A figure is emerging of the human as a holobiont i.e, a host which is, in this case, is human and its associated microorganism(microbiome); but in the case of humans, their gut is either threatened by both microbial excess and microbial absence. This is indicating that the global microbiome immunology scope and its market are raising high in these pandemic times.
Antimicrobial approaches to germ warfare are being supplemented by probiotic approaches to restoring microbial life. A microbiome is the community of micro-organisms living together in a particular habitat. Humans, animals, and plants have their own unique microbiomes, but so do soils, oceans, and even buildings.
The human microbiome relates to the human microbiota, which is the aggregate of microorganisms that resides on or within any of a number of human tissues and biofluids. This includes the skin, mammary glands, placenta, seminal fluid, saliva conjunctiva, gastrointestinal tracts, and so on. The organisms include bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, and viruses. The human microbiome is a definition beyond the ‘microbiota’, referring to the collective genomes of resident microorganisms.
In today’s scenario the healthy living is given utmost importance, so people are chasing for every nutritious thing which is instant as to balance with their busy lifestyle and also it is believed “ you are what you eat.” So to give their gut a healthy environment people are spending on gut microbiome health by adding probiotics and prebiotics in their daily lives which is pushing this microbiome market to flrouish. .
Major companies like Second Genome, Enterome, and EpiBiome. In addition, several new startups have entered the field making this field to be a hotspot for several more investors. Amongst the most active investors, Global Engage reports, are Seventure Partners, Flagship Pioneering and BioGaia. In fact there are some 120 companies investing in analyzing data relating to the human microbiome. To take one example, companies such as uBiome are developing genomic tests meant to identify and diagnose harmful microbes in the body.
Investments are also huge , The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018 that from 2011 through 2015, venture funding in microbiome firms soared 458.5 percent to $114.5 million, while overall venture investment grew 103.4 percent to $75.29 billion. Last year, microbiome investment has surged again despite a decline in overall venture funding.
The $616.9 million raised for microbiome companies to date so far in 2016 is more than all of the venture investment in the microbiome space in 2011 through 2015 combined The Human Microbiome Project (HMP) was a .US National Institute of Health set the goal of identifying and characterizing the microorganisms which are found in association with both healthy and diseased humans, based on a budget of $115 million. The aim was to inform about human health or disease. Drawing on the wealth of data provided by the HMP, many companies are investing in (immunology) microbiome based research.
As a report in Forbes notes “Capitalizing on new understanding of how imbalances in this ecosystem contribute to disease, a handful of startups aim to give physicians better weapons to fight conditions such as cancer, autoimmune disorders and infection.”Examples include Vedanta Biosciences Inc, a start-up that has teamed up with New York University Langone Medical Center to study how bacteria can be used in the battle against tumors. Drug delivery is a related area with start-up Blue Turtle Bio utilizing bacteria from the gut microbiome as a drug delivery platform for supplemental enzymes intended to treat enzyme-deficient disease states thus helping them monetize this field creating its huge market.
In a separate area, Human Longevity Inc. is putting $220 million into the sequencing of microbiome DNA to uncover disease-associated imbalances in microbial populations. This is aimed at the development of personalized medicines for patients with different conditions.
Similarly, Johnson & Johnson is collaborating with a start-up called Second Genome to look for targets for drugs that work by modifying what bacteria live in the intestine with the goal of coming up with new treatments for ulcerative colitis.
Research is also governmental: the White House recognized the microbiome’s importance, with an announcement of the National Microbiome Initiative. This is a $221 million investment plan which includes a $100 million investment by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Some examples of this wave of research and investment include the digitization of the microbiome information.
To decode the details of the microbial ecology requires high-resolution genome sequencing feeding into Big Data supercomputers. The complexity of the human gut’s bacterial communities on the computer, as Pharmaceutical Microbiology Resources reports, The research team hails from the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine of the University of Luxembourg.
For the project, the researchers gathered all known data on the metabolism of 773 bacterial strains and using these data developed a computer model for each bacterial strain. This collection can now be used with a computer program to simulate metabolic processes with the goal of investigating how the different organisms affect the metabolism of other microbes as well as that of the human host. This generates a series of predictive metabolic models so that diseases can be better understood and disease treatments theoretically tested ahead of drug development.
The Luxembourg approach was detailed in the journal Nature Biotechnology, with the research paper titled “Generation of genome-scale metabolic reconstructions for 773 members of the human gut microbiota.”
The comparative analysis of the market is given below:
Based on product, the human microbiome market is segmented into probiotics, prebiotics, foods, medical foods, diagnostic tests, and drugs. The probiotics segment is expected to account for the largest share of the human microbiome market in 2022.
The increasing awareness of probiotics for the prevention and treatment of various lifestyle & chronic diseases and health benefits of probiotics over conventional medicines, such as antibiotics are some of the major factors driving the growth of this segment.
Therapeutics segment is expected to dominate the market in 2022. This is due to the need for the development of reliable, precise, and quicker treatment of chronic lifestyle diseases and various other disorders as it is proved scientifically that stress kills healthy microbiota inside our body specially the home to them our gut.
And based on disease, the human microbiome market is segmented into five categories—infectious diseases, endocrine & metabolic disorders, inflammatory diseases, cancer, and other diseases. The infectious disease segment is expected to dominate the market in 2022.
This is due to the increasing research in microbiome-based products and their use in treating infectious diseases. Many smaller companies are investing in research, and their major focus is on developing products targeting microbiome modulators for infectious diseases.
On the basis of region, the global human microbiome market is segmented into four major geographies— North America, Europe, the Asia Pacific, and the Rest of the World . Europe is expected to account for the largest share of the global human microbiome market by 2022. The large share of this regional segment is mainly due to the high research activity in this region. These market are expected to rise highly by year 2022.
The major players in the human microbiome market include Enterome Bioscience (France), 4D Pharma (UK), and Seres Therapeutics (US).
Thus concluding ,even though the Covid-19 pandemic has thrown many industry segments off course, the microbiome field, at least, seems to be heading for a promising future. Investors see some positive outcomes for the life sciences industry as a whole.
They are optimistic for the longer term because after this is over – when people have recovered and the economy is partially back to normal – in all countries, governments will probably put healthcare as the top priority of their programs everywhere.
The cost-cutting that was anticipated on research and development in life science was put on hold but now we expect in budget and a greater focus on healthcare systems. So we expect the end of 2020, to have a really positive impact from the [Covid-19] crisis, for life science.
This analysis was done through several sources.
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