The Barcelona Debates on the Human Microbiome 2024

Clàudia Arajol is a specialist physician of the Digestive System Service and the Inflammatory Intestinal Disease Unit at Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge, Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain.

Adam Burgener is a Professor at the Center for Global Health and Diseases at Case Western Reserve University. The central theme of Dr. Burgener’s research program is to understand host and microbial mechanisms that are important for mucosal immunity and susceptibility to disease. His lab has developed mass-spectrometry based systems biology techniques to study mucosal barriers which play front-line roles in host responses to HIV. His lab is currently leading two Team Grants funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research, including one to study the microbiome in HIV transmission and prevention, and the other to understand the microbiome in cervical cancer disease progression. He also co-leads other NIH funded studies in HIV transmission and pathogenesis.

Malu Calle is the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences, Technology and Engineering, University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia. She is Full Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and group leader of the Bionformatics and Bioimaging research group (Bi-squared group) of the University of Vic. Her main research areas are statistical genetics, omics data analysis, microbiome data analysis and survival analysis. She works on the development of new methods for biomarker discovery, identification of genetic risk profiles and construction of dynamic prediction and prognostic models of disease evolution. Her contributions include innovative approaches for integration of multi-omics data and compositional data analysis in metagenomics. She was formerly Head of the Biosciences Department (2018-2022), chair of the Master of Sciences in Omics Data Analysis (2012-2020), President and Vicepresident of the Spanish Region of the International Biometrics Society (2012-2013 and 2014, respectively).

Dr. Fernández-Real received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Barcelona, Spain. Since then, he has been researching in chronic inflammation, iron metabolism and insulin resistance. He has published 389 articles indexed in PubMed, of which 102 as first author and 118 as last author (corresponding author). He is Principal Investigator of >20 competitive National and International competitive Projects (continuously since 1993) and is a former member of the Editorial Board of Diabetes Care and Clinical Chemistry, among others. He was among the very first authors to propose chronic low grade inflammation in the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes, obesity and insulin resistance and iron stores as a component of the metabolic syndrome. The interplay of the microbiota with all these elements is also an important line of research. He has been recently invited to talk about his research in the Annual Meeting of the American Diabetes Association (San Francisco 2015), the Endocrine Society (Boston 2016) and the American Society of Nutrition (San Diego 2016), in addition to invited conferences in meetings from European Association for the study of Diabetes (Lisbon 2011), Endocrinology (Budapest 2012), Obesity (Sofia 2014) and Nutrition (Prague 2016). He is currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine (University of Girona), Director of Research in the Department of Endocrinology, and Scientific Director of the “Fat Bank”, a nation-wide Biobank specialized in adipose tissue samples. He is Principal Investigator and member of the Steering Committee of the CIBERobn, a Network of Excellence in the Research of Obesity in Spain.

Professor of Microbiology at the University of Girona (Department of Biology), and Principal Investigator of the research group ‘Microbiology of the Intestinal Disease’ at the same university. She is interested in the study of human gut microbiota in the context of disease with the aim to find new diagnostic and prognostic tools, and new targets for future treatments. She has particularly focused on the pathogenic role of E. coli populations in Crohn’s disease.

Dr Mireia Valles-Colomer has a background in Microbiology and Computational Biology (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain and Free University of Brussels, Belgium). After her PhD in the University of Leuven (Belgium), she joined the Computational Metagenomics Lab in the University of Trento (Italy) as an EMBO postdoctoral researcher. Next September, she will start the Microbiome Research Group at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) as a tenure-track group leader. Her research focuses on the role of the human microbiome in mental health and the transmission of the microbiome among individuals. She has developed tools to characterise the microbial production and degradation of neuroactive compounds in metagenomic data, and performed the first population-level study on the link between the gut microbiome and host anxiety and depression (Valles-Colomer et al, Nat. Microbiology 2019). The study was included in “Nature milestones 2019” as a milestone paper in human microbiota research, and was awarded a recommendation from F1000Prime. Her work on the transmission landscape of the gut and oral microbiomes was recently published (Valles-Colomer et al, Nat. Microbiology 2022; Valles-Colomer et al, Nature 2023).

Dr. Clotet received his MD (1976) and his PhD (1981), with a thesis on autoimmune diseases, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). That same year, his internship as an Internal Medicine specialist at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona coincided with the first AIDS case reported in Spain. This case was the catalyst for a career dedicated to this serious disease, first as head of the HIV Unit of the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital in Badalona (1987-2015) and then as founder and president of the Fight against AIDS Foundation (1992), which is now named as Fight Infections Foundation.

Dr. Clotet soon saw the need to go a step beyond patient care to conduct research aimed at eradicating AIDS. In 1995, with the support of “la Caixa” and the Department of Health of the Generalitat of Catalonia, he founded the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, which he still heads.  In addition, Dr. Clotet is also the clinical director of Infectious Diseases at the Metropolitana Nord area of the Catalan Institute of Health, scientific advisor to two IrsiCaixa spin-offs: Aelix Therapeutics SL and AlbaJuna Therapeutics SL and director of the Chair of AIDS and Related Diseases at the Universitat de Vic (UVic).

He has published more than 1000 papers in high impact international journals and his contributions to research have been recognized with the Josep Trueta medal to Sanitary Merit and the ‘Premi Nacional de Recerca’, among other awards.

Consultant of Gastroenterology, Teknon Medical Centre Barcelona. International Human Microbiome Consortium Steering Committee Member. President of the Probiotics and Prebiotics Spanish Society Board. World Gastroenterology Organization

Roger Paredes, MD, PhD, is the Head of the Infectious Diseases Service at Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol, Head of the Microbial Genomics Group at the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, Badalona, Spain.

Roger Paredes obtained an MD, PhD degree in Medicine and Surgery from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). He specialised in HIV resistance at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School. His team has demonstrated the clinical utility of HIV-1 deep sequencing in both high- and low-income countries.

Joël Doré has been working on microbiota for 38 years. He is an internationally recognized leader in human microbiota.

Joël Doré, Graduated of Agro Rennes, with a Master of Advanced Studies in Applied Animal Physiology. He joined INRA in Clermont-Ferrand in 1983. Then he received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 1988, with a thesis on the rumen microbiota, completed while he was contractual scientific associate at INRA. His research on human microbiota started when he joined Inrae Center at Jouy-en-Josas, in 1990. From 2010 until 2014, he was vice-head of MICALIS, one of the largest units of INRA (now INRAE: French National Institute for Research in Agriculture, Food and the Environment).

He is now Scientific Director of MetaGenoPolis, an INRAE unit created in 2012 and funded by the French program “Investissements d’Avenir”. Its expertise in the analysis of the gut microbiome and its implications in health and nutrition has been widely recognized in the international scientific community. Joël Doré aims to contribute to a better understanding of the human-microbes symbiosis to support therapeutic choices, in the medical area as well as science-based recommendations in health nutrition.

Isabel Gordo is a principal investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Oeiras, Portugal.
She graduated in Physics from the Technical University in Lisbon (IST) in 1997 and received a PhD in Evolutionary Genetics from the University of Edinburgh in 2002.
Her post-doctoral research was carried out at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência where she then became leader of the Evolutionary Biology group in 2004.
Her research aims at a better understanding of what determines the diversity and evolution of microbes. Of particular focus is the study of antibiotic resistance mutations and the genetics of microbial adaptation in mammalian microbiomes.
She has won some international competitive grants: e.g. ERC Grant in 2010, Global Grant for Gut Health in 2019 and recently the ERC Advanced Grant in 2023.
She founded the Portuguese Society for Evolutionary Biology in 2014 and was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2017, and of the European Academy of Microbiology (EAM) in 2020.

Gianluca Ianiro received his medical degree in 2009 summa cum laude at the Catholic University of Rome.He trained in gastroenterology at the same University. He is currently gastroenterologist at the Digestive Disease Center of the Fondazione A. Gemelli IRCCS and adjunt professor in gastroenterology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome, Italy.
He has since gone on to establish himself as a key clinical and translational investigator focusing mainly in the field of intestinal microbiota, and has received several research grants in support of his innovative research. His current research is focused mainly on microbiome diagnostics, on disentangling the rules of donor microbiome engraftment, and on investigating microbiome therapeutics.

Since 2002, Dr. Chaysavanh Manichanh is using meta-omic approaches to study the human microbiome associated with disorders. In 2006, Chaysavanh joined the VHIR institute in Barcelona as principal investigator to pursue her line of research on Human Microbiome. She has collaborated with the MetaHIT and the IHMS consortia to build a comprehensive gene catalogue from the human gut microbiome and to develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) and protocols in order to optimize data comparisons in the human microbiome field. With this experience and her double expertise in molecular microbiology (PhD University Paris VI, 2001) and in bioinformatics (Degree at Pasteur Institute, Paris 2000), she is leading at VHIR a multidisciplinary research group to develop molecular, cellular as well as bioinformatics tools to understand the role of the microbiome in human health and disease.

Professor Siew Ng is Professor at the Department of Medicine and Therapeutics, Assistant Dean (Development) and Associate Director for the Center for Gut Microbiota Research at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.  She is the Director for the Microbiota I-Center (MagIC). She received her Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery degree from the University of London and the Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD) from Imperial College London.

She is at the forefront of epidemiology, genetics, pathogenesis and treatment of inflammatory bowel disease in Asia-Pacific and globally.  She pioneered the research on the role of gut microbiota in health and disease as well as fecal microbiota transplantation and microbial therapeutics. She also made a number of novel and significant discoveries in the COVID-19 research.

She has published over 300 papers in international journals, including Nature Genetics, Cell Host Microbes, Nature Communications and Lancet. Her research work has won over 30 prestigious awards including the Gold and Silver Medal of International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva 2022, Ministry of Education Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards, Sachar Visiting Professorship, Sir Francis Avery Jones Award and Professorship, Croucher Senior Medical Research Fellowship, and Highly-cited Researchers by Clarivate in 2020 and 2021.

Dr. Ravel received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland College Park in Environmental Molecular Microbiology and Ecology and performed his postdoctoral training as a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research fellow in the Chemistry Department at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD working on the chemistry and bioinformatics of natural products. He joined the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 2007 as an Associate Professor. Previously, from 2002 to 2007 he was an Assistant Investigator at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, MD, the pioneering institute where the first microbial genome was sequenced.

Dr. Jacques Ravel is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Acting Director at the Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD since February 2022. Over the past 18 years he has developed a research program focused on applying modern genomics technologies and ecological principles to characterize the role and dynamics of the vaginal microbiome in women’s health. He uses clinical genomics and systems biology approaches to develop improved strategy to manage gynecological and obstetrics conditions. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications. He is the co-Director (PI) of the NIH funded Collaborative Research Center on Human 3D Biomimetics Cervicovaginal Models for Sexually Transmitted Infections which aims to develop an innovative biomimetic model of the lower reproductive tract to study aspects of the sexually transmitted infections (STIs), chlamydia and gonorrhea, that are not achievable in humans or with current animal or cell models. The program specifically uses systems biology approaches to examine the triangular relationship between human genetic variation, sexually transmitted infections and infections caused by Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and the function of the vaginal microbiome. Further, his laboratory studies the role of the vaginal microbiota in bacterial vaginosis, pregnancy and prematurity, as well as the health of neonates. His foundational research is currently being translated by developing novel live microbiome-based live biotherapeutic formulations targeted to restore vaginal health, treat conditions such as bacterial vaginosis and urinary tract infections. His work earned him to be elected to Fellowship of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) in 2012, and in 2015, he was awarded the Blaise Pascal International Research Chair and spent two years at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. He is the founder and Editor in Chief of the journal Microbiome (www.microbiomejournal.com), which has achieved an impact factor of 19.9 in the 10 years since its creation, and as a fellow of the AAM, he is an Associate Editor for the journal mBio.

Natalie Silver MD, MS, FACS, is Staff at the Cleveland Clinic Head & Neck Institute in Cleveland, Ohio and serves as the Director of Head and Neck Cancer Research. Dr. Silver is a surgeon-scientist with a translational research laboratory studying the tumor immune microenvironment in oral cancer. Her lab is in the Center of Immunotherapy and Precision Immuno-Oncology at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute. Dr. Silver is also a practicing head and neck surgical oncologist specializing in ablative and endocrine surgery. Dr. Silver obtained her Medical Degree and Master’s Degree in Tumor Biology from Georgetown University followed by a residency in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery. She attended UT MD Anderson Cancer Center for fellowship training in head and neck oncologic surgery and translational research. Dr. Silver has received several research grants including a National Institutes of Health (NIH) K08 award. Her laboratory is focused on developing therapeutic mRNA vaccines for head and neck cancer, and exploring the role of intratumoral bacteria in cancers of the head and neck.

Arnau Vich Vila (PhD) is a computational biologist and postdoctoral researcher at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). He earned a Master’s degree in bioinformatics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and completed his PhD in Groningen (The Netherlands), where he investigated the gut microbiome and its significance in health and disease, with a particular interest in gastrointestinal diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Arnau has also made significant contributions to comprehending the factors that shape gut microbiota composition, investigating influences from diet and medication through extensive population cohorts such as the LifeLines cohort in the Netherlands and, currently, the Flemish Gut Flora Project in Belgium. Additionally, his current scientific interests involve exploring the role of the gut microbiota in food intolerances and delving into the metabolic implications of the small intestinal microbiota.

Sara Vieira-Silva is an associate Professor at the University Medical Center, JGU Mainz, Adjunct Director at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), and on the board of the Institute for Quantitative & Computational Biosciences (IQCB).
Initially trained in biology and computational biology (Lisbon, Portugal), she conducted a PhD in microbial evolutionary genomics, supervised by Eduardo Rocha at Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. As a postdoctoral scientist (VIB-KULeuven, Belgium), she specialized in studying microbial metabolism specific to the human gut environment and its clinical impact on the human host.
Her main research interests are in defining the boundaries of the healthy human gut microbiota variation and the role of dysbiosis in disease, especially through the promotion of inflammation and microbial metabolism of bioactive compounds. She combines her background in microbial comparative genomics and evolutionary ecology, with hypothesis-driven experimental design in close collaboration with clinical experts. She embraces and develops state-of-the art computational approaches to study quantitatively the contribution of host-associated microbial communities to pathophysiology and response to therapy, notably in the clinical context of inflammatory and metabolic disorders.

Prof. R.K. Weersma is a gastroenterologist and chair of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands. His research and clinical work focuses on chronic immune mediated diseases of the gastrointestinal tract. He has been working on the role of host genetics in disease susceptibility and how the identified genomic variants lead to diseases and their influence on disease behaviour. The emphasis lies on integrating “multi-omics” data with high resolution clinical data by making use of both population based and disease specific biobanks. In recent years he has been working on the role of the gut microbiome in both health and disease. He is one of the leaders of the Dutch Microbiome Project and cofounded the Groningen Microbiome Hub.