Enterome scientists contribute to extensive new genomic and proteomic catalog to enhance analysis of the gut microbiome and understanding of its role in human health

Published by international research collaboration in Nature Biotechnology

 ENTEROME SA, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company leveraging its unique knowledge of the microbiome-immunoinflammation axis to develop next-generation therapeutics, notes a new academic publication describing the creation of the most comprehensive and unified catalog to-date of genomic and proteomic data from the human gut microbiome.

The publication in Nature Biotechnology (Almeida, et al, ref. 1), reports on the establishment of a catalog of more than 200,000 reference genomes from over 4,600 species of human gut bacteria.

The research was conducted by an international collaboration involving major academic institutes, such as the European Bioinformatics Institute (UK), Sanger Institute (UK), University of California, San Francisco (USA), Chan Zuckerberg BioHub (USA), University of Trento (Italy), University of Queensland (Australia), Joint Genome Institute (USA) and Enterome (France).

These reference catalogs build on previous global projects aimed at characterizing the human gut microbiome (such as the Human Microbiome Project). The goal of this research is to enable a better understanding of the functions and interactions of bacterial species in the gut microbiome and link to their roles in human health – linking genotype to phenotype within specific clinical contexts, such as during inflammatory diseases, metabolic diseases and cancer.

Enterome has further expanded on this work to assemble the most comprehensive and annotated dataset of peptides and proteins from the gut microbiome (Enterome’s MetaSecretome dataset). This dataset underpins Enterome’s proprietary OncoMimics and EndoMimics platforms, which are being applied to identify and develop  novel orally administered, potent and well-tolerated next-generation therapeutics.

Christophe Bonny, Chief Scientific Officer of Enterome, said: “Enterome has a wealth of expertise and powerful technologies designed to explore and analyze the functional content of the human gut microbiome. We are focused on applying our expertise and tools to address in silico large-scale data analysis of microbiome genes and proteins to develop novel drugs for major diseases. We are thrilled that these capabilities have been recognized by our prestigious collaboration partners, and that we have been able to contribute to these important new genomic and proteomic resources. We are confident that these new resources will contribute to an even better understanding of how to leverage the influence of the gut microbiome to improve human health.”

Reference

1.      Almeida, A., Nayfach, S., Boland, M. et al. A unified catalog of 204,938 reference genomes from the human gut microbiome. Nat Biotechnol (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0603-3