State of microbiome-based therapies 5-10 years from now?

[Otto Kretschmer]

What will be the state of affairs in the field in 5-10 years? Especially in cognitive and mental health?

Will FMT still be a thing or perhaps newer, better therapies will be available?

I am not overall unhealthy and I would rate my personality at 6.5/10 and my cognitive health at 7/10 at age of almost 31. I'm under no pressure to fix things ASAP and time (i.e waiting for tech to mature) is on my side.

@Michael Harrop is respectfully invited to speak his mind.

 

[Michael Harrop]

Nothing is going to be able to match FMT for decades. I covered this in a few places:

Michael Harrop Q&A (Nov 2023)

and

https://www.humanmicrobes.org/blog/stool-donors-one-in-a-million-ai-funding-potential

Some people may hear about the new FDA-approved drug alternatives to FMT and think FMT will soon be made obsolete by them. I disagree. While they've been proven to be helpful for C. diff, they are not as effective as FMT, and C. diff is much easier to cure than other conditions. The current FDA-approved drug is little more than a human-sourced multi-strain probiotic with a handful of bacterial strains. Due to extreme technical and knowledge limitations, I believe it will be decades before whole stool can be replaced with a synthetic version. The gut microbiome is an incredibly complex and dynamic ecosystem made up of countless strains of bacteria, fungi, archaea, and viruses. And we have very little idea of what most of them do, or how they interact with each other, our immune system, and our genes.

I don't think you can, or want to, rely on FMT forever. I think we do need to synthesize it. And I would argue that even pharma companies working on synthetic FMT should support our work, as you can't make gold jewelry without gold. Their donors apply to HM and don't qualify. They're trying to make gold jewelry out of iron and mercury.

Click to shrink...

 

[Otto Kretschmer]

@Michael Harrop
I would do FMT some 3-5 years from now but I have some doubts:

While there are certain traits like emotional stability, working and visuospatial memory, which I'd like to improve, there are others that I very clearly don't want to change
I don't want to lose my extreme intellectual curiosity, superb logical-analytical skills or excellent imagination because my FMT donor lacked such traits.