The rich and famous espouse its importance on social media. Popular brands like Olipop and Activia contain biotics to help promote a healthy microbiome. The number of scientific papers about the microbiome multiply daily.
In the recent NutraIngredients-USA webinar “Personalized Microbiome Modulation for Optimal Health”, three panelists discussed the promise and challenges in this field. Key themes included access to personalization, new technologies that bolster microbiome research, advances in testing and whether the U.S. healthcare system can help support healthy microbiomes.
What does healthy mean?
Modulating microbiomes to promote health requires a definition of what it means to have a ‘healthy’ ecosystem.
“I think it’s important for people to understand that there are definitely things that we can do to move that in a direction toward health,” said Nathan Price, co-director for the Center for Human Healthspan and chief scientific officer at Thorne HealthTech. “We don’t have to always have really precise fine control of everything that’s happening [in the microbiome]. Trying to modify something like it is like trying to hit a target by throwing a live bee at it.”
That said, there are steps people can take—whether it is a fecal transplant or eating fermented foods—to move the microbiome in a positive direction, he added.
Defining healthy might be getting easier because the data has increased in parallel to the number of people who have taken microbiome tests. Researchers are starting to triangulate this information to determine what is healthy and what is not.
However, once people have information about their microbiomes, the question becomes, ‘what now?’
“They have this information, but it’s displayed in a way that the layperson really has a hard time interpreting,” said Noah Voreades, founder and managing director of GenBiome Consulting. “The fact that we don’t have a true, very simple definition that we can communicate, not only scientifically but to a consumer as far as what’s healthy, also makes it a little bit more challenging for those results to lead to a direct action.”
Emerging technologies
AI is playing its role in increasing the understanding of the relationships between the microbiome and other metabolites.
“It’s really helping us to kind of understand how these bugs are interacting with each other and how they’re interacting with the host,” said Joshua Anthony, founder and CEO of nutrition research firm Nlumn. “That’s incredibly important in terms of being able to make more predictive and more personalized models that are tied to the user.”
AI can also play an important role in changing behavior, because it is not only about understanding how these bugs are interacting—it is about working with consumers to make better decisions, he added.
Voreades said the most exciting use of AI to change how consumers are interacting with their health is digital twin technology.
“Every human being can have a digital twin avatar or bot where it’s trained on that person’s microbiome data,” Voreades noted, adding that digital twin environments can help people play with health-related scenarios.
Price said that “we’re entering the golden age of personalization” and that the digital twin technology and the delivery of personalized information through large language models can allow people to have a back-and-forth dialogue about their health.
He also discussed CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that essentially makes gene editing easy and precise.
“Imagine that we could take different strains like probiotics strains, and you can use CRISPR technologies and optimize them in certain ways,” Price said. “There are a bunch of companies that are working on this.”
He noted there are some concerns because it is genetic engineering and “you’re changing what’s there.”
“The extent that we’re swapping genes that already exist, that’s probably already happening in nature, but we are amplifying it up to a degree,” Price said. “But if we’re introducing truly new pathways, new synthetics, all of this has a higher regulatory burden. That’s a long way of saying it’s super promising, very complicated and that a lot needs to be figured out.”
The greatest good
Far fewer consumers use personalized products and services than blood and genetic testing.
“Ten percent or less of people that have done a personalized test have done microbiome testing,” Anthony said. “I think this in part relates to the whole comment about cost. But at the end of the day, any test has to provide value that’s greater than the combination of the amount of time put in and the amount of money put in.”
Data from Nlumn show that 78% of people interested in personalized nutrition make under $100,000 a year. It is people making over $150,000 that are buying into or subscribing to these tests.
“If you just want to look at it from a business standpoint, it’s leaving a lot of money on the table,” Anthony said.
It is also not considering the health a lot of people.
“We need to make sure that we have representative [microbiome] data sets of all people,” he said. “The extent that you’re going to be able to use this to understand the microbiome across different populations and to make predictions means we have to make sure that all people’s datasets are well represented to help to inform the models that are going to be developed.”
