Tastes like it’s working.

Keep your healthy teeth with a novel bioengineered probiotic that repairs the oral microbiome

SECTION 1: ABSTRACT

The Vision

The big vision is for everyone to be able to learn about their microbiome and optimize it in an easy-to-use, cost efficient way. Our gut, skin and oral microbiomes are essential and integral to our health, yet we still don’t know everything about how the microbial species interact functionally in their communities, whether a microbiome change causes disease or is a consequence of a disease.

To-date, few people are aware of the state of their microbiomes, and how the biomes affect their physical and psychological states. We know of the brain-gut axis. With more research, the microbiome at an individual level could be used to detect early onset of certain diseases. It could function as an Early Warning System. Remediation of early onset diseases is usually simpler than dealing with acute phases of an illness. We could also use biome detection to offer specific pre-and probiotics, plus lifestyle choices that would work reliably to warden off any diseases that we might develop. We should see if exposure to different global microbiomes can have a positive effect. The topic of epigenetics and microbiome is to be studied further.

The overall effect beneficial effects of a healthier individual and communal microbiomes would be less expenditures of pharmaceuticals, and a holistic ecological systems view of how we are all connected. We could even learn from more balanced biomes how they have achieved their state.

The big vision would be a trustworthy product or platform with novel components that would lead to a healthier global human microbiome. We would create a global metagenome of the human microbiome systems that any person can get use out of. It would be a continually balancing human microbiome for the individual and communal levels. We would bioengineer and create novel method and line of products that analyze our personal and communal microbiomes that provide an easy way to remediate any pathogens to rebalance the microbiomes.

The new microbiome platform contains:

1. Advanced multi-site microbiome sampling and analysis. A simpler way to repeatedly diagnose and analyze our biomes over time.
2. Personalized bioengineered probiotics that target specific pathogens, and rebalance our microbiomes after the use of antibiotics or travelling to a foreign locale. This would essentially create living therapeutic agents tailored to an individual's specific microbiome imbalances. It would also lead to a rebalancing of the microbiome for optimal health outcomes.
3. A communication and visualization interface that tracks individual and global microbiome health and interactions over time. It would help people understand how and which lifestyle changes, interventions, communities, or environmental exposures affect their microbiome composition and function. They should also be able to see what prebiotic, probiotic has what type of an effect. It would aid in creating healthier communities and social learning.
4. From 2007-2016 the NIH the Human Microbiome Project researched the human microbiome. It would be an amazing feat to continue this research and make it available at a much broader scale so everyone could have access to the information and tools to optimize their own and their community’s microbiome.

For the final project, I will limit my research and bioengineering practice to the oral microbiome.

Because the human microbiome system is so large and varied, ranging from our gut microbes to skin and nasal microorganisms, I will focus this project on our smile. A mouth with teeth intact just works better.

More specifically, I will devise a bioengineered probiotic to detect and destroy the main pathogen of the oral microbiome consortium that leads to periodontal disease. While human subgingival plaque harbors more than 500 bacterial species, considerable research has shown that Porphyromonas gingivalis, a Gram-negative anaerobic bacterium, is the major etiologic agent which contributes to chronic periodontitis.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4746253/

Periodontal disease caused an estimated loss of $154.06B in the US and €158.64B in Europe, in 2018. These results show that the economic burden of periodontal disease is significant.