Our science will help you listen to your gut.
By supporting ISB, you can be a part of leveraging the gut microbiome to make nutrition and healthcare personalized, predictive and preventive — not just for you, but for everyone.
A microbial community-scale metabolic model of an individual’s gut generated by MICOM data and the data visualization tool Gephi. Image credit: Gibbons Lab/ISB.
We are leveraging the gut microbiome to make nutrition and healthcare personalized, predictive and preventive.
ISB Associate Professor Dr. Sean Gibbons aims to create an online dashboard called My Digital Gut that will give individuals the ability to predict the impact of personalized nutritional changes before making them.
The dashboard is powered by MICOM, a computer program created in the Gibbons Lab. MICOM gets its name from combining “microbial” with “community.” It is the gold-standard program downloaded by more than 300,000 scientists worldwide to study gut microbiome metabolism.
Imagine the power of My Digital Gut in the hands of your healthcare provider – or in your hands. Once optimized, My Digital Gut will be an essential tool that enables a new class of life-changing precision interventions.
Donor Levels and Benefits
$25,000
Donors at this level will receive ten early invitations to be a beta tester and a private dinner with Dr. Sean Gibbons and ISB President Jim Heath.
$10,000
Donors at this level will receive four early invitations to be a beta tester and personal lab tour with Dr. Sean Gibbons.
$2,000
Donors at this level will receive one early invitations to be a beta tester.
An estimated half of the cells in our bodies are human, the other half are bacterial and fungal. 99% of the unique genes in our bodies are bacterial. Image credit: ISB.
Your gut microbiome is unique to you and plays a crucial role in your overall health.
The problem is that responses to different foods and supplements vary dramatically from person-to-person, and no single intervention works perfectly for everyone.
My Digital Gut addresses this problem by harnessing the power of MICOM to predict individual-specific responses to diets and supplements that are optimal for you, including pre/probiotics, without the guesswork.
What does it do?
MICOM is the software built in the Gibbons Lab that powers My Digital Gut. It can predict how our microbiomes transform our diet and supplements into important microbial molecules that are critical to maintaining our health, such as anti-inflammatory short chain fatty acids (SCFAs).
For example, predicting personalized interventions that increase gut production of butyrate – an important SCFA – can improve insulin sensitivity and lower blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, aging-related chronic inflammation, and the risk of certain cancers.
The My Digital Gut dashboard, when developed, will provide individual users, researchers and clinicians access to these personalized predictions.
Why does it matter?
The My Digital Gut platform could help people make meaningful changes in their health. It is driven by the ISB-developed computer program, MICOM, the first quantitatively accurate model for predicting gut microbiome metabolism in response to dietary inputs.
The platform will be an essential tool for clinical trials. This next-generation technology, deploying uniquely precise computational methods, will power new studies. These clinical trials promise to show scientifically the benefits of personalized interventions for a range of conditions. Used in the clinic and shared with the public, My Digital Gut will improve care and change lives.
Simply put, My Digital Gut could result in longer, healthier lives.
Contact Erika Kreger
Director of Development
ISB