Question:
Are we moving towards a new biology and medicine?
Recent discoveries in microbiome research opened up new frontiers in the life sciences. With the great potential it holds for translation, it is worthwhile to reflect how the field might transform biology and medicine in the future. Which perspectives open up for novel therapeutics and prophylaxes? Which are the prerequisites that will lead scientists from establishing correlations to defining causations in host-microbe interactions? With such great expectations linked to this field, it is also clear that a lot of research still needs to be done to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of host-microbe interactions in years to come. Finally, find out how the experts answer the question if we are moving towards a new biology and medicine?
Advances in microbiome research have changed and will further change the way we see the biological world and also how we treat diseases in the future. There are many promising perspectives for translation, especially medical interventions that will be based on a deep understanding of the metaorganism. Scientists have realized that this requires taking individual microbiome compositions into account, eventually leading to precise personalized therapies based on the individual patient. To achieve these goals, science has yet to fully establish how host-microbe-interactions work on the level of a fundamental and mechanistic understanding of the communication between hosts and microbes. This last set of answers shows how our experts judge the great promise lying in microbiome research and give an outlook on future directions of the field: A new understanding of biology and medicine, that defines life as multiorganismic with health and disease being governed by the microbial environment.
