Dr. Sabine Hazan
speaker
74 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Sabine Hazan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Progena Biome because it's from your genes to your biome. Progena.
So we're a research genetic sequencing lab. As you know, during the pandemic, we kind of made our debut by finding COVID in the stools. And then from there, we isolated a bacteria that we believe protects you from COVID or viruses. And then from there discovered kind of the microbiome. So that's the purpose of the company is really to research the microbiome and disease.
And we have 61 clinical trials going on on the microbiome and disease right now.
No, I started the company a couple of years prior because I was interested in the microbiome. I was seeing something when I was doing fecal transplant, the process of taking stools from healthy donors and putting it into unhealthy with C. diff. And what happened was I was really interested in...
You know, I had a case of a patient with Alzheimer's who improved after fecal transplant or intestinal microbiota transplant. And I said, what happened there? What microbe causes Alzheimer's or what group of microbes or what signature microbiome is involved in Alzheimer's?
So rather than just bringing a stool product to market and a pharma product, I was more interested into the microbe itself, the relationship of microbes and how does disease occur? We all know disease begins in the gut, but I just didn't know how and why and which microbes are involved. So I founded ProgenaBiome with that concept.
Correct. I knew because I saw something changed with C. diff. My first case was a doctor actually that was dying. And I was the girl that was doing clinical trials for C. diff. So when the clinical trial didn't work, And the pharmaceutical product, first of all, vancomycin, flagyl didn't work. And then I went the clinical trial route.
When the clinical trial route didn't work, I was kind of, I'm not going to let this guy die. So let me try fecal transplant. Everybody's talking about it. And when I saw the colon completely, you know, with ulcerations and mucus and everything, and then... Two weeks later, the colonic mucosa is completely normal. I said, what did that? How did that happen, right?
And so that's basically what got me into asking the question, how did poop change a colon that has a bunch of ulcers to a normal colonic mucosa?
Well, I wasn't focused on the bifidobacteria until COVID, really. Initially, what I saw with C. diff and what was a progression of the research essentially was, yeah.
So C. diff is a condition that people have that they come to the doctor with recurring diarrhea, chronic diarrhea, it seems. And if you take the history, they've taken some antibiotics in the past, have gone to the dentist, and then all of a sudden they get diarrhea that nobody can fix. And so C. diff, essentially, the way that we treat C. diff is either antibiotics like flagyl vancomycin.
And when that doesn't happen, we go into clinical trials. When those didn't work, we would put stools of a healthy donor in the colon, precisely in the cecum of a person, to fix the problem. What we realized is that, especially when we started, when we opened Progena Biome, was really that the microbiome was removed. The diversity, these patients lost their diversity.
That's why they were having recurrent episodes of C. diff. So what we were doing was we were giving vancomycin, killing diversity around the C. diff, but we were missing C. diff. And then we kept killing with another antibiotic. So it's like having a mosquito in your house and you're taking a machete and you're trying to kill it, but you missed the mosquito, but you've destroyed your house.
So that's essentially what we were doing 20 years ago and 15 years ago. And what fecal transplant does is it takes all the stools from the healthy donor, puts it back into the colon. So you're essentially re-giving a diversity to suppress the Clostridium difficile. And that was the big discovery prior to COVID. When COVID came on, I figured, well, I've done clinical trials for pharma.
I have a genetic sequencing lab that's looking at the microbiome. We know that, you know, at least I knew that to fight a virus, you need strong microbes. And actually, I wrote the book, Let's Talk Shit in there. There's a mention of bifidobacteria, but it was kind of a hypothesis. It was something that I read in different papers, but it wasn't really concrete. Until COVID.
And what happened was when we found COVID in the stools, we decided to look at the microbiome. And that's when we noticed that every single patient that had severe COVID was lacking this bacteria, bifidobacteria. And bifidobacteria is found in newborns and it's absent in old people. And so does the discovery of bifidobacteria, the implications of bifidobacteria, its functions.
And here we are today with my whole, you know, slogan, which is save the bif, because I'm realizing we're killing more microbes than we can do, you know, so it's crazy.
Oh, absolutely. So you don't. And that's the... You don't know whether the C. diff... I'm sorry. You don't know whether the loss of bifidobacteria happened because they were sick, they took antibiotics, they got COVID, they got a virus, or the virus created...
the loss of bifidobacteria or the person is so stressed about having the virus that the increased acidity in the stomach and the whole digestive tract is all in disarray, which creates the loss of bifidobacteria. So yeah, there's, you know, it's, you know, in medicine, it's never a one thing and we're not sure of anything really. It's all hypothetical.
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