Fueled, in part, by rapid advances in DNA sequencing technologies, researchers are uncovering important relationships between the human microbiota, health and disease. A recent flood of discoveries links changing bacterial populations to a wide range of diseases never before considered to have bacterial causes and highlights the need for new antimicrobial therapeutics that combat disease organisms without causing collateral damage to beneficial ones. This growing body of research offers the potential for a wide range of commercial opportunities.
The current inability to selectively subtract specific bacterial strains from the gut microbiota without affecting the diversity of the microbiota limits the ability to validate causality for many observed and proposed relationships between particular bacteria and particular human diseases or disorders. Examples of observed associations are plentiful, but other than adding suspect organisms to a healthy microbiota or to germ-free animal models and observing an expected phenotype, one is restricted to indirect testing of hypotheses and statistical correlations.
Pylum is currently evaluating opportunities to selectively remove from the gut microbiota specific bacteria that may have a causal role in various diseases. For more information, visit our technology or partnering sections.