Personalized gut microbiome model to improve nutrition and health
Official title: CyberGut: towards personalized human-microbiome metabolic modeling for precision health and nutrition
Funded at Institute for Systems Biology · NIH-11332726 · Data updated 2026-11-12
This project creates personalized computer models of adults' gut microbes, diet, and metabolism to predict how foods and drugs affect their blood and nutrition.
Quick facts
| Grant type | R01 grant |
|---|---|
| Study type | NIH-funded research |
| Funding institution | Institute for Systems Biology NIH-funded |
| Lab location | 1 site (Seattle, United States) |
| Project start | July 1, 2022 |
| Project end | April 30, 2027 |
| Funding year | 2026 |
| Award (this year) | $555,106 |
| NIH project number | 5R01DK133468-05 |
| Project ID | NIH-11332726 on NIH RePORTER |
Who could benefit from this research
✓Could help
Ideal candidates are adults (21+) who can provide or have existing stool, blood, and diet information for microbiome and metabolite analysis.
✕Less likely to help
Children and people without available stool, diet, or blood samples are unlikely to participate or benefit directly from this project.
What this research studies
From a patient's perspective, researchers combine stool microbiome DNA, diet records, and blood metabolite data to build a computer model called CyberGut. The model connects gut bacteria with specific host tissues, including the gut lining, to estimate what metabolites move between microbes, food, and your body. They will train and validate CyberGut using existing multi-omic data from more than 3,000 adults and refine it with tissue-resolved metabolic maps. The aim is to produce personalized predictions about nutritional and drug-related metabolic responses.
Why it matters
Potential benefit: If successful, this could help personalize diet and medication choices by predicting how an individual's gut microbes alter nutrient and drug metabolism.
How similar studies have gone: Prior studies have shown microbiome profiles can explain differences in blood sugar and lipids, but fully integrated host-diet-microbiome metabolic models like CyberGut are relatively new.
Where this research is happening
-
Institute for Systems Biology
Seattle, United States Active
Researchers
- Principal investigator: Gibbons, Sean Michael — Institute for Systems Biology
- Study coordinator: Gibbons, Sean Michael
About this research
- This is an active NIH-funded research project — typically early-stage science, not a clinical trial accepting patient enrollment.
- Some NIH-funded labs run parallel clinical studies or seek volunteers for related work. To check, contact the principal investigator or institution listed above.
- For full project details, budget, and progress reports, visit the official NIH RePORTER page.