Tim Sharpington, Chief Executive Officer at Microbiotica, and Matthew Robinson, SVP Research, Microbiotica, discuss the opportunities for precision-based microbiome therapeutics and which diseases could benefit the most from this approach.

The development of genetic techniques to analyse the microbiome has triggered a massive expansion of research into our relationship with our resident microorganisms, which are similar in number to the total amount of cells in the body. We now appreciate that our microbiome influences health by impacting multiple wide ranging biological systems such as the immune system, metabolism and mental health (1). This has led to the holobiont concept that considers a host and its microbiome to be a single ecological and evolutionary unit.

There has also been an increasing focus on understanding the mechanisms by which the human host and the microbiome interact.  Scientists are now starting to unravel the multiple modes of
actions of bacteria, enabling the potential of more precisely targeted, scalable defined Live Biotherapeutic Products (LBPs).

This research has provided overwhelming evidence that the human microbiome, and the intestinal commensal bacteria in particular, interacts with multiple biological systems to impact health,
disease and treatment response in many therapeutic areas. The microbiome therefore has the potential to be a new modality to treat a wide variety of diseases (1).  Encouraging data from multiple clinical trials of Faecal Microbiota Transplants (FMT) have been reported in areas ranging from gut infection, inflammatory bowel disease, as adjunctive therapy to immune checkpoint inhibition in cancer, autism and Parkinson’s disease amongst others.