Synthetic microbiomes to treat disease. Sea levels may rise faster than we thought. AI for scientific researchers. All that and more in this week’s edition of The Prototype. To get it in your inbox, sign up here.

Around 150 million children worldwide are at risk for a disease called environmental enteric dysfunction (EED), particularly those who live regions with poor sanitation. This causes severe gut inflammation, preventing them from absorbing nutrients from food. There is no approved medicine for the disease, though some interventions can help and others are being researched.

Kanvas Biosciences cofounder and CEO Matthew Cheng is aiming higher. His startup received new funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a treatment for EED. How? By developing a synthetic bacterial microbiome that can be delivered to patients in a pill.

Since it was founded in 2020, Kanvas has been building what it calls a “Google Maps” for the microbiome, using machine learning and spatial imagery. With these methods, Cheng told me his team can identify promising strains of gut bacteria that can work in concert in a bioreactor. His company’s technology, he told me, means they can get 145 different bacterial strains into a single pill–compared to other microbiome treatments that contain fewer than a dozen.

Why is this the solution? Because the gut inflammation underlying EED is usually the result of chronic infections from bacteria like E. coli, which damage the gut lining and prevents absorption of nutrients. This microbiome pill would introduce healthy microbes that displace the pathogenic ones, the way fecal transplants are currently used to treat certain bacterial infections. The treatments will be designed with pregnant women in mind, which hopefully will induce healing in mothers and provide a healthy microbiome for their unborn infants.

It won’t be easy, Cheng admitted to me. Not only will the company need to identify the appropriate local bacterial strains to use, but it will also need to design the pill to be stable at warmer temperatures. Dosing will also have to be optimized–one pill alone is unlikely to do the job, but if it requires too many, that could make it hard for patients to adhere to the medication schedule.

Kanvas doesn’t have any FDA-approved microbiome treatments on the market yet, but they do have one currently in clinical trials and another going later this year. And the advances the company has made in the past couple of years make him confident that his company can work with the Gates Foundation to tackle this disease. “We think we have a really high chance of solving this problem,” he told me. “Or at least being part of the solution.”

Discovery of the Week: Global Sea Levels May Rise Faster Than Expected

Increased carbon dioxide levels could cause sea levels to rise faster than expected. That’s suggested by new research published this week by the iC3 Center for Ice, Cryosphere, Carbon and Climate.

The reason for this has to do with Antarctic ice shelves. These are part of the giant glaciers on top of the continent, which have extended out over the ocean and are floating. They help slow........

© Forbes