Our Science
Creating a new framework for generational health.
The Key to Better Health is in your Gut.
The science of gut microbes has a bigger impact on your overall health and wellness than you think. We are as much bacteria as we are human - with trillions of microorganisms in and on our body, most residing in our gut. Furthermore, we have 100x more bacterial genes in our body than we do human genes.
The microbial ecosystem, known as our microbiome, greatly affects our development, functionality, and health. Much of our microbiome is shaped by diet, environmental exposure, antibiotic consumption, geography, and physical activity. In other words, understanding gut health science is just as important as decoding basic human health and the habits that can get you there.
"We're studying the 0.01% most fit portion of the human population in terms of optimal health and physiology. We look to identify what's unique and/or enriched in their microbiomes and then translate this biological data into next-generation health solutions for every body."
- Jonathan Scheiman, Founder & CEO
Decoding Elite Microbiomes (Guts)
TO UNLOCK OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE
Years of Cutting-Edge Research to Create Next-Gen Health Innovations
We developed our microbiome technology at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, at Harvard. We are believers in form-fits function and taking a cue from natural selection. Therefore in efforts to develop next-generation health solutions to benefit broader society, we had a radical idea: identify what works in the biology of the most fit people in the world to drive their optimal physiology.
This process entails harnessing meta-genomic information from the gut of super performers to better understand what is driving optimal exercise physiology. We assess this microbiome data through bioinformatic analysis to create a report of all the microbes, and their corresponding metabolic functions, in their gut. We compare each performer's data to others as well as more sedentary segments of the population. Additionally, we analyze how their microbiome changes longitudinally between performance and recovery phases. This is a wealth of information that we use to identify novel probiotic candidates. Once identified, we use microbiology and culturomics techniques to purify, validate, and develop our strains for functional testing and commercialization.
This fullstack process has led to the discovery and translation of our first two products: Nella for gut + sleep health and V•Nella to fight fatigue and promote endurance. However, we’re not done. We're building out our biological database and functional strain bank to develop microbes for numerous health applications, including strength, recovery, mood, women's health, and more. We live in a bacterial world and we're just scratching the surface of a new frontier to optimize our performance and longevity through our microbiome.
Featured in National Geographic Explorer
The microbiome is the epicenter of health and wellness.
Scientific References
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Nature Medicine
Read moreMeta-omics analysis of elite athletes identifies a performance-enhancing microbe that functions via lactate metabolism
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Harvard
Read moreHarvard’s athlete-based next-generation probiotics technology licensed to FitBiomics
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National Center for Biotechnology Information
Read moreInternational Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: Probiotics
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From Microbiome Data to Clinical Validation
It takes quite a lot of work to prove a cause-and-effect relationship between the microbiome, let alone specific microbes, and health or fitness.
Here at FitBiomics, we share and engage the public in the full process from hypothesis to discovery - ranging from sequencing elite microbiomes to preclinical testing to human clinical trials.
Unlike pharmaceuticals, nutritional supplements, and probiotics do not require placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials (PCRCT), but we'd like to see such evidence grow and see profits from products go to support continued research.
Ideally, we want PCRCT on humans with an adequate study design to achieve statistical significance.
As a leader in the microbiome science realm, we push to evaluate our products for all safety, quality, and efficacy measures beyond what is mandated. This allows us to understand the benefits of our probiotics before launching while continuing to pursue IRB-approved clinical trials.