Dr. Joshua Sterling

It won't be putting patients at risk to do it in the near future.

You know, we can at least simulate first to show people that, you know, it might be safe and then translate into the real world for that confirmation as opposed to initial testing.

At least you can get a couple of test cases and see what happens and use that as your base and kind of go from there.

When we first started talking about it, how would we really do a study where we're looking at it?

We're looking at not just cultures, but how are we changing it with that advanced sequencing?

And it's like $100 per culture per patient, and you're doing it multiple times.

And kind of that math adds up really quickly for something where you're not exactly sure

you know, what the benefit's going to be.

So.

I mean, there is a 2015 paper which kind of conclusively proved that urine is not sterile, that there is a healthy microbiome.

And I think that's the important word, a healthy microbiome.

Everybody knows about their gut biome.

And, you know, we learned in medical school that you have more bacteria in you than you have cells.

But then we think all bacteria are bad.

And to kind of understand that.

Yeah.

But outside of knowing that there is a microbiome, there really haven't been many studies that tell us kind of what it is.

Is it a balance?

You know, how do you if that balance is off, how do you reset it?

In the last two or three years, there have been a couple of publications on the urology literature, but in the microbiology literature that's looking at that and kind of.