Backing Cambiotics: A Natural Solution to Remove Forever Chemicals From Your Body
This post was originally published on Matt’s Substack.
Last year, researchers found PFAS—toxic synthetic chemicals linked to cancer, liver damage, and immune suppression—in the blood of Antarctic penguins. If penguins living thousands of miles from any industrial activity carry these “forever chemicals” in their bodies, that tells you everything you need to know about how widespread and inescapable this problem has become.
That’s why Collaborative Fund has led Cambiotics’ €4 million seed round, alongside co-investors EIFO and True. The company has developed a promising path to removing PFAS from the human body at scale.
The Problem: Toxic Chemicals That Never Leave
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals that have been used since the 1940s in everything from non-stick cookware to waterproof jackets, cosmetics, food packaging, and firefighting foam. Their defining feature is also their greatest problem: extraordinarily strong carbon-fluorine bonds that make them nearly indestructible.
These bonds give PFAS their valuable properties—they resist heat, repel water and oil, and withstand chemical reactions that would break down other materials. But this same stability means they never degrade in the environment or in living organisms. They can persist for centuries with no natural mechanism for breakdown, which is why they’re called “forever chemicals” and why they accumulate everywhere.
The health impacts are serious and wide-ranging. PFAS exposure has been consistently linked in humans to decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, increased risk of certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, thyroid disease, liver damage, immune suppression, and more1.
They’re Everywhere
PFAS are now detected in the blood of pretty much every person tested, including newborns. They’re in drinking water, rainwater, soil, indoor dust, and throughout the food supply—migrating from packaging into food, absorbed by produce from contaminated water and soil, and bioaccumulated in fish. They’re in your carpet, your dental floss, and your makeup.
There is no practical way to avoid PFAS entirely. You can decrease exposure by filtering your water or avoiding non-stick pans, but you’re still going to be exposed through air, food, and countless products you interact with daily. Nearly all of us carry a measurable PFAS burden in our bodies, and without an active removal strategy, it will only continue to accumulate as we age.
Current Removal Options Are Limited
A couple of months ago, I listened to a depressing podcast on the scale of the PFAS problem and went looking for good removal options. I came across a few, all pretty niche:
Dietary fiber approaches Some studies have shown that high doses of certain fibers, like beta-glucan, can modestly reduce PFAS levels in the blood. For example, a pilot human trial found that men who took a beta-glucan fiber supplement before meals for four weeks saw an 8% reduction in two PFAS types compared with controls. Encouraging, but a relatively limited effect.
Blood-based interventions Donating blood or plasma can reduce PFAS levels. In a randomized trial of firefighters with elevated PFAS, participants who donated plasma every six weeks saw a 30% reduction in serum PFAS, while those who donated whole blood every 12 weeks saw a 10% reduction. More intensive plasma-exchange approaches like Circulate Health’s can likely achieve greater reductions, but at significantly higher cost.
Blood/plasma donation is awesome, and more people should do it, but it’s not a scalable PFAS solution. Regular donation requires ongoing commitment, and the reduction only benefits the donor – not the recipient. You could draw and discard blood solely for PFAS removal, but you’d be paying out-of-pocket for phlebotomy. Intensive plasma exchange is even less accessible, given the cost and needle/blood phobia barrier.
Bile acid sequestrants There’s an old cholesterol drug called cholestyramine that has largely fallen out of favor. In a controlled clinical study of highly exposed adults, 12 weeks of treatment resulted in about a 60% reduction in serum PFOS (a common type of PFAS) levels. This is actually the most effective removal method we have human data for, and it sets a high bar for any alternative.
But cholestyramine has serious practical limitations that prevent it from being a widespread solution. It causes significant GI side effects like bloating, constipation, and nausea. It interferes with other medications, forcing you to time everything carefully around doses. It can cause vitamin deficiencies since it blocks fat-soluble vitamin absorption. It raises triglycerides. And perhaps worst of all, it’s a gritty powder that doesn’t dissolve. Taking it feels like drinking wet sand.
Cambiotics’ target is straightforward: match or exceed this level of PFAS reduction in a form people will actually take consistently, without harmful side effects.
What If Gut Bacteria Could Do This?
I was starting to feel that this problem might be pretty intractable until I came across work published in Nature Microbiology by researchers at the University of Cambridge. They discovered that certain bacterial strains—most already present in healthy human guts—can absorb PFAS. In lab tests, the top-performing strains absorbed 25-74% of the PFAS they encountered.
The real validation came in mice. When researchers gave mice these high-absorbing strains, the mice excreted significantly more PFAS in their feces compared to controls. The bacteria were absorbing PFAS in the gut and carrying it out of the body when excreted.
Most PFAS exposure comes from what we eat and drink. This approach is especially promising because the bacteria target more than just new dietary intake, they also capture PFAS that’s already been stored in your body for years.
PFAS accumulated in your tissues (fat, organs, and especially blood) continuously gets filtered through your liver and secreted into your gut with bile. Normally, most of it gets reabsorbed back into your bloodstream. But PFAS-absorbing bacteria can intercept this cycle. They bind the PFAS before reabsorption and carry it out of the body in feces.
This is the same mechanism cholestyramine uses to achieve its massive 60% reduction—it interrupts the bile recycling loop. The difference is that a probiotic could do this without the miserable side effects. Over time, as PFAS continuously cycles through bile and gets caught by the bacteria, you’re actually depleting your accumulated PFAS, not just blocking new exposure.
Anna Lindell led this work during her PhD under Professor Kiran Patil at Cambridge. They spun out the research to form Cambiotics, joined by Peter Holme Jensen as CEO. The company is developing the highest-performing strains into a probiotic supplement.
Why We’re Excited
PFAS exposure is a massive, growing problem. These chemicals are everywhere, stay in the body for years, and are increasingly linked to serious health outcomes. Today, there are no practical, scalable ways to remove them. Cambiotics may be building the first practical, scalable solution.
The results in mice are compelling, but the crucial next step is to develop a product that works in humans. This €4 million seed round will fund that translation: a clinical trial in 2026 testing their probiotic formulation “46&”, initially in firefighters and other high-exposure groups.
As a probiotic supplement, Cambiotics could go to market on mouse data alone. But the team is committed to validating efficacy in humans first. They’re doing this both because it’s the right approach scientifically and because it matters for adoption and credibility. The plan is to launch in the second half of 2026 with human data in hand. Join the waitlist here if you want in early.
PFAS is in your blood right now. This is our best bet on getting it out.
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Of course, these studies are all observational. We can’t run randomized trials because it would be unethical to randomly assign people to toxic chemical exposure. But observational studies can still suggest causation when they meet certain criteria. For example, PFAS shows a clear dose-response relationship: higher exposure correlates with worse health outcomes. We also understand the biological mechanism: PFAS disrupts hormones and damages organs at the cellular level. This is the same approach used to establish that smoking causes cancer. We never randomly assigned people to smoke, yet the evidence from observational studies became overwhelming. ↩