A clinical trial reported in 2021 and conducted by a team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh, showed that a newly designed therapeutic food aimed at repairing malnourished children’s underdeveloped gut microbiomes was superior to a widely used standard therapeutic food.
Now, another study from the same research team at Washington University School of Medicine has identified key, naturally occurring biochemical components of this new therapeutic food and the important bacterial strains that process these components. The study suggests that identifying these components and the key growth-promoting gut bacterial strains that function as their therapeutic targets can help guide treatment with the current food formulation and could enable creation of new, more effective formulations in the future.
The study, led by Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University, is published Dec. 13 in Nature.