Mining for Therapeutics from the Microbiome

Bacteria that live in and on us (i.e., the microbiome) make thousands of molecules that have drug-like properties. There is a new revolution afoot to mine for metagenomic functions of interest, clone and express such genes, and test the function of the bioactive (protein/peptide, etc.). in appropriate in vitro and in vivo models. Since many of these bioactives never previously been purified, characterized, and tested in therapeutic doses, this has potential to open up entirely new biology which can be exploited for finding new therapies for many diseases. Building a scalable microbiome drug discovery platform based on this premise requires overcoming key big data and engineering challenges that will be the main focus of this presentation.