The Jackson Laboratory and Azitra Receive Department of Defense Grant
Jackson Laboratory and Azitra have been awarded a $500,000 grant from the DoD. The goal of the program is to identify compounds produced by S. epidermidis that can inhibit S. aureus and ultimately treat skin infections.
A new paper, led by Microbiome Insights co-founder Brett Finlay and published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, evaluated the associations of fungal and bacterial changes (dysbiosis) in infants raised in the non-industrialized setting of rural Ecuador.
Results indicated that, similar to the previous findings in Canadian children, microbial dysbiosis in Ecuadorian infants at 3 months was associated with the subsequent development of atopic wheeze. Surprisingly though, the dysbiosis observed in Ecuador involved different bacteria taxa as well as some fungal species, and this was more pronounced than in Canada. Some predictions based on the metagenome analysis also emphasized significant dysbiosis-associated differences in genes involved in carbohydrate and taurine metabolism. The fecal short-chain fatty acid acetate was reduced while caproate was increased in children at 3 months who later developed atopic wheeze.
Microbiome Insights, Inc. is pleased to announce that it will receive a contribution of up to $190,249 from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP) to help support the development of a new personal health platform of microbiome testing.
“We’re leveraging our expertise in microbiome testing to develop a suite of tools for monitoring chronic disease in clinical practice,” says Microbiome Insights CEO Malcolm Kendall. “From the practitioner interface to the educational components of the test, our team is taking a fresh approach that is going to change the game for microbiome testing.”