by Peter High, published on Forbes
8-04-15
DNA sequencing has been an area of focus of many of the biggest brains in science for multiple decades. The National Institutes of Health, among others, invested billions of dollars in this area of scientific discovery. As a result, the first genome – DNA – has become less mysterious and better understood. The importance of the second genome, which is the bacteria that each of us has throughout our bodies is less well publicized, but a growing number of companies have chosen this as a domain of focus as the impact of the microbiome (the term that describes the trillions of bacteria each of us has in and on our bodies) on our health becomes clearer.
A leader in this growing field is a Bay Area-based company called Second Genome, suitably enough. Peter DiLaura is the CEO of the company. In this interview, DiLaura, who is a veteran in the healthcare space, defines the microbiome, its impact on our health, how issues with it can lead to disease, and the mission of his company to help develop cures for those diseases. DiLaura and his team are leveraging data science combined with traditional science in order to develop remedies. As he notes, the key to such discovery is to create an environment where people with various areas of expertise (hard science, computer science, data science, traditional business, etc.) can come together to more rapidly develop effective remedies.
Peter High: Could you define the microbiome, as it is a term gaining some traction, but is still quite foreign to most people, just as it is essential for all people?
Peter DiLaura: The microbiome is the term that is used to describe the estimated 100 trillion bacteria that we have living in and on our bodies. We now understand that nearly every biological system in our body is in some way influenced by this bacterial community. It represents three to five pounds of our mass. The hundred trillion bacteria is a huge community that is a connective tissue on most surfaces of our body: It includes our skin; it includes our airway; and it includes our gastrointestinal system, among others.
What we now appreciate is that this bacterial community plays an important part in regulating our health: the way we deal with infections, the way we process our nutrition, the way our immune system develops. We have been conditioned to think of bacteria as bad for us, we think about it in a pathogenic way. For many of us, thinking about a hundred trillion bacteria living in our bodies kind of grosses us out. We generally have been focused on antibacterial wipes and taking antibiotics and getting rid of bacteria, but we now are beginning to realize that our bacterial community, our microbiome, plays a critical role in our health and wellness.
We are essentially (although probably not completely) sterile in utero, and we are colonized by bacteria when we travel through the vaginal canal. And then our nutritional sources give us another bacterial community, and our contact with people and the environment around us further develops this bacterial community. Over the course of our first three or four years of our lives, we build this ecology that is a part of our bodies. This is a developmental path that has evolved with us since the dawn of humanity. We require our microbiome to survive, and it is essential for our health.
However, if you take the roughly last 70 years of Western society, we have changed the way that we are colonized. Kids delivered via C-section have a different bacterial community than those delivered vaginally. We have also changed our nutritional sources: breast-fed infants have a different microbiome than formula-fed infants, and a high fat diet produces a different microbiome than a low fat diet. When you take antibiotics, which we do all the time both through medicine and through our food supply, there is a huge impact on the microbiome. We are just now discovering that these changes are having a pretty profound effect on our health and wellness.
High: How much overlap is there between any two individuals microbiome? Is it above 50 percent? Is it below? How diverse would you say the individual microbiome is from individual to individual?
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