
UBiome received $83M in Series C financing - fosco
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/21/ubiome-is-jumping-into-therapeutics-with-a-healthy-83-million-in-series-c-financing/
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refurb
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.

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avip
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.

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Fomite
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.

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

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funfunfun
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.

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toufka
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.

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funfunfun
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.

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

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

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tdburn
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.

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

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wolco
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.

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fosco
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?

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wolco
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.

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fosco
thank you for sharing! great information on this site

[https://www.datapunk.net/](https://www.datapunk.net/)

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

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doitLP
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.

~~~
dougmccune
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.

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bsder
> 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.

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dougmccune
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?

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bsder
> 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.

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rexreed
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.

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loceng
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.

