https://www.bizapedia.com/ca/lantern-bioworks-inc.html has something:

"LANTERN BIOWORKS, INC. is a California Non-Profit Corporation - Ca - Public Benefit filed on January 4, 2023. The company's filing status is listed as Active and its File Number is 5412825.

The Registered Agent on file for this company is Tovella Dowling, PC and is located at 501 W Broadway Suite 1310, San Diego, CA 92101. The company's principal address is 501 W Broadway Ste 1310, San Diego, CA 92101 and its mailing address is 501 W Broadway Ste 1310, San Diego, CA 92101.

The company has 3 contacts on record. The contacts are Aaron Silverbook from San Diego CA, Connor Flexman from San Diego CA, and Nick Mossakowski from San Diego CA.

Hi! These are friends of mine. There is much more detail in the Google Drive (linked from the About page): https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/18ZDSe92LgLmS0sUb...

Sorry, but we don't know you either, so a word-of-mouth referral doesn't tell us much here. The Google Drive link doesn't provide anything substantive, like links to peer-reviewed, published research.

This comment describes the research: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37635401

If your friends are looking for feedback, you can pass on that at least one person on the internet finds it in very bad taste for them to describe the delay in treatment as a "civilizational embarrassment" while planning to charge $20k for a dose. The pricing point seems equally a civilizational embarassment to me.

Not just embarrassing. A disgusting example of the worst parts of humanity.

I can easily imagine someone who don't brush their teeth ever to spend like $1000 a year for cavity repairs (because, well, I did).

So I guess $20k is near to the market price you could expect people to pay for a lifetime (with refills and no cavities guarantee) for this product.

If $20k it too much for you, just wait for cheaper generics.

That's not the point — the critique (as I understand it) is about the way in which it's presented.

Capitalism at its finest. A civilization should be measured at how it treats the poorest. By selling such an incredible cure (if it's really working) for thousands of dollars makes it impossible for the low-income class to purchase.

Yeah, if it's in "patent hell and FDA hell" there should be applications and evidence of that online, right?

Patent hell should be over if this was invented in 1985.

who knows. maybe invented as a concept and then developed as a concrete dentistry protocol, which then got parented recently?

Good point. But that would be odd then to present it as solved in 1985 if only recently was figured out how to put it into a protocol. That would be a new innovation rather than “been around forever but never used.”

It seems hard to believe the ethanol producing bacterial strain would dominate your oral microbione for life from one application. But I’m willing to have an open mind and see some data.

They need to get the data off of the Google drive and presented in a better way. I don’t click unknown Google drive links if I can avoid it.

Brushing your teeth and using mouthwash wipes out the majority of the micro biome. Application of the new strain shortly after could totally replace it wholesale.

That said, I can’t imagine there’s not other side effects that just aren’t known yet. The sample size and reporting (as far as we know) is just too small and meaningless.

Does brushing and mouthwash really eliminate your microbiome? I heard it does precious little. Most of the microorganisms live below the gumline and surfaces. If that were true it would eliminate caries! Please post links

Mouthwash (WITH alcohol) daily almost completely eliminates the need for daily brushing and flossing. This was later retracted by demand of the ADA to only say "as good or better than flossing"; from here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894074/ "mouth rinses would be considered to be “at least as good as” daily flossing if the upper limit of the 90% confidence interval" there are a number of studies on this topic and they all seem to generally be in agreement. Mouthwash even once a week is really good for dental hygiene. They make alcohol free mouthwash but it's hard to argue with the antimicrobial properties of alcohol and the price difference is neglible.

That would get rid of all the good bacteria too, which can't be… good.

No thanks. I'll not be using alcohol-based mouthwash. https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/australian-study-...

You should stop drinking diet soda too, a byproduct of metabolizing aspartame is formaldehyde which is also a carcinogen.

In one of their articles they claim that the microbiome is stable over 15 years, but this is categorized as "unpublished work" which leaves me with a large sense of doubt. I don't mind research that is in preliminary stages (as in conference abstracts, technical papers, etc), but the fact they are very naïve in how they approach scientific evidence makes me highly doubtful.

I didn’t look at that Google drive, but Google search gave me:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12369203

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine

As a layman, I would be concerned about trying to control a bacterium called Streptococcus mutans, as that, to me, signals “this thing mutates rapidly”.

Mutations trend towards stable states. Stable states further trend towards states where fast mutation becomes disabled because it's in a "good" stable zone.

Symbiosis is the ultimate stable state.

You can get stable states in intermediate zones like hiv infections, but these zones are not as good as symbiosis. They have potential to kill off a weak population, additionally humans are actively combatting the virus. In symbiosis there's no negative for either side.

There is no evolutionary pressure to "mutate" in symbiosis. Mutations will occur in the beginning. Those will die off fast and eventually the strain will become more and more stable as the gene starts mutating towards a configuration that has slow mutations.

As I understand it you left off the key reason why symbiosis is a stable state for a parasite/symbiote: because other states tend to destroy the host, causing the mutated strain to (usually) have a harder time propagating. That's all well and good when you're looking at evolutionary theory writ large, it's less appealing when you're talking about sticking a new bacteria in a specific person's mouth.

>because other states tend to destroy the host

No untrue. That is the most extreme case. A parasite can make a host less healthy and less likely to reproduce. This all lives on a gradient where parasitic relationship move the likelihood of reproduction down a little while symbiosis is the most extreme state where reproductive success is only positively effected.

>it's less appealing when you're talking about sticking a new bacteria in a specific person's mouth.

What does appeal have to do with anything? Much of our medical treatments were unappealing at one point in time. Colonoscopy? Sticking a camera up your ass to prevent cancer. Surgery? Cutting you open to fix something. None of it appealing but all of it necessary and worth it in the end.

Also keep in mind we live in times where much of the food we eat is bioengineered to live in symbiosis with us. The difference is instead of directly manipulating the gene, we indirectly manipulate it through artificial offspring selection. All domesticated animals and plants have been manipulated this way at a macro level for eons. The difference here is that the manipulation is happening on the molecular level rather then the macro level.

Your aversion to it is just instinctive and habitual but it's no different to much of the things we already do.

> A parasite can make a host less healthy and less likely to reproduce. This all lives on a gradient where parasitic relationship move the likelihood of reproduction down a little while symbiosis is the most extreme state where reproductive success is only positively effected.

Whether or not the host is destroyed, that symbiosis is the end game is not reassuring to someone whose mouth has gotten worse as a result of the treatment.

I'm not saying it won't work and isn't worth a large scale trial, I'm just saying your arguments based on evolutionary theory aren't a sound basis for medicine. I would not take a tapeworm into me on the grounds that someday tapeworms might evolve into a symbiotic relationship with humans.

>Whether or not the host is destroyed, that symbiosis is the end game is not reassuring to someone whose mouth has gotten worse as a result of the treatment.

That is the point of clinical trials. No treatment can be released until it has been verified to be safe.

>I'm not saying it won't work and isn't worth a large scale trial, I'm just saying your arguments based on evolutionary theory aren't a sound basis for medicine.

I never said it was a sound basis in it's current form. It's a sound basis to move forward rapidly to change the current theory into a sound basis.

> I would not take a tapeworm into me on the grounds that someday tapeworms might evolve into a symbiotic relationship with humans.

one average guy who literally did the opposite of you. Against all medical advice, he infected himself with hookworms:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/23/parasit...

podcast on the same guy who infected himself with hookworms: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/404/enemy-camp-2010/act-thr...

The innovative risk takers are the ones that try things out and move things forward. I'm not recommending you become one, but I recommend you support people who have the drive and willingness to do this because you and I only stand to benefit.

Another guy who did it: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/12/4896190...

But here, we move this organism to a state of which we don’t know whether it’s stable. If it isn’t, it may take a while to get back to a stable state and, in-between, it could be nasty.

Also, I would think the Spanish flu, the Hongkong flu, COVID-19, etc. are examples of cases where “trending towards stable states” had fairly dire consequences.

>But here, we move this organism to a state of which we don’t know whether it’s stable.

We have to test the stability in experiments. Logically though we can assume it's stable as all the macro evolutionary pressures make sense here. When a virus kills, it's almost always a fluke one off mutation.

>Also, I would think the Spanish flu, the Hongkong flu, COVID-19, etc. are examples of cases where “trending towards stable states” had fairly dire consequences.

Yes they are trending towards stable states. But these are huge anomalies of conditions involving death. Likely instable states of mouth bacteria basically involve the newly introduced bacteria dying off or having new side effects. Again this has to be measured. I think it can be easily done with primates getting fed human diets.

I think you're just reacting to the fear mongering headlines of killer virus. What's going on here isn't living at those extremities and is ultimately a different topic. Cavities in our mouths are also stable states, the goal is to push it out of this zone into the ultimate stable state of symbiosis.

As I layman, I am more concerned that drastic alterations to the oral microbiome could have many negative downstream effects on health, from everything to digestion (naturally) to heard disease and neurodegenerative disorders. All of which show some correlation to an altered oral microbiome. We barely understand the connections, but that is obviously an argument in favor of caution.

I'm grateful that there are people out there willing to be guinea pigs for stuff like this, but I definitely wouldn't touch this kind of product until there are years (ideally decades) of usage with systemic scientific investigation into immediate complications as well as long term health impacts.

S. mutans was named in 1924, long before the idea of genetic mutations was established. It was likely named that because it converts sugars to acid.

I take very significant issue with the fact their appendix A and B do not link to the original literature. When I was skimming the pitch deck, I thought they had done the experiments themselves, but it just looks like they copy pasted the results without proper citation. At best this appears as miscommunication, at worst misrepresentation of the work they have accomplished.

I work in medical startup space and the evidence we develop to prove our technology works typically has a higher threshold than what I've seen presented. I would want to see significantly more work done to demonstrate the scientific validity of this research. Do they intend to carry out any additional pre-clinical research (in vitro/in vivo)? Do they intend to do a clinical trial? It appears from their slide deck that they don't?

>I work in medical startup space and the evidence we develop to prove our technology works typically has a higher threshold than what I've seen presented.

Like what?

>I would want to see significantly more work done to demonstrate the scientific validity of this research.

Like what?

Educate the layman instead of saying this is no good, please.

>are there actual published results from legit scientists on this?

The main papers referenced by document on the page are by JD Hillman on 1987[0] (et al) and 2002[1]. A layman review was done few years later by PopSci[2]. This specific site and company appear to have no relation to Hillman or Oragenics (co-founded by Hillman) that holds a patent on this[3,4].

[0]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002203458706600...

[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1020695902160

[2]: https://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-01/germ-could-sa...

[3]: https://www.oragenics.com/news-media/press-releases/detail/3...

[4]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9260488B2/en

Thanks! They have a deal with Hillman for use of the tech, it's in the slides:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OqDqFYMQdcS0XM4hORqN...