Claudia von Boeselager (00:00)
My guest today is Colleen Cutliffe, CEO and co-founder of Pendulum Therapeutics, a category-defining leader in microbiome innovation on transforming metabolic more than 25 years of experience across academia, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology, Colleen has a unique gift for translating complex science into real-world scalable solutions.

Before founding Pendulum, she served as Senior Manager of Biology at Pacific Biosciences and as a scientist at Elan Pharmaceuticals, where she worked on therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. Colleen earned her PhD in and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University and has since been instrumental in unlocking of next generation probiotics and microbiome-based therapeutics, positioning

pendulum at the forefront of one of the most and rapidly expanding fields in health today. Also to mention when I Dr. William Li back on the talked about akkermansia as a keystone strain for gut and metabolic almost like a natural GLP-1 with many health benefits. I was so delighted to discover that pendulum was the first to make live akkermansia available in supplement form.

And thanks to Colleen and her team for giving you, dear audience, a chance to try You can get 20 % off your first membership order by going to pendulumlife.com forward slash Claudia, and I'll link it in the show notes. So for anyone serious about health, this is such a powerful foundation. Please enjoy today's conversation.

welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle podcast, Colleen. It's such a pleasure to with us

Colleen Cutcliffe (03:25)
I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Claudia von Boeselager (03:27)
my pleasure. So you've been at the cutting edge of science for decades. What was the moment, can you share, that made you leave the pharmaceutical world to co-found Pendulum? And maybe there was a personal story that you could share or health challenge that shaped your motivation to focus on the microbiome.

Colleen Cutcliffe (03:46)
Yeah, I think there were two big reasons why we decided we want to start this company. One is that, so this was about 12 or 13 years ago before microbiome was a buzzword and people didn't even really know what that word meant. And I think the first thing was that we were starting to learn so much more about the microbiome and the, you know, these microorganisms that make up even more of our body than we do.

and the important role that they could play in health and disease. And it was just the beginnings of a taste of a new frontier of health. And so it was a really exciting place to be when you think about there aren't that many places that are completely unexplored in the body. And this was a place where we felt like there's a big opportunity to create new products that are going to help people and potentially even natural products. And so this idea of being able to have the efficacy of a drug with the safety of a probiotic has never existed before all this microbiome science started to come to light.

Claudia von Boeselager (04:24)
you you

Colleen Cutcliffe (04:38)
And then the second big reason why I was really inspired to start this company was actually my own daughter. So my daughter

was born almost two months prematurely and she was four and a half pounds when she was born. She spent the first month of her life in intensive care, hooked up to all these machines and monitors and receiving multiple doses of antibiotics. And in 2012, Marty Blazer from NYU published a paper. This paper changed my life. It basically showed that babies who are on a lot of antibiotics

later on in life were more prone to chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes. And the Mayo Clinic actually repeated this study and they showed that if you're under two years old and you're on a lot of antibiotics, you're more prone not just to obesity and diabetes, but also things like celiac disease, allergies, asthma, ADHD, all of these chronic illnesses that start with this early antibiotic treatment that is decimating the baby's microbiome and the baby basically can never recover from that.

And so my daughter, who had been receiving antibiotics at birth for about a month, I realized that there was an opportunity for me to help millions of people, including my own daughter. And that really set the path for exploring metabolism in the microbiome and then also for really being dedicated to creating natural products because it's something that I wanted to be able to give to my own child.

Claudia von Boeselager (05:56)
⁓ so beautiful. so fast forward, maybe you can take us on that journey. you clearly went down a lot of rabbit holes to understand it. And, this was really the new frontier and

even going back five years ago, talking about the microbiome, most people didn't understand it. It's much more of a buzzword. But what was that path? What was that journey, Colleen, to you to where you are today?

Colleen Cutcliffe (06:15)
Well, I think it starts with what I just said to you, which is like, we thought it was going to be this really cool science and we could make products. And that was all we knew. And so when I look back, I'm amazed anybody gave us any funding because it really was a research project in the beginning. We basically didn't know what the product was going to be. We didn't even know if you could actually change the microbiome. And we didn't know if you could change the microbiome in a way that could help with any of these myriad of diseases we wanted to go after. And so it really was almost eight years.

of R &D work, just trying to figure out what is happening in the microbiome, where is there a target of opportunity, and then doing all the traditional pharmaceutical development you do, which is in the lab work, pre-clinical trials, clinical trials, and all that culminated finally in a big publication on a placebo-controlled double-blinded randomized trial where we showed that this formulation that was completely novel could actually lower A1C and blood glucose spikes in people with diabetes.

Claudia von Boeselager (06:56)
you

Colleen Cutcliffe (07:12)
And it's the first and still the only time a probiotic has ever been able to be shown to be able to do that. And so that was really, you know, a lot of blood, sweat and tears to figure that out.

Claudia von Boeselager (07:23)
I'm really, really excited to dig into all those details And so I'd love to take a step back, look at gut health as the root of longevity as well. Cause we often think about gut health as digestion, right? But

The research is obviously clear what you were saying. There's a link to metabolic health, to immunity, mood, even energy, which is fundamental for us living well and thriving. So can you break down for listeners why the gut is really the root system of longevity?

Colleen Cutcliffe (07:48)
Yes, I think when we think about the body and what we learn in textbooks is that there's these 11 systems in the body and they're all kind of functioning independently. And we know that they interact with each other a little bit, but the gut microbiome, what we've discovered is it's really at the center. It interacts with all of your systems. So your metabolism, your immune response, yes, your digestion, but also your brain function. And so when we think about what are the key pillars to healthy aging,

Claudia von Boeselager (08:08)
you

Colleen Cutcliffe (08:14)
It's really centered around how do we keep all those systems operating optimally? And the reason your gut microbiome is such an important part of that is because with the food that you eat, you are populating a ⁓ entire ecosystem inside your body that is producing all of these small molecules and proteins and enzymes that are signaling to every part of your body. And so when you have a healthy gut microbiome that is creating all those proper signals, including neurotransmitters,

Claudia von Boeselager (08:17)
you you

Colleen Cutcliffe (08:41)
then you are going to be hitting all of those systems that are

important for longevity, including your ability to metabolize sugars, your energy levels, your brain function, all of these things become really important, even your muscle mass. So all of these things are important and tied to the gut microbiome. And so when you're missing those certain strains that can't perform those functions, you start to feel it depleted across the board. And so people often say when a probiotic is hitting for them,

They feel it in a lot of different ways and that's because it really is at your core.

Claudia von Boeselager (09:12)
So exciting. as we know, 88 % of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. what would you suggest, Colleen, where should people start if they want to take back control of their gut and metabolic health?

Colleen Cutcliffe (09:23)
I think the first thing is to look at your diet because that is one of the most profound ways to alter your microbiome. There's two things that we do that completely change our microbiome. One is taking antibiotics. So for some people, they notice that after they've taken antibiotics, all of a sudden they have these new issues that they never had before. So that could be because your microbiome was depleted and you haven't actually been able to replenish those functions back in your body. And your diet is one of the most

efficient ways to replenish your microbiome. so eating foods that are high in fiber, eating foods that are high in polyphenols, these are all going to be really helpful for reconstituting and feeding. There's actually the food for your gut microbes. That's going to be really important. And then there are certain strains which are actually hard to replenish in that way. And so you might want to supplement. Oftentimes, if people are dealing with chronic issues that they've been trying to figure it out and sort it out themselves, it's helpful to talk to a practitioner about this.

⁓ these kind of like functional and integrative medicine doctors who are thinking about more holistically Eastern and Western medicine and the microbiome, they tend to be pretty sophisticated in helping people target their gut health. So I would say think about whether you've been on antibiotics recently and there might be some cause there to look at your microbiome. The second is to look at your food and increase your fibers and polyphenols. And the third is maybe work with a healthcare practitioner

Claudia von Boeselager (10:40)
So,

Colleen Cutcliffe (10:42)
to help you more efficiently get your gut health in shape.

Claudia von Boeselager (10:45)
Beautiful. I'd love to look at your innovation with live akkermansia So in doing my research for a conversation, one thing that really stood out to me is how critical akkermansia, and I'm going to might butcher this a bit, mucin, I philia, philia, mucin, a philia, next generation probiotic strain pendulum, you have pioneered.

is for gut and metabolic health So as I understood, it's naturally found in our distal colon and even in breast milk, which I think is fascinating. And most of us are deficient. it's also so and I'd love to unpack this as well because it can't survive in oxygen. So growing it outside of the body must be a huge challenge. And I want to understand about that. And when this really came to light was for people listening who might've heard my second conversation with Dr. William Li recently.

He was describing akkermansia as a keystone strain, almost like a natural GLP-1 with wide-ranging benefits for metabolism, gut lining, and overall health. So I was delighted to discover Pendulum and that you were the first company to actually make live akkermansia, so no easy feat and I want to unpack this, available in supplement form, something that most people didn't even know could be done.

before I hand this over to you, I wanted to also thank you and your team for also giving myself and the audience the opportunity to try it. So dear audience, you can get 20 % off your first membership order by going to pendulumlife.com forward slash claudia20. So Colleen, for you, what makes acarmancia a keystone strain that is so special and why are so many of us deficient as well? Could you share?

Colleen Cutcliffe (12:14)
Sure. think akkermansia, first of all, it was only discovered in, I think, 2010 or the early 2000s. So it's a strain that you're not going to find on the shelves because it was only discovered. And so what makes it a keystone strain are two key things. The first thing is that there were all these studies that were being done trying to look at what is the difference between a healthy person and a sick person.

And to find sick in any way that you want to, it's type 2 diabetes, is Parkinson's disease, it is digestive issues, it is deficient immune responses, all these different illnesses, one common strain kept coming up as deficient in the people who were sick, and it was akkermansia mucinophila. And so that was the first step where people were like, why is this strain deficient across all these different diseases? And that's one of the things that makes it a keystone strain. So when you're missing it, it shows up, it's correlated with all these different diseases.

The second thing is as people started digging more into it, there's now thousands of studies published about akkermansia. They realized that it has two really important functions. The first is, as its name implies, mucinophila. It loves mucin. And so mucin is actually the glue in your gut lining that holds the gut lining structure in place. So if you ever heard about leaky gut,

or you're worried that you have gut permeability and that's creating inflammatory and immune deficiency responses or things, responses that you don't really want to be having in your body, you might be deficient in akkermansia because it is the glue that keeps that structure in place. And so that's one important factor. So if you're low in it, you have a deficient gut lining. You literally have openings in your gut lining and nobody wants to have a leaky gut. ⁓ It's not good. It's not good.

Claudia von Boeselager (13:54)
That doesn't sound good.

Colleen Cutcliffe (13:57)
the second thing that people discover that acrimency can do is that it can stimulate GLP-1 production. people have come to know GLP-1s through drugs like Ozempic and the incredible immediate weight loss that people experience on those drugs. Those drugs are actually chemicals that are mimicking your body's natural GLP-1 hormone. So your body naturally makes GLP-1.

And more importantly, it's your gut microbiome that stimulates GLP-1. And then more importantly, it's akkermansia that stimulates your gut that stimulates GLP-1. So if you're deficient in akkermansia, you're likely not getting your natural GLP-1. So if you have this strain that's responsible for the structure of your gut lining and responsible for stimulating your body's GLP-1 hormone, well, you can see why people think it's such an important strain.

Claudia von Boeselager (14:43)
I am curious, Colleen, because

Are all babies born with the same level of akkermansia As it's found in breast milk, if babies are bottle-fed, for example, do they have less akkermansia Has there been studies around that?

Colleen Cutcliffe (14:58)
I think the initial colonization of the gut microbiome is still under a lot of study. And akkermansia is not the first strain that you kind of see pop up when there's newborn babies. The first strain that pops up is bifidobacterium infantis. A super important strain actually works with akkermansia mucinophila. They're actually kind of on the same team. One passes the ball to the other and helps you create short-chain fatty acids that are important for a healthy gut microbiome.

Claudia von Boeselager (15:19)
You

Yeah.

Colleen Cutcliffe (15:23)
Some are early in development, people do start to see the appearance of akkermansia mycenaephila. And to your point, there have been so many studies that have been done today to try to figure out what foods you can find akkermansia in. And there hasn't been a single food or beverage where people have found akkermansia. It has only really been found in mother's breast milk. And so the idea is that your mother gives it to you and then you spend the rest of your life trying not to lose it. Or

Claudia von Boeselager (15:49)
Or replenish it, right?

Colleen Cutcliffe (15:50)
replenish it, yes.

it is fed by... You can increase akkermansia levels through these fibers and through polyphenols. And so in infant formula, there are a bunch of these different small molecules that can help feed the akkermansia. So even if you're not full-time breastfeeding and even if you're mostly bottle feeding, as long as you're getting some of that ⁓ seed planted in there of akkermansia and you're feeding it with these other... A lot of the ingredients that are in infant formula.

you should be good to go in terms of giving your baby a good start with their acrimancia levels.

Claudia von Boeselager (16:21)
Okay, I'm sure there's some mothers are going, like had to bottle feel, have to work, whatever exactly.

Colleen Cutcliffe (16:23)
Yes, it's okay. We'll mess our

children up in a myriad of ways, but this is one thing I think we're okay with.

Claudia von Boeselager (16:28)
Exactly.

We do our best. do our best. Colleen, can you share what were the biggest challenges your team faced in actually pulling off live akkermansia available in supplement form?

Colleen Cutcliffe (16:42)
Yeah, I think this is a really important distinction to make because when people are looking up akkermansia or searching for it on Amazon, it's really important to look for live akkermansia versus pasteurized akkermansia. So pasteurized akkermansia is where they treat the akkermansia with a high heat in order to kill it. So it's basically dead organism. So you don't want, I mean, that's easier to make than live and keep alive.

Claudia von Boeselager (17:06)
Yeah,

but you have none of the benefits then, right, if it's been killed essentially.

Colleen Cutcliffe (17:10)
There've been some studies that show that you can get some of the benefits because they've killed it. And so all those small molecules that were in that original live akkermansia, those are being delivered. But the problem is you can never colonize on your own. So you have to be on that for the rest of your life. And the efficacy is not as large as if you're getting live akkermansia. And so I think for all those reasons, it's sort of an inferior product to the live akkermansia. So you want to make sure you don't get duped in the pastries. It's less expensive, all things that you would expect. So you want to look for live akkermansia. And the reason

Claudia von Boeselager (17:37)
Mm-hmm.

Colleen Cutcliffe (17:40)
that it's hard to make and sustain live akkermansia is because it lives in that mucin layer and feeds off mucin. It doesn't feed off regular things. And it is, as you pointed out earlier, it's a strict anaerobic, meaning that it can't survive in the presence of oxygen. So you actually have to freeze dry the akkermansia after you grow it. You culture it. If you've ever been to a brewery or a vineyard or they have those big bats, you kind of culture the stream. And then

When you want to get it into a pill format, you have to freeze dry it with all these things that protect it through that freezing stage so that it can remain protected. Once it's freeze dried and in a powder form, it's actually quite stable if you follow that process. But that was a lot of the challenges and the hurdles, which is first, how do you grow this guy who has to grow in the presence of no oxygen whatsoever? And the way you do that is you basically pump in other gases in order to keep the oxygen out.

And then the second thing is how do you keep this thing alive so that when the person ingests it, it's going to come back into life in the gut microbiome and do its job. And so those are, mean, and we can talk about delivery too. That would be the third challenge is how do you make sure that it gets all the way to the gut microbiome and the distal colon. So these are all the big challenges.

Claudia von Boeselager (18:55)
wow. Sounds like ⁓ a few head scratching and reflecting and iterations going on there as well.

Colleen Cutcliffe (19:01)
Yes,

I think if we had known how hard it was going to be, we probably wouldn't have taken this on. In some ways, a lot of people who've been in the probiotic space for a long time didn't do this because they probably knew all these challenges existed. But we kind of came from a different, more ignorant place, which allowed us to kind of make all these steps one by one.

Claudia von Boeselager (19:04)
I

And your why was really big, right? So to help your daughter, I'm sure, and all the other people in similar boat. Let's talk about the delivery though. So I think some people are cautious with supplements. like, well, you know, how much does it get to the cell? it doesn't really work. So maybe you can walk us through that.

Colleen Cutcliffe (19:31)
Yeah, you really want to have proof that the strain is getting delivered. And so we have publications showing that you can see the appearance of the strain. And more importantly, one of the things that akkermansia can help do is to stimulate short-chain fatty acid production. So you can actually see short-chain fatty acid production also. So that tells you that the thing is getting there. It's doing its job. It's coming to life. And so we've done all of that research and work, and it's all published data.

But the way you as a consumer can know, unless you're out there reading a bunch of published papers, is you can talk to your healthcare practitioner about it. We also have all publications on our website, so you can also download them easily and take a look at them. But what you want to look for when you're looking for any probiotic is a capsule that has two key components. One is enteric coding, and the second is time-delayed release.

Claudia von Boeselager (20:19)
So,

Colleen Cutcliffe (20:20)
And the reason is because when you think about the...

the journey, the adventure that this pill has to go through, you swallow it. It has to get through your stomach first. Your stomach has a lot of acid in it. And then it has to get all the way through the GI tract, which is just this long winding tunnel to the distal colon. So you want the enteric coating to get through the stomach acid that protects it through the acid. And you want the time delayed release because that gets it through the whole tunnel to the distal colon, where then the capsule will open up and now all your goodies can come out there in the right location. You've got to deliver.

Claudia von Boeselager (20:51)
Amazing. So let's look at results in clinical evidence you were touching on there So your pendulum glucose control, one of the products you have, showed a 33 % reduction in glucose spikes, as you mentioned before, and a

0.6 point A1C in a BMJ published double blind trial, right? So totally reputable quality results that I think a lot of my audience love digging into the science mean, these are really pharma level results. How do you think about Pendulum's role? Are you a supplement company? Are you biotech company? Are you new category altogether?

Colleen Cutcliffe (21:23)
Yeah, we really are a biotech company because all that stuff that I just explained to you was all kind of at the heart of it, really biotech. And it's kind of a mix of biotech and pharma, right? How do you identify what's the right pathway to go after? How do you figure out how to grow these novel strains? How do you figure out how to deliver them? How do you make sure that you're publishing, you're creating publication quality data that people can really look at and say, okay, I believe this. And so I think we really are a

Claudia von Boeselager (21:30)
Mm-hmm.

Colleen Cutcliffe (21:49)
company and pharmaceutical in the blueprint that we use for developing products. But at the end of the day, think consumers are smart enough now to be able to make good choices about their own health. And so because this is a natural product, we can bring it directly to consumers. And so I think in terms of the category, pendulum glucose control is actually not a supplement and it's not a drug. It's in this third category called medical food.

And that's why we can make claims around A1C and type 2 diabetes because it's not actually a dietary supplement. And so there are some different ways in which you can, if you have the data, you can start to make these claims and really differentiate yourself. I think that we're just the beginning of another ⁓ or a whole new generation of products that are going to be probiotics and prebiotics, but they are really founded in science and pharmaceutical-like drug development.

that the world has been waiting for and needs. We really need these natural products that are going to be able to help us. And the microbiome is beautiful because it's one of the only places in the body where you can actually have a natural product, the bugs as drugs themselves, that actually delivers the work.

Claudia von Boeselager (22:57)
I love that the bugs is drugs. And I mean, you've had amazing early investors like the Mayo Clinic, et cetera, right? So I think it's really showing that the importance of this rigorous clinical validation, you know, and for people listening to, I get a lot of questions.

which supplements, how do you focus on it, where's the research, et cetera. And I love that you're really coming from that scientific backing to really validate what you're doing. So congratulations on that. Colleen, I'd like to move on to women's health and longevity. So something that stood out to me is your research on menopause and the And your research shows that menopause significantly reduces gut microbial diversity, which I didn't know.

including important strains like akkermansia. I was very surprised to learn this. Can you explain the connection between gut health and women's health across the lifespan and how microbiome interventions might support women in perimenopause and menopause to maintain resilience, energy and metabolic balance?

Colleen Cutcliffe (23:51)
Absolutely. Well, first of all, the work has been done globally by amazing investigators across the world. And I just get to have the luxury of pulling it all together and then telling you about it. First of all, and as this is true with menopause in general and women's health, there's so much more research that could be done. There's very little out there, but I'll tell you what we do know so far. What we do know is that your microbiome changes significantly when you go through key hormonal changes in life.

Claudia von Boeselager (24:13)
you

Colleen Cutcliffe (24:18)
So when you go through, as Owen, when you go through puberty, that's the first big hormonal change that we experience. And your microbiome completely shifts when you're prepubescent and then post-pubescent. And then between puberty and menopause, menopause being the second huge hormonal change that we go through, there is a particular

Claudia von Boeselager (24:38)
So, thank

Colleen Cutcliffe (24:39)
type of microbiome that you have. And when you go through menopause, on the other side of that, your post-menopausal microbiome looks totally different.

So you have kind of three stages of microbiome. One is pre-puberty, the second is between puberty and menopause, and the third is post-menopausal. And one of the really interesting things about menopause, about what happens to our microbiome through menopause is it's directly correlated to these hormonal changes. So if you have investigated menopause at all, you'll know

Claudia von Boeselager (25:06)
you

Colleen Cutcliffe (25:06)
that one of the things that happens during menopause is you get this like dramatic decline in estrogen and progesterone. And that's some of the...

huge pain points that people experience when they go through paramenopause and through menopause is just dramatic change and drop in those hormone levels. Well, your microbiome actually goes through a similar change and becomes extremely depleted in certain microbes. And you can literally plot the drop in estrogen progesterone and lay it right on top of the drop of these microbiome strains. And they literally converge

on top of each other. they're changing exactly together. Yes.

Claudia von Boeselager (25:36)
Direct correlation.

Well.

Colleen Cutcliffe (25:40)
The key things that you're losing are strains that are actually interacting with those hormones. And so before you go through menopause, you could take a gut microbiome sample and you could say, like, this is a man or this is a woman, just by looking at their microbiome alone. After women go through menopause, our microbiomes look like men's. And so you actually cannot tell the difference between a man and a woman's microbiome after menopause. That's how different it

and so it is an incredible

difference. And so I think there's a big opportunity for us to kind of target the menopausal microbiome, the postmenopausal microbiome, and also even just to help during that precipitous decline, you know, how can we kind of ease that decline? And so there's a lot of research going on right now about how to modify the microbiome to help alleviate the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause.

Claudia von Boeselager (26:27)
I'm really

curious about this. I want to dig in a little bit deeper.

As we know, right, hormones are dropping off, estrogen, et cetera, even testosterone as well. And there's obviously HRT supplementation, but you said that the relevant microbiome bacteria is also disappearing. So is it because there's less estrogen in the body that they're then dying off because they're not needed? Like what exactly is happening there that the bacteria is also disappearing?

Colleen Cutcliffe (26:55)
Yes, this is perfect chicken and egg question. So I think that is part of the issue is what is causing, which one is causing which, and that is definitely still being studied. But I think regardless of which is causing which, you could have a solution that is independent of the cause, right? And so you could still have a solution that you replenish one side and it helps the other side. So I think that's really, ⁓ for us, that's where we're focused. And other people are solving the chicken and egg problem.

Claudia von Boeselager (26:57)
haha

Yeah.

But it makes sense as well. And do you find people who are supplementing that they are not experiencing the same symptoms, that their estrogen levels, for example, are staying elevated for longer?

Colleen Cutcliffe (27:32)
people using our products, especially around glucose control, because if you have obesity, pre-diabetes, or type 2 diabetes, actually all of your symptoms when you go through menopause are far worse. And it usually exacerbates your diabetes. So oftentimes people end up having to go on higher doses of medication or new medication when they go through menopause because of these changes. we definitely have customers with

metabolic diseases that are that the our products are helping them through that. But I would say we haven't done the kind of gold standard any any placebo control double-blinded trial. And I also think that if we were going to develop a menopausal product, there's a couple of other strains that probably need to be

Claudia von Boeselager (28:13)
let's look at some human stories. So pendulum is obviously science first, but what stories have moved you most, maybe from customers or clinicians about how these interventions are changing lives?

Colleen Cutcliffe (28:26)
I think it's always the inspiration first getting into health in the first place, I think is the people and the people that you can help. And so we have just these beautiful stories. I'll share one with you, which is this woman who, she lives in Alabama and she's super smart, but she never went to college because her grandmother got type two diabetes. runs in their family. And when her grandmother got type two diabetes, she ended up having to have

one leg amputated and then her other leg amputated related to the disease. And so she ended up quitting college and coming back to live with her grandmother to take care of her. And she just decided, I am not gonna go through this. I am not gonna get type 2 diabetes. So she exercised, she ate really well, very disciplined. And so she was devastated when she got into her 50s and went to a doctor's appointment and the doctor said, your A1C is elevated, you are pre-diabetic. And...

She came to us because she had been doing her own research about different strains and acromancy and all this stuff. And so tried our product and it was able to lower her A1C and actually reduce her food cravings. She said, interestingly, I have been fighting this battle my whole life of food cravings. And I didn't realize that if I had had this better microbiome that was helping me produce GLP-1, I wouldn't have all these food cravings that I've been fighting this whole time. And so it actually made it easier for her to even just do the things that she was doing beforehand.

Claudia von Boeselager (29:46)
Huge,

Colleen Cutcliffe (29:47)
So I think that's really being able to break the cycle of a multi-generational problem in health is huge.

Claudia von Boeselager (29:47)
a gift, Huge, what a gift, yeah.

And I also love that Halle Berry, the Hollywood actress, for those who may not be familiar, not only was using it, but became such a fan that she's become your chief communications officer. maybe you can share what did her journey with the product teach you about impact and maybe even storytelling?

Colleen Cutcliffe (30:13)
Yeah, well, think that so Hallie Berry, a lot of people don't know, has diabetes or had diabetes. And so, and this is another, think, important thing for people to realize is that somebody who is top of their game in terms of nutrition and exercise can still have a depleted microbiome that impacts their health. And so her experience with our product was she was on it ⁓ and saw her A1C drop and she shared that and she shared it with us. I met her

several years ago and she wanted to wait before she made any conclusions. She wanted to reach out to me to understand like how does this product actually work? She'd heard about it from the Cleveland Clinic and so I took her through how it works and then literally a year later where she still was experiencing those health benefits she said okay this is real so now I want to talk about how can I help the company and you know I think if you know who Halle Berry is you know that she is a

Claudia von Boeselager (30:58)
Okay.

Colleen Cutcliffe (31:07)
one of those people who has been an A-lister in Hollywood through many, many ⁓ people who've appeared and gone away. And to have that kind of longevity in Hollywood is not by accident. She's incredibly smart about building a brand, about

Claudia von Boeselager (31:14)
Mm-hmm.

Colleen Cutcliffe (31:20)
reinventing yourself, about staying relevant. And so when she came on to work with us, she and I, first of all, had a really strong personal connection, but she also said, look, you got the science down, you know how to create products that work.

I know how to build a brand, like why don't we work together to build this company? And so that's really what we've been doing together. And she's been an amazing partner, incredibly creative, and just brings a, I think a level of legitimacy to anybody who's trying to ⁓ age healthy

Claudia von Boeselager (31:46)
So,

Colleen Cutcliffe (31:48)
and doesn't wanna look to all these pharmaceuticals and unnatural ways to do it. She really is kind of an icon of natural, beautiful aging.

Claudia von Boeselager (31:57)
Role model for a lot of us, exactly. Because as we know with longevity, we want to take care of our insides, but it helps if we look good on the outside as well. And typically, if we take care of the inside, the outside will reflect it so you've said Pendulum is rethinking healthcare by combining the precision of biotech with the wisdom of nature.

What do you see as the future of microbiome therapeutics? And could we see a world where gut interventions replace or even outperform standard drugs for metabolic disease?

Colleen Cutcliffe (32:24)
I think that it depends on how we define outperform. the context of longevity, think totally, because what you're doing is you're giving your body back the functions that it used to have or you never really had in full force, and you're not going to get all those side effects that come with small molecule drugs. And so if you think about like, hey, I'm 20 or I'm 30 or I'm 50 or I'm 70, and I want to take something for decades to come, this is something that is going to give you

Claudia von Boeselager (32:43)
Okay.

Colleen Cutcliffe (32:51)
sustained long-term health benefits. So if you think about it from that perspective, I would say hands down, yes, this is going to out-compete any drug out there. On the other hand, if you define impact as I'm going to see an immediate result and I don't really care or think about the side effects too much, it's unlikely

Claudia von Boeselager (33:00)
Okay.

Okay.

Colleen Cutcliffe (33:08)
that you're going to see that with any microbiome intervention the same way that you do with a small molecule drug. And the reason is because, first of all, you have to get these microbes into your existing ecosystem. They have to colonize.

and they have to start performing their duties. And so it's going to naturally take longer than if you ingest, inject your body or take a small molecule that's gonna go immediately to the target. And also a lot of these small molecules don't get metabolized by the body very quickly because they're unrecognizable

Claudia von Boeselager (33:21)
Okay.

Colleen Cutcliffe (33:35)
to the body. And so you will get a really strong immediate impact, but there's sort of the long-term downsides as well as side effects sometimes that come immediately.

Claudia von Boeselager (33:45)
And just for people interested, how long would you say it takes for, with the supplementation, with the live akkermansia, et cetera, to start noticing a difference? Because there is that colonization that's happening, so you're really replenishing and you're rebuilding.

Colleen Cutcliffe (33:56)
Thank

Claudia von Boeselager (33:58)
Is it a one month, is it six months, is it a year? What would you say is a guideline? Obviously everyone's a bit different.

Colleen Cutcliffe (34:05)
I know, I'm going to give you the annoying answer, which is that it depends. It depends on your starting microbiome and your starting health state. It depends on your diet and your environment. It depends on your stress levels. ⁓ It depends on if you're going through menopause. It depends on if you're taking antibiotics. It depends on actually if you travel a lot. All of these are actually things that have been shown to deplete the microbiome. So if you don't have a diet that's high in fibers, if you took antibiotics recently,

Claudia von Boeselager (34:08)
It's events, Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Colleen Cutcliffe (34:32)
If you travel a lot and your circadian rhythm changes all the time, if you're under a lot of stress, if you're going through hormonal changes, all of these things change your microbiome. Some of them you have control over, some of them you don't. And so all of those will impact how long it takes your body to actually accept these new strains and start experiencing the benefits of them. And for some people, you know, it can happen in a matter of days. And other people, we've had them come back and say, I just really stuck with this thing because I was a believer.

And finally, six months later, I'm starting to feel the impact and I went off of it to see if it really was the probiotic and all my bad stuff came back. So I would say it really does depend on all of those multi-factors.

Claudia von Boeselager (35:11)
I think for everyone listening and wondering as well, it's really knowing that you are with every time you do the supplementation, you are replenishing what is so desperately needed. We have so many toxins in our environment, what we ingest,

Yeah, just bit by bit and have that patience. And I think that's the tricky part for people who go to medication, they want the wonder pill. You have to realize how the body is actually made and replenishing it is just so important and rebuilding. Colleen, I'm curious, what is your optimal health routine? What have you started implementing? do you set yourself up to win the day and win the week?

Colleen Cutcliffe (35:41)
I think for me, one of the most important pillars has always been sleep. And I know sleep right now is kind of becoming a much bigger thing. And I'm so glad because it is so important. So I've always been very disciplined about my sleep. even my kids make fun of me. They're like, we go to bed after our mother. I. Yes. Yeah. But I think that, for me personally, I just noticed very early on that if I didn't get good sleep,

Claudia von Boeselager (35:56)
I know I'm an avid aura ring wearer. I know this is a big thing to do.

Colleen Cutcliffe (36:07)
I almost felt hungover for the whole next day. Like I just really couldn't function as well. So for me, sleep has always been a really important thing. And then I would say things have changed. I used to wake up ravenous and I had to have breakfast right away. And now as I started to age, I don't wake up quite as ravenous. I kind of don't eat until lunchtime as sort of my first meal. And I think that that breakfast, whether you're eating it at 6 a.m. or 2 p.m., that breaking of the fast is actually really important. And so I'm always very thoughtful because what's been happening

to your microbiome over that time is you're starving your microbes. So every morning, every time you break the fast is an opportunity to select for the microbes that you want to grow. So if you start with things that are high in fiber, high in polyphenols, you're really giving those a head start to all those microbes that you really want to flourish. you know, starting with a smoothie that has polyphenols or berries, or even some people will have salad with their breakfast. You know, all of those things are great things to start with.

And so I really try to adhere to that when I'm breaking the fast. I have something that's got fibers or polyphenols in it.

Claudia von Boeselager (37:11)
can you walk us through Pendulum's products? Not only is the design so so powerful as well. So can you walk through the different products that you have and just share that with my audience as well and what applications or use cases you would recommend them for?

Colleen Cutcliffe (37:24)
Yeah, well actually, and I should tell you the packaging, we recently just changed it this year. It used to be kind of, you I'm a scientist. I'm like, you just put it in a bottle and throw it on a shelf. what's the problem? What's inside the bottle that really matters? And this is actually a big thing with Hallie, our relationship where she really pressured me. She was like, Colleen, I want to work with you on redesigning the packaging because even though I know the inside is what counts,

Claudia von Boeselager (37:31)
Who cares about packaging exactly? I want the science, yeah.

Yeah.

Colleen Cutcliffe (37:51)
The entirety of the experience is actually what's really important. And so we really coordinated on this new packaging. And I think it does look really beautiful. And I think it does matter when you are launching into a new product or launching into a new health routine that everything about it feels really good and premium. Because your body deserves premium product from the way it feels when you unbox it to the way it feels after you've been taking the pills. So I'll start with that. That was not my push, but definitely one of things that came to mind.

Claudia von Boeselager (38:02)
You You

Colleen Cutcliffe (38:18)
The lineup of products is really centered around ⁓ metabolism and gut health. So we'll start with our flagship product, which is pendulum glucose control. If you have type 2 diabetes, you're trying to lower your A1C, you're trying to lower your blood glucose spikes. That is kind of the Cadillac. That's your product. It has all five strains at the highest dose. was a publication in BMJ. If you're trying to lower your A1C and blood glucose spikes, pendulum glucose control is for you.

have good metabolic health and have kind of a daily pill that you can take in order to sustain metabolic health, metabolic daily is right for you. It's basically the same as glucose control. It has all the same strains, but just a lower dose. So if you're like, well, I don't have diabetes, but I think metabolic health is really important. I want to stimulate my body's GLP-1 production, then you should take metabolic daily. If you're like, okay, my gut is a wreck. I think my gut lining has been destroyed through all these different stress and environmental factors.

Claudia von Boeselager (39:08)
So,

Colleen Cutcliffe (39:10)
then akkermansia is a single strain and you can just take that. Acromansia is in metabolic daily and pendulum glucose control, but if you're just targeting the gut component, you can take just pure akkermansia. So those are the three products. If you're just doing gut, it's akkermansia. You want daily metabolic health, it's metabolic daily. You've got diabetes and you want to lower your A1C, that's glucose control. And then we also sell a polyphenol that you can take as a booster that goes with any of these and it boosts your akkermansia. We did a lot of work to...

Claudia von Boeselager (39:14)
you

Colleen Cutcliffe (39:38)
look at what are the right polyphenols to boost acrimacy levels. And so that's a booster. if you take that along with the probiotics, you kind of get accelerated benefit of the probiotics.

Claudia von Boeselager (39:47)
Amazing. And I know with some supplements they recommend cycling. Would you recommend that too or is this something you can take every day?

Colleen Cutcliffe (39:53)
You can take this every day. think one of the recommendations around cycling is that most of the ingredients that are on the market are either lactobacillus or bifidobacterium strains. And so when people recommend cycling, they just want you to cycle, like kind of get some different bifidobacteria and some different lactobacillus strains. The strains that are in our product are acrimansic mucinophila, anaerobutyric amylohyse. So you're going to find strains in there that don't exist in any other products.

until somebody else comes out with other strains in the system that can have health benefits, cycling off of this, it's not really equal to the other probiotics that are out there. So I do think cycling those other ones does make sense, but for this one, because the strains are unique, you can't really substitute or cycle

Claudia von Boeselager (40:34)
if you could fast forward 10 years out, what breakthroughs in the microbiome space excite you most? What do you see?

Colleen Cutcliffe (40:42)
two areas that are really exciting. One is what we were talking about in women's health and really targeting these hormonal moments. And we didn't talk about the third moment, which is if decide to have children or you're lucky enough to be able to have children or unlucky enough to have children, depending on how you see it. But when you go through pregnancy, that's another place where you're going through extreme hormonal changes and you are responsible for the microbiome that your baby is exposed to in utero and then also in delivery and then.

Claudia von Boeselager (40:56)
Depending how you say it.

Colleen Cutcliffe (41:10)
after during breastfeeding. That's another moment where there's an opportunity. So I think for women's health, every time we go through these hormonal changes, there's a big opportunity for the microbiome to play a role. And so I'm looking forward to that for mostly selfish reasons. And then I think the other big breakthroughs will really come around this gut-brain axis. I started my career working in Parkinson's disease, and we were always very focused on the brain and these plaques that show up in the brain and how do you target them.

Claudia von Boeselager (41:15)
Okay. Okay.

Colleen Cutcliffe (41:36)
And it turns out that the gut might be a huge opportunity to modify the neurotransmitters and the actual onset and progression of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. And so I think that's a huge opportunity to think about the gut-brain axis. And it's not just Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. It includes autism. It includes anxiety, depression, stress. And so there's a whole, when we talk about like our gut instinct or that gut feeling or butterflies in your stomach,

This is kind of terms that we use because we kind of know at the heart of it, our gut is tied to our brain and affecting our emotions. And so I think that's going to be another big breakthrough that can help a lot of people.

Claudia von Boeselager (42:13)
really excited about that. As my audience will know, my mother sadly just recently passed with Alzheimer's disease. So it's been a real passion area of mine. We've had many neuroscientists on as well. even Dr. David Perlmutter right? So comes back to the gut and the food and that we feed our body the medicine every day, right? So yeah, really, really

Colleen, do you have a few minutes for some longevity rapid fire questions before we finish what's a surprising biohack or longevity tool that's had the biggest impact on your health? And I'm going to obviously say besides akkermansia and

Colleen Cutcliffe (42:33)
Okay, let's do it.

I would say for me, surprisingly, it's this cryotherapy, whether you're doing it in a bath or doing it in a chamber. I have always hated cold weather. I grew up in Georgia. I love warm weather. I had to live in Boston and in Chicago for many

did not like the winters there. And so it's almost ironic that now I'm deliberately experiencing ⁓ that coldness.

But I think it's just, you feel it immediately. There's just such an immediate impact. And we know that it's really stimulating all of these different pathways that are not normally stimulated. It's like we've become so, we've created so many inventions for life to become so comfortable that our body is just kind of in a dormant state in so many ways. And so really activating it through cryotherapy, I think is something that I was surprised by and actually now do.

Claudia von Boeselager (43:34)
Yeah, I love it too. So I used to be very sensitive to cold, then you realize you don't actually feel the cold anymore because your heating engine essentially is working really well. yeah. if you could only keep one longevity habit for the rest of your life, Colleen, what would it be?

Colleen Cutcliffe (43:47)
It would be feeding my microbiome. think that that is, it really is the key. you know, I don't take a bunch of supplements and I am not on any pharmaceutical I think that if you can manage your gut health, hopefully you can kind of stave all of those off for as long as possible.

Claudia von Boeselager (44:03)
What's been your most exciting purchase in the last six months? Under $200. So for people listening, they love this and we love brands, we love specifics and it doesn't even need to be health and longevity related. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.

Colleen Cutcliffe (44:15)
my older daughter, who was the one who inspired the company, actually just started college. filling her room with all these different things. And I told her you should have vitamin C, because like, for sure you're gonna get exposed to all these different illnesses and things like that. So you need to make sure they have vitamins, old school, old school vitamin C.

And so I bought some for her and she started taking them daily. And so I feel like that has been, I think, rewarding purchase because if you have children you know, they usually don't take your advice. And so I think that's, you know, I'm happy about that one.

Claudia von Boeselager (44:46)
a book or resource on health you find yourself recommending over and

Colleen Cutcliffe (44:51)
Well, I think many people who are listening to this probably have already read this book, but you know Peter Attia's book Outlive is one that he and I have sort of become friends over time and he's not a huge on gut health and things like that, but the idea of being able to increase your health span and what are all the different things that we can do to tackle our physical and our mental health is really all kind of embodied in that book Outlive and so

I've recommended it to many people and given it as gifts. ⁓ great stocking stuffer. ⁓ There's the stuffer there, exactly. Highly relevant for anybody who's really trying to age in a healthy way.

Claudia von Boeselager (45:20)
Mine's over here.

you could wave a magic wand and solve one aging related challenge instantly, Colleen, what would it be?

Colleen Cutcliffe (45:35)
I think it would be, it would be cognition. It just being able to be, when you meet those people who are in their nineties and they're just, they really know what's going on there on top of it. They have all these years of accumulated experience and they now know how to translate that into things that can help other people. I think having, being sharp,

Claudia von Boeselager (45:51)
Colleen working listeners find out more about you and pendulum and we can obviously link everything in the show notes.

Colleen Cutcliffe (45:58)
Yes, please come visit the website, pendulumoflife.com. Even if you don't buy anything on the site, we have a lot of materials and resources to learn about the gut microbiome, to learn about gut health, to learn about these strains. And so, and if you're a practitioner, we actually have protocols on there written by other practitioners on how they're using the supplements in their practice alongside other interventions. And so I would encourage everyone to please go to pendulumoflife.com and come learn and hopefully try something.

and I know we're giving a 20 % discount, so hopefully that makes it easier to at least trial.

Claudia von Boeselager (46:27)
Yeah, to try for sure. I'd highly recommend it. I've been really enjoying my supplements as well. As I said, so beautiful, but obviously feeling the health benefits more energy, et cetera. for you, audience, Pendulum and Colleen have kindly gifted 20 % off your first order. So you go to PendulumLife.com forward slash Claudia20 and the discount is applied automatically at checkout.

So Colleen, just as we finish up today, I'd love to close by asking if you could leave our audience with one parting thought about taking control of their metabolic and gut health, what would it

Colleen Cutcliffe (47:01)
I would say the, the, the one takeaway is to actually start to be thoughtful and aware about your gut and metabolic health. A lot of us go through life, we're doing a million things all at once and you start your day and you end your day kind of in just go, go, go mode. I think to take a moment to really think about is my gut digesting food properly? Am I having food cravings for things that I know I don't need?

Am I experiencing brain fog every day after I eat lunch? Am I not sleeping well and therefore, you know, feeling groggy throughout the day, which is leading me to these food cravings, which is leading me to not be my top best self? So I think just really being cognizant of these things and not taking them for granted. A lot of us just sort of think like, ⁓ well, I just, you know, I'm just a chocolate fiend. I always just eat chocolate. It does not have to be that way. It could be that your gut microbiome...

is missing certain strains that are causing you to have those food cravings. And so just be thoughtful for the next couple of days. Just think about after you eat your digestion, all these different energy and metabolic things. And then at the other of the other side of that, after two days of really being aware, think about is there anything that I want to change?

Claudia von Boeselager (48:10)
Beautiful. Colleen, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you for your research and the gut microbiome for really helping so many people improve their It's such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much.

Colleen Cutcliffe (48:20)
Thank you.

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