Developing Microbiome-directed Therapeutics for Treating Childhood Undernutrition

by Jeffrey I. Gordon (The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology, and Center for Gut Microbiome and Nutrition Research, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis)

Wednesday Jun 18, 2025, 2:30 PM → 3:30 PM Europe/Paris

Bâtiment Alix et Marwan Lahoud (IHES)

Human postnatal development is typically viewed from the perspective of our ‘human’ organs.  As we come to appreciate how our microbial communities are assembled following birth, there is an opportunity to determine how this microbial facet of our developmental biology is related to healthy growth as well as to the risk for and manifestations of disorders that produce abnormal growth. We are testing the hypothesis that perturbations in the normal development of the gut microbiome are causally related to childhood undernutrition, a devastating global health problem whose long-term sequelae, including stunting, neurodevelopmental abnormalities, plus metabolic and immune dysfunction, remain largely refractory to current therapeutic interventions. The journey to preclinical proof-of-concept, and the path forward to clinical proof-of-concept emphasize the opportunities as well as the experimental, analytic and other challenges encountered when developing microbiota-directed therapeutics.