Scientist recreating human gut microbiome into a small pill, could lead to major disease advances

[Alvin2]

Tagbo Niepa is an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh who recently received a $2 million dollar award to develop the capsules meant to replicate a strong microbial community.


“With this technology, we can actually collect and store samples from healthy individuals, screen them to understand the composition of their microbiome, and later administer to the patient when they’re sick,” says Niepa in a university press release.

https://gutnews.com/gut-microbiome-pill-capsule/

 

[linusbert]

this is awesome, i hope they deliver fast.

what i wonder, how do they know what microbiome is healthy and what not? what if one biome fixes cfs at the cost of having later colorectal cancer? or alzheimers?

 

[BrightCandle]

The fundamental issue is that quite a lot of really important bacteria die in the presence of oxygen, so they are dead in the stool. These are very important bacteria and so far no one has worked out how to maintain them and deliver them back to a patient. I think until we have worked that out this is science fiction, its a good thing to work on but there are fundamental problems that need solving.