Baylor University researcher Aaron Wright, Ph.D., has earned a $5.
6 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Transformative Research Award for a project that he and collaborators hope could lead to personalized – and revolutionary – treatments for gut microbiome diseases like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Crohn's, Ulcerative Colitis and more. Wright, a nationally recognized microbiome researcher and chemical biologist who serves as The Schofield Endowed Chair in Biomedical Science in Baylor's Department of Biology, will partner on the project with colleagues from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. "The NIH Director's Transformative Award is an exciting award that we're grateful to receive," Wright said.
We've proposed an idea that is out-of-the-box but has potential. If successful, it would be truly transformative. People's gut microbiomes vary greatly, and much of this field is moving toward personalized therapies.
Our long-term vision is to develop personalized fecal microbiota transplantation for microbiome diseases that identify and deliver select bacteria based on the individual." Aaron Wright, Researcher, Baylor University Wright will serve as co-principal investigator on the project with Randy Longman, M.D.
, Ph.D., director of the Jill Roberts Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease and associate professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Chun-Jun Guo, Ph.
D., assistant professor in the Jill Roberts Center and associate professor at Weill Cornell Medici.