Novel and robust systems based approaches for the identification and translation of microbiome derived diagnostic and therapeutics

The microbes and their associated functions that reside within and on the human body interact in both beneficial and detrimental ways. Some microbes can contribute to the initiation and severity of several diseases, while others can have beneficial effects which promote healing and treatment. Identifying which exact microbes cause either negative or positive effects relies on proper DNA sequencing approaches, computational algorithms, and statistical methods. Current methods have several limitations resulting in the improper identification of key microbes. This limits the ability to develop these microbial based targets for future clinical and commercial use in several diseases. Our team aims to develop and extend several new methods to alleviate these problems by allowing the generation of more informative DNA sequencing data and also new data analysis approaches. These new approaches will be tested against a diverse set of ongoing human microbiome studies including different sampling sites (oral and fecal), different age groups (infants, children, and adults), and various health conditions (healthy, inflammatory bowel disease, cancers, and several chronic diseases). We expect to discover several novel microbes and functions that incorporate personal demographic information to allow for the generation of new disease diagnostics and treatments. Our approaches will be shared openly with other microbiome researchers allowing accelerated discovery across an even wider set of diseases. Our team includes the very best computational and statistical microbiome researchers across Canada and integrates them with individual leads of population and clinical microbiome cohorts.