SC Talk, Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 2pm, Title: “Can We Use Bugs as Drugs?” Speaker: Emma Allen-Vercoe

Abstract

There is now abundant evidence that the microbial consortium associated with a host – its microbiome – is critically important to the health of the host. Health is generally associated with a gut microbiota of high species diversity. When this diversity is degraded, damage to the microbial ecosystem may occur. In these cases, there exists an opportunity to mitigate the damage by introducing microbial communities therapeutically. However, a major barrier to this approach is understanding how best to predict which microbial species should be used to rectify ecosystem damage. In this talk I will describe ‘microbial ecosystem therapeutics’ (MET), where gut microbes are isolated from a healthy donor, purified, fully-characterized and preserved, and then recombined to create a defined microbial ecosystem with beneficial properties. I will also discuss the utility and the practical considerations of MET, and how we study defined microbial ecosystems to answer fundamental questions about gut microbial ecology, as a foundation to producing microbial therapeutics for treatment of disease on a commercial scale.

Bio

Emma obtained her BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry from the University of London, and her PhD in Molecular Microbiology through an industrial partnership with Public Health England. Emma started her faculty career at the University of Calgary in 2005, with a Fellow-to-Faculty transition award through CAG/AstraZeneca and CIHR, to study the normal microbes of the human gut. In particular, she was among the few that focused on trying to culture these ‘unculturable’ microbes in order to better understand their biology. To do this, she developed a model gut system to emulate the conditions of the human gut and allow communities of microbes to grow together, as they do naturally. Emma moved her lab to the University of Guelph in late 2007, and has been a recent recipient of a John Evans Leader’s Fund Award (through the CFI) that has allowed her to develop her specialist anaerobic fermentation laboratory further. This has been further boosted by the award of a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Human Gut Microbiome Function and Host Interactions . In 2013, Emma co-founded NuBiyota, a research spin-off company that aims to create therapeutic ecosystems as biologic drugs, on a commercial scale. The research enterprise for this company is also based in Guelph.

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=JsKqeAMvTUuQN7RtVsVSEKo-DHaj3xRAluk2q6EEM7NUQlhHQ0xXWTY0WEhWNU4zTTFBSjBKQ0FSVC4u
The deadline to register is Monday, before the talk at 1pm. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.