Over a five-year span, FitBiomics took the results of its eight-week placebo-controlled study and used them to support the creation of VNella, a probiotic "sourced from the finest microbiomes on earth" that has been industrially scaled to address major consumer health concerns. For example, 100 million Americans suffer from insomnia. VNella reduces multiple categories of fatigue and increases physical activity.
“[VNella’s launch] is a pretty exciting moment, not just for FitBiomics and not even the entire microbiome field, but I think in general for the consumer health industry,” said Dr. Jonathan Scheiman, co-founder and CEO of the company.
The product is named after the genus Veillonella, the ‘good’ bacteria that ‘eats’ lactic acid. Lactic acid is produced as a byproduct of strenuous exercise and physical activity and breaks down carbohydrates for energy, converting it into beneficial short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). These provide energy to the body’s cells and have anti-inflammatory properties.
“This notion of reducing fatigue, it's very different than sleep,” Dr. Scheiman said. “You could get 10 hours of sleep but still be tired the next day. SFCAs are powering the mitochondria, creating more energy, which go back into our muscles. It's breaking down a metabolite associated with fatigue and converting into something beneficial for our bodies. So, it's a completely different physiological mechanism to reduce fatigue.”
Veillonella became well known after a 2019 Nature Medicine paper outlined how elite marathons runners had an abundance of the strain post race. This was a shift in research, as prior studies had focused on the link between Akkermansia and the improvement of metabolic profiles in athletes.
Shaking up the probiotics industry, Dr. Scheiman said, requires looking at the gastrointestinal tract (GI), the large and small intestines, to identify microbes that are associated with optimal health, longevity and performance. The GI tract is an anaerobic environment, devoid of oxygen, making the creation of therapeutics a challenge because supply chains are abundant with oxygen.
Ninety percent of the probiotics on the market come from strains such as Lactobacilli and Bifidobacterium, which are tolerant to oxygen. However, VNella is different because it works in an anaerobic environment.
“Part of what FitBiomics is doing is again disrupting this industry and the status quo by creating these novel microbes through biotech innovation,” Dr. Scheiman said. “If you look at something like VNella, this is a strict anaerobic microorganism, and these are notoriously hard to scale from a fermentation perspective.”
However, Dr. Scheiman’s enthusiasm for the new product was tempered by the realities surrounding the efficacy of the microbiome industry, he said.
“Over the past decade, $3 billion has been invested into the microbiome space, and I think not a lot has really come from it in terms of actually translating microbiome metagenomic information into tangible, clinically validated health solutions.”
Elite athletes
FitBiomics is changing that narrative by focusing its research and product line on the microbiome of elite athletes. In 2021 it launched its first product, Nella, a probiotic that improves quality of sleep leveraging gut immune and gut brain benefits.
Formulated with three proprietary strains—Lactiplantibacillus platarum FB00015, Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus FB00047 and Lactobacillus acidophilus FB00012—Nella, like Vnella, is derived from the gut microbiomes of these super athletes, individuals who make up only .01% of the human population.
“Spinning out of Harvard Medical School, we spent a lot of time on discovery, bioinformatics and metagenomics, sort of our secret sauces,” Dr. Scheiman said. “We track athletes between performance and recovery phases to see what microbes are unique or enriched in their GI that drives optimal physiology.”
His team uses microbiology to isolate these microorganisms, rapidly and functionally validating them. Then strategic partners help the company take the lab scale discovery to industrial fermentation under anaerobic conditions to conduct more clinical validation and then ultimately commercialization.
“We've taken a radically different approach to translational medicine, starting from the data sets and biology we look at to the discoveries and how we can now rapidly translate them into clinically validated consumer health solutions,” Dr. Scheiman said.
“That's why we're excited about this as much as we're excited about Veillonella. We're equally excited about how it creates a new model for translational science, and what I could say is FitBiomics is just scratching the surface. Nella and Vnella are just the beginning of all these other unique microbes we could develop for various functional health applications.”