Ben Scruggs, CEO of Altis Biosystems: Building the Gut Model That Predicts Which Drugs Actually Work

Ben Scruggs, CEO of Altis Biosystems, joins me to talk about building human gut models that help pharma, biotech, and nutrition companies predict how a drug or ingredient will actually behave in the body before it ever reaches a patient. The conversation covers what an epithelial barrier is and why the gut is such an overlooked bottleneck in drug development, how Altis's technology is being used for absorption studies, inflammation research, and toxicity screening, and why GLP-1 drugs make such a compelling test case for the company's platform.

Just as much of the episode is about Ben's own path: trained as a cell biologist, he spent close to a decade as a venture investor at Hatteras Venture Partners before stepping into the CEO role at Altis, a UNC spinout, about three years ago. He talks candidly about what surprised him most moving from advising founders to running a company himself, including the realization that most of the job is selling, not science.

Altis Biosystems has scaled from testing a few dozen compounds at a time to routinely screening thousands, using automation and robotics to keep pace with customer demand, and Ben shares where he sees the technology heading next, well beyond the gut.

Timestamps

00:00 Cold open & sponsor thank-yous

01:40 Scot's pre-show intro: today's guest, Ben Scruggs of Altis Biosystems

03:33 Episode starts

03:49 How Scot and Ben know each other

04:25 Ben's background: PhD in cell biology, postdoc in genomics

05:28 The pivot into venture investing at Hatteras Venture Partners

06:43 How UNC connections led Ben to Altis Biosystems

09:24 Inside Hatteras Venture Partners: 25 years, 100+ investments