Hey, it's your host, Kate Einbach.

We're doing something a little different today.

This is the first episode of a two-part story.

It's about a biotech company called Ubiome.

It had idealistic leaders, a promising idea, and a lot of venture capital funding.

But eventually, the company had a spectacular downfall.

It's quite a story, and to tell it, we brought in our colleague, Amy Doxer-Marcus.

She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning health reporter, and for the past few years, she and her colleagues

have reported on the rise and the fall of Ubiome.

Amy will take it from here.

As a reporter, I spend a lot of my time thinking about why healthcare doesn't work for so

many people.

Why cares still seem out of reach for so many?

How medicine seems to focus more on treating disease rather than preventing it.

So back in 2014, I had taken an interest in this company called Ubiome.

At the time, it was a small start-up, but its founders, Jessica Richmond and Zach Apty,

had big ambitions.

Their product was an at-home test kit, kind of like 23 in me.

But this kit would test the makeup of your microbiome, the trillions of microbes that live

in and on all of us.

The bigger idea behind the company was all about something called citizen science, getting

everyday people involved in data collection, understanding their own bodies, and taking

...