How Gusto Global is opening the floodgates of emerging microbiome science
As with most medical breakthrough narratives, it evolved from humble beginnings.
A cancer survivor, two master microbiologists and the quest to better understand and design bacterial networks foundational to human health: the microbiome.
Back in 2017, Drs. Daniel (Niels) van der Lelie and Safiyh Taghavi had recently discovered and developed world leading agricultural biological products at FMC Corporation, and were pursuing entrepreneurship. They spent decades following a career road map to advance microbiome science by mechanistically understanding and manipulating nearly any host-microbiome interaction underlying human health, animal health, agriculture, biofuels and environmental remediation.
My close friend Diana, who survived an aggressive case of breast cancer, was interested in seeking a frontier in medical research. She embraced the microbiome early because of her understanding of its potential for both therapeutic and nutritional interventions. I credit her with clarity of thought post chemo and radiation therapy.
“I get the sense we are sometimes asking medical questions within one system that need to be answered within another,” she intuitively commented during a remarkable lunch in New Orleans, when I made an introduction to Niels and Safiyh.
The timing felt right to begin bringing the microbiome to the forefront of patient-centered medical care: data-driven care integrating molecular science for health and early-stage predictive diagnosis, leading to more targeted and physiological interventions.
Diana was spot-on, and people are now starting to recognize the value of adding this dimension to the existing base of human host readouts. There is a growing appreciation the microbiome may even be more predictive than traditional measures, as in many instances we might be directly addressing causality.
Building a next-generation microbiome platform
Co-founder John Fennebresque, Jr. loves to emphasize Gusto is building a capital-efficient company with a two-sided platform network effect: first, accurately diagnosing patients through a cutting-edge readout of biological systems; and then precisely intervening with therapies. The goal is to deliver novel interventions such as living clusters of bacteria that precisely modulate multiple targets, synergistically restoring a healthy community.
This message always seems to resonate, and I remember embracing this line of thought while convincing Diana to become our first external investor.
Before agreeing to invest, Diana brought a new perspective to the conversation. Though she wanted to take personalized medicine to the next level by understanding active microbial pathways and liked Gusto’s therapeutic discovery plan, she wanted a more direct approach. As a patient she saw faults in the system and wanted us to provide real answers to future patients.
Diana eventually became Gusto’s angel investor because she believed in Niels and Safiyh’s ability to attack critical problems containing the highest degree of difficulty with speed.
Together, we agreed to follow the science and began studying inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In that field of study there were gaps within the research, and significant unmet need due to low standard of care and the involvement of immunosuppression. We believed the microbiome could be transformative.
The bar for innovation was set exceedingly high, as others were already clinically investigating IBD therapies targeting the microbiome. We saw technological leapfrogging opportunities and began building a fully integrated platform with core capabilities addressing complex challenges that were being overlooked: (1) predictive analytics addressing systematic complexity; (2) a next-generation bacterial strain collection; and (3) clear therapeutic design thinking.
Fast forward to the present… Against all odds and intense academic and commercial competition, with significantly less resources, Gusto Global outpaced a rapidly growing field to deliver on the full promise of microbiome science by becoming the leading company to understand how microbes interact and change status of the immune system.
The landmark paper published in Nature Communications today, a collaboration with UNC Chapel Hill, highlights this deep mechanistic understanding through the bottom-up rational design of an IBD therapy. This manuscript details Gusto Global’s bacterial network design capabilities, and the GUT-108 therapeutic candidate represents the most advanced design of a minimalistic, functional, and healthy microbiome to restore immune and epithelial homeostasis.
In parallel to this work, Gusto Global proved several computational breakthroughs to a pharmaceutical partner, integrating multi-omics data to gain deep mechanistic understanding of active microbial pathways using real world patient data. Our proprietary GUST+ bioinformatics platform coupled with the design capabilities demonstrated in the paper will surely lead to more exciting drug discoveries.
Our seed investors have strongly supported our vision. Gusto will continue to concentrate our efforts on building a revolutionary platform and is pursuing partnerships to execute on the full scope of the opportuity and get to scale. Our investors thought microbiome science was too important to fumble and saw extroardinary opportunities if we succeeded in setting the industry’s gold standards.
As Gusto’s platform is coalescing, the speed at which we are covering ground and quality of discovery is accelerating. We look forward to sharing more updates in the future!
Mark Spizer
Gusto Global, Co-founder and COO
In 2017, Gusto Global captured the moment we set our minds to be a leader in the microbiome movement and contribute to the battle against many existing conditions and diseases.
