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Sam Jactel, CEO of Ayble Health:
“Being patient centered is different than being patient driven”

At the end of the interview, Sam Jactel, GI patient turned CEO talks about Thomas Nagel the philosopher. In a paper from 1974, Nagel famously asked us to contemplate “What is it like to be a bat?” He suggested that you may be able to study the behavior of a bat but you can never really know what it’s like to be one.

Sam takes that analogy to his own GI condition. He was tired of looking for answers within the industry. He was tired of not being seen or heard. And he ended up figuring out a solution that worked for him. Then he thought why not help other patients like him. That prompted him to go from being the CEO of his own condition to becoming the founder and CEO of Ayble Health. This digital GI startup has raised $4.6 million from investors.

Watch this incredible interview. It’s a sign of the times. Expect more patients to become digital healthcare providers because the industry isn’t stepping up enough.

◘  From being a patient to becoming a CEO: The story behind starting up Ayble Health

◘  What is really missing in the GI industry?

◘  “The needs of the patients are either filtered or not heard”

◘  “The challenge that I have with GI and healthcare, in general, is that…”

◘  “Being patient-centered is different than being patient-driven”

◘  “With the tools that we have at our disposal, we are not driving optimal outcomes for patients like myself”

◘  “There aren’t even enough GIs to meet demand”

◘  Ayble Health raised $4.6 million. What triggered investor interest?

◘   The business model

◘  “We are part of the UCSF Rosenman Institute ADAPT program”

◘  The startup’s payment model

◘  Is the use of AI and machine learning really necessary?

◘  Is there a need for more and more digital GI companies?

◘  “We want patients to be seen”

◘  The future of GI & healthcare

◘  “I think that there’s too big of a gap currently between the claims that companies make in digital health and the evidence that supports it”

The Transcribed Interview:

Praveen Suthrum: Sam Jactel, founder, and CEO of Ayble Health. Welcome to The Scope Forward Show. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. This is one of the only times that I’m interviewing a patient who’s turned CEO, so really glad to have you. Welcome.

Sam Jactel:  It’s a pleasure to be here and really excited to be part of this long time listener, first time caller kind of thing. Really excited to have this conversation. And thank you to the audience also for their interest in what we’re building, how we’re building it, and really looking forward to the conversation.

Praveen Suthrum: Excellent. Sam, congratulations to you and your team for raising $4.6 million, and it’s a fantastic start. It is very reassuring for the industry and for digital GI that this space is growing, and it’s going to bloom in the coming years, and it’s very telling that you’re doing so in the IBS and IBD space. So, again, congratulations to you and your team.

Let me first start by asking you what the back story is here. How did you get started, and what is the story behind the name Ayble health?

Sam Jactel:  Happy to do that. Well, you know, I think at the end of the day, the story of Ayble is my own story. So I’ve been a GI patient for about ten years. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, and  I’ve lived with that, and it’s not been the most linear journey, so to speak, and I think a lot of patients experience the same thing. But for me, I was diagnosed back in about 2014, and I was actually misdiagnosed a couple times before I got my final diagnosis. And over the past, you know, 8-9-10 years, I have seen five different gastroenterologists at some of the world’s best academic medical centers. I have played around with half a dozen different drugs, oral or not, over the counter supplements, all those kinds of things to find a cocktail that worked for me.

And despite having access to the best care that I was able to get my hands on and to be able to afford it, which is not the case for a lot of people in the United States, I think we make those assumptions. I still fell out of remission. I had four significant flares in the last eight years, and I couldn’t live like that anymore. And one of the things that I realized was that we were only, or I as a patient was only really getting treated as part of a person right of going to the clinic. The drugs were available, certainly, but not always effective alone, and the diagnostics were there and all those kinds of things. But the second I walked out of the clinic; I didn’t have any support for any of the evidence based interventions that my physicians were recommending to me. And those things were things like elimination diets or just dietary interventions generally, things like mental health support and cognitive behavioral therapy or being able to see a GI psychologist. And the best I ever got was a pamphlet and instructions to go figure that stuff out on my own. That just didn’t seem like it was good enough. And we were missing an opportunity in the space to use the new technology that exists out there, right, the machine learning, the predictive artificial intelligence, and just generalized technical tools to reduce the cognitive burden on the patient and improve the likelihood that I was going to get to remission.

And so that was kind of our core thesis. And the inception of the company was in very early 2020. I had my most recent pretty big flare and I was bedridden, and I just sat there and I said, I can’t do this anymore. And what I ended up doing was kind of working with group of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s, Northwestern, and building out essentially a personalized nutrition program that worked for me and that I realized I could systematize and standardize and expand upon that could potentially also help others. And so we’ve been around since 2020 and for two and a half years we have been in the clinic running clinical research on that approach.

And so our precision nutrition program, which is kind of our flagship program, is built on 20 years of research in the space and the intersection between diet and IBS and IBD, as well as two and a half years. Of our own primary clinical research now published in Gastroenterology Inflammatory Bowel Diseases and most recently clinical and translational Gastro Neurology and are now taking that. And some of the funding is going to the commercialization of this novel machine learning guided precision nutrition program for folks like myself. But at the end of the day, to answer your question, I solved my own problem and realized that maybe it could help others. And that was, I think, the inception of where we came from.

Praveen Suthrum: Let me ask very fundamental question before we get into the company stuff and the business stuff and all that, when you experience GI as an industry, as a patient, you went in and out of clinics, met different gastroenterologists and so on, what’s missing in the industry? You touched upon it. But I want to touch on the pain a little bit. If you don’t mind, what really missing that caused you a great deal of discomfort and made you wonder that something is really off with our system.

Sam Jactel: How long do you have, my friend? Look, I think there’s a lot that’s going really well in the space. So I serve also on the congressionally directed medical research program as a patient reviewer for IBD. And I’m seeing a lot of amazing research that’s being done. There are new drugs, there are new approaches to team-based care for GI. And I think that folks in the space coming around and it’s a growing ecosystem that is evolving and doing better.

I think that the problem that I have is not maybe necessarily a GI problem. I think it’s just a healthcare issue. And I think the healthcare issue and something that I’m very passionate about is that healthcare is the only market where the end user doesn’t really have a voice. Here’s what I mean by that. So if you are a consumer of shoes, right, you will go and you’ll go to your store and you’ll purchase the pair of Nikes that you like and Nike will take that and say people are voting with their dollars. People like the gray shoes with the red stripe and I’m going to make more of those because that’s what people want and that’s what people need. And in health care there is no real direct way for someone like myself to vote with my dollars. And so what ends up happening is that the needs of the patient are either filtered or not heard.

And by that I mean the need of the patient is either filtered through the GI. The GI then gets to the pharma company, to the health system, to the insurer, and it’s like a game of telephone. It gets distorted. And I think the challenge that I have with GI and with healthcare in general, is that what then happens is that the companies that are building in the space, right, the ones that are innovative and putting tons and tons of dollars behind it. Are the health systems, are the insurers? Are the employers making those decisions with assumptions around where those patients are and what they actually need? And I think at the end of the day, we talk a lot about patient centricity. But unless you are patient, there’s always that little gap. I think that unless you live with it everyday, I don’t think you can make assumptions about what it’s like to live with it. And that’s where I think you see a lot of the statistics that are kind of shocking to people about what it’s like to suffer in that silence, right?

These conditions are taboo. Like we don’t like to talk about poop. I certainly didn’t. And so patients like myself just sit around there and we are unproductive at work. We are uncomfortable. There’s some really interesting statistics out there that just illustrate this and shock a lot of people like that. Patients like myself are willing to give up 15 years of our remaining life expectancy for an immediate cure today, that doesn’t exist. That’s like 20% of someone’s lifespan. That acute need and what it’s like to live with the condition, but also work in the environment of siloed places, of being essentially the CEO of your own condition because no one’s doing it for you. And I’ve had to do that.  Right? And you see, patients are incredibly resourceful. You have people building their own Excel models, people writing things in notebooks, gathering reams and reams of information so that they can problem solve for themselves in an environment that is not surrounding that patient. And that’s like a big piece to me, kind of in conclusion, is that being patient centered is different than being patient driven. And patients being founders, I think, is something that I’m really excited about, that we’re seeing in this space as well as other spaces.

Those are a couple of the observations that I’ve found and that I’ve lived with, and I figured, why not give it a shot? I’ve lived with it ten years of market research. There’s an opportunity to change the industry and the way that we think about it. By putting the patient as the driver, not as the passenger.

Praveen Suthrum: You know, Sam, my friends and colleagues in private practice are going to say, look, you know, you’re smart, you’re a biology major, you’ve done your MBA from Kellogg, and you have all these resources to put all this together and pay for diet, pay for drugs, and so on. But look, in our industry, we are driven based on what the insurance company pays. And so it’s managed care that is ruling. So who’s going to pay for all this food stuff? It sounds good. Who’s going to pay for it?

Sam Jactel: Yeah. And I think the core to this is, to me, there’s a trend into value based care.  Right? There’s a trend into at the end of the day, I think financial drivers are connected to outcomes drivers. I think the reality is, currently with the tools that we have at our disposal right now, we are not driving optimal outcomes for patients like myself. And the reason why is because we don’t have the tools. Right? And so one of the things that is really exciting about the way that we’re positioning ourselves is that we’re not disintermediating the physician at all. We want to keep you in the driver’s seat, and we want to be positioned as another tool in the physician’s toolbox to treat that patient. I’m also very empathetic, right? Like, you don’t have a lot of time talking to a patient. You also have not spent a huge amount of your medical career learning about nutrition, learning about mental health. You’re not an expert in that field. We also know that, like GI psychologists and GI specialized dietitians, there just aren’t enough to meet demand. There aren’t even enough GIs to meet demand. And so in that environment, we need to use technology to extend the care that a physician is able to provide to a patient.  Right? That’s the Hippocratic oath, right? That’s really important.

The other piece to it is if you can do that together as a holistic approach to care, you drive better outcomes and that drives cost down, but also make sure an ecosystem of GI as a treatment industry is long term sustainable. And I think that’s really important.  Right. We need to drive to those outcomes. And I think if we are only using a couple of tools and not all of them.

Praveen Suthrum: Excellent. Let’s talk a little bit more about the company. So what is the operational model and how do you plan to get paid? And why did investors choose to invest the money that they did in Ayble Health?

Sam Jactel: Yeah, it’s an exciting place to be. So very concretely. Ayble is a precision health platform for folks with gastrointestinal conditions, right? And I use the term precision health on purpose in the space. You’re probably familiar with precision medicine, right? You take a lot of variables from an individual that hopefully you can then use to predict what drug works best for that person. What about everything beyond the pill? And so we have built as a comprehensive ecosystem of care beyond the pill. And it’s built on the largest GI behavioral health database in the world. And in a way where we’re using machine learning and predictive AI to essentially gather a bunch of that data, continue to use it, so that eventually we’ll be in a situation where we can be able to predict for that individual what the right pathway through diet and through mental health will generate the most optimal outcomes. In addition to the pill.  Right. Not as a replacement. And so that’s kind of the ecosystem that we built.

Now, our go to market strategy is very similar to some of those companies that are category defining in other places, Headspace Health and a few others. And what it is, is essentially a B to C to B business model. One of the things that’s really exciting is that because we’ve been patients, we know where they are and we are going direct to consumer on purpose to be able to have that individual find evidence based resources in addition to the work that they’re currently doing in the clinic and then transitioning that into the enterprise. And so we sell through gastroenterologists and providers, primary care groups as well as that extra tool in that toolbox. And then of course through employers and insurers who are looking to drive down the claims volumes and drive down the per capita claims cost for patients like me who are incredibly expensive because we’re incredibly sick, that’s the kind of approach that we’re taking. But it’s very different. We’re not a virtual, like a telehealth platform right? We’ve kind of built out a digital therapeutic. We’ve wrapped around with hands on care, with a nutritionist and a health coach and a dietitian. And then we have last mile nutrition tools that allow us to suggest and find food products for someone to be that are compatible with their diet. What if you can’t eat onions? That’s hard enough, right? Alliums are poorly digested for most folks anyways, but it’s in everything. That’s why food tastes good, right? What if you’re also halal and you want to eat low sodium for other health reasons and you want to eat organic? Like, how do you do that? And so we built out this database of grocery store items, about 95% coverage across the United States. And we can filter for those foods that are compatible and not compatible for you, as well as pushing you recipes. And so really trying to wrap someone around with that full end to end support, not just leaving them with a recommendation and then still having them be at their own devices, but really combining end to end for them. To change the way they buy, change the way they cook, change the way they eat, and therefore feel good and adhere for the long term.

Praveen Suthrum: So do the patients reach out to you directly or do the GI doctors and primary care providers or anybody else, do they refer members to you? How does the business model work?

Sam Jactel: So for patients directly, it’s a subscription basis, right? Very similar to some of the other health and wellness companies that exist out there. For physicians, it’s a referral pathway. And so what we have built is there is an entire physician ecosystem of tools that we provide to that individual. So if you are the physician recommending Ayble to your patients, I think it’s very important for you to be in the driver’s seat and understand how that data comes back to you. And so we have a dashboard that allows you to monitor and say, okay, Sam’s doing well. And so the next time, right, the next 15 minutes I have with Sam, it’s more impactful, more powerful, and by the way, I’ve driven better outcomes. And we give you all that data. That’s really important and that’s a kind of referral pathway. And then for those enterprise clients, it’s very similar to some of those other groups, right? Per member per month payments or per member per year. And we also are very confident in our data because we published it to drive costs down. We go at risk with some of our fees as well. It’s really important, I think, to align those incentives.

Praveen Suthrum: Are you planning to work with insurance companies? There are some startups that are.

Sam Jactel: So we are part of the UCSF Rosenman Institute ADAPT  program. Recently we’re selected to be a finalist there. That’s a phenomenal ecosystem of insurance groups. I think the groups in that program, I think, manage about 100 million members in the United States. And so we’re working and having conversations with folks like those to be able to provide that is essentially a member benefit to their groups.

Praveen Suthrum: What is the pricing model?

Sam Jactel: The members pay a subscription and yes, yes, exactly. Like, it’s not much more expensive than Netflix, but it’s much more effective. And that’s how we’ve kind of orchestrated that. And then for the enterprise contracts, those are relatively standard enterprise contracts. It’s important to pay for that use. And so it’s those engaged members that we get paid for. And that I think is really important. And there are a couple of contracts that we’re putting together with some others that are like completely value based. We’re sharing on the dollar of savings and on the improvement of outcomes for those individuals.

Praveen Suthrum: So there’s a tendency in the digital health start-up community to apply AI and machine learning on everything. And one of the questions that I have, and I’d like to push back here a little bit, is that really necessary? Because what is the AI going to do? And is it not just a simple algorithm that you need versus a predictive mechanism? Because I think having been a patient, it’s probably more to do with not doing the wrong things versus doing certain specific things, maybe a combination of both. But as I understand IBS, IBD, it’s an act of removal and knowing the triggers and managing what those triggers are. And once it is set, it is set because I’m sure you’re not changing the recommendations or what you do too much after a point of time. Why is AI or machine learning required for something like this? What’s your response or reflection on this whole variability aspect?

Sam Jactel:  Look, I love that question because I think those terms are thrown around a lot and they’re either ill-defined or they’re used, but with no real purpose. And so I’m going to answer this question in two ways. One is I want to illustrate what it looks like to do this on your own, and I hope in illustrating that you’ll understand where these kinds of data models are really important, particularly around the diet piece. I think the other piece to this is our broader ambitions and what we’re trying to do with our company in defining a new gold standard of care on an Iterative basis.

So let me illustrate what it looks like first on the diet side, right? So let’s say a FODMAP pamphlet that gets given to a patient. The onus is then on that individual, you shouldn’t eat FODMAP for the rest of your life.  Right? It’s highly restrictive and that brings on additional problems and certainly very hard to adhere to. And there are some good encyclopaedia type resources to figure out what’s low or high or medium FODMAP, whatever that is. And the interesting thing is that there also is no real consensus about is it FODMAP? Is it nice guidelines? Is it other? The Mediterranean diet, the specific carbohydrate diet.

It’s a very kind of diffuse let me use FODMAP as an example. So you go through the process of eating very low FODMAP for quite a long time. And what that requires you to do is eliminate hundreds of foods, staples of your diet for quite some time, six, eight weeks, something like that. And then what you’re supposed to be doing is the reintroduction of that, because not all of those foods are individualized to you to be exacerbating symptoms or causing symptoms. And so you have to go through an iterative process of reintroducing one food every three to five days. And if you’re doing the math in your head, you have 100 foods reintroducing every three to five days, you’re talking about a year and a half of experimentation. And that’s not to say that then you also have to write down how you feel all the time and then connect the dots. And even working with a dietician, it’s incredibly complicated.

And so the machine learning and the AI tools are there to help reduce the cognitive load on that individual, to make it easier to gather that information and to draw conclusions from it. And the most important part of that is then you can use that to inform a better, faster, more effective program for the next patient on the basis of all the aggregated data and the identified data that we’ve gathered for others. And so it’s a positive flywheel that’s important that we’ve kind of innovated here and patented for this group. And so we take what’s, a year and a half long experimentation process, which, by the way, a lot of people start and never finish, and so you never get the outcomes out of it. And we collapse it to 12 to 16 weeks and proven that we’ve been Ayble to generate outcomes, right? So we improve outcomes for 81% of IBS and IBD patients, and for almost 70% of them, by the end of the program, we’ve gotten them to clinical remission as defined by the Symptom Severity Scores, right? The IBS symptom severity scores the CDI, et cetera. That’s really important.

I think the second part of my answer is that what we’re trying to do here is not just take the standard of care that exists in the clinic. We’ve talked about how it’s not effective, it doesn’t drive optimal outcomes for everybody. And so what we’re trying to do here is, on the basis of this incredible data ecosystem that we’ve developed, and we use that as a positive flywheel to continuously iterate that gold standard of care, right? It’s not just about making care virtual, but not changing outcomes. It’s about using the digital tools to make the outcomes better and more equitable and easier to access for everybody. I think that’s really exciting. And so that’s why it’s kind of like a very core problem that we solve with the ML and AI stuff, right? Same problem also with mental health that we’re working on. But the other piece is just what is our bigger ambition? You cannot get to precision health unless you gather that data, and that data cannot be interpreted unless you use tools like ML and AI. And so that’s kind of how we’re thinking about it. And of course, we may be incorrect, and the value of those models is that we can continue to get better and better over time. And that’s just we have to be humble in the way that we approach it. But that’s the vision.

Praveen Suthrum: One more question on the company and competition and all that. I would argue that there are other companies also in the wellness space that are taking similar approaches for digestive diseases. And there’s one at least that’s been through the FDA gate, taking a digital therapeutics approach. So does the world need yet another digestive disease digital GI company? Or this is the sign of the times. And I’m asking again, with all respect to the clinical side and the patient side of the story, I’m just asking a business question here.

Sam Jactel: It’s a really important question, and I’ll give you a like, but not the answer you want and then the answer that you want afterwards. I think the reality is a gigantic market and the needs are not solved yet. And so we need as many people in the space trying different things as possible to be able to change the lives of patients like myself. And the diabetes market is a good example of this, right? There are half as many diabetes patients in the US. As there are GI patients. And there are hundreds of diabetes companies doing really interesting work, approaching it from different angles, and they’re all finding a good niche in the market and generating solid returns for investors and having sustainable business models. And I think we’re going to see that in GI. It’s a huge market. I think the other piece of this is just how you present yourself to the business ecosystem and what your go to market is. And I think the prescription digital therapeutics route is really exciting, right. And they’re doing a couple of other things, I think insomnia as well, and some other folks like Mahana Therapeutics, metaMe with the Regulora, they’re going through that model. It’s a different approach to the market where certainly there’s a value creation and value capture piece to this, right? They create a lot of value. They capture almost all the value that they generate because of the ecosystem that’s built, right. It’s just like a drug. But I don’t think that you’re going to be able to get the volume right. And I think the reality is that there are tons of people, right? If 25% of a commercially insured population has a GI diagnosis, and then another, let’s say 10 to15% have undiagnosed or under diagnosed conditions. You’re never going to be able to meet the demand with that model exclusively. And so that’s really important for us is like, we want to make this amazing new science and the innovations that we’ve developed accessible for as many people. And the reality is also that the conditions that we are trying to address are really hard to manage with one tool alone. And so I think there’s actually much more collaboration that can be in the system than we maybe expect, right? Because in my view, these are and conditions rather than or conditions. And by that I mean you should do your diet and you should do your psychology and you should do your drugs and you should do your physical.

There’s a lot, but it needs to be tailored to you as an individual, and someone needs to quarterback that. And in lieu of an ecosystem that makes that possible, we think the patient does it right, and we empower the physician to help extend that care as well. So that’s kind of the way that we’re thinking about it.

Praveen Suthrum: Very well answered. Thank you for sharing that perspective. If there’s a patient out there watching this or listening to this and thinking, hey, I want to be in his shoes, I want to turn CEO too, and take my problem head on, what advice would you have for them?

Sam Jactel: First, I think the most important thing, the reason why we’re called Ayble is that we want patients to feel seen in this world, because a lot of times we aren’t. And I told you about voting with dollars and stuff like that. I think it’s also uncomfortable to talk about. And so we are called Ayble because our goal is to make you be Ayble to go to restaurants without fear, be Ayble to travel, be Ayble to be defined by something other than your condition. And so to those patients that are looking at it, we see you, we’ve been in your shoes, and it’s a tough place to be, but we’re trying to solve for what you are living with all the time. And to those that are taking that next step of being not just a CEO of their own condition, but trying to be the CEO of their own company, let’s say, a gift and a curse. I think the gift is that you have a unique understanding of the problem that you’re solving for your ultimate users. And I think that’s really, really exciting because you know what to build, you know what not to build.

I think the curse is me search rather than research. And by that I mean, like, I am an end of one. And we need to be very humble in our understanding that my experience as a white male, privileged, educated individual is not the case for everybody else. And if you make the false assumption that you are your only customer or that all your customers look and talk and feel and live like you, you’re going to have a bad time.  Right. It’s not going to be appropriate. And so the thing that is really exciting about that opportunity is also its potential downfall. And so for those individuals that are looking to go into this space and take advantage of their however many years of research by being that patient, I think it’s also important to hear others and to include others as part of that. And we’ve talked to thousands and thousands of patients, and we use that to inform our decisions. It’s not just me.  Right. And that’s really important, I think we don’t talk a lot about, but yeah, I think that’s a key insight that I learned.

Praveen Suthrum: Final two questions. What’s the future of GI and health care? From the lens that you’re seeing right now?

Sam Jactel: I won’t beat a dead horse. I think the future of healthcare is patient driven. Not just we talk in, like, loose terms about, oh, we are patient centric.  Right. It needs to be at the core of what the actual problem we’re solving, because we can’t get the outcomes unless the person at the end of the day who is sick gets better. And so I think that’s, like, really important.  Right. So the patient driven things, I think, will end up, whoever solves my needs as a patient, better, I think, will ultimately win in the market for a variety of reasons.  Right. Not just for outcomes, but also for contraction. I think the other piece to it is that we are very excited about this. You know, we’re running randomized controlled trials. We did three years of clinical research before we took a dollar from anyone. The bar for clinical evidence needs to keep going up, and it cannot be a non-inferiority thing. We need to keep pushing that up.  Right. That standard of care needs to continue to evolve. And we’re excited to be part of that new trend of first, we should be publishing more of our research, right. In clinical journals. We should be showing how we do that to people, and we should be empowering others to keep evolving. I welcome all the folks in the space to keep building that out and publishing that research. But I think that there’s too big of a gap currently between the claims that companies make in digital health, not just GI, but generally right. And the evidence that supports it. And I also don’t think that it’s good enough to refer to other research. I think the onus needs to be on digital health companies to run their own research of their own brand of doing that care and their innovations. I think it’s important to validate their novel innovations and what they’re contributing to the space. That’s a challenge, for sure.  It’s expensive. It’s hard to do well. But science is so important in this space, and I think we need to lead with evidence because that drives trust and it also drives outcomes and it drives sustainability from a business standpoint for everybody. So that’s, I think, my challenge to the space, it’s a challenge that we’ve issued ourselves. We’re not perfect at it, but it’s something that we’re really excited about.

Praveen Suthrum: So, Sam, in closing, I want you to reiterate that philosophical analogy that you shared with me before we started recording about being the bat versus knowing the bat. So I’ll let you share it, and then we’ll close.

Sam Jactel: I’m glad you can nerd out about this, but yes, I’ve been a big philosophy guy for a while, and there’s a phenomenal philosopher. His name is Thomas Nagel. And Thomas Nagel has an amazing article that I’m happy to share with this community as well, where he makes this proposition where he says, imagine you are the foremost scientist in the bat field, right? You know everything about the physiology of the bat. You know all the neurons, how they’re connected, the chemical signaling. You know how the whole system of the bat works. You know how the echolocation works. You know the difference between the signals and how they find their way through their environment while being functionally blind. You can know everything about the bat. But his proposition is that even though you know everything there is to know about a bat, you will never know what it’s like to be a bat and what it’s like to being this, I think, super important in this space. And the analogy is, I think, very connected to what it’s like to be a patient.  Right? And if we can think more like that, I think we’re really going to change the world.

Praveen Suthrum:  On that note, Sam Jactel. I’m so glad that you came on The Scope Forward Show. Wish you and your team all the best, and I really wish for more patients like you to step up, take action, and start companies in the GI space because there is a lot of need. Thank you once again.

Sam Jactel: Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity. And I welcome the discussion with the rest of the GI community. Would love to chat with GIS, with other folks, kind of innovating in the space. And it’s a really exciting time. This is the right time and the right place to be building for people in this ecosystem. So go forth and prosper. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

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