Andrew Rice  
You are listening to the ingredients for success podcast where you can consume dietary supplement industry best practices, trends, recent news and other insights provided through interviews and discussions with members of the Stratum team and seasoned industry execs.

Welcome back to The ingredients for success podcast. I'm Andrew rice. And today we have Ally Perlina with Viome, a leading precision supplement company. Ally is the chief Translational Science Officer at Viome. She's a systems biology leader, with over 18 years of professional industry experience in drug and target discovery. nutraceutical invent, intervention, design, as well as translational and precision medicine. It's a whole lot of stuff, alley, like I said, having a conversation with her the other day, and then what we're going to get into here in a little bit, all that stuff is going to shine really well as she she begins talking. I love her passion, and just the genuine joy that I can tell she gets from a good challenge. And we all know that is a very rare quality these days. So we had good conversation the other day around that topic. I feel like alley. Yes. Thank you for this introduction. Very nice. Thank you so much. So we're going to get right into the what we call the Fast Five. And I'm just going to ask you, this or that just a couple of five questions and kind of like a speed round. So are you ready? I'm ready. All right, let's do it. 

Ally Perlina  
Born ready! 

Andrew Rice  
Born ready? All right. So translating science or surfing? 

Ally Perlina  
Translating surfing. Ha ha ha. Translating science. 

Andrew Rice  
There you go. Translating science. I figured that might be it. Ah, so here's one guitar or ukulele. 

Ally Perlina  
Oh, I do both. By the way. How did you know? Did you see it behind this this separator divider? It's supposed to hide all my stuff. 

Andrew Rice  
Yeah, I was gonna try to come up with something made up but I actually just took notes while we were talking the other day, because I actually, I play the guitar and love music as well. So I took note of that. So anyway, so which one was it? Guitar? 

Ally Perlina  
Guitar guitar, I stay true to my initial calling. I did a classical guitar minor in college actually. 

Andrew Rice  
Work as a creative outlet, or karaoke?

Ally Perlina  
Oh, you're making it really difficult for me. Work as a creative outlet for sure.

Andrew Rice  
Figured so I figured so. 

Ally Perlina  
Actually, we have a machine at home. Kids love it. We are the champions. That's one of the songs they sing. 

Andrew Rice  
Queen's like that. That's a really good go to on the on the old karaoke. Something challenging, or easy breezy? 

Ally Perlina  
Are you kidding? That question is too easy, breezy, of course, something challenging. 

Andrew Rice  
Netflix or, or a good science doc binge. 

Ally Perlina  
Can I say both. Sometimes you need a Netflix things just to snap your mind out of all of the other stuff that's going on. But of course, I'll take the science binge. 

Andrew Rice  
So today, Allie and I will be discussing embracing complexity, precision supplements and viome. Before we get into that, Allie and I had a really good conversation the other day. And most of these topics came from that conversation. But what really drew me about her specifically is just kind of her story and in her passion, her, her, her just real undying passion that you can just tell she is she exudes it about what she does. And there were some things she's got she's got a really good story about how she got started and, and kind of why she does what she does. So, Ali, you know, if you could explain a little bit about that passion and why you do what you do, and what drove you that, you know, to reimagine and reinvent integrative and holistic supplementation. I think that'd be great for the listeners. 

Ally Perlina  
Yeah, yeah. So overall, I'm really a huge believer in delivering more of scientifically powered medicine and in working from, you know, academic to pharma to precision medicine settings. I always wish that there would be more integrative options and more preventative options as well. So even before coming into biome, I always try to reach, you know, as much of the expert knowledge, and all of the data that's available out there, in order to be able to synthesize it, and somehow deliver through products through services to more people than I myself would be able to touch, you know, one on one, because if you, you know, if you just have this sort of an expert mentality, I'm an expert, then nothing else can be done with that, then you can only reach so many people. So my passion is really to help people impact their health, but at a larger scale, that's any one of us individuals beyond ourselves. So when they, especially when they look at, you know, my aging parents, and I want to make sure that my family's healthy. When I was growing up, I had my own issues with asthma and things like that. And it was one of those factors that actually, even back in high school made me switch from loving math and always being like a, you know, thinking I'm going to be a math major into into biology because I wanted to understand and do something about every single part of the biological function, which now we call it systems biology. And I'm a systems biologist with with that idea in mind, that, you know, you just really want to understand what is happening in a human body? And what is the normal way or the healthy way? And how does it all go wrong? Where you have dysfunction, and you get disease or disease? And what are the biological processes down to the nitty gritty molecules that are responsible for that. And so with, you know, every step of the way, anything I've done, I wanted to see how can we take these factoids, and this piece of knowledge and that part of that domain, and this part of the, you know, biology domain, and connected to help more directly, because it takes just way too many years, sometimes to, to carry out all of the individual drug trials. And we all know that there's certain side effects to different pharmaceutical agents, and I've worked in drug discovery before, but at the same time, you just want to be able to do something that is as natural as possible. But it has to be personalized, so that for you, it can reverse or prevent chronic disease. So that that's just a huge passion of mine to be able to do something that's that's beyond myself to impact, you know, human health and health span lifespan for the greater good.

Andrew Rice  
Yes, I love that Allie. Love your story. And I also, in part of our conversation, the other day, we we discussed you, and you said it, it really resonated with me, we talked about you know, I have the why not tag on my LinkedIn page. And you said, embracing the complexity, and you kind of talk through some of this. Now, I wouldn't say struggles, but some of the hurdles you had to kind of you went through in the very beginning, as you went through ideation and trying to figure out, you know, how are we going to make this thing with viome work? But you know, we, we shared a very, some very common positions on things. And we talked through kind of like, the proverbial like, well, it's always been done this way, or, you know, that's gonna take too much time, or, you know, it's going to take too many man hours or too much money or whatever, before anybody's even really figured out whether or not that was the case, right? And so like, just putting your best foot forward digging in, doing some research and figuring out okay, is this doable? I keep hearing this is, this is not how we've always done things, and this is gonna be so expensive, but you know, what, I'm the same way and I just kind of Lalalalala So, I love that. We talked about that. Can you talk about that? Just a little bit?

Ally Perlina  
Yeah, why not? So like you say that you have to ask why. And you have to ask why not? And that's just part of the whole, you know, critical thinking that, you know, I very much embrace and and believe and you have to be able to, to critically assess the situation and to dare to actually get into all of the whys, which means that you shouldn't be afraid to get the answer that you're seeking, which means a lot of details. So when you get the detail, and you grasp it and you understand it, then why not dare to dream of doing something that that's bigger and the next level of sophistication and complexity, and basically embracing it because, you know, there's always going to be a lot of people a lot of you know, maybe Great brilliant experts who will caution you and say what the caveats are and what the fears may be what the risks may be. But, again, back to mind motivation, it's like, well, do you think that your body has all the systems and organs functioning completely in isolation? If you look at yourself, the answer is no, it's all connected. Right? You can, I hope it still is, yeah. So when it's all connected, and you want to address something like human health, it just makes sense that you're not going to just go and specialize in just this one area under the lamppost or this one section in an isolated way. And hence, you know, there's a lot of integrative medicine initiatives, functional medicine. But to do that, right, you have to be able to understand the root causes that are down to the molecular level. And so from, you know, for my particular journey, this is what it boiled down to basically anywhere I've gone and here biome, it's the basis, the core of what informs personalization is understanding the complexity with molecular level precision, and to be able to then automate and scale that so that many individuals can benefit from it. If I heard, you know, all of the people who would say, well, you can focus on that, because that's gonna be like 10 years, or you cannot integrate all the knowledge of biochemistry, and nutrition, and, you know, manufacturing and sourcing details of the nutrients to bring it all together, because that's going to take, you know, three years here, five years there, nobody has a comprehensive database. And, you know, before you build any tools, it's going to be forever, I would not be able to do anything. So I basically had to say, why not? Why not embrace the complexity and and if you have enough knowledge, and you have enough of the, you know, drive towards innovation, why not dare to actually imagine this completely new New Age solution, where everyone's supplement blend is unique and made to order so that it addresses your biology with molecular level precision. 

Andrew Rice  
Right? Yeah, I dare to dream of something bigger. I, you said that just a minute ago. And, and so when you when you started on this journey, as we talked through the, you know, embracing the complexity of situations, or what we're what we're facing at work or, or challenges with that, that we all have, you know, you specifically about viome that, okay, that's kind of what kind of went into, like the beginning of your story, how you were, you know, you were with Viome, and I think you had, you had mentioned that there was this, you know, you were kind of hoping for this, like, larger shared database of all this knowledge and network of data. And, and I think, you know, that it seemed like, that was one of the bigger challenges early on for you was just like, overcoming, you know, collecting all that data. Right? 

Ally Perlina  
Right. Right. Right. That's a good point to actually discuss a little bit more, because, um, excuse me, in all of my experience, I mean, I was always knowledgeable about supplements, I've been kind of like a supplements junkie, or hacker since my teenage years just because and you would think, you know, you know, enough about supplements because you know, but the nutrients are, you know, about the biochemical properties, or metabolism of specific nutrients and supplements, then you kind of know, enough, but then in this in this new realm of viome, it was a whole new ballgame, where I was actually trying to come up with a way to personalize supplements at scale, as opposed to relying on branded available off the shelf products. We have been recommending within the biome app, these branded off the shelf products. And that is part of the personalization logic that I, you know, definitely spearheaded, but at some point, you're like, Okay, we have to do it ourselves. Because in the branded supplements, there could be something that is just not available that goes together. So you end up with a lot of different bottles that you would like to recommend to a person, which come with their own, you know, additives, and excipients, and fillers and things like that. And that's not even the worst of it, it's just that you can see a lot of ingredients that go along for the ride that for a given individual just are not needed, and maybe even harmful. And in that sense, it becomes so difficult to really prioritize the most important ones for any given customer. So at viam looking at, okay, how can we go per ingredient? personalization. We already had all the knowledge of 550 or so ingredients. Now how do I take that too? Something that actually personalizes at scale. So I was thinking that well, the missing the big missing piece is kind of like this manufacturing knowledge base of the world. And I was so convinced that if you talk to manufacturers who have a lot of clients who get a lot of different supplies in have a whole inventory, they must have a really sophisticated knowledge base that just tells them, you know, this is how many ingredients, you have this out how often they go together, this is how often they're in a, let's say, a stick bag, or a tablet or a capsule. This is how often they're, you know, let's say requested or or supported by clinical evidence for immune health versus, you know, gi, gastrointestinal health and things like that. And turns out, there was nothing like that. So the next big sort of exponential milestone that that ended up presenting as a challenge or an opportunity is to jump over that, that that barrier, and create something that connects all of our knowledge within biome with this, you know, the final piece that manufacturing and sourcing, input and constraints. And so that took another year and a half or so before we actually launched the supplements. But yeah, my maybe naive thinking was that, well, you have all that information, why wouldn't you have some query about database? And then it kind of dawned on me, Well, why would somebody have a query built database, that is not something that is in line with the objectives of any, you know, manufacturers, company, they're not ones trying to necessarily themselves solve human health and disease puzzles, proactively themselves, they're helping other companies who are on their journey to do that. And then there's, you know, suppliers, who will, you know, deliver and supply the ingredients that are needed, but it's not like they're tasked or would, you know, would be incentivized to, to have such a knowledge base. So knowledge base are for people who want to, you know, productize, and deliver knowledge in an actionable way. So I realized that actually doesn't exist. At first, I thought it was basically because of proprietary reasons. And maybe there is a little bit of that. But soon enough, we realized that actually, there is no one comprehensive consensus knowledge base on all of the ingredients, you know, clinical biochemical microbiology, food science, nutrition, science, and, of course, the manufacturing side of things. factoids, we just don't have any one thing like that. So we had to build it ourselves.

Andrew Rice  
Yeah, and, and you were, you know, as we discussed before, you know, going through that process, and you had an an engineer, I can't remember his title, but the engineer that helped with like, kind of create your own, like, artificial intelligence of it was just so interesting to me kind of how far you guys took this, and you've been so pivotal in this is just like, it's just mind blowing to see all of the things that went or hear all of the things that went into this. So it's really, really, really cool. So one of the things that I think we just get into now is just, you know, one of the things that you say at viome, I think it might even be on the box somewhere. But it's just so you know, you mentioned giving them everything they need, and nothing that they don't and I think is just this really clear, concise message of what it is that you provide your customers. So that's kind of that's kind of what you all are doing, um, you know, with viome, specifically, could you just kind of speak to where you're at with viome, how things are going and, and maybe kind of where you guys are headed?

Ally Perlina  
Absolutely. So just for a little bit more context. In order to figure out what you need, we say, we give you just what you need, and nothing that you don't we look at these molecular pathways, and so biome, some of the services that we already offer are the gut intelligence test, which tests your microbiome from a stool sample. And then there's the health intelligence service, which includes the gut intelligence, but also gives you the host the human side, from a blood test. And we also have other tests that are in more of the research and development and soon will be coming out like the saliva test and we're looking at vaginal health and other sort of aspects to the whole systems biology puzzle of a human body and human health. So the way that I've approached this from you know, from the get go when I came to viome, just having learned some lessons that you know, when you have too much of the manual expert analysis, you just can't scale really quickly. When I came in, I developed this methodology for analyzing biological pathways at scale, so that you can In automated way, do what an expert does when they look at, you know, let's say glycolysis is something you may know, but we look at different microbial and human pathways. So from the very beginning, we kept learning insights and then delivering new pathway scores, which then in our app actually get folded into these functional and unhealth level scores, that there's kind of like a hierarchy, because they're different molecular mechanisms that are responsible for let's say, your inflammation, or your aging, your cellular aging and senescence or your oxidative or not oxidative, but the different types of stress or stress response, and it could come from the microbiome, it could come from, you know, too many toxins that are being that are crossing your gut lining, barrier, it can come from something that you're exposed to, maybe you're fighting some virus, or there's some histamine reaction. So we pick up all of these different pathways, molecular pathways that tell us that, and then having that methodology that's been with us, you know, we basically, I think the first time I started working on it was immediately when I came to vironment 2017. And we implemented it into our products and just enhance that. So that is the basis the molecular basis that I was talking about, for making supplements address just what you need, and nothing that you don't, because the idea is that if you don't take action with molecular level precision, then how do you know it's truly personalized? How do you know that it's precise to your biology. So the word personalized, almost got kind of worn out at this point, because or used up, I would say, because it's more of a categorization in the market than personalization, like you see supplements for cognitive health or weight loss or immune support. And people just buy those different pre existing formulas, or there's like the red pill for this and a green pill for that, and a brown pill for this. Whereas what you know, we've done here is completely reimagined all of this. And ultimately, to find a way to get every single ingredient to be considered separately, and then considered together as your personal blend. So let's say that, Andrew blend, and that would be the type of blend that would address your your biological pathways for which we already have the platform and the framework and for which you have the score. So you could see if you're a little bit often inflammation, or if you're a little bit off on, you know, mitochondrial health and and other types of functional patterns that emerge.

Andrew Rice  
Do you have anything that you feel you want to talk about about viome we I know, we've got to wrap it up pretty quickly. But is there anything that you feel like maybe you want to talk very, very, very, you know, briefly about with Viome or about Viome or anything else? 

Ally Perlina  
So we always do a lot of research, everything we do is evidence based, we have different ways of, you know, curating and annotating and organizing the evidence. So that means that we always look for new ingredients, new studies, new information, and then we juxtapose it on our data sets to see that okay, well, knowing that this is what's important for, let's say, some of the pathways for cell renewal and regeneration, something like cartilage formation and biogenesis and those types of things, how can we look at some of the signatures or culprits or just just pathways and functional patterns that can speak to that and then how can we then use something that you know comes from let's say, some of the ingredients you guys are working on, that can maybe be the next sort of enhanced version of our supplements, you know, 2.0 or 3.0 I don't know if you want to talk about the example that that you brought up and I thought it was really interesting you share some research with me so that could be one of the examples as that speaks to our ongoing research efforts and inclusion of very important types of ingredients that have unique properties. 

Andrew Rice  
So yeah, as we were talking the other day, we did talk about NEM our joint health ingredient our eggshell membrane that we have and I don't know much about you know, the study itself although just kind of the the preface and just the what what came out of the study and some of the claims that we can get or whatnot Kevin Ruff with a scientist I think he's the the chief scientist director of science and everything science and regulatory very, very smart guy. He designed and led that study and in the study was on the latest one was on the CTX II biomarker. So yeah, we could discuss that for a second if you wanted to.

Ally Perlina  
Yeah, so I looked at it, and it's really interesting. And I just shared it with my team as well. So one of the things that just intuitively kind of makes sense is that it's part of the for me or supporting system for an embryo, like a chicken embryo, then it may have some of these growth factors and things that promote different cellular or organ biogenesis. So on, you know, pathway or molecular level, it makes sense how CTX II plays into different collagenous formations. And we know that that's important for, you know, cartilage and, and joint health. But specifically, you know, while that's, that's very, very intuitively, meaningful, I think that there could be even more things that we may learn, if we look at the effects of these types of pathways across throughout the human body, we I don't know yet. But it could be that eventually, it will prove to help, let's say, you know, anti-aging, and you know, how collagen is important for healthy skin and for different supporting connective tissue functions. But back to cartilage, and those types of biological patterns that people need support with, we have various scores that assess from the human perspective and also the microbiome perspective, your patterns of immune response and autoimmunity and inflammation. And so I think that they would be very curious to see if there are some facts that when in somebody's personalized blend, let's say we were to include this ingredient in the future, and who knows what we might see, we might see, you know, mitochondrial function being boosted up when you know, even right now, I don't know if that's if that's even possible. But we may see something like that, along with inflammation, and maybe the predicted age going down. So maybe who knows your molecular signature, biological age will make you younger, because of, you know, this ingredient, along with others that may be complimentary to going into your personalized precision supplements blend. So that's kind of the thinking that got me onto considering this ingredient. I think it's it makes sense. And it's really exciting. 

Andrew Rice  
Cool. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're excited about it. And I'm sure you understood the science documentation a lot better than I did. That's for sure. But yeah, and then at some point, if you want me to connect you directly with Kevin, I'd be happy to do that. We've got a we've got to wrap up here. Ally was really great talking to you again. We've only had two of them. But so far, I have loved our chats. I like, I just I love, I love watching your brain work and hearing what you have to say in science. I think you do such a great job of articulating science in a way that is palatable. So Ally, I, you know, all the cool things that you guys, you and the rest of your team have accomplished at Viome I think it's just amazing. Keep challenging the status quo. You, You keep going because I think, I mean, I can't wait to see what keeps coming out of Viome and specifically you. So thanks for coming on the show. 

Ally Perlina  
Thank you so much and great pleasure talking to you both times and hope we'll have our jam session sometime in the near future. So we have to pencil something in or it never will happen. But yeah, thanks so much for having me. And I'm also looking forward to, you know, pushing the boundaries and getting even more precise with, you know, molecularly matching you to what's really right for you for your health. 

Andrew Rice  
Awesome. All right. Thanks, Ally. 

Ally Perlina  
Thank you. Take care.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai