Is the gut microbiome the next frontier in health?
Trillions of microbes make the human gut their home. But how these communities of potential friends or foes help us stay healthy and contribute to our overall well-being remains a difficult question to answer. Continual waves of top-level research show that changes in the types and amounts of different microbes in our gut are associated with many diseases including Alzheimer’s, obesity, and Crohn’s, among countless others.
But, despite these associations with disease, we still don’t understand how modern foods, drugs, or supplements might nurture the ‘good’ bacteria to benefit our overall health or encourage shifts towards microbes that might cause us harm.
“In many cases, it remains to be seen whether changes in the microbiome are causal or just biomarkers of disease,” explains Alberto Noronha, Ph.D. in microbiome computational biology and CEO of NIUM, a Luxembourg-based start-up focusing on technologies and data analysis approaches to understand how different ingredients and compounds affect the composition of the gut microbiome. “The microbiome has such a fundamental impact in all aspects of our life that it’s probably the next frontier in health,” continues Noronha.
“The microbiome has such a fundamental impact in all aspects of our life that it’s probably the next frontier in health,” – Alberto Noronha, Ph.D.
Eating to thrive
It’s clear that what we eat has a dramatic effect on our health. A primarily plant-based diet is associated with a significantly lower risk for many diseases, including ischemic heart disease and cancer, two of the biggest killers affecting industrialized societies.
Similarly, we know that a highly varied diet is crucial for nurturing microbial diversity and stability. For instance, members of a hunter-gatherer society in northern Tanzania called the Hadza mostly subsist on hunted and foraged native wild foods and have much greater microbial diversity in their guts than a Californian population with a highly processed, industrialized diet.
But how this dwindling diversity in industrialized societies contributes to disease, and how our microbiome is affected by different foods and ingredients, remains an open question.
Growing interest in the gut microbiome
Thankfully, interest in harnessing the microbiome for gut health and overall well-being is booming.
Growing public awareness of the importance of a healthy gut, combined with strong scientific evidence, has led to an upsurge in the probiotics market, now estimated to be worth over USD 70 billion.
But are these probiotics and supplements actually good for the gut? To answer this question there is an increasing need for novel technologies that more accurately replicate the physiological conditions of the gut and allow companies to functionally assess how supplements like probiotics and prebiotics, food ingredients, or therapeutic drugs might be beneficial or detrimental for the microbiome. Scalable methods, like those developed by NIUM, aim to accelerate the development of these product portfolios.
“Previously, you would do a test to see what microbes are there, but that was pretty much the end of the story. In contrast, we wanted to develop models that would help companies accelerate their development cycle, especially in the early stages of development,” says Noronha. “It’s one thing to try to find associations between a change in microbial composition and a given phenotype or observation, but we believe that’s not enough. You need to understand the dynamics of that community and how the microbes interact with each other.”
Answers from a gut-on-a-chip
NIUM tackles this problem with a gut-on-a-chip device combined with an advanced data analytic pipeline to make sense of the complex constellation of microbes present when cultured in the presence of different ingredients of interest. “One of the main issues that we faced very early on is that the microbiome gets very complex, very fast,” explains Noronha.
The ‘micro gut’ system helps navigate this complexity because it enables standardized experiments in highly controlled conditions. The system requires rapid freezing of donor feces to preserve as many of the microbes as possible. Small volumes of the feces are then added to media containing the ingredient under investigation and the mixture enters the micro gut system.
Most gut microbes are anaerobic and grow without oxygen, so NIUM’s system contains only very small amounts of oxygen to closely mimic the gut and ensure these oxygen-sensitive microbes aren’t lost. Users can also decide how long to run their experiments to best mimic transit through the gut and can change the pH level over time, which gives the flexibility to assess a variety of variables. The microbes present after culture in the micro gut are then sequenced and analyzed to determine which species are present and in what quantities.
Eventually, the predictive capabilities of the system and software developed would allow better overall planning of experiments to optimize product development pipelines and provide more scientific support for claims about products being beneficial for gut health.
Luxembourg as a growing biotech hub
NIUM originated as a spin-off from the University of Luxembourg and has benefited from mentorship and business acceleration opportunities as part of the university start-up incubator. Recently, Noronha and colleagues moved to the House of BioHealth to expand their laboratory space and be more prominent in Luxembourg’s growing healthtech ecosystem.
Noronha also explains the benefits of being at the center of Europe from a business opportunity perspective. “We are part of an organization called the Food Valley in the Netherlands, which helps us connect with players in this sector, and we’re also part of the EIT Food Accelerator network, one of the largest accelerators in Europe.”
Overall, technologies that provide a window into our gut microbiome, and tease apart how our friends and foes respond to what we eat, will be crucial to our future health and well-being while ensuring more nutritious ingredients for all.
