A new research project based in Germany is investigating how gut microbiome data can in future be used for diagnostics, disease monitoring and personalised therapies to tackle inflammatory bowel disease.
MikrobiomProCheck is a collaborative project spanning the region of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, gathering clinical, bioinformatic and data-driven expertise. The project is being funded with around €3.4 million by the North Rhine-Westphalian state government and the European Union. researchers from Bielefeld University and University Hospital OWL
The aim is to make microbiome data usable for research and therapy. Professor Dr Robert Heyer (pictured above) coordinates the collaborative project as head of the Multidimensional Omics Data Analysis research group at the Leibniz Institute for Analytical Sciences (ISAS) in Dortmund. The Professor of Bioinformatics and group leader at the Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at Bielefeld University describes the microbiome as a data space in which a great deal of information comes together.
The researchers are searching for patterns: which microorganisms occur in the gut? What functions do they perform? And how does this information relate to disease, treatment success and individual differences between patients? “The correlations are so complex that they can only be systematically analysed using data-driven and AI-based methods,” says Heyer. In the long term, such analyses could help to monitor the course of the disease in a gentler way. In some cases, a faecal sample alone might in future be sufficient, rather than having to repeatedly perform colonoscopies. At the same time, they are intended to indicate which medications might be particularly suitable for which patients.
A faecal sample alone does not yet provide a basis for medical decision making. Only when clinical data, molecular analyses and bioinformatic evaluation come together can patterns be identified that may be relevant for diagnosis, therapy and disease monitoring. In the clinical study, University Hospital OWL and University Hospital Essen are working closely together.
CeBiTec’s genome-analysis expertise makes it possible to determine which microbial genetic information is present in the samples and which biological functions might be associated with it. This reveals what the gut microbiome is composed of and what tasks its constituents might perform. The next step is to identify specific patterns, using bioinformatic methods that allow these large volumes of data to be analysed systematically. This enables the researchers to identify which changes in the microbiome might be linked to disease, and which data are suitable for further AI-supported analyses.
Professor Dr Robert Heyer comments: “What is special about MikrobiomProCheck is the breadth of its approach: we do not look at the gut microbiome in isolation, but combine clinical data, molecular analyses and bioinformatics. This allows us to investigate correlations that would scarcely be visible using any single method alone.”