The translation of preclinical findings into valid clinical outcomes remains an issue to this day. This “Valley of Death” is very present in gut microbiome research due to the intractability of gut microbiome interactions in vivo.The ex vivo SIFR® technology successfully predicted shifts in the gut microbiota composition observed in vivo across different interventions (inulin, resistant dextrin, 2’FL). This predictivity for clinical outcomes enables the quick generation of mechanistic hypotheses, while the high throughput of the technology embraces the inter-individual variation at the preclinical stage to de-risk clinical trials on the responder/non-responder question.

Link to full article: Van den Abbeele et al, 2023, Frontiers in Microbiology