Episode 56: Lung Cancer in Non-Smokers Linked To Oral Microbiome

Metabolites are having their moment in the media, but what does the science say? 

A quick refresher - remember that a metabolite (also called a postbiotic) is the byproduct made by the microbes in our guts. These metabolites have recently been heralded as the real heroes in this whole microbiome picture, so it only makes sense that science will continue to discover more about them in coming years. 

On this “Straight From The Gut” episode, Andrea Wien and Afif Ghannoum are joined by Aubrey Levitt, co-founder of The Postbiotics+, for a roundtable discussion on her latest research on metabolites, including a new study in Nature. 

It takes the team a minute to get going, but they find a good rhythm, so stick around as they chat about the microbiome of different cancers and tumors, plus how a dysbiotic gut correlates to severe COVID and long-haul COVID symptoms.

Questions? Ideas? Email us at themicrobiomereport@biohmhealth.com or reach out on Instagram @DreEats or @BIOHMHealth. 

Approximate Timestamps: 

• What’s new with metabolites? (2:04) 
• Medical foods (4:42) 
• The Cancer Microbiome Atlas (11:44) 
• Fecal transplants (14:03) 
• Oral microbiome and lung cancer (15:45) 
• Scanning microbiomes before medical trials (17:18) 
• Personalization of medications (19:28) 
• Susceptibility to “long haul” COVID (23:54) 
• Afif’s new obsession, Clubhouse (30:30)

Mentioned On This Show:

• COVID-19 severity linked to gut bacteria in first-of-its-kind study
• Oral microbiome = lung cancer in non-smokers

• For the first time in the world, we have successfully fought cancerous tumors by changing the gut microbiome
• The Cancer Microbiome Atlas
• Clubhouse app
• VSL3
• Aubrey’s company, Postbiotics+
• Aubrey’s past episode on balancing the gut after antibiotics
• BIOHM’s website (Promo Code: POD15)

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Transcript: 

Andrea Wien: Welcome to The Microbiome Report I'm your host, Andrea Wien. And today we have a special guest joining Afif and I for our Straight From The Gut episode. Aubrey Levitt is joining us, you may remember her from our re-air of her episode last month, and she's come to share some updates on her research and just generally kick the tires with Afif and I about some of the latest research. It takes us a little bit to get into a groove, but I think we hit a good stride so just stick with us. On this episode, we're talking about the microbiome of cancers and tumors and how a dysbiotic gut correlates to severe COVID and long haul COVID symptoms. I'm also happy to announce that we have a shiny new discount code for any and all BIOHM products for listeners of the show. Just use POD15, POD15 for 15% off.

I'll of course link to this and everything we mentioned on today's show in the show notes at biohmhealth.com/pages/podcast. Again, BIOHM is B-I-O-H-M. Enjoy the show. Hey everyone. Welcome. Welcome. Straight From The Gut episode, I have a Afif on the line and also Aubrey Levitt, who we just re aired one of her episodes last month. One of the questions we get asked the most is what do I do after a round of antibiotics? So we repaired her episode, but we wanted to bring her on to this show because she's had some exciting updates with her company. Some new research they've put out, so Aubrey welcome to the show.

Aubrey Levitt: Thank you. Thanks for having me back. Appreciate it.

Andrea Wien: So we would love to hear it's been about a year and a half, I think since we recorded that. And we had said in a lot of our emails, postbiotics, metabolites, this is really the next frontier and now here we are, I'm seeing so much research. Afif and I talk about this topic all the time on these episodes. So I would love to hear from your perspective, really being on the inside and doing the science, what is new in this front?

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. As you mentioned, it's a very exciting to see that postbiotics are getting a lot of air time and play right now because it's really, we believe the metabolites and looking at the entire ecosystem of what's happening in the gut, which is extremely complex and overwhelming a lot of times. But you have to take that into account when we're looking at how we can stay healthy and how we can protect it from what I'd say is our modern lifestyle, which includes antibiotics and anything that really destroys the gut microbiome. So that's why we specifically are working on a product to address that and how we can essentially leverage the competitive and complex dynamics of what happens in the gut microbiome. So we can protect it from when you're getting an extreme assault, like antibiotics or other therapies.

The exciting actually so Jonas, my co-founder was previously at Memorial Sloan Kettering. And what you see in the research there is that in cancer patients, they get one of the most extreme assaults to their gut, through chemotherapy in addition to antibiotics and other things happening. And what they found is that if you can protect this diversity, these patients do better, they recover better their immune system is reconstituted faster. So this is a huge goal on that level and as you talk about with just your average person who's generally helping gets antibiotics. The effect is less but it's so matters in those patients, especially if you have to receive many rounds.

So essentially though what we have found is that not only does diversity protect us from pathogens or other things that could make us sick immediately after getting it wiped out, but it also impacts our immune response and inflammatory response and in these cancer patients when you are able to protect your gut, your immune system helps you recover. And that's a big discovery for this field so that's the big update. But we're working on how we translate that into products that can help us at these different touch points.

Afif Ghannoum: So Aubrey, can I ask a question? So I was looking at your site and you guys talk about microbiome therapeutics. So you guys are doing IMD drug pathway?

Andrea Wien: That's one of our long-term goals, but we actually are creating a medical food first. So our first product is a medical food.

Afif Ghannoum: Really cool.

Andrea Wien: For someone who might not know what a medical food is, can you describe what that is?

Aubrey Levitt: Yep. So that is a product that you essentially can take when you're under supervision of a physician. So meaning that you have some other condition going on and it's going to nutritionally support you in ways that are going to help your recovery or help you through that process.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah. Taking a step back because I think for a lot of people even in the dietary supplement industry it's confusing. The way I'd explain it is there's really three broad categories and Aubrey you're more sophisticated on this stuff than I am, but just broad strokes. There's obviously dietary supplements, right? So what things can be done to supplement your diet, the classic things are multivitamins, fish oils, obviously probiotics. Then there's medical foods, Aubrey said something really important, which is a medical food is something that can be used to nutritionally optimize the condition. So an example, cancer patients, they can have a lot of issues ingesting food, especially if they like neck cancers.

So developing medical foods that make it easy for them to get nutrition while dealing with that. That's actually helping with that condition and then there's drugs that's why I was asking about therapeutics drugs are what you think of something to treat, cure, prevent disease or condition. So that's why I was asking are you looking at it as a drug? So it's a really fascinating area. The reason I ask is we've looked a lot at it, and it's really interesting. And this is getting in the weeds, but to see what FDA-

Andrea Wien: That's what this show is all about Afif.

Afif Ghannoum: Right. But to see how FDA treats probiotics and microbiome therapeutics as a drug category, it's going to be really interesting.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. It's definitely an evolving space to see how that's going to turn out. But I think it's going to have to get used to dealing with probiotics and live biotherapeutics.

Afif Ghannoum: Yes. Yeah. Well, offline, I'd love to pick your brain about on the manufacturing side there's so many interesting nuances as we're looking at it, it'd be interesting to compare notes.

Aubrey Levitt: Yes. To your point. I think one other area of medical food that's often, or is interesting in this space is just tying that how the microbiome is going to be essential to protect it from why it matters to our health. So if you look at some probiotics they might play medical food because it protects the ecosystem or the I think VSL#3 or something like that. So tying it to overall health of keeping you healthy, and then also when you have certain conditions is also part of the next frontier of the microbiome.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah. What's interesting when we've talked to... Because we've looked at medical foods and the feedback we got at least in the pure probiotic world is that FDA is really tough to deal with when it comes to medical foods. So it's interesting it's going to be... But I think you nailed it. They're going to have to because it's just an emerging area where science just keeps getting stronger and stronger, but that's a really interesting category just generally medical foods.

Andrea Wien: How many, when we look at the market for medical foods surrounding microbiome, are there many yet, Aubrey, do you know?

Aubrey Levitt: There's VSL#3, which is a probiotic that is a medical food. I know there's... I would consider like enterade that impacts the gut. You could argue that's the microbiome, I think it also helps the electrolyte balance. There's a handful, it's an overlooked category for sure.

Andrea Wien: And are your foods really working in that post space, like in the metabolite space or are they still working on the bacteria and the diversity that's in the gut.

Aubrey Levitt: We're working at protecting the diversity, but the way we're doing that is through the postbiotics or metabolites. So we're not looking at live probiotics as being a solution we're looking at more of an ecosystem approach.

Andrea Wien: And Afif how is something like a VSL#3, which is a probiotic but on a medical level different from something like BIOHM? Is it just the quantity?

Afif Ghannoum: I don't know enough about VSL#3 to talk specifically about them. I do know they're like uses the prime example of a medical food probiotic. So I honestly don't know enough about how-

Aubrey Levitt: I think it's more the research. It's the research behind it that shows the benefit in certain situations.

Afif Ghannoum: Taking a step back. This is a lot of times what people don't realize is whether something is considered a dietary supplement, medical food, or even a drug, or even a cosmetic is very much around not just the research but the claims that are being made around a product. So you can have a totally different category you can have a mouthwash that if you say kills germs, that's a drug claim. But if you say the mouthwash moisturizes your mouth, that's a cosmetic claim.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. Correct. I think it impacts the marketing in a large way overall versus even this product that we've created could be a supplement as well. It's really just a position in the market is that what your point is.

Afif Ghannoum: Exactly.

Aubrey Levitt: And to highlight the research in a certain language that's essentially.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah. And then just dealing with FDA, drug is obviously the highest level of evidence you need but then it becomes a nuanced discussion with the regulators. So it's going to be just more and more, you saw it around GRAS, which is Generally Recognized as Safe. So simple example of something that's GRAS is an apple. We don't need to confirm that include apple in a product is safe. Probiotics, more and more, including BIOHM have gone through the process to prove that they're GRAS and dealing with the FDA. It's just an interesting area where I think FDA is starting to see that they're having to pay more attention and deal with first medical foods, but drug therapeutics are coming in the microbiome space. There's a lot of guys already working on it.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. Yeah. From my perspective too, the goal was we were really interested in how we could do clinical studies and create research. And then our goal is how do we then communicate that to people who can use the product that we'll be putting out and in the right way. So that's the mindset behind it and then we have to fit into those categories that you mentioned and find our path within that. We as a company are hanging on the research for us.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah, that's really cool.

Andrea Wien: So Aubrey, you mentioned cancer as one of the biggest assaults to gut health and the microbiome in general. And so a lot of studies that I've pulled today actually talk about cancer. So we'll just jump into it. I don't know if you've heard there's something called the Cancer Microbiome Atlas that's being created currently, and essentially they're using big data to beat contamination issues. So these researchers who are looking at different organs that have turned cancerous or even healthy organs, have a hard time differentiating what was actually taken from that organ and what was contaminated on the way out or through the bloodstream or whatever. So they were able to use big data to be able to separate these two things.

And then actually look at these resident organs and sample the microbes that are really in them. And so they are starting to put together a look at why certain organs turn cancerous, what the diversity breakdown is in each of those. So it's a kind of interesting look at... If you look back even a couple of years ago, many of these organs are sterile or don't have a microbiome to now being able to catalog exactly what's in there is pretty interesting.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. It is very, very interesting. And I think it's going to be an interesting journey to take, okay, we can collect all this data and then how do we turn it into something meaningful in terms of treatment or prevention, which is the journey, right? What we do already know is that when you go through the treatment, what you do want to do is protect what you already have. So you want to make your body as strong as possible to be able to bounce back from whatever you're going to have to go through, and I think that's the baseline of what we know. So it's chemotherapy or immunotherapy or whatever treatment that destroys your gut microbiome by accident, by default, you're not treating the gut it's just part of the process. And how do you prevent that from happening because that's going to... Because now that we know that the gut directly impacts your immune system and your inflammatory response, how that is protected is going to impact your recovery.

Andrea Wien: Yeah, absolutely. And there was another study too in the same vein that they used fecal transplants. So you mentioned, and we talked about on this show responders to drugs and non-responders and how that can be very dependent on the microbiome and the metabolites that are being created. So for the first time, researchers have successfully fought cancerous tumors by changing the gut microbiome. So they did a fecal transplant on some patients who were not responding to immunotherapy. So these were terminally ill patients with melanoma, and they said currently immunotherapy only works for 40 to 50% of patients. These patients were not responding at all. So they completely wiped out their gut microbiota gave them a fecal transplant. And some of them the tumor shrank considerably, one patient's tumor disappeared and hasn't returned even more than two years later. So to see this kind of response is pretty extraordinary.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah, it is. And that's extremely exciting and promising that this is a point where we can pretty easily impact how you're going to respond to a treatment.

Andrea Wien: Yeah. And I think not to give false hope to people, there's still a lot of work to be done. These studies have been done on a very small number of people I think, that one I just mentioned was only 10 patients. But starting to really put the pieces together of each organ has its own diversity. What are we looking for when things go awry, for example, in colon cancer we know there's a specific strain of bacteria that if it's present, we have a higher prevalence of colon cancers. And then something like this study so the oral microbiome tied to lung cancer risk in people who've never smoked. So I think this is something that you hear someone had lung cancer and you're like, "Well, they never smoked. They weren't around secondhand smoke. How could this have happened?" And now we're starting to learn that there's a microbial picture in play.

Aubrey Levitt: Exactly. And it's a lever that we can use to impact the results. And that's what we're looking at is how is this a lever in these different various conditions, and how can we impact this to make the upside greater or whatever response you're looking for. But also one thing to keep in mind is I had a really interesting conversation about an MD Anderson study recently, where they were doing the fecal transplants and they had amazing success with some colitis patients completely turning around their condition and believe it was curing it. And then the patients who had success versus the patients that didn't, there was a couple of patients that had success.

And then they went out and had I believe it was some kind of Tex-Mex or extreme diet change for three nights in a row and they went right back to where they were before. And patients who didn't do that and maybe continued to do well and so... It was just very interesting to think but we've also got to keep the whole picture in mind of, we can have these therapies that impact microbiome and what do we need to do in our daily life set, in our life to also sustain that positive impact.

Afif Ghannoum: Aubrey have you heard these studies that now we're starting to see that your microbiome can impact your ability to synthesize or metabolize drugs? So they're starting to actually scan people's microbiome before putting them in clinical trials for drug development. Have you heard any of that?

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah, I have. I've been keeping up on that a little bit and I think that's a very... Is where personalized medicine is going to come in and this is a place to look at that. So I know that's true in immunotherapy for sure, but it's a place where we can get more specific about who needs what, and I think it might even also impact how we do clinical trials in the future so we're talking about that to make sure that this person is set up to respond to this drug. And it may not come about like this certain cancer condition anymore, but this could apply across many cancers if the setup is right. So I think that's going to change a lot and help personalize these treatment plans.

Afif Ghannoum: The parts that's amazing about that to me is that that can literally mean that whether a drug quote unquote fails a clinical trial and is not approved versus if it is positive and it does pass, could literally come down to the clinical trial participants having the right type of microbiome to optimize metabolism of that drug. That's wild.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. It's huge. And that's going to save a lot of time and leading us down false hopes, or letting us know when we are onto something a lot faster. I think it's huge.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah. But then it becomes the nuance of but if we're really working on making sure who's in the clinical trial has the optimal microbiome, how do you translate that drug then-

Aubrey Levitt: Into larger population.

Andrea Wien: That's what I was just going to say.

Aubrey Levitt: I think that's true looking at as an end to having a more successful clinical trial is not necessarily the lens to take that approach, but more how do you get the right treatment to the right people or set the average person up to benefit from that treatment more. So you've got a back end and then I think they're looking at restructuring clinical trials so that it's not about picking the right patients, but just a different approach to how these therapies are reaching their patients. Does that make sense?

Afif Ghannoum: Totally. That's wild.

Andrea Wien: And maybe there's eventually at some point a pre... Before you can take this drug as a patient on the tail end, you have to go through a gut reset or some type of elimination diet or a around probiotics or something that makes you more available to be able to receive the benefits of it.

Aubrey Levitt: Exactly. And then it's more holistic program, which I think is what we're after. And so there's two ways personalization can work, it's finding the right program for that person or also making that person more right for the program. And I think if we look at it from both angles where it's going to be a better match to make sure that person gets the treatment they need.

Andrea Wien: I think about, I was just talking to a friend whose cousin had her stomach stapled for weight loss and this parallels with exactly we fix one problem, this person's eating too much, now they're not eating as much. But the underlying psychology really when we're going to do a surgery like that, that person should be given therapy not just medical therapy but psychological therapy. There needs to be some help along the way to make this a successful procedure for them otherwise it's just going to cause more issues on the backend. So I can see what we're talking about with some of these therapies in the microbiome going that direction. Like, "Great, we've figured it out, here it is." But without the support, it's kind of a moot point.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. I think that's, what's so exciting to me about the microbiome space is it's getting us into some of those nuances because we do it in other areas. I guess the analogy I always use is if you have surgery, you go to rehab and you rebuild around it. And a lot of times when we get therapies we don't really think that way. We think, take the pill, do whatever you need to do and you don't put it into a more holistic program. Whereas I had a friend just the other day where this happens all the time, they had to have a couple of rounds of antibiotics for something and then they wind up with a colitis problem downhill. And I'm not saying that it's result of, but there's some lines that happen of what you could do around whatever treatment you're getting before and after to reduce the likelihood of some of these secondary effects.

Andrea Wien: Or something like SIBO with food poisoning, something that everyone is susceptible to regardless. Having some therapies around making yourself stronger beforehand, but then also not just, "Here's an antibiotic." And go on your way because there's long-term effects.

Afif Ghannoum: Part of it, for me, it just brings into light how we feel medicine is so advanced, but in reality it's just a blink of an eye in time. And how we look now at surgeries they did in the Civil War versus now and how that seems so lo-fi and so, so unsophisticated. It'll be amazing to think even 20, 30, 40 years from now how the way we develop medicines, how we treat patients, like you said postoperatively post treatment. It's so amazing to me, just things like this really bring into focus of just how much progress we still have to make.

Aubrey Levitt: I think that's very true. And I think we're being pushed to evolve that right now, which is it's going to be interesting how it turns out. Because I think even this idea of one thing has one effect seems very archaic to me now, rather than the complexity of everything is going to have multiple effects and how do we really Zoom out and look at the bigger picture here.

Andrea Wien: And it goes for everything we talk about depression, for example, as a disease. And Josh Gitalis who we had on the show last year, he just sent out an email he's like, "Depression is a symptom of something bigger. It's not a disease in and of itself." And so even reframing that thought can be helpful for people too like, "Oh, I can fix something that could potentially get rid of this thing that I'm living with that feels so overbearing." I think it's hopeful.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. I agree. I agree. And it's just an expanding our minds at this point because tracing it back to one thing that that caused something is not necessarily the right answer. And it requires us to take more responsibility though for how we can participate in a more complete solution.

Andrea Wien: Well, this is what I've been saying to you and this brings us to our last study that I want to talk about just in terms of COVID. And I know everyone's sick of COVID, but we're starting to learn a little bit more about who is most susceptible to severe cases to long haul symptoms that people are experiencing months after they test negative. So there was a study that investigated COVID severity and the gut microbiome, and they found specific microbial patterns that correlated with disease severity. And if you had a dysbiotic gut, so bacterial imbalances, those accounted for some of those cases of long haul COVID. So even something that's so we think about, "Oh, it's this virus." And if we could just eradicate that or get a vaccine or whatever, we'll be fine.

And it's something that Afif and I have talked on this show is so frustrating to me, make everyone healthier going into getting exposure to this virus and we would have much better outcomes. And I think research like this is starting to shed the light on that. That if you are taking care of your gut and you are in a good place with it, your chances of success coming through it are much higher.

Aubrey Levitt: Exactly. It just sets you up so the odds are in your favor, more likely, and there's always going to be exceptions, but what you want to do is have your best chance going into it.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah. And the only nuance I always give to that is we're still so early in microbiome, understanding correlation versus causation. So for example, is your microbiome healthier because you take care of yourself and you don't have those conditions and therefore your microbiome isn't checked or is it the reverse? Do you see what I'm saying? So that's what we still need to figure out, is it just the fact that if you keep your microbiome in check these other things don't come to fruition more likely, or is it this happy accident that because you do take care of yourself, your microbiome is healthy and then you're avoiding these things. So I think that's where over the time we're really going to, as we start understanding that how much of it is one way versus the other that's where it's to me going to be [crosstalk 00:26:06].

Aubrey Levitt: Or most likely a two-way communication.

Afif Ghannoum: Right.

Aubrey Levitt: So the back and forth between if you're healthier, your microbiome is healthier. And if your microbiome is healthy or vice versa because at the very baseline, it is the place where we digest food and create some of these vitamins and minerals and turn them into useful products for our body. So I think on that level, it's part of keeping us healthy we know that for sure. And we know that the more diverse it is or the less we destroy it, the better we're going to be. I think that's where we're at at a baseline.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah. Totally.

Aubrey Levitt: And that's really all we know. We don't know that we know the mechanisms of that, or as you said those are the lines we're going to need to draw to make it more effective or be able to address it more effectively.

Andrea Wien: Absolutely. I think it would be interesting some of these people who are young 30, 40, and seemingly had no pre-existing conditions and then died of COVID. Going back and being able to say, "Well, did you have digestive symptoms? Did you have diarrhea, constipation?" Just basic things that a lot of people overlook. I think we're missing an opportunity to have that discussion. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's normal. So it'll be interesting to see as people do start to come out with more of these long haul symptoms, if more work is done in this space.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. I think that'll be very interesting. And like you said are there signs that we can start looking for, that might be early indicators that something's going awry.

Afif Ghannoum: Then back to your world Aubrey, what is the role of postbiotics in all of this? Are those the real heroes in the story? I feel like we say this all the time Andrea, but it's just such, such a really cool area. It's going to be decades and decades of just really cool innovation coming up.

Andrea Wien: Since we last spoke to you because one of the questions we get the most is how do I get my gut to bounce back after a round of antibiotics? Do we have any more details on that? Do we have any more information that we could share with people? Or maybe if someone hasn't listened to that past show maybe we could just answer that question again.

Aubrey Levitt: Yeah. The basic insight is always going to be to have a very fibrous diet, and make sure you reduce sugar intake around that time because the sugar is going to feed the bacteria that may be more likely to be pathogenic. I know that's very basic answers but we're going to solve that problem soon. So having a product to the market that you'd want to take while you're taking those antibiotics and right after, so that's going to be my answer. Just give me a little bit more time to get that out to the pharmacies, but that's the problem we're solving for to make it a more direct solution other than just making sure your diets varied.

Afif Ghannoum: Now, Aubrey, can I ask a logistics question? Medical foods, are those typically covered by insurance or are those out-of-pocket?

Aubrey Levitt: No, those are still out-of-pocket. It's really just to, as you mentioned, have a different claim and also when you're also seeing a provider.

Afif Ghannoum: And the provider does... And sorry for these basic questions, but just I don't know and I think they'll be helpful. So you go to your doctor they think Postbiotic Plus would work for you, do they give you a prescription? Are they selling? How does it logistically work?

Aubrey Levitt: You're still going to buy it in the same way most likely from the actual company or wherever you... so it's not actually related to the physician. They can recommend it if they think it's going to be helpful for the patient but outside of that, you're still just going to be purchasing it in the same way.

Afif Ghannoum: But do you need a physician to authorize you buying it or?

Aubrey Levitt: No. Not at all. Not at all.

Afif Ghannoum: Got it. Okay. Learn something new every day.

Andrea Wien: No. I think it's a good question because I think a lot of people are listening like, "Well, wait a minute. If I want to try something like this, do I have to be working with a physician?" Obviously it's recommended but it can be done from a savvy point of view if you're working with a nutritionist, or someone else who maybe doesn't have a medical degree. Afif do you want to talk about Clubhouse quickly?

Afif Ghannoum: This is my new obsession. We'll see how much we use it but do you know Clubhouse Aubrey?

Aubrey Levitt: No, I don't.

Afif Ghannoum: Well, you're about to. It's wild. It's this new app. I had heard about it over the last six months, kind of like the new darling of Silicon Valley and the idea was... You described it actually great, Andrea, it's like a never ending conference. So you go, you open the app, you have a profile and then there are rooms and it's different topics. We're doing one this Friday on what's up with the microbiome? Q&A for anything about the microbiome, and people will be able to come in and we basically moderate questions that people ask and it's just a discussion, but I cannot believe how many people are going in these rooms. I've been checking out last few days Andrea, there's thousands of people going in on these topics.

Andrea Wien: Interesting.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah. It's like going to a conference and it's an unending 24 hours a day of just interesting topics and you can follow topics. Someone described it as a podcast... It's like a live podcast. It's really cool. So we're going to try and try and do some live Q&A's.

Andrea Wien: Yeah. So by the time this airs we will have already done one, but if people want to check it out on Clubhouse, Afif and I are both there so you can search for us and follow us and then you'll be updated when we do some more live stuff.

Afif Ghannoum: Aubrey if you join, just jump on in. What's so cool about it, it's literally like an informal conference panel is the way I'd say. You just log in and it would be a discussion like this but then people can ask us questions, they can come and go. It's like quietly leave the room or enter another room. It's really cool.

Aubrey Levitt: I'll check that out. Definitely jump on and join the room.

Afif Ghannoum: Yeah.

Andrea Wien: So we'll link to it in the show notes page. And then also we'll link to the study that Aubrey mentioned in nature that they did, and of course all the topics and studies that we talked about today. Aubrey thank you so much for joining us it was great to have you on the line-

Aubrey Levitt:  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Andrea Wien:…and Afif always a pleasure.

Aubrey Levitt: Nice to chat. All right, take care.

Andrea Wien: Bye guys.

Afif Ghannoum: See you.

Aubrey Levitt: Bye.

Andrea Wien: Thanks for listening. Check out BIOHM's website and save 15% off with the code POD15. If you have something you want us to discuss on these episodes, send me a DM on Instagram @dreeats or drop an email to the microbiomereport@gmail.com. Until next time I'm Andrea Wien.

 

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