S6 Ep28: The Morning After -- Beating That Next-Day Misery After Alcohol with Zack Abbott
“The technology was getting thrown under the bus so that brands can make a buck. And technology is very powerful and extremely important for humanity in terms of addressing a lot of existential crises.” — Zack Abbott
Many people find solace in drinking alcohol, whether it be during social gatherings or as a means to decompress and find some relief after a tiring day. Unfortunately, as our bodies metabolize alcohol, a toxic substance called acetaldehyde begins to accumulate. Experiencing high levels of acetaldehyde can bring about various distressing symptoms such as throbbing headaches, nausea, and other indicators of a hangover.
Founded by Zack Abbott, ZBiotics offers a unique solution by leveraging genetic engineering to produce novel probiotics that can break down acetaldehyde more efficiently. This allows our bodies to recover faster and feel better after a night of drinking. This revolutionary product is designed to help our bodies catch up by temporarily adding good bacteria to our gut to help mitigate the effects of excessive acetaldehyde and promote overall health.
Listen in as Zack explains the science behind this groundbreaking product and how genetic engineering can change the whole trajectory of food tech. They will also share how alcohol is metabolized by the body, what probiotics and functional proteins are, and how biotechnology can help promote overall health.
Connect with Zach:
Zack Abbott is the CEO and co-founder of ZBiotics. He is the inventor of the company’s proprietary technology and sets the mission, vision, and values for ZBiotics. Zack has a Ph.D. in microbiology & immunology from the University of Michigan and holds a Bachelor’s Degree from UC Berkeley, where he double-majored in immunology and classical art & archaeology. Before starting ZBiotics, Zack worked in clinical trial design as well as researching HIV vaccines and pursuing novel antibiotics in both academia and industry.
Episode Highlights:
02:18 Alcohol Toxicity
08:31 Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology
13:24 From Microbiology to Entrepreneurship
18:43 Promoting Overall Health
21:19 Customer Satisfaction and Product Evaluation
25:57 The GMO Advocacy
Tweets:
Have you ever wondered why you feel so terrible the day after a night of heavy drinking? Learn what causes hangovers and how genetic engineering can solve this problem with @jreichman and @ZBioticsCompany founder, Zack Abbott. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #ZBiotics #probiotics #acetaldehyde #alcohol #geneticengeneering #biotechnology
Inspirational Quotes:
08:10 “Everybody's microbiome is different. And your microbiome today is different than it will be in a week or a month. It's constantly changing.” —Zack Abbott
14:27 “There's not really an opportunity for you go to work to somebody else and then build whatever you want. You can go work for somebody else and they'll tell you what to build. But you don't always get to solve the problems you want to solve.” —Zack Abbott
18:15 “The technology was getting thrown under the bus so that brands can make a buck. And technology is very powerful and extremely important for humanity in terms of addressing a lot of existential crises.” —Zack Abbott
24:06 “We wanted to create something where people recognize the product is helping them feel better. That's the point that matters.”
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Dr. Zack Abbott. He is the CEO and Founder of ZBiotics.
Welcome, Zack.
Zack Abbott: Hey, Justine. Thanks for having me to chat with you.
Justine Reichman: It's great to chat with you too. I'm excited to learn more about ZBiotics, how you got into this and talk about all things microbiome. All things that are really interesting around this topic, and it's a relatively new space. So I think there's a lot to learn for everyone.
Zack Abbott: Absolutely. Yeah.
Justine Reichman: So before we get started and dig deep, I'd love for you to just share what ZBiotics is.
Zack Abbott: Yeah, absolutely. So ZBiotics, the company, we make genetically engineered probiotics, and then we take those probiotics and put them into products that we make and then sell. So essentially, we start with probiotic bacteria, like a good, safe, edible bacteria. And then we engineer it so that it performs some sort of useful function. Very specific function for you. So the idea with our first product is that it's a probiotic bacteria that we've engineered to be able to break down one of the metabolic byproducts of alcohol called acetaldehyde. That makes you feel not so great the day after drinking. So when you drink alcohol, this acid aldehyde solid starts to form in the gut. And so our bacteria is now specifically engineered to break down that acetaldehyde so that you can feel better the next day. So that's our first product, but lots more on the way. It's really exciting technology. And so that's kind of what we do.
Justine Reichman: Okay. So before we dig too deep into this, I heard you mentioned the word, I can't even say it. It's a tongue twister.
Zack Abbott: Yeah, acetaldehyde.
Justine Reichman: Acetaldehyde. I've heard you mentioned it, and I would like for those listening and watching so that they can be part of this conversation and better understand what acetaldehyde is. So if you could just talk to us. I thought that would be great.
Zack Abbott: Absolutely. Yeah. So it's an interesting molecule. So essentially, when you drink, the star molecule is of course like ethanol or alcohol, right? And when you drink alcohol, the ethanol gets absorbed into your bloodstream. Most of the ethanol gets absorbed in your bloodstream. It circulates throughout your body. It's a molecule, and that molecule has certain effects on your body that are usually why you're drinking and then your liver breaks down. Alcohol takes on the ethanol in two steps. One, it uses an enzyme to convert alcohol or ethanol into acetaldehyde. And then a second enzyme converts acetaldehyde into acetate. An acetate is essentially vinegar. It's innocuous. And at that point, sort of the story of how the toxicity of alcohol is over. Other things happen after that, but not interesting for this conversation.
Justine Reichman: No, I appreciate you breaking that down. Because it's complicated. I want to make sure that everybody understands what we're talking about as we go deeper into this conversation. I feel like it's a bit sciency. So I'm gonna have a little science, a little personal, little business, and then wrap them all together.
Zack Abbott: Totally. Yeah, exactly. So they kind of key was really focusing on that intermediate, that acetaldehyde in the middle. And acetaldehyde, this molecule is very similar to ethanol, just only a little bit different. But that difference is very important chemically. It's a highly reactive molecule. Meaning that that molecule can bind to proteins, and DNA, and all these things in your body that can really gum up the system. It's sort of like it can wreak havoc in your body. And the good news is that intermediate acetaldehyde is very short-lived in the liver. The liver is very good at converting the alcohol to acetaldehyde. And then subsequently, immediately to acetate, which is not toxic. And so it's sort of like this toxic intermediate, but it doesn't really form in large quantities in the liver. The story in the gut is a bit different. So a very small amount of the alcohol you drink. Most of it is absorbed and processed by the liver, but a small amount is broken down in the gut. That alcohol gets converted to acetaldehyde using very similar enzymes as your liver, in the gut, in large part by your microbiome by the microbes that are living in your gut. Because microbes are bacteria, they don't like alcohol, and so they want to get rid of it. And so they convert it to acetaldehyde, but they don't subsequently convert the acetaldehyde to acetate.
And so what happens is you get this acetaldehyde accumulation in the gut, and then that acetaldehyde gets absorbed into the bloodstream out of the gut, sort of wreaks havoc throughout the body and then makes its way to the liver, and the liver can very effectively break it down. And so even though the gut is a very minor source of alcohol metabolism, it ends up being the major source of acetaldehyde. And so this really nasty one molecule is sort of formed in the gut. And normally, you kind of have to wait for it to make its way to the liver to break it down. And so ZBiotics, we thought we could engineer a microbe that capacity your gut to deal with this problem before it gets into the bloodstream and wreaks havoc on the body. So that was just basically the same process that your liver already does, the same enzyme. And we just programmed a bacteria, safe bacteria you can eat, to make that enzyme in your gut where the acetaldehyde is forming. So that's kind of science. I don't know if it was--
Justine Reichman: No, it's good. We'll get into it a little deeper so that the rest of us that are not sciency can understand the impact of this and understand what your objectives are. And first and foremost, what inspired it.
“Everybody's microbiome is different. And your microbiome today is different than it will be in a week or a month. It's constantly changing.” —Zack Abbott
Zack Abbott: Well, I think that the thing that inspired this overall ZBiotics as a whole was the idea that there are so many important functions that we could essentially execute. We have all these bacteria that we're engaging with all the time. And currently right now, if you think about probiotics, they're just bacteria that we take out of the ground and hope that they have some sort of helpful benefit for you. But it's very variable. Everybody's microbiome is totally different, and so we have this huge community. So it's sort of interesting, I guess.
Justine Reichman: I was wondering if they moved on from, I don't know.
Zack Abbott: Understanding the microbiome, then we'll help understand what inspired me to produce, and what's exciting about ZBiotics.
Justine Reichman: Don't feel bad here. You don't have to apologize. It's all good. Because what's interesting is that we're all inspired by different things, right? Mine was watching a movie one day, some ridiculous rom com, that inspired me to create something that connects people. I'm not sure how I made that connection, but they all come from different places. And the goal here is to give you a platform to share your story so that you can inspire others too, and sharing the securitas route that it took for you to get from inspiration to product. It's going to resonate and really inspire others, because you're not the first person to take from one to another that is completely not related when you look at it on paper, but somehow connects in our brains. It's complete sense.
Zack Abbott: Okay. I did my PhD in microbiology, and I learned a lot. At first, I was sort of interested in microbes because they cause disease. I was interested in sort of disease and disease prevention. But then as I learned more and I got to know more about it, I learned about all of these incredible microbes, like the vast majority of the bacteria we interact with are either neutral or beneficial, not disease causing. And that became really exciting to me. And so you have this microbiome, you have many bacterial cells as you do human cells in and on your body, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Numerically speaking, you're just as much bacterial ecosystem as you are a human body. So that was really interesting to me, and everybody's microbiome is different. So the community of microbes that live in your gut is totally different than the one that lives in mine. And your microbiome today is different than it will be in a week or a month. So it's constantly changing.
These communities of microbes, so unlike your cells which all have the same DNA, all these microbes are totally different. And so they live in this complex community, much like a city or a country, and they interact with each other. And they have this complex network of interactions. And so when I was thinking about probiotics, generally, currently, it's sort of like the vast array of probiotics, or lactobacillus, or bifidobacterium. These are like common probiotic bacteria that aren't even really found in a healthy adult microbiome. And the idea that they get sort of like silver bullets being beneficial regardless of your microbial community is not a good scientific kind of hypothesis, not really backed very well with science. You could say that some probiotics can help some people sometimes, which is what you'd expect given the fact that everybody's microbiome is so different. So I thought I was inspired by the idea that we could do better, that we could take a probiotic, we could engineer it to do something specific. And that specific function would be valuable independent. So the probiotic just becomes a chassis for a function.
So the idea was taking genetic engineering, modern biotechnology and refining this view. The analogy would be like these bacteria just kind of exist in nature, and we kind of give them to you and hope that they do something for you. It's sort of like, we pull a hunk of iron ore out of the ground and we hand it to you and say, hey,this will do whatever you want it to do. Whatever you want the iron to do. If you want it to be a hammer or a screwdriver, it can do any of these things. And obviously, that's not true. But we can take that iron ore and we can refine it down into the shape of a hammer and say, this is a very specific tool for hammering nails. And that's what this does. And so that's essentially what we've done with probiotics. We've taken genetic engineering and we've refined a probiotic bacteria so that it can perform a very specific and useful function regardless and agnostic of your microbiome. And I thought that that was a very exciting idea. Because at that point, we can take any biological function on the planet, anything that any biology does, and then we can give that. We can program that into a probiotic, and then you can eat that probiotic, and then temporarily gain that new biological function as the bacteria passes through you. That to me was like, it just blew my mind.
Justine Reichman: I gotta ask, were you dreaming this off at two years old, or three years old? Like, oh, I want to do this. I want to go get my PhD. And this is what I really get excited about. Or was there something else that spearheaded that interest or led you down that path?
Zack Abbott: I love that. It's a very insightful question, because you're right. Obviously, I wasn't born with this. No, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I certainly didn't even know I wanted to be a microbiologist or anything. It's sort of a securitas route. But I think that the moment, the aha moment for me that set me on this path towards what would become ZBiotics was, I was very interested in microbes, bacteria and viruses. I say, largely from a disease perspective, initially, until I was working at an HIV lab before doing my PhD. And this lunch, a speaker came and he was talking about his HIV research. And he had engineered this protein that he saw. Basically, he had taken out a microbe to produce a very specific protein, and this protein could bind to the HIV virus and completely prevent the virus from infecting a cell. And I was totally blown away. This was amazing. Like, oh, my gosh, you've done it. You've solved HIV. And he laughed at it. It was like I went through Africa. I was like, so you're gonna make this into a drug, and I'm gonna give it to everybody. And he was like, no. Absolutely not. This is a protein. Proteins are these very complex and difficult things to make. They only invented this as a research tool, it'd be wildly impractical for us to manufacture all of this protein, and then we'd have to inject it into people because proteins are unstable. And you have to do that every day of your life to prevent you from getting HIV. It doesn't make sense. It was meant as a tool.
And so I walked away from that thinking, wow, that's really stupid. He's basically saying that logistics are the reason why we can't have proteins be delivered functionally. So I thought, what if we were able to make protein or enzyme delivery more easy? And that led me to think about the idea of the fact that we have all these bacteria in our gut constantly making all of these functional proteins for us. What if we engineer them to make a protein that we wanted that was useful? It took me a long time. I started about 10 years after I heard that lunchtime talk. But that I think was the moment for me when I was like, this is a problem that we could solve, and we could do something really big with it. And it took a long time to get there. And then, of course, I got to see biotics. Obviously, it's not HIV. But it is like a proof of concept for functional protein delivery from a safe probiotic bacteria, which is a really exciting thing.
Justine Reichman: So my question to you is, Dr. Microbiology, entrepreneur, how did you get, I mean, obviously, you wanted to fix the problem. I knew that and I got that. Did you see yourself fixing it scientifically to research and all these kinds of things to provide as a tool to somebody else? Obviously, not. You've built a company. But talk to me about that road from microbiologist to entrepreneur, and where was your head at? I mean, was that plan?
“There's not really an opportunity for you go to work to somebody else and then build whatever you want. You can go work for somebody else and they'll tell you what to build. But you don't always get to solve the problems you want to solve.” —Zack Abbott
Zack Abbott: Definitely wasn't. That's not on my radar at all. To be an entrepreneur, I didn't even consider it. I've had this idea. And I thought of myself, even as a kid, I was really obsessed with inventors and inventions. I used to idolize Thomas Edison and all of his inventions. I thought that that was really, that for me combined a lot of passions. It was like problem solving. It was creativity. It was building something that had never been built before. And so that was the idea that I can maybe invent this. And then as I kind of dug into it more, I saw that the best way to do that is to start a company. There's not really an opportunity for you to go to work for somebody else and then build whatever you want. You can go work for somebody else, and they'll tell you what to build. But you don't really always get to solve the problems you want to solve. And so this idea, I just couldn't get rid of it. It kept stirring around in my head, and I realized that the only way I was ever going to get the opportunity to build it the way I wanted was if I started a company for myself, and I built it. I really created the opportunity for myself as opposed to going to work for somebody else. And I think that that was why entrepreneurship fell into my lap. I hadn't intended to. The story was I had some friends that I was working with at another job leave to start their own company. And they were like, hey, you should start one too with the idea you told us about. And I was like, what are you talking about? I don't even know where to begin. And they gave me some early tips, and then kind of like twisting my arm to apply to offer a little bit of funding, and I managed to get it, and then was sort of like off the races without even really intending to, I fell into it. I got kind of forced into it.
Justine Reichman: That really connects with the question I was gonna ask you. Because as a microbiologist, you're a researcher, right? If that's what you were focused on, that's what your core competency was in and just say, okay, well, I'm gonna go create this business. It takes another set of skills, not to say you don't have them.
Zack Abbott: I did. Yeah.
Justine Reichman: And that's the point. So when you decided to go start this business, and you know that your core competencies are research and all these all things, microbiology or biome, what were your next steps? I know your friends gave you some tips and tools, but how are you feeling then? Was that a little frightening or scary? What do you do first?
Zack Abbott: Yeah. It's overwhelming. And then I think that I just naturally fell into starting with what I knew and figured that I'll figure out the rest later. Let's just see if this has legs. And so what I knew, of course, as you said, is science. And so I thought, okay. Look, if I can build something that I believe works, if I can do the science, then we can build a business around that. Because I believed strongly that if we built this thing, that it would be really, really valuable. And so when I started ZBiotics, I didn't even really know exactly what I was going to build. The first pitches I had were around a probiotic to help your gut recover from exposure to radiation. It was like an example of something I thought, which was a very cool idea. And I had this biology rounded river, but was objectively not a good business idea. Like nobody was interested in that. So it took some ideating and talking to a lot of people to realize that what I wanted to do was make something.
Well, I had a list of things that I knew I wanted with this tech. And one was I wanted it to be accessible. I think that there's another layer that I probably need to bring into this story to explain a little bit more as to why I chose to go the direction. And yeah, which is in addition to this very exciting technology that I thought could do a lot of good. I also simultaneously was, as a scientist, very frustrated by the direction in which the conversation around GMOs was going. There were a lot of things that were really unfortunate and negative that had happened with the use of the technology of genetic engineering. And that'll result in a lot of public mistrust. And that's very understandable.
“The technology was getting thrown under the bus so that brands can make a buck. And technology is very powerful and extremely important for humanity in terms of addressing a lot of existential crises.” —Zack Abbott
What I think the conversation really got out of control was when brands that had nothing to do with genetic engineering whatsoever started throwing that technology under the bus because they realized people were afraid of it. And they thought that they could make their brand stand out if they said that they were non-GMO, even though they had nothing to do with genetic engineering. And so for instance, if you walk into a grocery store, you'll see that there's lots of wheat flour that's labeled like non GMO, but there is no genetically engineered wheat. Doesn't exist. So all wheat flour is non-GMO. And so that was really a situation where the technology was getting thrown under the bus so that brands can make a buck. And that really frustrated me. Because at the end of the day, the technology I felt then and still feel now is very powerful and extremely important for humanity in terms of addressing a lot of the existential crises we're facing, like feeding a growing population of people dealing with emerging diseases, climate change. These things are all like partnering with biology and using biotechnology are very important ways for us to accomplish that.
Justine Reichman: So my question for you is using biology and science. Because I think right now, we're at a crucial point where there's a lack of science and advocacy for a lot of these products that are acting to promote health, if you will, in the space whether it's functional food, whether people are using the term food as medicine, et cetera. So when you, as a researcher and as a biologist came up with this idea and you started to use it or test it, did you do any trials with people? What was your process to validate the idea?
Zack Abbott: Yeah. The idea there was we could use like, as they use our technology to make a product that actually did something. I think that that was really important, and that we could build something that people could use in their daily lives and choose as opposed to have. I didn't want to build drugs. I wanted to build products that people could choose. And so with that in mind, I wanted to build something that wasn't carrying a disease. It was for healthy people, but to your point that that actually improved their health in some way. And so that's a fine line. Because if you make health claims or you cure a disease, then you're a drug by the FDA standards. I definitely did not want to make drugs, because there's a lot of reasons why they want to make drugs. But like one of them being that, it's incredibly expensive. And it's not really conducive for the inventor. Essentially, your goal is to script, you have enough data to get acquired by one of the big drug companies, and then you kind of have to let it go.
Justine Reichman: I wasn't trying to go the drug route. I was trying to say, as a scientist, what did you do to show the impact and the direction. What could be from taking ZBiotics? Let's say that somebody had an alcohol, has had alcohol, and they use this. Did you test a variety of people to put a sample together? Because as a scientist, I'm looking at a guy, he's got to have done something like this? Well, you made it happen, and you can see it in whatever format you have. I'm sure that there's also some experience that you want, or some trial, or something that you wanted to create to be able to substantiate what you were doing and share experience.
Zack Abbott: Absolutely. I mean, the whole foundation of ZBiotics is around the idea that we could build something that actually creates a benefit. And we could pass that, as opposed to, as you're saying, a lot of the things out there that are sort of white labeled slept off the shelf vitamins and stuff that say like, hey, this will help you in some way.
Justine Reichman: So say you tested, how are you testing it?
Zack Abbott: So did several things. Very systematic. We built the product, and the goal of it was to break down that stuff behind. So the first thing that we did was validate that it could break down acetaldehyde, and it could do so at a physiologically relevant rate. Meaning, it can break down the amount of acetaldehyde that a person will be likely to be exposed to after drinking. That it can break down enough to make a difference. And so we knew roughly how much acetaldehyde forms in the gut depending on how much you drink. And so we want to make sure that a reasonable dose of bacteria could break down that amount, mass and all that. So we validated that. Validated out in a test tube. So we basically, okay, first, I'm walking you through it. So we would test to say that, we will add an unknown amount of acetaldehyde to the known amount of bacteria, and make sure that it could break down in a reasonable period of time. And so first, we showed that the bacteria are capable of doing that. So then the question becomes, okay, can they do that in your body? And even if they do break down the acetaldehyde in your gut, does that actually result in you feeling better the next day? There's a lot of questions that happen there.
And so essentially, what we did was we validated that final point. It didn't really matter if it broke down the acetaldehyde in your gut if it didn't result in you feeling better. So what we wanted to find out was the important way, do people feel better? And so we did several tests to validate whether or not we created that benefit. And so I could say, I can't really talk about some of them in detail because they're not reviewed, like FDA approved clinical trials. And so it would be sort of misleading for me to discuss them because I can't market that. What I can say is that, I think the thing I can share is that we also did perception of efficacy. So we asked people to try the product and tell us the next day whether they felt better than expected, the same as expected, or worse than expected the next day. We did several tests. But this I think was an interesting one. So we started with, firstly, like 20 people. We saw like 95% of people said that they felt better than expected. Then we expanded it out to like 90 people and saw the same. There were like 94, 95%. And then we went out to 220 people, and it was still the same. And then now, we're going to market for three and a half years, we have sort of customer satisfaction as well, as well as continuing to survey people and asking them how they're doing.
“We wanted to create something where people recognize the product is helping them feel better. That's the point that matters.”
And now that we have hundreds, or tens of thousands of people, the numbers are still very similar. It's like 92 to 95% customer satisfaction and evaluation of feeling better than expected. So you basically ask yourself, do you think that it's hard to know the AB test whether or not how you would have felt had you not taken the product, but people usually have a good feeling whether or not they should feel worse. And I think ultimately, what we wanted to create was something where people recognise the products helping them feel better. That's the point that really matters. And so we know chemically, we're breaking down acetaldehyde. And so then what really matters is, does that translate into a benefit for the end user? And that's what we wanted to create, something where people really perceived and felt the benefit of a genetically engineered probiotic, given that our product is the world's first and still the only genetically engineered probiotic on the market for anything. Like it was very important that people could feel that benefit. And so we've seen, very definitively, now larger and larger populations of people that indeed we're creating that benefit for people. And so that's pretty satisfying to see.
Justine Reichman: I know you have ZBiotics, and I'm curious, how many products do you have? Are you planning to go forward?
Zack Abbott: Yeah. The vision of the company is a whole, right now, we have the one on the market. But we're looking to commercialize our second product. Really exciting second product starting in the first quarter of next year. And so we're in the process now, I can't talk about specifics just yet, but we're in the process of validating it. And dealing with all sorts of packaging regulations and all those sorts of things, it's totally different from our first product. It has nothing to do with alcohol. It's more around your microbiome and gut health. Again, it's an engineer probiotic to a very specific function. And then we're looking at things related to sleep, and exercise, and recovery, and nutrient acquisition, and protection from heavy metals and other toxins that you're kind of engaging with in your daily life. So the whole goal here is to engineer products to do something very specific to make healthy people healthier. The goal of these products is for people to choose them when they're already looking to make healthy choices in their life. And so I think there's a million products we can build. And I hope that in the next 5 to 10 years, we're gonna have a whole shelf in the grocery store.
Justine Reichman: I can't wait to try them myself. That would be fun. We're going wine tasting tomorrow, so that would have been useful. You get it to me ASAP. On that note, if somebody wanted to go get the product, where would they go get it?
Zack Abbott: Right now, the best place to get it is our website. So zbiotics.com is the best place to get the product.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. What's new, and what's next? I know that you got your product coming up in 2024. Any other plans for the imminent future?
Zack Abbott: Yeah. We're excited about what we can do with this tech, and we have a whole pipeline of products that we're building. And I think that the other arm of ZBiotics in addition to these exciting products is what we're doing in terms of GMO advocacy and genetic engineering. So (inaudible) is genetically engineered microbe safety. So the idea that we can build products and establish clear defined rational science base regulations around how we make them, and how we make them safe. I think that there's a lot of exciting things we can do. But regulations are unclear, and we're still the only part of the market that does this. And so we're hoping that we can build really rational, exciting, good, clean regulations so that this category can grow. And there can be a lot of trust and a lot of safety in it. And I think that that's a huge part of what we're focused on right now.
Justine Reichman: I really appreciate you sharing that. It was great to have you on the podcast. I'm excited for people to check out your website. And if they did want to get a product, if you could just share what your website is, spell it out for everyone. So the people listening to the podcast can jot it down.
Zack Abbott: Cool. Yeah. So it's ZBiotics, that's Z-B-I-O-T-I-C-S.com.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Well, it was great to connect with you. Great to learn all about. So ZBiotics, clearly I did not order it in time for my wine tasting tomorrow. We'll have to sort that out. And in the meantime, keep us posted on how things progress. We'd love to stay in touch and hear more about this. And for our audience, if you guys have any specific questions, because this was very sciency, just shoot us a note. We'll see if we can connect you guys so that we can continue this conversation and make sure that we've made the information accessible to everybody. Thanks so much. It was great chatting with you.
Zack Abbott: Yeah, likewise. Thank you.
