I am a curious mind.

I started studying the human gut microbiota as I joined Prof Jeremy Nicholson’s lab at Imperial College London in 2005 thanks to a Nestlé sponsorship. My PhD focused on understanding how the host responds to bacterial colonisation from a metabolic perspective. For this purpose, I used a combination of molecular tools to screen the microbiome (i.e. the gut microbial genome) and the metabolome (i.e. all detectable metabolites in a sample). Modern microbial sequencing technologies were applied to assess variations in the microbiome in combination with metabolic profiling (metabonomics)  together with other molecular biological tools to measure modulations of the metabolism.

I then obtained a lectureship at the University of Reading in the Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences and further became Associate Professor in Integrative Metabolism. There, I established a research group with the support of prestigious institutes such as the Royal Society, the BBSRC, the MRC, the Crick Institute and the European Commission. Our mission was to decipher host-gut microbial metabolic interactions in order to link gut microbial ecology to metabolic health.

In 2017, I decided to apply the fundamental knowledge I gained in an academic setting to design a microbiome-based product supporting obese patients with metabolic disorders and joined LNC Therapeutics as Chief Scientific Officer. LNC Therapeutics has now become YSOPIA Bioscience. Today, the first microbiome-based live biotherapeutic product to treat obese people is about to enter into clinical stage.