This Meeting Summary highlights the key insights from the 12th meeting of the Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit, held in Washington, DC, organized by the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) and the European Society of Neurogastroenterology and Motility (ESNM). Through a 2-day series of plenary sessions, workshops, a poster session, and live discussions involving thought leaders, physicians, researchers, and representatives from the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry, the conference attendees focused on the strategies and challenges in developing microbiome-based therapies to prevent and treat human disease. The conference highlighted progress in the field, including the recently successful introduction of 2 new fecal microbial transplantation-based products into the clinical setting, and the continuing development of next-generation probiotics. However, to continue to advance microbiome-directed treatments, three key themes emerged during the meeting, including (1) better methods to identify actionable targets in the microbiome (2) developing effective strategies to manipulate the microbiome (3) aligning microbiome-based therapies with existing treatment paradigms in the real world.
Keywords: Fecal microbial transplantation; inflammatory bowel disease; probiotics.