The forgotten organ.

There is increasing exploratory evidence that body-microbe interactions play a key role in maintaining homeostasis of our gut, skin, immune- and endocrine systems and even our brain. In fact, our body harbours more microbial cells than human cells.

Disruption of this harmonious relationship (dysbiosis) mediates both acute and chronic illness, including infection, inflammatory bowel diseases, autoimmune diseases, behavioural disorders, diabetes and cancer - which microbiota transplantation, live biotherapeutic products and new small molecules recovered from microbes have the potential to cure directly or indirectly, favouring the outcome of existing therapies.

Precision medicine and -editing.

Just like our genomes, our microbes represent unique fingerprints. It has been demonstrated that individuals conserve particular microbial strains over years and that after fecal microbiota transplant, most patients recover an important proportion of the microbial strains present prior to the transplant. Although the overall functional capacities of our microbiomes are much alike, the actual species and strain composition differs between people. At GeneCreek, we believe the analysis of the microbiome needs to be one of precision medicine and microbiome modulation one of precision editing.

read further with "The microbiome in precision medicine: the way forward".

Real life microbiome data is big data.

The microbiome is sometimes a cause, often a mediator or at least a reflection of disease state. The discovery of causal relations between microbial composition and phenotypes of healthy controls, responders and non-responders to a treatment, over the course of disease development, cure and relapse has to be a real life data approach in order to be successful. Indeed, diet, environment, age, gender and lifestyle are influencing directly and indirectly the composition of our microbiomes. Since these parameters vary across countries and continents, meaningful discovery requires analysis of multiple cohorts.

With its focus on non-interventional, large scale and multiple cohort exploratory studies, GeneCreek meets the complexity and variability of microbiota-host interplay upfront, during discovery and pre-clinical testing. This approach has the potential to reduce the risk of failure in downstream clinical evaluation of live biotherapeutic products and other microbiome modulators.