Guruduth Banavar

RNA is the expression of your DNA, right?

So if you have, as a human, you have approximately 22,000 genes.

So now you think about approximately 5% of those 22,000 genes being expressed at any given point in time, depending on what you're doing right now, you know, what you ate,

how you slept, whether you're stressed or not.

So that 5%, which 5% of your entire human genome is being expressed at a given point in time, that is super important.

And if the wrong things are expressed, then you end up having chronic disease of different types.

So RNA is basically the dynamics of your biology.

DNA is kind of like the static blueprint from which the RNA is derived.

And it's the same thing for your microbiome.

So when I think about microbiome, like think about a bacteria, right?

A bacteria approximately has about 3,000 genes.

Again, 5% or less of the 3,000 genes are expressed.

And you know what?

All bacteria are not bad guys.

Most of the time, bacteria tend to be good guys, but sometimes they express the bad genes depending on the environment they're found in.

So it's much more important for us to measure and analyze RNA than DNA.

So when we realized this in Viome and we made the bet that RNA is going to be more important, that was back in 2016, 2017.

Yeah.

We were way ahead of everybody else.

There's really nobody in the industry who measures RNA right now.