With a growing body of science linking gut microbiota to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a need exists in clinical settings to understand changes in the gut microbial community as they relate to IBD and its management. Two leading microbiome companies, Rebiotix (part of the Ferring Pharmaceuticals Group) and Microbiome Insights, are collaborating to validate one such tool: a proprietary analysis to determine how closely a patient’s microbiome resembles that of someone with IBD. Microbiome Insights’ bioinformaticians developed an IBD Microbiome Score, based on a vast dataset of over 1600 individuals with IBD and healthy controls. The metric combines the latest understandings of the gut microbiome as a complex ecosystem with information on hundreds of taxa in the bacterial community, rather than the presence or absence of specific taxa. Based on fecal microbial characterization by sequencing, the IBD Microbiome Score can be assigned for each individual patient at diagnosis and at different times throughout treatment, making the Score practical for clinical use. Leveraging Rebiotix’s proprietary Microbiota Restoration Therapy (MRT) drug development platform, the Score is being evaluated in active clinical trials to treat IBD.

“The microbiome field is enormously complex,” says Dr. Ken Blount, Rebiotix’s Chief Scientific Officer. “With the use of the first-in-class Rebiotix MRT platform continuing to expand into complex conditions such as IBD, it is critical to have strong, scientifically-validated tools to understand the dynamics of the microbiomes changes within our patients. We’ve seen first-hand how the novel platform and expertise of Microbiome Insights has the potential to rapidly advance not only our understanding of the impact of MRT on patients, but also to uncover valuable microbiome findings for the entire industry.”

The companies are also to exploring applications of Rebiotix interventions and Microbiome Insights’ personal health platform in other microbiome-related diseases.