Could the final frontier of medicine actually be inside us already? New research like that presented at the recent Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit, organised in part by the American Gastroenterological Society (AGA), is illuminating how the gut microbiome may be the secret key to unlocking better health and disease prevention. But what exactly is the microbiome? “The gut microbiota is a vast community of bacteria and other microscopic organisms, including fungi and viruses, that live in our intestines,” says pediatric gastroenterologist Geoffrey A. Preidis, MD, PhD, an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital and a scientific advisory board member for the American Gastroenterological Association Center for Gut Microbiome Research & Education. “There are more microbes in our gut than there are human cells in our body! Each of these microbes carries genetic material in the form of DNA, and the whole collection of this community’s DNA is called the microbiome.”
4D Pharma plc (LON:DDDD) is a world leader in the development of live biotherapeutics, a novel and emerging class of drugs, defined by the FDA as biological products that contain a live organism, such as a bacteria, that is applicable to the prevention, treatment or cure of a disease.
