“ We have unusually strong marketing connections; Vitalik approves of us; Aella is a marketing advisor on this project; SlateStarCodex is well aware of us. We are quite networked in the Effective Altruism space. We could plausibly get an Elon tweet. ”
From the short investor spiel document. Also they want to just bypass the FDA?
this doesn’t sound terribly bad, and might be actually beneficial if it works, but i’ll wait for FDA approval
it’s definitely the kind of thing that probably needs a whole lot more eyes on it than the gung-ho rats would be willing to give it
Synthetic biology as a field is in its infancy. It’s coming along fast and the possibilities are absurdly endless, but it’s hard to overstate how complex of a problem this really is.
The idea that it’ll magically outcompete the rest of your extremely diverse, hyper complex, and largely beneficial mouth biome alone with just one treatment and no maintenance immediately shows it as a scam. We aren’t there yet.
There’s sneer in the pitchdeck about the FDA requiring 300 people healthy people with fully removable teeth isolated from others to trial this, as if it was the dumbest thing ever, instead of a reasonable precaution to introducing an unknown strain of bacteria into everyone’s mouths.