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A week ago, I posted a thread about trying Lumina, the probiotic dental caries treatment from Lantern Bioworks. It got way, way more visibility than I expected (good), but given the popularity of the thread, I felt it would be responsible to address a number of concerns, objections, and skepticisms it uncovered. Instead of doing this in the marketing-friendly bite-sized tweet storm format, I will do this in a more long-form format, which is more conducive to nuance and detail: 1. Disclosure: I am an investor in Lantern Bioworks! (I am sorry it didn't occur to me to bring this up right at the beginning but the thread started out as a "look at this crazy thing I am doing" and then ended up later sounding promotional, if you can call it that) Anyhow, yes I am an investor! However, it doesn’t work exactly the way you think. The cached-thought reflex most people have is “investor = wants to get rich, shills for company; don’t believe what he says!” First, my investment is something like 0.05% of the company [details elided here about SAFEs, caps, etc]. Similarly, the equity I hold in Lantern is also a tiny portion of my net worth. Second, I invested in LB because I knew about this dental caries cure 10-15 years ago. If you’ve been paying attention, the basic research had been done in the 80s and 90s, and in the early 2000s, the inventor was attempting to get it approved by the FDA as a medically-approved treatment, and it was under patent. At the time I found out about it (mid-2000s), that was the status quo: a cure (technically: preventative vaccine) for caries existed, but it was under patent. So all we [normal people] could do was wait, and hope it came to market. It never came to market. For various reasons (more on this later), it wasn’t able to even start to get FDA approval, and the company is basically defunct. My overriding priority, therefore, is to help get this out to humanity. If you’ve read Cremieux’s piece [cremieux.xyz/p/46ebd66b-8a6…] on the history of dental caries, it is global problem that has plagued us since the dawn of history, and if we could eliminate (or even greatly reduce it), it would result in a profound improvement in the human condition. Hence, when I found that a company was working on it, I was intrigued. It turns out that yes, many other people were willing to experiment with this, but the company needed a bit of capital to ramp up production. The amount of money needed was an amount that I felt I - in addition to more investors within my network that I thought I could bring to the table - could provide. In fact, I invested ONLY because the company decided to pursue what I consider the LESS profitable route of distribution: When I first learned about Lantern (Sep 2023), they were mulling over their go-to-market plans. At the time, they had concluded that: - Just making and distributing the cure would not be particularly profitable, as it was a one-time treatment and if successful, that’d be the end of things. And, being as it was out of patent, other companies could clone/pirate the same treatment and just copy them. - The more profitable thing would be to slightly tweak the bacteria in a trivial way so that it would be patentable, get a patent, then sell it to Pfizer, have Pfizer drag it through the FDA approval process. It was anticipated that this process could take 2-10 years to before it would get the bacteria into peoples’ mouths. At the time, Lantern seemed to slightly prefer this plan. I did not like this plan. My feeling about this cure is that it is game-chantingly important for mankind, and not something to be subject to our monstrously dysfunctional public-private FDA-Big-Pharma late-stage-capitalist regulatory-capture system. So I didn’t invest. (There was another third plan, which was to pursue approval in other, faster countries, with the caveat that the FDA holds a grudge against you if do that, so it was sort of a worst-of-both-worlds plan) Months later in ~Feb 2024, Cremieux posted about having gotten the treatment himself at Prospera, and answered a message from me with an offer to introduce me to Lantern’s founder, Aaron. By then, Lantern had apparently decided not to deal with creating a tweaked strain, patenting, and dealing with Pfizer, and were intending to just make and distribute it as a cosmetic (probiotic supplement), which doesn’t require FDA approval, and presumably make a healthy return selling a one-time treatment to all of mankind, which is still 8 billion people. The idea is that they were selling it for $20,000 per treatment at Prospera to rich guys like Cremieux, then it came down to $5k, and now they’re taking pre-orders for $250 each, putting it in the budget of well-off biohackers and other early adopters. They’ll drive the price down at each stage, and eventually the last billion doses will probably be sub-$1 production cost distributed by NGOs in developing countries. But in order to make the jump from bespoke lab bench treatments at $5k each to producing 1000 units/month at $250 each, they needed to scale up a small production facility, and that’s why I invested - to help them make this next step. I should mention that even if this investment does well, I won’t actually personally make money from this. I invested through a charitable donor-advised fund that I contributed to, and any returns on the investment will just go back into the charitable fund, to be deployed into other similar investments. I can’t actually claim any of the returns. My role as an investor (and indirectly, apparently as a marketer) is to accelerate the production and deployment of this as a cure to as many people who want it as possible. I am not doing this for the money. I am doing it because I’m hoping to remove hurdles (financial or otherwise) for something that I think will be beneficial to mankind - after 20+ years of development hell - to finally see the light of day. Next: FDA approval - no?