I hope you all like this post…and I hope you also get excited about learning what some other UC’ers are up to(especially when it related directly to IBD!)
The story goes like this…Vik sent me the email below on October 24th:
Message:
Hi Adam,
I am a UC\’er (15 years) and am a longtime fan of iHaveUC.I am also the founder of Toi Labs, which has created a novel toilet technology that can better assess disease activity for IBD patients at home. We\’re based in San Francisco (I know you\’re also a local Bay Area dweller) and I\’d love to connect to see how we might be able to work together.
Regards,
Vik
(pretty cool right…??!!)
And...about two weeks later on November 9th we met eachother for the first time. (In the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco, California…here is the two of us midway though our causal meeting below..)
I’m in the red shirt, Vik in Green. What he has stared and is involved with is amazing. What other UC’er invents a toilet seat business that can help people with all sorts of medical situations..???!!!!
So what the heck is Vik up to..?
He has started an amazing project. His company( Vik’s the CEO), I think we can call him the Head Poop Officer or HPO for short…
His company(Toi Labs) which has support from many people in the medical, and IBD world is looking to revolutionize the bathroom experience.
Click on the Image Above to download the high resolution PDF version so you can read all the details. This was actually a posted Presented by VIk at the large Inflammatory Bowel Disease Conference which took place in New York City in early November 2018. (Great work Vik & Team!!)
In one sentence, Vik and his company are developing a toilet seat which will be able to read our poop, and let us and our doctor’s learn more about our physical health and potential problems as they are developing.
Who Is This HEAD OF POOP OFFICER VIK…??
Vik like so many of us also has UC. I’m just over 10 years with ulcerative colitis, but Vik is at the 15 year mark. And, that is just the very beginning.
Here’s a little bit of impressive stuff about Vik:
- Vik graduated from Harvard
- Spent time at MIT
- Spent two years in Japan (and speaks Japanese…yeah…friggin crazy…I hear ya…)
- Looks like he’s 25 years old…but he’s a few years past 40 (there’s hope for us after-all:))
- Took the initiative to test himself with worms to treat his UC…and was the main person(the patient) involved with a scientific study(which he was heavily involved in developing and getting published). Since that isn’t so impressive(haha..) it has been cited now OVER 100 times….don’t believe me…here is the abstract of the exact study
IL-22+ CD4+ T cells are associated with therapeutic trichuris trichiura infection in an ulcerative colitis patient
Author information
Division of Experimental Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.
Abstract
Ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease, is less common in countries endemic for helminth infections, suggesting that helminth colonization may have the potential to regulate intestinal inflammation in inflammatory bowel diseases. Indeed, therapeutic effects of experimental helminth infection have been reported in both animal models and clinical trials. Here, we provide a comprehensive cellular and molecular portrait of dynamic changes in the intestinal mucosa of an individual who infected himself with Trichuris trichiura to treat his symptoms of ulcerative colitis. Tissue with active colitis had a prominent population of mucosal T helper (T(H)) cells that produced the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-17 (IL-17) but not IL-22, a cytokine involved in mucosal healing. After helminth exposure, the disease went into remission, and IL-22-producing T(H) cells accumulated in the mucosa. Genes involved in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism were up-regulated in helminth-colonized tissue, whereas tissues with active colitis showed up-regulation of proinflammatory genes such as IL-17, IL-13RA2, and CHI3L1. Therefore, T. trichiura colonization of the intestine may reduce symptomatic colitis by promoting goblet cell hyperplasia and mucus production through T(H)2 cytokines and IL-22. Improved understanding of the physiological effects of helminth infection may lead to new therapies for inflammatory bowel diseases.
So there you have it…Vik has done muchooo POOOPshooow for people like us with UC, and it appears that he is just getting started.
His new toilet seats are in the early/mid phases of development(he has been working on this for over 10 years now), and much progress has been made.
Vik Needs Help:
What is most important at the moment is he is needing to find 300 people by the middle of 2019 (so by the end of June 2019). These 300 people would be using the toilet seats, and ideally they would be located in the Bay Area of California and with IBD.
Vik’s company has setup a study for people with IBD, and again, for those of you in the Bay Area, California…his team of engineers will come out to your home and install the toilet seat free of charge. (For those of you interested but not in the Bay Area of California(near San Francisco where his company is located and his engineers who would install the toilet seat, I’m sorry about this being limited to those geographic locations, but both Vik, his team, me, and many others hope and expect this to be available to much of the world in the coming years, so please hang in there and follow the progress Vik’s team makes)
More details on this are on the website here: https://www.toilabs.com/ibd/
Vik is a UC’er, he’s a great guy, and I’m sure he will help many of us, but right now, he needs some people to test out the early versions of the toilet seat. If you are interested, please check the link above, it’s a pretty amazing opportunity, and thank you Vik for all you are doing for the medical world and especially for the UC’ers out here!
Best to allllllllll,
Adam
I started site shortly after being diagnosed in October of 2008 with severe pancolitis (when my whole colon was inflamed).
For me, it was a very rough start with severe symptoms. Getting bounced from medication to medication was not easy or too helpful. But, I did meet another UC’er, changes several parts of my diet, and of course the rest is history.
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