Christopher Reyes

Reyes is the CEO, co-founder, and director of Bloom Science, a San Diego biotech with a deceptively simple premise: the gut, not just the brain, holds part of the cure for neurological disease. Bloom's lead candidate, BL-001, is a first-in-class, orally delivered live biotherapeutic product. The pitch is that it can deliver the neuroprotective benefits of the ketogenic diet without the diet itself - a capsule of carefully chosen, genetically optimized bacteria instead of a punishing regimen of fats and counted carbs.

The science underneath is real and recent. Bloom holds an exclusive technology license from UCLA, built around peer-reviewed research published in the journal Cell showing that gut bacteria mediate the anti-seizure effects of the ketogenic diet in mouse models of refractory epilepsy. Reyes co-founded the company alongside UCLA neuroscientist Elaine Hsiao, whose lab produced that finding, and Duke microbiologist Raphael Valdivia. The work connects a 100-year-old clinical observation to a 21st-century manufacturing problem.

The MethodLooking for the Usain Bolt of bacteria

Reyes does not talk about microbes the way a wellness brand does. He talks about them the way a chemist talks about reagents - specific, measurable, occasionally infuriating. When his team needed to pick the strain that would become a drug, they did not settle for any member of the species. "We wanted to find the Usain Bolt of these bacteria," he has said, "the highest performing strain of that particular species." It is a competitive event, and only the fastest gets the contract.

Then comes the hard part. Gut bacteria are anaerobes, allergic to oxygen and picky about everything else. "These anaerobic bacteria are very finicky," Reyes notes. "Each species has very particular growth media requirements." Turning a promising strain into a reproducible medicine at manufacturing scale is its own discipline, and he is blunt that you cannot fully outsource it: "No matter what you do, even if you contract all of your manufacturing out, you should have some internal capabilities." That instinct - keep your hands on the hard part - runs through his whole career.

The MapFrom three campuses to a capsule

The training reads like a tour of California's research universities. A BA in molecular and cell biology and biophysics from UC Berkeley. A PhD in biophysics from UCSF. A postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. Along the way: National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation fellowships, and a McNair Scholar distinction - a program built to push first-generation and underrepresented students toward doctorates. Bloom's core technology, fittingly, comes out of a fourth campus, UCLA.

After the bench came industry. Reyes spent roughly five years at Biogen Idec as a scientist in molecular discovery, learning how big pharma actually finds and develops drugs. Then he left to build his own. Eclipse Therapeutics, a cancer stem-cell startup he co-founded as chief scientific officer in 2011, was acquired within 18 months - a fast, clean exit that taught him a startup can be a sprint as much as a slog.

There was also a detour that says something about how he thinks. Between biotech ventures, Reyes co-founded Hey Social Good, a public benefit company aimed at helping people identify and support socially and environmentally responsible businesses. A biophysicist building a sustainability platform is not the obvious move. It tracks with how he describes himself: an entrepreneur "with a passion for creating solutions to improve our health, environment and economic sustainability."

The BetLiving medicines for diseases that ignore pills

Bloom's stated mission is to harness the gut-immune-brain axis and expand the landscape of therapies for patients with severe or untreatable neurological and inflammatory conditions. The targets are unforgiving: pharmacoresistant epilepsy, including orphan indications like Dravet syndrome, with the platform reaching toward ALS and other neuroinflammatory disease. These are conditions where existing drugs frequently fail. That is the point - Reyes is aiming at the patients medicine has not reached.

The strategy hinges on a concept that has become a wellness cliche but, in Bloom's hands, is a drug pipeline. The gut and brain talk constantly - through metabolites that feed neurochemical synthesis, through immune signals that climb into neuroinflammation, through pathways like GABA modulation. Bloom's approach is to engineer that conversation on purpose. BL-001 is designed to confer the neuroprotective effects of the ketogenic diet through bacteria that modulate GABA, delivered as a pill.

The Money & The ClockTwelve million and an IND

In December 2021, Bloom Science raised $12 million in Series A financing. The capital had a clear job: file an Investigational New Drug application for BL-001 in refractory epilepsy and push it into Phase I clinical trials. The following year, Bloom strengthened its board, naming veteran biotech executive Dr. Grace E. Colon as board chair. For a company translating a Cell paper into a regulated medicine, the boring work - manufacturing, IND-enabling studies, governance - is where the bet gets won or lost. Reyes, by his own account, would rather keep that work close.

What makes Reyes worth watching is not that he believes the gut talks to the brain. Lots of people say that. It is that he has spent a career learning how to make finicky biology behave at scale, and he is pointing that discipline at diseases that have humiliated easier drugs. The ketogenic diet has worked for a hundred years and almost nobody can stick to it. Putting its effect in a capsule is either very hard or impossible. Reyes is treating it as merely very hard.