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| Activity title | Microbiome Applications in Human Health and Performance | Activity Reference | HFM-358 | Panel | HFM | Security Classification | NATO UNCLASSIFIED | Status | Active | Activity type | RTG | Start date | 2022-09-15T00:00:00Z | End date | 2025-09-30T00:00:00Z | Keywords | Characterization, Human Performance, Microbiome, Modulation | Background | There are more microbial cells in and on the human body than there are human cells. Our ‘microbiome’ encodes two orders of magnitude more genes than our human genome. This represents a huge metabolic potential that enables humans to thrive. Unsurprisingly, when our microbiome is aberrant, it affects human health and performance. Unlike our human genome, our microbiome can be modulated to ameliorate health and performance detriments. The human microbiome thus has unrealized potential as a driver of human health and performance. This Research Task Group proposal is a direct outcome of the HFM-ET-186 Exploratory Team. | Objectives | 1) Facilitating understanding of how warfighter stressors alter the microbiome, and how this alteration impacts warfighter health and performance
2) Forging a path towards protocol standardization to facilitate inter-project comparison
3) Understanding international ethical, legal, social, and environmental implications (ELSEI) of microbiome modulators
4) Determining international agreements required to facilitate collaboration and cooperation
5) Sharing data to accelerate microbiome modulation for warfighter health and performance
Deliverables to include:
• RTG roadmap to microbiome research collaboration and cooperation
• Targeted workshops to:
- Facilitate collaboration
- Standardize protocols to enable inter-project comparison and data aggregation
- Address international ELSEI considerations
• Initiation of data exchange agreements between member nations
• Outline path towards joint experimentation amongst member nations
• Informing policy decisions regarding microbiome-based interventions
| Topics | The HFM-ET-186 Exploratory Team identified the military impact of the microbiome on human health and performance in the near-term (0-5 years), mid-term (5-10 years), and far-term (10+ years), and the technologies that will enable these advances. The RTG will focus on the topics that the ET determined to be near and mid-term goals to facilitate microbiome interventions that will modulate warfighter health and performance.
Enabling Technologies
• Standardization of methods
• Multi-organism genetic tool kits
• Advances in culturomics
• Facilitation of data sharing between nations
Gastrointestinal microbiome
• Characterization of warfighter GI microbiome
• Foundational results and mechanistic understanding
• Microbiome as a performance predictor
• Nutritional interventions for performance
• Gut-organ axes: gut-brain axis to understand impact on physical and mental stress resilience and recovery, including chronic issues (e.g., PTSD); gut-muscle axis for recovery and endurance, gut-immune axis for inflammation and disease susceptibility.
• Improvements in warfighter physical endurance, recovery, cognition, mental well-being
Skin microbiome
• Improvements in wound healing
• Stress prediction through microbiome differences
Oral and Respiratory microbiome
• Characterization to determine disease susceptibility
• Stress prediction through oral mucosa microbiome differences
Targeted and Engineered Modulation
• Microbes to combat fatigue
• Microbes to combat GI diseases
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