Our Science Behind Probiotics
Gut microbiome innovations: Creating the new frontier of health and wellness.
The key to better health is in your gut.
The science of probiotics has a bigger impact on your overall health and wellness than you think. We are as much bacteria as we are human - trillions of microorganisms in and on our body, most residing in our gut. We have 100x more bacterial genes in our body than we do human genes.
The microbial ecosystem, known as our microbiome, greatly affects our development, functionality, and health. Much of our microbiome is shaped by diet, environmental exposure, antibiotic consumption, geography, and physical activity. In other words, understanding gut health science is just as important as decoding basic human health and habits that can get you there.
"Elite phenotypes (super performers) represent the 0.01% of the human population in terms of optimal health and physiology. We decode their microbiomes and translate that biological information into next-generation health solutions for every body."
-Jonathan Scheiman, Founder & CEO
Decoding Elite Microbiomes (Guts)
TO UNLOCK OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE
Years of Science-Led Research for an Innovative Probiotic Solution
We developed our probiotics innovation and microbiome technology at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. We are big believers in form-fits function and taking a cue from natural selection - seeing what works in elite phenotypes to support their physiological demands in today’s environment and modern stressors, then applying those learnings to develop next-generation health solutions for every body.
This process entails extracting bacterial genetic information from microbiome samples for sequencing and bioinformatic analysis. We assess their microbiome compositions - how they compare to non-phenotypes, how they differ between phenotypes from other disciplines, and how they change over time.
We look to identify strains that are unique or enriched in elite phenotypes or that change over time between performance and recovery phases. This helps us understand how our efforts in probiotics science can impact everybody.
Once identified, we use microbiology and culturomics techniques to purify, validate, and develop our strains for functional testing and commercialization.
However, we’re not done. We discovered that the strain Veillonella increases in abundance in ultra-marathon runners post-race ( Nature Medicine ). This specific strain offers a heightened ability to process lactic acid and in turn, may offer endurance benefits.
Featured in National Geographic Explorer
The microbiome is the epicenter of health and wellness.
The Phenotype Gut Microbiota
It takes quite a lot of work to prove a cause-and-effect relationship between specific microbes and health or fitness.
Here at FITBIOMICS, we'd like to share and engage the public in the full process from hypothesis to discovery - ranging from sequencing elite phenotype microbiomes to animal testing to human clinical trials.
Unlike pharmaceuticals, nutritional supplements, and probiotics do not require double-blind placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials (DBPCRCT), but we'd like to see such evidence grow and see profits from products go to support continued research.
Ideally, we want DBPCRCT on humans with an adequate study design to achieve statistical significance.
As a startup in the microbiome science realm, we push to evaluate our products for all safety, quality, and efficacy measures beyond what is mandated. This allows us to understand the metabolomics and human perceived benefits of our probiotics before launching while continuing to pursue IRB-approved clinical trials.
