There is evidence that the microbiome is implicated in the pathogenesis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or associated with it in one way or another. Many patients can trace their symptom onset back to infectious gastroenteritis or multiple courses of antibiotics. Microbiome-based strategies (eg, probiotics, diet, antibiotics) offer benefits to subsets of patients and so does the use of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT).
Development of microbiome-directed medicine is stalled by the laborious nature of conventional cultivation methods and insufficient data for machine learning-driven approaches. Read more ...