Microbial Metabolites and Human Health Take Center Stage at ISB’s 2025 Virtual Microbiome Symposium
Six leading experts from across the field presented new insights to more than 1,000 registrants worldwide, with over 400 participants joining live.
Lab Overview
Gibbons Lab
The Gibbons Lab, led by Dr. Sean Gibbons, develops experimental and computational approaches to dissect and engineer the functional outputs of the human gut microbiome to advance personalized medicine.
Health Research
Dr. Sean Gibbons with members of his lab. Photo credit: Scott Eklund / Red Box Pictures.
Topic: Microbiome Health
Understanding Our Unique Response to Foods
Our gut microbiome – the trillions of microbes in our digestive system – differs substantially even between people, even identical twins, and responds in unique ways to dietary intake. To design microbiome-informed personalized diets to optimize our health, the Gibbons Lab, with NIH funding, is studying how the microbiome influences our individual responses to diet.
A colorful bowl of food. Photo credit: Food Photographer, Unsplash, recolored by ISB.
Topic: Microbiome Health
My Digital Gut – A Platform for Personalized Nutrition
The Gibbons Lab is developing an online dashboard called My Digital Gut to predict the impact of personalized dietary changes before people make them. The program assesses someone’s current diet (no food diary needed) and guides individuals towards personally optimal nutrition. My Digital Gut is in the testing phase, seeking to eventually inform personalized clinical care.
3D rendering of bacteria. Image credit: AdobeStock, recolored by ISB.
Topic: Maternal and Infant Health
Improving Health of Infants Born to Mothers with HIV
Infants born to mothers with HIV, but not infected, do not respond well to rotavirus (annually kills more than 200,000 children) vaccines, and their guts are depleted in the critical newborn microbe Bifidobacterium infantis. The Gibbons Lab, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and South African researchers, where these births are frequent, are administering a B. infantis probiotic to see if it improves rotavirus vaccine efficacy.
Gibbons Lab members working at ISB. Photo credit: Scott Eklund / Red Box Pictures.
How You Can Help
Help enable a new class of life-changing precision interventions for improving your gut health.
ISB Associate Professor Dr. Sean Gibbons is creating an online dashboard called My Digital Gut that will give anyone the ability to predict the impact of nutritional changes before making them. By supporting ISB, you can help us leverage our growing knowledge of the gut microbiome to make nutrition and healthcare personalized, predictive and preventive.
Latest Gibbons Lab News
Behind the Breakthroughs: ISB’s Postdoctoral Fellows in Focus
Postdoctoral fellows are the lifeblood of research institutions, yet their contributions are often underrecognized. At the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), postdocs enter the scientific workforce with passion, vision, and advanced training – bringing the fresh ideas that fuel discovery.
Disarming a Hidden Killer: Predicting – and Preventing – C. diff Before It Strikes
Researchers at ISB have developed personalized models to predict C. diff colonization risk and test targeted probiotics. This approach could prevent infection before it starts and paves the way for precision microbiome therapies tailored to individual gut ecosystems.
View All Labs
Contact Dr. Sean Gibbons
Associate Professor
ISB