Working Toward a Biologically Healthy Indoors

Many studies highlight the importance of a healthy gut microbiome for overall well-being. The general public has taken notice, too, as evidenced by the emergence of multiple probiotics into the market.

Beyond our bodies, there are beneficial microbes in the built environments we inhabit every day, such as our homes, offices, cars, etc. With a significant portion of the population spending more than 90% of their time in these built spaces, understanding the interaction of microbes is essential to maintaining human health.

The PreMiEr: NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Precision Microbiome Engineering is actively identifying beneficial microbes and developing technologies to support them, with a focus on achieving a healthy balance between beneficial microbes and pathogens. The vision of PreMiEr is to develop frameworks that create biologically safe, smart and healthy indoor spaces.

But research can only take these ideas so far. To make an impact on public health, these technologies and eventual products must take root in the daily lives of our communities—and their grocery store aisles.

Translating these emerging technologies to commercial products was the focus of the first PreMiEr Industry Summit, hosted on November 6-7, 2024 at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, which is also one of PreMiEr’s member organizations. This two-day gathering brought together key representatives from academia, industry and non-profit to discuss strategies for getting PreMiEr research topics onto the shelves and into the spaces of the everyday public. The discussions not only delved into technological and scale-up challenges, but also regulatory hurdles, operational concerns and societal acceptance to microbiome technologies.

“It was insightful to learn what aspects of PreMiEr’s research portfolio are most valued by the industry,” said Claudia Gunsch, the Muriel Theodorsen Williams E’46 Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke and director of PreMiEr. “It was also useful to understand how they prioritize their research interests to align with their business priorities”

The summit was attended by 55 people from industry, academia and non-profit. These include several PreMiEr member organizations such as PS&S, Novonesis, Neogen, Illumina, PacBio, North Carolina Biotech Center, Nexilico, and BIOME Consortia. A few non-member organizations that are potentially interested in becoming more closely associated with PreMiEr attended the summit in addition. These include Westat and Locus Biosciences. The academic participants include faculty, scholars and staff from Duke, NC-State, UNC Chapel Hill and NC A&T.

The first day featured introductions and overviews from Gunsch and Anurodh Tripathi, co-director of innovation ecosystem for PreMier. These were followed by several informational talks on sampling and characterization for microbiomes in a low-biomass indoor environments. Rob Donofrio, chief scientific officer at Neogen, shared the processes Neogen follows in standardizing methods for microbiome measurement. The morning was finished by a visionary talk from Boyuan Chen, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke, on how to achieve high throughput sampling through robotic automation.

The afternoon session focused on the talks from industry members to detail how an idea develops from benchtop research to a commercialized product. These insights were delivered by John Harp, staff scientist at Novonesis, and Michael Dosier, founder of BIOME consortia and former CEO of Biomason.

The day also featured a panel discussion focused on the standardization of microbiome for the built environment in context of human health moderated by Rachel Noble, professor in of environmental science and engineering at UNC Chapel Hill. Participants in the panel included:

• Deverick Anderson, professor of medicine at Duke Hospital
• Joe Brown, deputy director of PreMiEr
• Ginger Dosier, founder of BIOME Consortia
• Taylor Penke, director of automation and informatics at Locus Biosciences
• Rob Donofrio, chief scientific officer at Neogen

“Each session was rich in material and very helpful to familiarize ourselves with potential partnership and collaboration opportunities with the center and other industry members,” said Mohammad Soheilypour of Nexilico.

The day ended with poster presentations from PreMiEr students. These posters were formally judged by industry participants. Ammara Aqeel, a PhD student in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, received the award for the best poster.

“The student poster session was a productive opportunity for students to practice and improve presentation skills and answer questions on the fly,” said Jaime Randise, territory account manager for PacBio.

The second day featured a workshop on key research questions that the center must tackle to execute its vision on commercializing technologies for societal benefit. Topping the list are the challenges of detecting microbes or pathogens in real-time, such as through a device that can be integrated within an existing HVAC unit. Another example is engineering cleaning and disinfection formulations that minimize pathogens while maintaining a balanced microbial community—and educating the public that simply killing every microbe possible isn’t in their best interest.

Throughout the summit, key themes cropped up time and again that speak to the inherent difficulties of these challenges. How does the community detect and identify “beneficial” microbes? How do you educate the public that not all microbes are bad? How do you get new products through a regulatory process that has not had to deal with these questions before?

“It is going to become very important for our industry engagement to lead the way with Premier, especially on standards, regulatory progress and thinking outside of the US,” said Rachel Noble, the Mary and Watts Hill Jr. Distinguished Professor of Marine Science at UNC Chapel Hill.