"microbiome" therapies has been one of the hottest areas in biotech the last five or so years. some of the hype has died down, however. microbiome therapies w

"microbiome" therapies has been one of the hottest areas in biotech the last five or so years. some of the hype has died down, however. microbiome therapies work well in c. difficile infections and some other gut diseases. in this case, you give a patient a set of "good" microbes that fight the "bad" microbes (c. diff). people are studying microbiome therapies for cancer, autoimmune disease, cns disease, etc, but its way too early to tell if any of it is real. there are many challenges: how do you ensure the microbes you administer stay in the body, colonize, and actually produce the molecules you want them to? how do you manage the risk that they interact with other microbe populations in ways that are impossible to predict accurately, but potentially very harmful? how do you manufacture these things in a consistent, high quality way? what is the regulatory path? how do you justify a huge risky r&d investment when you can't patent a microbe? not to mention the biology risk; the "microbiome thesis" sounds nice, but how confident are we that microbes can treat cancer, depression, parkinsons? right now, not very