Daily Wrapups

This page will contain the daily wrap-up videos that talk about what was covered each day by the speakers for that day.

There will eventually be three videos here, one after each of the three days.

Day 1 Wrap-up

Day 2 Wrap-up

Day 3 Wrap-up

This is Alan Gray with a wrapup review of the third day of the Microbiome First Summit underwritten by the World Asthma Foundation. 

Thank you for participating in the Summit.

Today, in the Current Clinical Trials and Future Therapies Tracks

We heard from Yale University’s Dr Paul Turner, who presented his session on Phage Research.

We learned about:

The possibility of phage therapy combating antibiotic resistant bacteria, the history of phage therapy research.

A comparison of phage therapy and chemical antibiotics, and potential synergies when they are used in combination.

Dr ANDRES CUBILLOS-RUIZ, a scientist with the Wyss Institute of Harvard University and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science at MIT spoke about "Protecting the Gut Microbiota from Antibiotics by using Engineered Live Biotherapeutics" 

We learned that :

Antibiotic-induced alterations in the gut microbiota are implicated in a wide range of metabolic and inflammatory diseases, as well as with the emergence of antimicrobial resistance and increased risk to secondary infections.

β-lactams are the most widely used antibiotics and their broad-spectrum activity is known to cause major disruptions to commensal bacteria in the gut.

They Used a mouse model of ampicillin treatment, to demonstrate that oral supplementation with their engineered live biotherapeutic product (eLBP) minimizes dysbiosis in the gut without affecting the ampicillin concentration in the serum.

From Toni Harman we heard a practical application of microbiome research. We learned that informing parents about the critical microscopic events that take place during a normal birth and through breastfeeding can empower their choices before, during and after birth. Parents can take positive steps to nurture and protect their own gut microbiome, and thereby their child’s microbiome.

We hope you enjoyed the presentations on day 3, and that you’ll help us share this information with your friends, colleagues, students, and others who may benefit from this information.

This was the final day in the inaugural Microbiome First Summit underwritten by the World Asthma Foundation, and we expect there to be many more as microbiome research continues to reveal things we didn’t understand about our own bodies before.

The World Asthma Foundation is grateful to our Keynote speaker, Dr Rodney Dietert for his time in helping guide us over the past two years. We thank all of the high-calibre speakers who presented at this Microbiome First Summit over the past three days for the huge effort they put  into their presentations, and for passing on the amazing information they learned through their research.

We also thank everyone who registered to participate in the summit, researchers, Non Communicable Disease communities, students and people who suffer from these diseases and companies that help bring new technologies and new products to market to improve the lives of people who suffer. We hope you all learned some things you didn’t know before, we hope researchers, students and entrepreneurs will be inspired to great things.

The two big things we hoped to do, when we thought about creating this Summit, was to first find ways to improve people’s lives, addressing the actual cause of their suffering and not just the symptoms, and second, to reduce the cost of making people well. This idea was advanced through our initial research, and came when we interviewed Dr. Dietert. The phrase “Microbiome First” came from a discussion with him, as did the idea of Sustainable Healthcare. This interview was part of our Defeating Asthma series, in which we interviewed Dr Martin Blaser, Dr Justin Sonnenburg, Dr Paul Bollyky, Dr Marie-Claire Arrieta and Dr. Nikolaos Papadopoulos.

Future

Please look for our next messages, where we plan to talk about the future for getting to practical help for those with non-communicable diseases. Later we will announce our next Summit.

Please follow @MicrobiomeFirst and @AsthmaFacts on twitter. We would love it if you would communicate with us about any ideas or suggestions you may have and of course participate in the conversation on twitter. Let's all collaborate and improve lives.