Dr. Anand Kumar | Exploiting the Interactions Between Microbes and Host to Enhance Human Health

Many people take probiotic supplements or eat fermented foods to improve gut health, to reintroduce beneficial microbes after taking antibiotics, and to strengthen the body’s natural immunity. While probiotics are generally considered to be safe, their effectiveness can be highly variable.

Other methods for introducing beneficial microbes into the human body include fecal transplants from healthy donors, to treat infections, obesity, gastrointestinal diseases, and more. In addition to fecal transplants, beneficial microbes can be combined to create targeted remedies that are easy to administer, called ‘defined consortia’.

However, most beneficial microbes have yet to be identified, meaning that probiotic treatments are not reaching their full potential. Interactions between beneficial microbes are even more poorly understood. As such, there is an urgent need for new screening tools that can identify beneficial microbes and their interactions in the human body. This would greatly accelerate the development of more effective probiotic treatments and administration approaches.

Towards this aim, Dr. Anand Kumar and his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently developed a new screening platform that can identify microbes and closely examine microbe-microbe interactions. The team’s new platform integrates microfluidics, microbe cultivation, flow cytometry, and sequencing techniques.

Using fecal samples, the platform first creates millions of microdroplets of a liquid that microbes can thrive in. Each microdroplet hosts a complex community of microbes. Using fluorescence-activated cell sorting, the microbes in these droplets can be categorized, and then identified through genetic sequencing techniques. In this way, the platform can identify and isolate beneficial species for use in new probiotic formulations.

Dr. Kumar and his colleagues are also using their screening platform to address the growing crisis of antibiotic resistance. Specifically, they have adapted their original platform to identify microbes that naturally inhibit the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. Currently, his team is expanding this concept to develop a host-microbe screening platform aimed at discovering beneficial bacteria that can inhibit viral infections and cancer growth.

Microbes and microbial interactions could play a key role in the future of healthcare, especially given that many microbes have now become resistant to existing antibiotics. Dr. Kumar and his colleagues believe that the exploitation of microbial interactions has a highly transformative potential and could eventually revolutionize the field of modern medicine.