useful information out of the data and not trusting it at all. I think my wife emailed them asking why the results were basically identical to mine (including the totally abnormal metric), and I don't think she ever got a reply.

I'd be far more surprised if you and your wife had markedly different microbiomes.

> I think my wife emailed them asking why the results were basically identical to mine (including the totally abnormal metric), and I don't think she ever got a reply.

Well, to be fair, one of the working hypotheses about human mating behavior is that one of its goals is to equalize the biome of the female (bacteria, viruses, etc.) to that of her partner before she gets pregnant.

So, husband and wife having the same biome is not surprising.

And, even if you have the same biome, your systems will almost certainly react differently depending upon the expressed receptors.

Totally fair, but then what use is the data? If we have totally different digestive reactions / problems, then can you really tell much of anything from the microbiome data?

> If we have totally different digestive reactions / problems, then can you really tell much of anything from the microbiome data?

Congratulations. You now understand why the folks trying to monetize microbiome are regarded as snake oil salesmen right now.

I'm sure there are broad strokes that are valid. You have a lot of bacterium X--that isn't good. You completely lack bacterium Y--that isn't good. Your overall diversity is low--you probably should try to correct that.

However, once you start getting into "you need specific bacterium X to solve specific problem Y", that's likely snake oil.

Biological systems are annoying like that. For any treatment X, there will be some, generally tiny, fraction of the population that responds to it.

The problem is finding a treatment that works in either 1) the vast majority of the population or 2) a readily identifiable minority of the population.

Microbiome work is probably going to produce some cool results, but it will take time to get there. Running experiments on people is time consuming and expensive.

Yep. They still owe me the $80 or $90 I paid for a kit. I followed up with them multiple times and never got a resolution. This was a couple of years ago.

Why didn't you just file a chargeback?

Hi there! Please email us at support@ubiome.com and we'd be happy to look into this.

I did. Multiple times. I do not want to relive the experience of trying to get my money back. I also don't want to support the growing tendencies of companies to not care about customer complaints until they hit social media.

Grapevine is true. What they are doing is extremely questionable. They are billing insurance thousands of dollars for tests that are rudimentary and only look at absence or presence of microbes.

Look at Better Business Bureau and Customer Reviews, https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/clinic/ubiom... https://www.highya.com/ubiome-reviews

The biotech funding atmosphere is incredible right now. A few years ago, a $10M series A would be impressive. Now there was have been series A's in the $100M range.

Congrats to uBiome, but honestly, the microbiome space is so nascent, this is an incredibly risky play. I haven't seen any data so far to suggest the microbiome plays a major role in disease. It's entirely speculation at this point.

The FDA disagrees with you (about the role of the microbiome -- I doubt they have an official opinion on biotech funding). C. Diff. is probably the biggest indication with multiple clinical trials going on to demonstrate the efficacy of full-spectrum fecal microbiota transplants as a therapeutic. Besides that, check out the work of the Allegretti or Borody labs for more human studies about the role of the microbiome in various metabolomic, developmental, and autoimmune diseases.

Fecal transplants are not new science and C. Difficle is just a bacterial infection. The relationship to microbiome science is minimal.

As for the science around the microbiome role in metabolic, developmental and autoimmune disorder is observatory at best. I’ve yet to see a paper that took a human, changed their microbiome and observed X effect (beyond the obvious bacterial infection example).

I'm not quite following how the relationship between microbiome science and an infection of the microbiome is minimal.

But more to your point, using the mg data from their "healthy" population along with the open-label data in the literature seems like a good way to construct RCTs, no? Data from open label studies isn't speculative... it's just not phase 3.

In case you're curious, here are two papers on UC: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28214091 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29052237

This is not "Biotech" though, it's "soft healthcare", i.e well-being fluff mainly designed to sidestep any FDA procedure as that would force you to do proper statistical analysis and double-blinded tests.

Hell, it's not even clear that prior to a bunch of bloggers calling them out on it that they were going to seek the input of an IRB.

This. Try to find a single diagnosis, treatment, or illness listed in their claims.

All of VC is frothy right now. It's not that biotech is suddenly more attractive, it's that the tidal wave of cheap money is finally sloshing against the deepest parts of the shoreline.

But also, it's not getting any easier to raise money for a real biotech, where you have to have scientific validation and might hurt people; it's easier to raise money when you're a blockchain biotech, and are promising whizzy vaporware that interacts with customers only in unregulated ways that can't be validated.

Some of the really big rounds have been for therapeutics as well. Denali raised a $250M series A a couple years ago.

There is just a ton of money right now.

Even for companies like uBiome whose business strategy is “we’ll sequence your microbiome and <waves hands around furiously>”

I'd put Denali in the "actually does science" category, though. Certainly more than uBiome. They do have a drug in clinical trials, after all.

Trying desperately not to be bitter as I submit yet another grant to keep my lab going, and where $250K a year is a really pretty successful grant portfolio.

It sounds like we've figured out what'll cause the bubble this time around

I think that's a bit cynical of the current round of bio-based funding. It's not wrong, but it's also not the whole picture.

It's only just started, but there is now a light at the end of the genetic/gene-therapy tunnel. With the approval of the first CAR last year (and it's success at curing children of leukemia), there's now a very real environment to produce valuable inventive biological products that are not just chemicals or antibodies.

Kite and Juno sales for ~$10B each earlier this year has done quite a bit for the field. Vapor always follows the good money, but it's not just that the money is cheap.

Maybe you're right that investors are going a little crazy because there's a whiff of success in the air. But even so, throwing money at a company like uBiome based on the stuff you're talking about is just the usual VC herd-following behavior.

Also interesting to note that Joseph Jimenez joined the board (former CEO of Novartis).

It is interesting. Theranos appointed high-profile people who were incapable of doing due diligence on their product. I wonder if this is another one of those.

A CEO of a phrmaceutical company ought to be able to do diligence on an FDA-trajected company in a way that a former secretary of state would not be able to evaluate a diagnostics company.

I could be lead to that conclusion, but I see this another way. Running the business of a multinational pharma company doesn't qualify you to judge primary literature in microbiology, methods, or data science of the results. It also doesn't help you differentiate claims from hot air in this emerging space. Considering the maturity of this field I think these are the skills required for due diligence. I think a pharma CEO as well as you and I are at the mercy of pop-sci reporting.

From what I read, he came by the board seat through his involvement with one of the VC that participated in this round.

An interesting move into therapeutics, from their previous main business in diagnostics. I wonder how much due diligence the new investors did.

I've done multiple 'free' tests that they try to bill through insurance and haven't had any issues. Whether the tests are yet accurate and useful I love the ease and hope they can develop a more in depth service.

Does it bother you that those 'free' tests are just another unnecessary cost burden on our medical system?

Love the concept but after my results came in I expected a better interface. It was missing a section to tell me what bacteria was missing compared to the other groups.

That I think is a critical offering and I assumed was part of the data including maybe how to improve it? (It being the microbiome where mine may lack etc)

maybe those offerings will be in the future?

what are your thoughts on the data they did provide?

Very valuable but I have to do strain by straijpn searches. There is a great site called datapunk that has many of the missing suggestions with links to the research.

thank you for sharing! great information on this site

https://www.datapunk.net/

The more money that gets put into a company the more Confirmation Bias / Social Proof comes into play. Why would investors put so much money in if they didn't do fundamental due diligence, the thinking goes. So that means these firms can raise even more money with less scrutiny than a Series A round would get at a $2M round with a $10M valuation.

Is this company real? Who knows. Do I trust the VCs to do real due diligence and verify that it is? Nope. Not a chance in hell.

The indicators for Theranos was the lack of interest from folks like A18Z and Sequoia. Similarly the top investor here is not a household name. If this was the bees knees, I'd be expecting the big folks in this round.

Is it possible this company is on the up-and-up and this is all going to pay off handsomely for everyone? Sure, it's possible. Do I have every right and reason to be skeptical and doubt that there's something here? Based on past experience, yes.

It's impossible to know without doing a deep dive into everything. The play with large amounts of VC usually trends towards giving a significant exit to earlier investors with new large rounds, or finally to IPO - dumping a potentially worthless (long-term) company. There are a lot of companies that fit into the later round though, off-loading the risk and unsustainable spending in order to capture/hold market share - dumping that risk onto the public, general markets, where then stock brokers etc take their cut. If smart decisions are being made with this money though, then it could play out well for these companies.

Get off the hype train. If the cool people aren't investing so what.

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