NutraCast: Thorne’s Microbiome Wipe adds convenience to gut health testing

The Microbiome Wipe is made from a biodegradable polymer that breaks down in a provided testing solution that preserves the user’s DNA.The Gut Health Test provides a detailed analysis of factors related to digestion, inflammation, the nervous system, immune function, and the presence of pathogens. By mapping and integrating results of the test, users have access to a personalized action plan that targets gastrointestinal discomfort and optimizes wellness.

“Once we have that sample, it may not sound like much, but you actually have a huge number of microbes that live on your body and in your gut. You have about the same number of microbial cells as human cells. So it's a huge reservoir that's important for health and one of the developments fairly recently is that we can interrogate all these different microbes that are living on us or inside us. And when we do that, we're able to use something called metagenomic sequencing. So this is just like getting your human genome sequenced, which we can now do. But now you can get your metagenome sequenced and what that means is it gives us the gene content of all of those bacteria and other microbes that are living in your gut and it turns out that that has a lot of implications for health,”​ explained Nathan Price, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Thorne HealthTech. 

Price added that essentially everything that we ingest passes through our microbiomes before it comes inside the body. “So that means everything you eat in terms of food, any supplements that you might take and any drugs that you might take, all of those can be modified by the microbiome.”​

In clinical studies, the Microbiome Wipe showed increased efficacy compared to traditional stool collection methods. The study showed that the Microbiome Wipe performed comparably to a commercial room temperature DNA/RNA preservation kit and was also very similar to the gold standard frozen samples for most metrics. Additionally, the same study demonstrated that the wipe collection method enables easy access to sampling, testing, and genetic analysis in clinical trials, home use, or in remote environments given the wipe method’s stability. The results of the clinical study​ were recently published in Frontiers in Immunology. ​

To hear more about the wipe and the information that can be gleaned from the test, listen to the NutraCast.

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