The microbiome continuously shapes its environment through a complex set of interactions, and the microbial flora within and outside the human body has an essential relationship to an organism’s health status. For instance, dysbiosis in the gut microflora is an established contributor to the development of pathological conditions such as chronic inflammatory bowel diseases, type 2 diabetes, and colorectal cancer. In the drug discovery industry, scientists must be proactive in detecting changes in the intestinal microbiome in response to novel therapeutics. Changes to the microbiome associated with probiotic and prebiotic administration must be carefully monitored. Characterizing changes to the gut microbiome whether by metabolic, enzymatic, biomarker, or genomic approaches is fraught with difficulty and has a high assay development and validation cost. Therefore, many companies have looked to partner with research organizations that have success with innovative microbiome analysis tools.

In this webinar, our distinguished speakers, Dr. David Kwok and Dr. David Willoughby discuss current biomarker identification and metabolic evaluation techniques of the human gut microbiome, as well as metagenomic sequencing modalities utilized to streamline results for expedited interpretation and analysis.

To ensure good data yield, there are challenges encountered during NGS operations, especially with poor quality RNA or DNA material, which is a common scenario for clinical samples. In this poster, we showcase three key tricks during the NGS operations to generate consistent data with high quality.

In the discovery and investigation of novel biomarkers, tissue immunohistochemistry (IHC) studies are critical. The important question has been how to translate the technology into the clinical laboratory for patient testing once a biomarker target has been identified. Dr. Nan Zhang, VP of Global Central Lab Services at Frontage Laboratories Inc., will provide a valuable update on the application of Tissue IHC in new biomarker development, selection between different types of IHC, and validation of the methodology to be used for patient testing in clinical trials.