Dr. Sabine Hazan about microbiome

"Well, I think we're going to end up finding out that immunity is in the gut. It starts in the gut. It is in the gut. It is those microbes in balance. That's going to be the future. The future is really looking at these microbes and saying, you've got too much of these kinds that are not so good and you've got too little of these kinds that are good, maybe we need to up the good and drop the bat. It's really, you know, the problem with this is that it's not a necessarily a product. It's not necessarily a consumer product, right?

And it's really the art of medicine. It's how do you fix someone that has an imbalanced microbiome, right? And especially since the technology is really not there yet, right? I mean, there's a lot of labs out there that are doing that, but they're not really validated and they've not really normalized their samples to even know. And also there's no clinical data on it. That's what we're doing. We're looking at the clinical data. We're looking at what does Alzheimer's look like? What does Parkinson's look like? What does autism look like? So I think ultimately the microbiome is a complex organ, and it is an organ.

It is where immunity starts, but at the same time, it's the wild, wild west and it's a new frontier that we need to explore because there's so many things we don't know. And here's the other thing, we've trusted animal studies to guide us in this field. However, the animal studies do not reproduce human beings. And so, you know, that's another challenge that we have. And every individual is different.

So we can't even compare each other. One person that may think that they're healthy compared to another person is really, you know, not necessarily healthy, right? So, you know, they may have the same microbiome, or not necessarily the same microbiome, but the same relative abundance of microbes. One person could be healthy with those microbes and another person could be unhealthy. So those are the challenges that, you know, are in the field in my opinion."