The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #271 - Kyle Cetrulo (Gut Biome Bank)
Kyle Cetrulo is primarily a patient advocate and works diligently to bring life changing technologies to patients in need. Kyle has unparalleled expertise, strategic vision, and a track record of success with over 20 years of experience in the regenerative medicine and longevity industry.
As a serial entrepreuer, Kyle currently is currently wearing many hats.
Kyle is the Founder and current CEO of MyGutly, the first personalized Fecal Transplant company in the United States.
Kyle is the COO of MitrixBio, a leading mitochondria transplant company.
Prior to his work with MyGutly and MitrixBio, Kyle served as the CEO of Auxocell Laboratories, Inc., a prominent biotech company. In 2008, he founded Auxocell and from its inception as an idea, he secured the initial investment, assembled a highly skilled team, and led the company to profitability.
He served as the Director of the International Cord Blood Society from 1998 to 2005 and played a pivotal role in organizing the 5th and 6th International Congresses, which brought together representatives from 23 countries. Kyle's deep involvement in the field is further highlighted by his editorship of two editions of Perinatal Stem Cells (Wiley Press, 2010 and 2013).
In 2013, he founded the 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, International Perinatal Stem Cell Society, Inc., and successfully hosted the society's inaugural international forum in May 2014. He recently hosted the 10th International Anniversary Congress in May 2023, showcasing his continued commitment to advancing the field of cellular therapy.
Throughout his career, Kyle has cultivated strong relationships with world-renowned scientists and speakers, leveraging his extensive network to establish partnerships with corporate sponsors for funding nonprofit initiatives. He has been involved with numerous presentations to the FDA, including the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and the Center for Veterinary Medicine, and a pre-510K FDA meeting, underscoring his comprehensive understanding of the regulatory landscape in the biotech industry.
Kyle is the host of the podcast Dragon Longevity where Kyle interviews guests from his stem cell and longevity background.
LEARN MORE AT:
gutbiomebank.com | IG
mitrix.bio
Get EQUITY or $300 off Gut Biome Bank with the code MelanieAvalon at MelanieAvalon.com/biomebank!
SHOWNOTES
IF Biohackers: Intermittent Fasting + Real Foods + Life: Join Melanie's Facebook group for a weekly episode giveaway, and to discuss and learn about all things biohacking! All conversations welcome!
Follow Melanie on Instagram to see the latest moments, products, and #allthethings! @melanieavalon
AVALONX SPIRULINA: Spirulina is out now! AvalonX supplements are free of toxic fillers and common allergens (including wheat, rice, gluten, dairy, shellfish, nuts, soy, eggs, and yeast), tested to be free of heavy metals and mold, and triple-tested for purity and potency. Get on the email list to stay up to date with all the special offers and news about Melanie's new supplements at avalonx.us/emaillist! Get 10% off avalonx.us and mdlogichealth.com with the code MELANIEAVALON!
Text AVALONX to 877-861-8318 for a one-time 20% off code for avalonx.us
FOOD SENSE GUIDE: Get Melanie's app to tackle your food sensitivities! Food Sense includes a searchable catalog of 300+ foods, revealing their gluten, fodmap, lectin, histamine, amine, glutamate, oxalate, salicylate, sulfite, and thiol status. Food Sense also includes compound overviews, reactions to look for, lists of foods high and low in them, the ability to create your own personal lists, and more!
Stay up to date with all the news on the new EMF collaboration with R Blank and get the launch specials exclusively at melanieavalon.com/emfemaillist!
LMNT: For fasting or low-carb diets electrolytes are key for relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. With no sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, and only 2 grams of carbs per packet, try LMNT for complete and total hydration. Be sure to try the new LMNT Sparkling — a bold, 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. For a limited time go to drinklmnt.com/melanieavalon to get a free sample pack with any purchase!
Kyle's Background
Restoring your own gut microbiome
How to tell if the microbiome is at a good point to capture
Banking and re-banking
The twin study
Your "signature" gut biome
Longevity and weight maintenance
Storing the capsules and the shelf life
Federal regulation on the process
The Perinatal Stem Cell Society
Stem cell harvesting and use
How to take the capsules
Muscle regeneration
Quality longevity
TRANSCRIPT
(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)
Melanie Avalon:
Welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I am about to have. I've been looking forward to this for quite a while now, ever since this individual brand company reached out to me and we were just talking before this. It's gone through some name changes and things like that. So we are here now with an incredible amazing service called Gut Biome Bank. And as you guys know, I am a bit obsessed with the role of our microbiome and our health. I've been talking about it for years and years and I've done so many episodes on it. And I feel like every now and then I will reference things like fecal transplants, which I think people, it sounds a little bit foreign to people and they might not know exactly what that entails, but I've been really intrigued about the potential there when it comes to the effects on the microbiome. And we talk about a lot of studies where, you know, transitioning or changing microbiomes between rodents we see certain effects as well as between humans. And there's this growing evolving idea of even restoration of the microbiome with fecal transplants. So I was so excited when Kyle Setrelow reached out to me from the aforementioned Gut Biome Bank because he has created a service that I will let him tell you more about. But basically, friends, you can become your own donor for your own stool, for your own fecal transplant. So I'm sure people have a lot of questions. We also have a really exciting announcement about the company and how you can get involved early and actually get equity in the company. So that's super cool. But I just have so many questions. I've really been looking forward to this for a long time. So Kyle, thank you so much for being here.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, thank you for inviting me on your podcast. It's really great to join you, Melanie.
Melanie Avalon:
So to start things off, I have so many questions for you. I know we, I think we first did a call to connect and I remember I didn't know which direction was going to go and you were just so fascinating with your history and everything that you've done in the health and wellness sphere. And so can you tell listeners a little bit about your journey? What led you to what you're doing today with gut biome bank?
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, so my career really started in the umbilical cord banking world and I came out of college and my father was an eternal fetal medicine OBGYN and he immediately saw the value of saving the umbilical cord blood, stem cell, it's a metabolic stem cell collection and that can be used in replacement of what you think of as a bone marrow transplant. A bone marrow transplant is really a stem cell transplant from the source of tissue being bone marrow and when you collect the umbilical cord blood unit, you're saving a perfect match for your child in the future and that's where I started to work and then I eventually formed my own company that focused on stem cells from the umbilical cord tissue which is the mesenchymal stem cell from the umbilical cord tissue which is sort of the rage of the regenerative medicine stem cell space, I mean that's the most prolific stem cell that's being used in the offshore clinics and when people, you know, go to Costa Rica or Mexico and they say I got stem cell treatment, you're getting an umbilical cord stem cell treatment for the most part. So that was my background, so it was really biobanking, you know, creating tissue banks from umbilical cord blood units or from umbilical cord tissue units, you know, there's two different types of cells there but what I was really fascinated by the microbiome as well and I saw the technology that was developing in this space and particularly out of this lab in Israel, Professor Aaron Elinov's lab where he does a lot of the autologous fecal transplant data and wrote some amazing papers on using your own stool sample, collecting that microbiome at a time of health and then using that sample to restore your microbiome after you need to take antibiotics for any reason or any other thing that really disturbs your microbiome, you can restore it using your own sample and that really clicked in my entrepreneurial mind that okay, you know, this is something that would really be a great tool for longevity approaches and overall, you know, health span and biohacking.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, this is so cool. And because what you're referencing right now is this concept of people using their own stool to restore their own health. How much of it is looking at stool transfers between different individuals versus this doing it for yourself in your own stool?
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, so the field is really- so we're the first company of our kind in the United States, and I think the second in the world. So most of the field of fecal matter transplant is from what's an allogeneic donor. So it's from a donor to the recipient. And that's what when people talk about getting a fecal matter transplant, it's not using your own stool sample. And what his lab has really done is shown that you can restore your own, you know, using your own stool sample, you can restore your own microbiome, and it's really fast. And that's really the advantage. If you take antibiotics, for instance, it's going to deplete your microbiome. And it's going to, you know, kill the bad bacteria, but it's going to kill all the good all the good bacteria too. So you're almost starting from an empty microbiome situation. And that allows bad bacteria to, to take hold in your mic in your gut microbiome. You know, the best analogy for it is like a garden. And if you go, and you put down great soil, and plant some seeds, you know, the weeds are going to show up first. And that's just what's going to happen. You have to, that's why you have to weed. And that's similar happens when you start with your microbiome. You know, there's nutrients that pathogens want to use to grow, and that good bacteria want to use to grow, and you compete for that, those resources. But when it's like an open playing field, a lot of the back bad bacteria are able to take hold in that situation.
Melanie Avalon:
It's really interesting, so a few comments there, because you have a lot of really cool studies on your website that talk about trials that have been done and such. And there was a study which I was already familiar with, but I didn't really dive deep into it until researching for this show. And it basically looks at restoration of people's gut microbiomes after a round of antibiotics like you were talking about. And they compare letting the person's microbiome recover on its own versus using probiotics versus using a fecal transplant. And it was really, okay, well, first of all, curveball for a lot of people. The probiotics actually, at least in that study, slowed down the return to the original state of the people's microbiome, which I think people might find a little bit surprising. The fecal matter transplant, like you just said, was really fast in how fast people could recover. So do you have thoughts there on the probiotics versus the fecal matter transplant?
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, let me back up a little bit. So when you look at the gut health industry, if you will, it's a lot, it's composed of mostly testing companies that will test you and say, oh, you don't, you know, your microbiome is not in a great place. And here's some probiotics that will help bring it into a great place. Or here's a diet plan or a meal plan that can move you in the direction of creating a good microbiome. And what a good microbiome is really is a diverse microbiome. There is a study out of the University of Oxford that showed that you actually needed like 50 different strains of bacteria in your microbiome, all kind of working as a community to create a good microbiome. And just adding one or two strains of bacteria through a probiotic is not necessarily going to help that much in some cases. And the reason for this was that you really needed to have the good microbiome consume the nutrients that also the pathogens need. So if you have a robust microbiome with multiple strains of bacteria strains consuming the nutrients, there's no room for the bad microbiome to come in. So that paper that you talked about was actually out of Professor Alanoff's lab. And that was his paper, believe it was in Nature. And basically, there's nothing in the gut microbiome industry that actually helps you restore your microbiome other than probiotics and food. So the idea and when you, you probably have experience in this, Melanie, but when you take antibiotics, it takes you four to six months of eating and being healthy to start to get back to having your microbiome that has the full range of multiple strains of bacteria working together in the community. And it just takes time. It takes a lot of time. You know, four to six months is a long time. Whereas this technology in that paper, what they did is they did a test that showed the composition of the microbiome. And then that cohort took an antibiotic round. And then, and then they restore, you know, they did the test and they collected the stool sample rather, then they took antibiotics, and then they took the microbiome, you put them in capsules, you put the bacteria into capsules. And then you see, you just consume it orally. And the capsules have a coating so that they make it through the stomach and get to the intestine and colon. And that's where they are broken apart and where the bacteria repopulates the gut, the colon and the intestine. Essentially, that cohort was restored to 75% of the previous composition of the gut microbiome in under eight days. So where I see this really going is that I think this is going to be a standard in cancer treatment going forward, because when you take chemotherapy, you know, that completely wipes out the microbiome. And even stem cell treatments generally have an antibiotic component to them as well. So if you apply it to like a cancer situation, so you generally schedule your chemotherapy. But what you can do, and what Professor Ellenov is looking at is like high fiber diets and ways to enhance, you know, cancer therapy through priming the microbiome really for that, that treatment. But what you could do, what I think will happen, and there's been clinical trials that show this out of Sloan Kettering, where you collect the microbiome previous before you do the chemo, you do the chemo, and then when you finish the chemo, and you begin your stem cell transplant to rebuild your immune system, you can take the capsules from your pre chemo microbiome. And that's shown to have a less relapse in five years, and also less degree of graft first host disease, which is a infection that is caused from the stem cell transplant where your body is rejecting the donor stem cells. And it's a really terrible infection, you get all blisters in your mouth, and it and you're basically your, your graft is the stem cells that are being rejected by the host, which is your body. And, and it just is battle. And about 5% of all people who go through chemo transplant end up have, you know, they die from that infection. So if you have a big chance, you know, that 5% is a lot of people, and there's a million people in the United States that undergo chemotherapy every year. So that's like 50,000 people, I believe.
Melanie Avalon:
A big overarching question I have about all of it is because we're talking about situations right now where you have your microbiome state and then you go through something which is going to potentially, probably negatively affect it. So antibiotics, chemo, things like that. How do we know that the microbiome is one that we want to necessarily return to? How can people know that they actually should capture their microbiome at their state right now? I wonder if a lot of people are thinking, well, let me wait until my microbiome is in a better state before I capture it.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, that's a great question. And that's one that we get asked a lot. And what we advise is actually that you look at this like, you set a baseline. I mean, you don't know what can happen tomorrow, you could go out and get COVID tomorrow. And then you're back way worse than you were today. Correct. So you where you're at is is what we like to say, you know, let's let's collect it now at a relatively time of health, and then work on improving it. And, you know, improving it through diet, improving it through probiotics, improving it through if you do like a cleanse or, you know, the various gut health methodologies, right, I mean, there's a lot of them. And you can continue to, to work better. And it's basically, you're continuing to create a more diverse community of bacteria strains in your gut. What we could, you could always do with the baseline, you could improve on it, and then bank it again, and do another baseline, and in continually improving and creating the inventory of, of samples as well. So that, you know, if you if you start today, and so you're your 30 year old person, you can realistically say that this will be your worst gut microbiome for the rest of your life, you know, if you collect enough pills, enough of the capsules, and any incident that happens in the future, you can restore back to this point, but better yet, you know, six months from now, you may have a better gut microbiome, and that can become your baseline. And you can keep improving, you know, on that, on that level. And just imagine if you were 100 years old, but you had the microbiome that you have when you're 30, we don't know what that's going to look like from a scientific perspective. But I guarantee you, it's going to be better than what you had if you didn't do it.
Melanie Avalon:
I know you just said it, but I'm going to say it again. So basically, because that's like a huge reframe, basically, it could in theory never get worse because you could always return to the state you are now. And then in the meantime, you can continue improving, continue banking. So it's really just an upward potential. I like that.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah. And the money, I mean, money is the only drawback there is because it costs every time you do it. But if that's not, let's, let's, let's assume that we, you know, that's not the, that's not an issue from a scientific standpoint that we can, anyone can create the number of banking possibilities. Cause with, with this stool banking, I mean, you could bank a new sample every day, or for instance, say you did like a, a retreat and you went and worked with, you know, a great nutritionist and, and you felt like, oh, you know, I just have the healthiest, cleanest microbiome I've ever had. You could bank it 20 times at that point, you know, get 2000 capsules and then you can work off those capsules for the rest of your life. Wow. Okay. There's another reframe that while we're on this topic, that I, I have not, we've not had a client do this yet, but I'm, I'm really excited for some. And basically when you look at biobanking parents, I mean, you could take your child's microbiome and before, before they have any antibiotics in their whole life, make that their baseline and then see how that affects their life where you keep going back to those pre-antibiotic treatments because you could restore it to the pre-antibiotic level and then keep restoring back to that point. Cause even though you'll, you'll restore it, like you, you bank it, the child has to take antibiotics, but then you would restore it back to the pre-antibiotic level and then you can bank it again and, and keep that cycle going.
Melanie Avalon:
I did see, trying to remember where I was reading this, I think it might have been in Dr. Michael Greger's book, How Not to Age, I think. It was talking about the gut microbiome and how they could realistically pinpoint people's ages very closely just looking at their microbiome, which is really interesting and kind of really makes you wonder what you were saying earlier about if you had your stool now when you're 30 and then you take it, you know, later when you're 70, like what would that mean? What would that do? That's fascinating. What are your thoughts on, because you just talked about, you know, taking it for an infant or a baby and then saving it for later, is there the potential of, okay, so backtracking a little bit, because I was researching about the different types of fecal transplants and it was saying that some of the problems with doing it, transferring it between donors, so not within yourself but between different people, was that you could potentially transfer pathogens or it could be a mismatch that just doesn't work or it was talking about gene transfer that might be problematic. So going back to that baby situation, do you think our microbiome as we go through the world and grow up kind of, you know, learns and adapts to things and if you transferred stool that was like too young, would it not know enough yet? Like would it not be adapted to things that we need to be adapted to?
Kyle Cetrulo:
That's a great question, but what came to mind was a twin study, and you mentioned there's a famous twin study where they took convergent, discordant twins, so one twin is obese and one is lean, one is fit, and the humans, and then they put them into germ-free mice, and the microbiome from the obese human created an obese mouse. So there's arguments that we all have like a signature microbiome that we kind of revert to, and that has a lot to do with dieting as well, like obese, there's a different study. So in that twin study, which was really interesting, the human microbiome created an obese mouse, and the lean microbiome created a lean mouse. So there was a signature microbiome there, and then there's another study that looked at obesity, and it's out of Israel as well, out of Ben Gurion University, and what they did is they put these different obese cohorts of people who were obese on this diet called the Direct Plus Diet, which is like a clinical diet and exercise plan, and if the people who lost 3.5% of their body mass index, they collected their stool sample, and then that cohort, I think it was 90 people, stopped the hardcore dieting and hardcore exercises, and they only took ten pills once a month from their own microbiome that was collected at like the peak of dieting, and that cohort didn't regain the weight.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, wow.
Kyle Cetrulo:
which is amazing.
Melanie Avalon:
That's cool.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah. So, and, you know, Professor Alanov and others are really looking to show that, you know, there is a signature microbiome that's developed. And I'm not sure if that's environmental or only genetic or both, but it could, you know, when you say like your question about maybe you won't have the factors you need to be healthy, I think it's kind of going the other way. I think you get the factors that make you more unhealthy, particularly with our food that we eat and, you know, all the toxins and our water. I mean, all the factors that are not natural when you look at, you know, if we went back to like Pangea, like the earth would be very different microbiome from like a caveman to a modern person based on, you know, the food and the diet and nutrition that we get. So, I don't really know that you'd be missing out. I think you'd be in a more pristine situation where there certainly are papers that show that, you know, children who don't breastfeed don't have as strong as their microbiome because a lot of that comes from the mother sharing her back, you know, for through breastfeeding is very beneficial to create a microbiome in your baby. And also even from vaginal birth is for C-section, you know, there's different microbiomes that are developed, but there's papers that show that, you know, children that have antibiotics in the first year of life have higher instances of allergies and, you know, ultimately go on to develop allergies down the road, you know. So, there's a, we're really just at the tip of the iceberg of like how much the microbiome really affects all of our systems in our body. And, you know, what I'm offering my company is the ability to really do like citizen science on your own family, on your own body and see how it interacts. But what really got me really intrigued in this was looking at from a longevity standpoint, you know, there's like groups in Japan that centurions that are really smart and really fit and their microbiomes are very, are diverse. I mean, they're more diverse than your average hundred year old person. And I think that that's where I was like, okay, maybe you can start collecting your microbiome, you know, I'm 48 now and at least I'll have a more diverse microbiome now. And generally as you age, your microbiome becomes less diverse. And that's pretty well known.
Melanie Avalon:
The weight loss thing and maintenance, that is really cool. So basically people potentially, you know, they go on a weight loss diet, they lose the weight, they capture their microbiome in that state where they've actually lost the weight. And then would they take it like preventatively to not regain weight or they would take it like, so how, how often were they people taking it afterwards, after the.
Kyle Cetrulo:
They took it one time a month, but 10 capsules at a time. So it's once a month, but 10 capsules. And, you know, as we develop our clientele, I believe that we'll have like people that, you know, we have, we offer subscription services of like two or four times a year to bank it. So you do like a quarterly banking. And then I would think you would consume the pills in between that. So you maintain the balance or you are working to improve it and we'll be creating like a gut microbiome ecosystem and working with other experts and figure out other products that, you know, our customers will work with and use in between banking with the idea of, of gradually improving, you know, every three months and then banking again. And, and, and if you have a dip, you can kind of, again, it's, it's, this isn't really backed scientifically, but intuitively you might take, you know, two or three pills a day and just sort of maintain that. Or if you go out to a restaurant and you, you know, you feel a little, you don't feel a hundred percent the next day, maybe that's when you take a couple pills to kind of restore back to your, to your baseline.
Melanie Avalon:
or travel.
Kyle Cetrulo:
or travel, like a pre-travel. I know there's a lot of microbiome products that people use, pre-travel. It's hard for me to eat when I travel because I have a really healthy diet and it's hard to maintain that.
Melanie Avalon:
I'm having flashbacks. I remember my dad went to India, I don't know, a year or so ago. And he's not very much in like my biohacking world or anything like that. And he was so excited because he was like, I got this, he's like, I got this product that I'm going to take and it's supposed to really help. And I think it's like in your world. And so I was looking at the ingredients and I was like, oh, this is just, it was basically just like the most common, you know, probiotic strains with a lot of fillers that I didn't like. But it's interesting to see how, you know, this world slowly seeps into the larger general population. You know, so there's like that approach versus this just sounds like, I mean, the ultimate is something like helping with your with your travel. Because I know that's often has a huge effect on people and their digestion. The actual capsules themselves, when you store, how do you store them? And how long do they have a shelf life?
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah. So the, they're stored in a minus 80 freezer, which is a very cold freezer. It's not in liquid nitrogen or anything like that, but they generally are the shelf life, I think has been shown out to like five years that they maintain five years. That's as far as the tests have gone, but you know, they shouldn't scientifically, as long as they main are stored in that freezer, they should last past the five years, but the data doesn't go out that far. Okay. Yeah. We're constantly building on that, on that timeframe, but we can only state what we have. Right.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, that makes sense. The capsules and the administration, is there any risk of the capsule opening up prematurely? Can you do it as an enema?
Kyle Cetrulo:
That's another delivery system. That's not the delivery system that we provide. There's multiple ways to do a fecal transplant and NMO is one delivery method, but that would be more like a liquid product. So I guess we could do a suppository, but that's not what we are providing.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay. And the capsules, they're very resistant to digestion. I just have this idea of them opening up in my small intestine.
Kyle Cetrulo:
it's a powder in the capsule. So it's not like you have like a piece of your poop that you're consuming. So when you process it, you get the microbiome, you know, the steps are basically, they're pretty simple steps, but it's really diluting it and filtering it. And then the microbiome, the bacteria kind of floats the top.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, so it's like taking a probiotic.
Kyle Cetrulo:
It's exactly like that, yeah.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, okay, that's, I don't know how I didn't realize that until now. I mean, I knew that you were doing some sort of processing on it, but I don't know what I was thinking. Okay, so it's more like a probiotic created from your own stool.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Correct, yeah. And the capsules are coated in, you know, a chemical that allows it not to be digested in the stomach from the stomach acids, otherwise it would just not reach the intestine and colon. So it flows through the stomach and then it breaks apart in the colon.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, and do you guys do any analysis on this tool collection, like the strains and everything?
Kyle Cetrulo:
We have a testing partner that we work with, where you can do like a pre-test and a post-test as well, and you can confirm. So right now, we don't do any manipulation to the sample. So what you send in is what we encapsulize. But we're looking into actually like this is a whole new company. So we're just getting off the ground, as you know, and it's really a great opportunity to share this story with your audience. But ideally, what we will do is then do a test and say, okay, I send my sample in, and I'm low in some of these bacteria strains that we've identified as being helpful for longevity or helpful for mental health, and we can grow those specific strains up from your own microbiome and then encapsulate them and send them back to you. But instead of being like 1x, we can potentially grow up 10x and then re-encapsulate it and send it back to you. That's going to require a lot more safety studies as well. So there's a lot more science that will need to be done to show that that's safe and effective, but that is definitely something I want to go in the direction of with this company, particularly from a mental health component. I think that there's a huge mental health play here, where when you look at studies that look at the microbiome and depression, for instance, have you ever read any of those studies or anything like that?
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Cetrulo:
They're basically, like when you have depression, you have similar microbiome profiles. And when you are not depressed anymore, either you're lacking certain bacteria strains or you have too much of certain bacteria strains. And that creates the depression that you're not creating the serotonin and oxytocin and whatnot naturally, because you're lacking the bacteria strains that produce that. So you could grow up from your own microbiome those bacteria strains, then encapsulate them at non-depressed levels and return it to the depressed patient.
Melanie Avalon:
Wow, that yeah, that's amazing
Kyle Cetrulo:
I mean, that that's in the future. I'm not trying to say that that's something we're doing now, but that's hypothetically, that's totally doable and it's not that hard to do either.
Melanie Avalon:
There's somebody I want to connect you to who I think you're going to hit it off with who might be really symbiotic with what you're doing. So speaking of the future and safety and all these things, I have my own supplement line. And that alone is just creating supplements where they're already on the market. And that alone I have dealt with my own. There's like a lot of legal stuff and you have to deal with the system. So I can't even imagine what it must be like trying to start a company like this. So what has it been like legally, like actually launching this company? Is the world receptive to it? What has that journey been like?
Kyle Cetrulo:
Well, the people are very receptive to it. Sort of the sales cycle pushback is, you know, oh, I'm not at my healthiest right now. So I'm going to wait to become a client. And that's something that we will need to overcome. Because everyone you can always get healthier, right? You always can feel like, oh, I want to do it. But I'm really healthy right now. And I'm going to feel like I'm always going to be healthy. Right? It's this mindset of like, no, you're not always going to be healthy. And you should really base your baseline and then improve on it that way. But from a, like a regulatory framework, and this is where my background in stem cells made really helpful, because if we don't manipulate it, like we don't culture and change it, and we just collect it, it's called minimum manipulation. And that's what we do to the product. And it's your own bacteria, it's your own biological material that our company doesn't manipulate. And then we will return it only to you. That that's, you know, a legal pathway that is pretty clear, that it's legal to do that when you start manipulating it and changing it like that. And also, what's really interesting is that the FDA, they never really envisioned autologous use for fecal transplant. So any guidance document or any, any statement they've made, it's like not applicable. Yeah, they don't address it. And I know, you know, people they've said in the conference and whatnot, that it would be considered a drug, but that anything that's actually like I went through all the, the right the documented stance from FDA, and they don't once talk about using your own stool sample. And now there's a huge change with people don't realize that you heard about the Chevron deference Supreme Court case that happened a few weeks ago, maybe like a week ago.
Melanie Avalon:
What happened?
Kyle Cetrulo:
So Chevron, it was a ruling from the 80s that had been referenced 18,000 times by the court systems as a basically where there's a question of like who's right and who's wrong, the deference would go to the agency, whether it was like the EPA or the FDA or whatever, if they could interpret their own documents and be in the experts, the court gave them deference, right? So it is the case that set that up was called was from Chevron, and it was a Reagan period where, you know, administration was like very conservatives were excited about that ruling. And it set up that even though, you know, for instance, they don't talk about using your own stool sample in the paperwork, the FDA could say, well, even though we don't have it in our guidance, we can interpret this way, and the courts generally would follow well, FDA is the experts. So their interpretation is what stands. And now that's thrown out. And it doesn't matter. Like they lost a huge leverage interpreting, you know, this exact topic, it has huge impacts on environmental law as well. It really comes down to the letter of the law that's in the law itself has to be followed in the agencies no longer have the deference to interpret that outside the lines.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so basically, they can't take the existing laws and apply it, they've got to like create new
Kyle Cetrulo:
No, they have to take the existing law and apply it. That's as far as they can go.
Melanie Avalon:
they can't reinterpret that to make it applicable.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Or to change it. So, for instance, since they don't say you can't use your own stool sample, I mean, this is not a legal opinion I've received or anything, but they would have to write a law that says you can't use your own stool sample, and then they can enforce that.
Melanie Avalon:
They're going to take the existing law and when I say apply it, I mean, they couldn't take it and be like, well, this in this situation would mean this because it just doesn't address it. So they have to actually just make a new law.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, and that's where they used to be able to do that, though. They used to be able to say, well, we're FDA, and we don't really have a law that addresses this, but we think this. And since we're the experts, the court would say, well, they're the experts. And they no longer have that we're the experts to fall back on.
Melanie Avalon:
That's really smart, especially because I'm happy to hear that. I just feel like there's so many ever-evolving new technologies that it could get really tricky if they can just use old laws to apply to things that weren't even a concept back then. Like, we need new regulation, I think.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, I mean, that's the, it certainly has a huge impact on the stem cell field as well, because they were, they were interpreting, you know, that's why there's all these stem cell rules are why you, you know, you don't really get great stem cell treatments in the US, because of the how they interpret all the laws.
Melanie Avalon:
So now since that just happened, is there a change happening with stem cells in the US?
Kyle Cetrulo:
there's going to be more chaos is what's going to happen and still not access to the best stem cell. It's very clear that if you culture a stem cell like when you grow the stem cells out that that's a drug so that you would still have to go through clinical trials to show that and that's what you basically can do offshore. You know you can you can get like when people go and get like 100 million mesenchymal stem cells injected or IV. It's their culture-grown cells and that's not something that you will be legal in the U.S. you know until you go through clinical trials. My non-profit, I have a non-profit in this space too which is like my my work towards humanity is to try to change the rule the law so that that would be legal in the United States.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, wow. Okay. And so that's your International Perinatal Stem Cell Society.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, the website's perinatalstemcells.com, and what we proposed there is that the way that Japan does it, and it's not really the laws that are really that restrictive. It's the funding and the cost of doing clinical trials, which is the restrictive part when it comes to stem cells, because there's no IP enforcement. You can't patent a cell. So therefore, companies aren't able really to raise the $500 million it takes to do the clinical trials, and there's not a lot of backing there. So what Japan does is that the company pays for the phase one trial, which is a safety study, and then the company can charge patients to be part of the phase two and phase three and actually start commercializing it once they get a safety trial that is approved. So you still go through the clinical trial process, but companies don't have to pay for the expense of phase two and phase three, which is generally like phase two. Phase one is like three to five million, 10 to 20 patients. You show that it's safe. Not that it works. That's a clinical trial, phase one, with the idea that it works, but the data that to move to phase two is to show that that is effective. So you prove safety first, then you show that it is effective at maybe 100 patients, and then if it shows that there is efficacy, then you get moved to a phase three and you maybe do 1,500 patients or 2,000 patients, whatever the statistical number that you need to. I mean, it's a mathematical equation of how many patients you have to apply to treat, but that gets really expensive, and the company has to pay for all that, whereas in Japan, they allow payment, actually, in a lot of instances, national insurance pays for the participation, but you still conduct the clinical trial. And that's what we would like to see from our society, is not so much that we abandon clinical trials and certainly not abandon safety profiles for the products, but enable a way to fund them and then stay within the FDA system. And in that case, all the people that are going to get clinical stem cells in Costa Rica or Mexico, they would definitely pay to be part of like a Mass General or the best hospitals and MD Anderson sponsored stem cell trial. I mean, if you had to pay to be part of that, rather than pay to go to Columbia, I think people would do that.
Melanie Avalon:
So in Japan, are they doing that with just stem cell studies or are they doing that with other things as well, that model?
Kyle Cetrulo:
It's mostly for cell therapy, or it's advanced therapeutics. So like gene therapies, other CAR T treatments, anything that's an advanced therapy is able to go through that process. And they're kicking our butts in terms of developing the stem cells, because you can't get the best treatments here. And what happens is the space is that the best doctors don't really get involved in the stem cell space at this point, because the products are not regulated. There's no oversight. You don't really know what's in the product. And as a result, you can get stem cells in the United States, but you don't really know where they're coming from or how good they are. And it's just like the lack of oversight, there are some good manufacturers for sure. But it's impossible for the lay people, the patients, to delineate that.
Melanie Avalon:
Speaking to that, I think we might have talked about this when we talked on the phone, but for example, I supposedly got stem cell treatments here. I really trusted the doctors that I got it from. I'm wondering, so what you were just speaking to with not knowing the actual source and everything, would the trust breakdown or the potential for not getting what you think you're would that be between you and the doctor or the doctor and actually the source they're getting it from?
Kyle Cetrulo:
it'd be the doctor and the manufacturer of that product. I mean, so the doctor is, I would assume, offering the best product that he has access to, right? You think, ideally, you trust your doctor and he's going to want to get a product that works for you. But the, I mean, when you get that product sent to your, to his office, it just looks like, you know, clear liquid. And it's, do you see going to run every test to say, oh, does it really have the 10 million stem cells and where the growth factors that are supposed to be in there? And a lot of the manufacturers, you know, what happened was it was really poorly managed via FDA. They put a three year discretionary enforcement. And that just invited a lot of unethical manufacturers to come into the space with no intentions of like moving towards clinical trials. And as a result, there's a lot of product that is not really good product that is considered, you know, from the stem cells, when people talk about they didn't work or whatever, it's probably because they just got saline at the end of the day.
Melanie Avalon:
What do you mean by a three-year discretionary enforcement?
Kyle Cetrulo:
So like I could kind of do this through my company is how I look at it. But originally I started a company called Oxa cell laboratory in 2008. And we were looking at stem cells from the umbilical cord tissue from the mesenchymal cell. And at that point there was no like umbilical cord products on the market. And around 2014, a really smart attorney came up with a way that if you a lot of this is pretty complicated. So I'm trying to break it down. But there's the rules that follow the stem cell world is this 1271 document. And you start out, you default into being a drug, right? So remember I mentioned, like, if you culture the cells, then you're a drug. And there's a number of things that you're, you're not a drug until you default into it. Right. Does that make sense? So you can stay on the non-drug side of things through your labeling, because it's up to the manufacturer to label, you know, this is a stem cell product, and then that makes you a drug. So what this attorney decided is that if you just label, this is a tissue allograft period and stop there, then you can continue to sell that as a 361, which means it's not a drug and you don't have to do the clinical trial process, even though you know that there's stem cells in that product, you didn't label it as such. So that's the genesis of the field is that that kind of like gray area manipulation. And so it's label how you label it. So what happened is manufacturers started to take an umbilical cord, process it, they know that there's stem cells in there, they didn't grow them. So they're just taking the natural growth factors and stem cells and label it as a tissue allograft. And then they go sell it to like an orthopedic knee surgeon. And he decides to, you know, use it as a to treat a knee that's on the doctor's practice of medicine. And and that's nothing to do with the company, if that if that makes sense. So the company didn't make any claims that you could use this to treat a knee. They didn't label it as such. And as a result, they're just selling a tissue allograft, but they're selling this, you know, dead of the day, they are selling a stem cell product to treat a knee. And so it's really back, it's a backdoor way of how the field developed. But it also enabled a lot of people to get really good treatments in the beginning. So what happened was around 2017, now there's lots of companies doing this. And FDA was like, whoa, we don't know how to handle this. So we're going to create a three what they put out. They said the 36 month discretionary enforcement means we're not going to enforce anything for three years. But we want you to come and meet with us, you know, and move into clinical trials and we'll work with you and we'll help you. And any company that, you know, went and met with FDA got completely slapped back. So then companies said, well, that's that's not the path forward. We'll just that we had we got 24 months left to sell these products. Let's let's do that. And new companies were coming in left and right. And then Covid came and they ended up extending the discretionary enforcement another like 18 months. There's like basically almost five years of non enforcement in FDA. And that just created a whole bunch of companies that, you know, would start diluting the product and whatnot, because they were just taking advantage of the situation. And then FDA also wasn't, you know, the lot of don't get me wrong, there's a lot of really serious manufacturers that want to follow the rules and want a pathway that enables them to create really efficacious products. But the competition, you know, created an environment where kind of the ones who wanted to get the muddiest would end up winning and the ones who didn't want to dilute the product would win. And that became a space where I didn't really want to be a manufacturer anymore in that that space, which is why I could just switched gears towards the fecal transplant, you know, the gut biome bank at this time. and work on the nonprofit to create an environment where if the rules that, you know, the perinatal society proposes, every company would be able to raise $5 million to do a safety study and multiple new companies would come in knowing that you have phase two and phase three potentially paid for from clients. It would create such competition that the prices would really come down. And then you would be still working through clinical trials, but people would be getting stem cell transplants in that with FDA oversight. And I think it would be a really beautiful program. And have you ever had a stem cell transplant other than that one that you talked about?
Melanie Avalon:
Just that one, and what's interesting about that one is, I mean, it's literally the exact situation that you describe. Like, basically, they told me, like, in writing that it... They used words about it, about it being stem cell. I think they said it was exosomes. But then in the office, they were, like, vocally, they were like, oh, this is actually umbilical cord stem cells, but we just couldn't say that. I was like, oh, okay.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Well, what happened that is a change happened in January, the state of Utah passed the law that the governor signed that says non FDA approved stem cell treatments are legal in the state of Utah, which completely goes against federal law and sets up a battle between states versus federal, you know, similar to what happened with marijuana in a lot of ways. But all you had to do to make your stem cell product legal is you have to put up a notice that says the products were selling you or not FDA approved. And then that makes it legal to do that in Utah, you know, Washington state passed something similar, there's a bunch of other states that are following suit. So there's a showdown coming for sure. But now with the Chevron loss of Chevron doctrine, FDA lost a lot of power there. And that's why I was saying that it's just going to create like chaos until there's a path forward that manufacturers know they can invest in and follow to get to the end, you know, to get a market approved stem cell product until that exists, there's just going to be the chaos basically, and the cutting corners and what those exosome companies often do is they they get a cosmetic, so they get approved for topical use. And then they, you know, they use them off label like as an injectable, even though it's, you know, supposed to be a topical use exosome, then it will be injected into your knee or so.
Melanie Avalon:
They told me it was exosomes, but then when I was there, they said it was actual just umbilical cord stem cells. So I don't know what I'm talking about.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Exosomes are derivative from stem cells, so I don't know, did it work?
Melanie Avalon:
So that's the thing. Yes. And also, I don't I don't have a control. So I don't know if I hadn't taken it if I would also be better now.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Well, I know, you know, when I had my stem cell company, I treated myself a number of times and they work really, really well when they're good manufactured stem cell products. And it's really a shame that this isn't something that everyone has access to. It's really like this is one of the biggest outrages in my life that I've I mean, I've been working in the stem cell field since 1998 and it hasn't advanced at all. There's been no stem cells approved by FDA.
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, no, it's crazy. I would love to do it because what I did it on on my knee was a recent ish, I think it was like a year or so injury, which didn't just didn't seem to be going away at all. And now it's gone. So maybe that's what did it. I would like to do it on something, even if it's smaller, but something that I've had, you know, longer term that doesn't seem like it's changing at all and see if there's a difference. Well, speaking of like you doing the stem cells yourself and going back to got my own bank, how often do you bank your own stool and take it?
Kyle Cetrulo:
So with this new protocol and the new lab, like we're just getting going on that. So I did it with a different lab twice, but I didn't really trust the protocol per se, because it wasn't our protocol. It wasn't based on the Wiseman protocol, but I'm going to, I'll do it quarterly and I'll, I'll be a regular consumer of it. That's my plan.
Melanie Avalon:
You'll bank it quarterly and you'll take it quarterly.
Kyle Cetrulo:
No, I'll like consume them in between the bankings. So I'll like, I'll get to a point of what I'll do is I'll, I'll probably do like a hardcore, you know, I'll bank it, but then I'll be doing some like leptin dieting and high fiber dieting and really cranking it up and then bank it again, and then I'll just. Remains to be seen, but I think I'll be like regularly consuming the samples in between banking. So I'll in a month, my other goal is to build an inventory for the rest of my life as well. So it depends on how healthy I am or if I get sick or whatnot, but assuming that I don't get any major, you know, COVID or need to take antibiotics. I'll con my plan is to probably continue to maintain the level I'm at at a minimum.
Melanie Avalon:
When you take it, do you take it on an empty stomach or with food or does it matter?
Kyle Cetrulo:
I would do with an empty stomach, like the first thing in the morning kind of, it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't get digested in the stomach, so it shouldn't really matter. But I, those questions, I don't really know the answers to them all because we're just getting started in this, you know? So like, I don't want to be like, this is the protocol I'm following, because it will change, probably. You know, I look at this from like, I have a, my children, you know, when I banked my, when my children were born, I had like, I did everything you could do under the sun for the stem cells. Like, I created master cell banks for my children, I banked their placental tissue, I banked their umbilical cord blood, I banked their own, you know, they're using my own technology. I had four different companies for my son that I worked with. So like, from a standpoint, like I look at this from like, my daughter particularly, who's a ballerina. She's 12. She's in, she's dancing in New York City right now. And like, she's going on that route. And I'm like, okay, you know, the challenges of ballerina that come with that are obviously like weight and, and, and being physical. I mean, you have to be skinny, but you also have to be a super athlete.
Melanie Avalon:
Be strong, yeah.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Right. But it's both. It's like the training, and they do a really good job actually of talking to them about nutrition and how to take care of your bodies now, which maybe they didn't do in the past. People come in and talk to them all the time. But I think that if you look at anorexia, people who have anorexia are basically similar to the depression. Anorexia is more like a mental disorder. But the same anorexic people have very similar gut microbiomes. And as they get better, those gut microbiomes, it's what we were talking about before, like different strains are either lacking or too prevalent. And that creates the anorexic mindset. And you can adjust that. So I look at like what would be the most beneficial for her career and how to manipulate that with the gut microbiome and ultimately with stem cells as well.
Melanie Avalon:
That's amazing.
Kyle Cetrulo:
But from an athletic standpoint, like I think that, you know, when you talk about the dieting and banking at like peak dieting, I think athletes will also look at this at like, you know, when you're at like the top, like, you know, for instance, like boxers is maybe not the best example, but they train and they get ready, you know, they know when their fight is and they train so that the night of their fight, they're at their peak conditioning, right? That's the idea anyway. And, you know, at that point, you could bank the microbiome, like at your like peak athletic component, and then any injury or anything like that is going to affect your microbiome. You know, what's really interesting, there's a study that just came to my mind when you look at this from like an athletic standpoint. There's a paper that talks about muscle repair being generated from your microbiome. So the signals that your microbiome sends out to Treg cells that produce the muscle regeneration as well. So there's a component of like being in your peak athletic shape that your microbiome is also affected by that peak optimal health experience. And I believe that, I mean, there's papers that show that like muscle repair is generated from your microbiome. You know, you don't think about that as being generated from a microbiome standpoint, but that there's clear data that that is the case.
Melanie Avalon:
I think we just have no idea everything that it's affecting so many things.
Kyle Cetrulo:
That's the case, you know, it's amazing. There's like a thousand new microbiome papers that come out a month. I mean, there are, it's a thousand. That's not an exaggeration. That's just the level of, you know, since the NIH, you know, the microbiome project in 2007, it's just spurred this amazing scientific discovery and really just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, if you look at where we were a hundred years ago, with understanding our bodies versus now and the speed of our knowledge growth with AI and whatnot. I mean, like you said, we're like, it's really just the tip of the iceberg, but we do know that it affects everything.
Melanie Avalon:
Yes. And actually, the company earlier that I mentioned that I want to introduce you to, what they've done is created an AI machine model that all it does is analyze gut microbiome studies.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Is that Jonah?
Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, do you know them?
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, we have a partnership with them.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, you have a partnership with them? Yeah. OK, I was just talking to the founder and I was talking about you.
Kyle Cetrulo:
They're the company that we recommend you do the testing with when I said we had a partner for that reason, because you can do a test with them and it's a great product and they run it through all of the medical literature and make suggestions on how you where you could do improvements. I mean, that's the level of excellence we want to create our brand with, you know, like really providing products that help you move in the in the direction you want to go, which is health and the longevity component in biohacking. I think it's for me, it's mostly about happiness, you know, and being healthy and being able to live however long you're going to live as well as you can live. Right. And, you know, when you look at all the when you go to those I love your your Instagram posts when you get all dressed up and go to the concerts and whatnot. I mean, that's so fun, but that's such a joy of being alive. Right. And having the ability to be healthy enough to do that and physical enough to do that is for as long as you can do that, you know, maybe you'll be 110 and still be able to do that. That's that's the goal of longevity for me in how I look at it.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness, I'm smiling so much. I agree so much. I just really treasure life and there's so many amazing moments. And when it comes to biohacking, I think, like, I think it can be a little bit overwhelming for people and they think that they have to be doing these things to be healthy. But I would rather see it like you were just talking about where it's really enhancing your life and just, you know, helping foster a body in an environment where you can do all the things that you love. So that's awesome.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, when people look at like longevity, you know, biohacking approaches, like if you're not enjoying it, you know, change it, like, like, I mean, cold plunges, yeah, it's not like, the greatest experience when you first get in there, but, you know, that you're fighting through it. And at the end, you enjoy the experience, right? But if it's like, a struggle, and you're not happy doing it, then, you know, find a path that you can, you know, practices that you do enjoy, you know, something you can sustain, even like, even on diet, you know, people, like you see, people who get into this, like, like, my best friends, a great example, he started drinking like celery juice every day. And like a week later, he's like, I got really bad diarrhea. I'm like, well, maybe just have one celery juice dude. Yeah. But he's like, what all in, you know, it's like, only celery juice, like his only liquid, you're like, dude, that's not gonna, that's not sustainable. That's not what you really, that's not the approach we're looking for. But that's just his personality, you know.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, I cannot agree more, especially with diet, because like I like the diet I follow, I think if you'll see it, it looks I mean, it looks restrictive, because I there's like, if there's the foods that I like, they're all whole foods, I don't eat processed foods, I don't go crazy, you know, with seasonings and stuff, but I love it. So like, for me, it's sustainable. And that's what I just want everybody to find is, you know, the diet and lifestyle that really works for them. Really exciting that you are like we talked about, you know, in the beginning of launching this company, and you have a really awesome thing that you're doing where you're actually giving equity to the first X amount of people that sign up. Can you tell listeners what you're doing with that?
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah. So for the, we're a new concept. I mean, we've got my gut biobanking and we realized that, you know, the people that are going to sign up with us in the initial phases are our greatest ambassadors you could possibly have. So we're doing a crowdfunding for the first 500 customers. Instead of, you know, signing up on our merchant account, you go through WeFunder and you pay the $2,000, which is the cost of the service, and you get equity, and then we give you the service so that you're invested in the company's success as well. Because that's going to be the people who are going to be able to tell their friends and to experience it and be, you know, a valued community member and also have some value if the company does really well. You know, they're the early people and we've seen, there's been a few really successful crowdfunding within the gut industry as well. So I mirrored that off of, you know, some of the other companies like raise their Series A in a few hours, or at least the first 5 million of it through their customer base. So what we're trying to do is really just incentivize the first customer basis to be our best ambassador as possible because a lot of this is going to be, I mean, it's a strange concept. I mean, you're taking poop and using it for a really magical and mysterious health concept, right? I mean, almost every meeting devolves into some sort of third grade level of humor. It's just natural what develops in the space. And, you know, running a company where the product is collecting poop and transforming it into capsules that can restore your microbiome is an interesting company to be running. You know, at some point, I had to just put my ego aside and be like, yes, my career did make me come to the crossroads. We're on the guy that people should send their poop into so I can make capsules.
Melanie Avalon:
That is amazing. Okay, so this is so awesome. I love, I love that you're doing that and just embracing all of it. And this equity thing is just so cool. So basically the first 500 people, so listeners, go now, run, so that you'll be one of the first 500 people. And we will put a link in the show notes to how you can get that equity version. But basically, if you buy it through that or sign up through that link, you will get equity in the company if you're one of the first 500 people. If you are not one of the first 500 people, miss the boat and or would like to try the alternative route, which is you can buy directly from your website. And we do have a code for listeners, they can get $300 off. So thank you so much for that. And that will be using the code Melanie Avalon. So there's a lot of options there. Okay, so your website, what is your website for the product and then also again, for the equity option.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Gutbiomebank is the website and there's the links to go through whether you want to just pay and use the code Melanie Avalon for the $300 discount and that doesn't get you the equity or they'll sign up through the equity link which will be on the website.
Melanie Avalon:
Okay, super cool. Awesome. I really am so excited about all of this potential and listeners-friends do this now and let me know how it goes. Keep me updated. Kyle, what are you most excited about right now with the future of this company?
Kyle Cetrulo:
I'm really excited with the future of restoring and maximizing your microbiome for health, it's unlimited. It's really untapped as well. So just really excited. I know I mentioned some of the mental health components, you know, treating andorexia. All these things are what we're going to be exploring with the company, you know, in a very scientifically sound basis as well. And being able to do studies, is what really is exciting for me.
Melanie Avalon:
No, this is so cool. I am so excited for you. I'm really grateful for you as well that you're doing this and going the route that I want to see done, which is with these studies and with these institutions and like doing it the right way, basically. So this is awesome. So again, friends, go to gutbiomebank.com. If you are one of the first 500 people to sign up for the equity option there, you can get equity in the company and or you can purchase directly on the website and use the coupon code MelanieAvalon to get $300 off. Well, this is awesome. Was there anything else that you wanted to touch on about all of this?
Kyle Cetrulo:
No, I think we covered a lot, and what I'll do is I'll put all the papers that I mentioned, I can send to you as well, and you can put them in the show notes, or I can put a place on our website to link to it. That's what I can do, either one or both.
Melanie Avalon:
I mean, both is amazing. I'd love to see those papers. And again, for listeners, the show notes will be at MelanieAvalon.com/gutbiomebank. So there will be a full transcript there, links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out. So the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. So it really speaks to what you were talking about earlier with, you know, just enjoying life and loving life and the benefits that come from biohacking in that regards. But what is something that you're grateful for?
Kyle Cetrulo:
For my children, I mean, I'm the proud parent to the 10th degree. And, you know, I have a really great relationship with both my son who's 14 and my daughter who's 12. And when their lives are going well, my life's going well. So that relationship and connection, which is what it really inspired this. My daughter really inspired me to get this company going because I want to utilize these technologies for her and for my son as well.
Melanie Avalon:
That's so incredible. And I'm so jealous that they were born to parents where they have all this stuff banked up. That's just so cool. Very, very cool.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, it was pretty, their mom, the children's mom, who I'm not married to anymore, but she was a trooper.
Melanie Avalon:
Oh, that's so funny. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Kyle. This was so, so incredible. I really can't wait to see all the future developments. Yeah, we'll have to have you back on the show in the future and update the listeners with everything.
Kyle Cetrulo:
Yeah, thank you so much to this audience to provide this audience to me and for your time as well. It's been great to chat with you.
Melanie Avalon:
Awesome. Well, have a wonderful rest of your day.
Kyle Cetrulo:
You too.
xt goes here