The Barcelona Debates on the Human Microbiome 2025

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).

Stanislav Dusko EHRLICH was trained in Organic Chemistry at the University of Zagreb, Croatia and obtained PhD degree in Biochemistry at the University Paris VII, France. He was a research associate of Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize winner, in the Department of Genetics, Stanford University Medical School, California. He founded and directed Microbial Genetics Research Unit and the Microbiology Division at the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), coordinated the EU-funded MetaHIT project and was the PI of the French Investissements d’Avenir funded project Metagenopolis.  He authored or co-authored 420+ publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, 60 book chapters and 14 patents and holds an H index of 89 by Web of Science. He is member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, French Academy of Agriculture, the European Molecular Biology Organisation, the American Academy of Microbiology and the European Academy of Microbiology. He is Laureate of the Excellence in the Agricultural Research of INRA and of the Grand Prix Scientifique Del Duca de l’Institut de France, Chevalier de l’Ordre de Mérite, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and is currently Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences of the University College London.

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.

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 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.