The Microbiome, Technology, and the Future of Health | Scott Sundvor | TEDxESADE

I have an autoimmune disease called OSHA colitis. This is a disease that causes inflammation, bleeding and ulcers in the large intestine. If you ask a doctor, they will tell you that there is no known cause and no known cure for this disease, the only thing you can do. What I can do if the medication fails is to surgically remove the entire colon. About a year and a half ago my body started to shut down due to this illness. He was incredibly sick. I had extreme diarrhea more than 20 times a day. It was like the worst food poisoning you could imagine.

I was bleeding internally and had started to develop anemia and was so sick that my girlfriend literally thought she was dying. I was terrified, so you might be thinking why do I care about this guy's illness? I don't have this, my insides are fine. Feel

health

y, forty-five percent of you in the Western world have some type of chronic illness. Fifteen percent of you have an autoimmune disease, like me. More and more

health

problems are no longer atypical and are now becoming the norm. Look at this graph. On the left you can see that in the last 60 years infectious diseases have decreased drastically and that is really surprising, but at the same time autoimmune diseases and chronic diseases are increasing dramatically.

Researchers wanted to better understand the prevalence of celiac disease, so they looked at blood samples from soldiers taken sixty years ago and compared them to blood samples taken today. They found that celiac disease is now 4.5 times more likely than it was ago. six years. Food allergies have increased by 50 percent since 1997, as have allergies to peanuts and tree nuts. Specifically, they are now three times more common than they were 20 years ago. Interestingly, this appears to be a problem that is mainly limited to the Western world, so in the UK rates of type 1 diabetes are 10 times more likely among children than in Pakistan, but if a child from Pakistan moves to the UK United Kingdom, you will be just as likely as natives of the United Kingdom to have type 1 diabetes.

This is a problem that at the moment has no explanation or idea why or how it is happening and it is our responsibility as innovators. and employers to focus on this issue, which is why I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis my freshman year of college when I was at MIT and dealing with the ups and downs of this disease from the pain-related gut issues from the issues that had just arisen. I was motivated to focus my career on health when I graduated, so I founded a company called Nima and to help people with intestinal problems like me, people with allergies and food intolerances, and we built an incredible product, the first beautiful and easy laptop to use in the world. -use a lab in your pocket where someone who has gluten sensitivity or celiac disease and very soon could sit in a restaurant, take a small sample of their food, put it in our device and then, in a matter of minutes, know if that food was contaminated or No, this was a mission in which I believed a lot and at the same time was growing incredibly.

I learned how to build a company from scratch. We shipped thousands of products and were even awarded one of Time magazine's best inventions of the year. So from an external perspective I was on top of the world, but internally I was devastated. Every compliment I received tasted like ash because I was falling apart, my body was disintegrating. I started a company to provide a solution to people with problems like mine. but at the same time it was killing me where I went wrong so when I got sick I went to see my doctor naturally to find out what I could do and my doctor recommended me one last medication that I could try the only one I had I haven't tried it yet and if that doesn't work, I would have to start preparing to have my colon removed from my body.

I looked up the stats for that drug and found that it had about a 15% chance of getting me in. remission and stay there and I didn't like those odds so I decided to get a second opinion, talk to another doctor, he was a little blonder, he basically just said you should go get surgery, so at that point I realized that Yes To recover and maintain my colon, the only way I could do it was if I empowered myself, took control of my health and that's exactly what I did right. Some of you may remember the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, nearly 5 million barrels of oil flowed into the ocean.

Now one of the main ways they worked to clean that up was by adding another chemical to the oil to make it disperse and sink into the ocean. They basically tried. to clean chemicals with more chemicals and I realized that was exactly what I had been doing every couple of months. I would go to the hospital and they would inject intravenous medications into my arm to try to treat the disease in my intestines. pouring chemicals into my body but it didn't work for the last eight years. I have been controlling my disease, but disease control is not the

future

.

Health is the

future

. There's a concept I love: life expectancy vs. life expectancy. Life expectancy is simple, it is simply how long you live, but health span is how long you are alive but disease free and healthy and that is the measurement that really matters. The human body is an incredibly complex system. If we want to enable health, we need to address the system that is in place. the human body in a comprehensive way for multifaceted problems such as chronic diseases autoimmune diseases food allergies a single drug that targets a single chemical pathway and a single part of your body has not developed a cure we live in a culture that is predisposed to look for magic solutions for those magic pills that will make all our problems go away, but those magic solutions, like the polio vaccine, penicillin, smallpox, have mostly already been discovered and used today, drug discovery It is becoming increasingly difficult, nine out of ten drugs that are created today and reach clinical trials fail because if they are not safe for humans or are ineffective, it is up to us to change the paradigm from looking for magic solutions to one of holistic health, so in the 1960s most of us are probably too young to remember it.

This, but the rivers and waterways in the United States were so polluted and so full of oil that they literally caught fire. Now to solve this problem, the EPA didn't just try to put out those fires and then allow businesses and cities to continue dumping their waste. Not in the ocean, they worked to stop the problem at the source, so I decided to do the same now. I'm not a doctor, but I am an MIT-trained engineer and for me this was something I could apply in engineering and I also had a problem-solving mindset, so I dove into research and wanted to understand not only how I could treat my symptoms, but that I needed to understand the why and how of what was happening so I could start working to find the root cause and I fixed it at the source and through my research I realized that there was a common thread, a theme that tied everything together. and that topic was the

microbiome

, so the

microbiome

is a community of organisms, microbes that live in or on our bodies, most of them in In our gut we think of the microbiome primarily as bacteria, but they are actually also viruses, fungi, bacteria, phages and hulls, and well, I started looking for a cure and how to help my specific condition, what I realized is that the microbiome actually affects one's health. one of you and we can think of our bodies, our health, our genetics, as a chain and if your microbiome is not healthy, it is only a matter of time before the weakest link in that chain breaks for me, that weakest link becomes an ulcer. of colitis for someone else it could be obesity diabetes Parkinson's disease you're thinking about the microbiome that's in your gut how does that affect all these other things that doesn't make any sense, try it yourself you can go to Google Scholar search for medical articles , type the microbiome in autism and you will discover that specific microbiome treatment has caused a 25% or more reduction in autism symptoms and kits type the microbiome and autoimmune diseases and you will discover that researchers have actually found specific bacteria in the intestine that travel to different parts of the body and create diseases as diverse as lupus or an autoimmune liver disease in the microbiome and depression, and you will find that 90% of our serotonin is produced in our intestine and when researchers We take free mice of germs.

Those are mice that have had their microbiome removed. They started producing 60 percent less serotonin when they then reintroduced the microbiome. Their serotonin production returned to normal, so today it is increasingly easier for us to control our health ourselves. We no longer have to do this with just a doctor, we are empowering ourselves with

technology

that we can wear on our wrist, we can get tested at home instead of just with the doctor, we are democratizing access to laboratory chemistry, so when I was sick , I decided to use the

technology

that was available to help me on my own journey and the first thing I did was look at my microbiome.

I knew that from my research, even a single course of antibiotics can permanently alter your microbiome and I had been taking some antibiotics for months as a child, so I used an at-home test where I took a sample of my microbiome and I sent her to a laboratory. A few weeks later, I got results on my computer that showed I only had 10% bacterial diversity, so I decided to do something that was a little drastic, although arguably much less drastic than removing an organ from my body, and I underwent which is called fecal microbiota transplant. This is a relatively new treatment that is actually exactly what it sounds like, it is where the poop and therefore the microbiome of a healthy donor is taken, mixed with saline and then the solid waste material is filtered out to leave essentially a mixture of bacterial water that is then introduced into the colon of a healthy donor.

A person like me through a colonoscopy and MRI sometimes even capsules, so for a month every day I did this treatment and after five days, for the first time in more than five years, I pooped solid and it was great, and within a month after each medication. Everything he had ever tried had failed. I was finally in remission. It was an incredible experience. I got my microbiome to a much better place. I knew I still had a lot to do and I wanted to understand how I could keep my microbiome healthy, but I continued to improve it, we now live in a world of technology and we look for technological solutions for many things, but many times the solution can be much simpler than that.

In this case I was able to use technology to really help me. I understand what was going on, but in this situation this solution was so simple that it was just diet, so let's move on to a little science so we can explain this in more detail. All of you inside your intestine have a mucous membrane, this is a protective layer that between the intestinal bacteria and food waste and the intestinal lining, if this mucous membrane breaks down if it has any holes then the bacteria and eating habits can interact directly with the intestinal lining, which can cause an immune response, can cause inflammation and can lead to what is known as leaky gut, we are literally food particles and bacteria that will leak through the intestinal lining directly into the bloodstream and this It can cause a lot of problems, it can cause food allergies and intolerances, it can cause chronic inflammation throughout the intestine. body and can lead to autoimmune diseases and chronic diseases like the one I have, but our microbiome can actually help us stay healthy when we eat plant matter, resistant starch fiber, our microbiome actually consumes that fiber to produce a compound called butyrate, and butyrate is the fuel source. so that our intestinal cells produce mucin, which then repairs the intestinal lining, repairs the mucous membrane and reduces inflammation.

Now, on the other hand, we also have some bacteria in our gut called sulfate-reducing bacteria. These guys are not nice, they consume sulfur in our food to produce hydrogen Sol gasps this is that toxic gas that smells like rotten eggs we have all smelled it it is genotoxic it causes inflammation and actually breaks down the mucous membrane and I found out that the main sources of sulfur in our diet come from the amino acids methionine and cysteine ​​which are mainly found in animal protein, so here you would really learn somethingSurprising: Fiber from plants leads to the production of butyrate, which helps heal the mucous membrane and reduces inflammation, but sulfur from meat causes the production of hydrogen sulfide, which damages that mucous membrane. and now it causes inflammation my whole life I have been completely against a vegan or vegetarian diet but I am a man of science and here the science was clear the next day I switched to a plant based diet and since then I have felt much better, I What's exciting here is that we've barely scratched the surface of the health and technological empowerment we have at our disposal.

Think about it, it was only 15 years ago that we first mapped the human genome. 90% of the investigations. What we have about the microbiome has only come to light in the last five years, so we've barely scratched the surface and this is really where we need the trends of tomorrow to focus. The exciting thing is that this movement has already started, a friend of mine. at MIT is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at how the microbiome really affects chronic diseases. There are companies that are using your personal physiological health data to help provide better preventative medicine and my company, NEMA, is using tools and technology to help you stay. healthy before you get sick instead of just reacting afterwards, so all these technologies are amazing and they're emerging now, this is really the future of health and this is where we need to focus.

I am very hopeful for our future in 50 years. We are going to think it was crazy that we thought we were going to live with chronic illnesses or common illnesses for the rest of our lives. Everyday startups. Private businesses. Individual researchers are developing new technologies. New research is emerging that is pushing us in the right direction, but we still need more attention. So what I ask of everyone who is listening to this today is to make the decision to impact the future, make the decision to look at yourself, look at your friends, look at your family and not just work on something that could help today or what is it.

It is interesting today to think about your children and your children's children and how they can make the world a better place. Each of you has the ability to impact the mindset of your friends and your families and the organizations you're in or to be entrepreneurial and to move us forward, so being on stage right now, I commit and take responsibility for sit at the intersection of health and technology and help provide the conversations and tools so we can move our health systems in the right direction. way and for people to be empowered in their own health journeys, we are the generation that will eliminate chronic diseases.

I know this is possible and I will work tirelessly until we have achieved it, so please join me, thank you.