# The unleashed microbiome of cancer patients as a discovery platform for rational microbiome engineering

> **NIH NIH DP2** · NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE · 2022 · $508,500

## Abstract

Project Summary
The human gut microbiome is associated with a range of diseases, and may positively
or negatively affect the success of therapies. However, the causal directions between
the human gut microbiome and host health are seldomly clear due to a lack of feasible
controlled experiments in humans. High resolution, high frequency temporal data of
paired microbiome and physiological measurement, and rich metadata of potential
confounders, allow the application of causal inference frameworks. Such data can be
mined for potential microbiome drivers of host health, especially if both the microbiome
and host physiology are perturbed during the time courses. We have recently published
a vast longitudinal microbiome set from cancer patients undergoing severe perturbation
of their immune system. Concurrently, these patients experience dramatic shifts in their
gut ecosystem. We here propose to unlock this data and build a discovery platform for
microbiome causality, towards rational microbiome engineering. We will develop a new
machine-learning technique that enables rapid exploration of our data through effective
visualization and a web-based interface. We will develop a new method to identify gut
microbial competitor species of common pathogens, which are systematically missed by
existing approaches but are representing the most promising targets for microbiome
engineering. Finally, we will elucidate the bidirectional interplay between human-
targeted medications and the gut microbiome. For this, we will leverage our large data
set of paired microbiome and host immune cell trajectories. This will validate recent in
vitro results indicating that human-targeted medications may influence gut ecology
using in situ data, and it will identify potential gut microbiome modulation of
pharmacokinetics.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10468793
- **Project number:** 5DP2AI164318-02
- **Recipient organization:** NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
- **Principal Investigator:** Jonas Schluter
- **Activity code:** DP2 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $508,500
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-08-13 → 2026-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10468793

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10468793, The unleashed microbiome of cancer patients as a discovery platform for rational microbiome engineering (5DP2AI164318-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10468793. Licensed CC0.

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