Seed Health Launches Computational Biology Platform, Powered by Most Comprehensive Host-Microbiome Data Set, to Expand Pipeline Beyond the Gut

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Apr 11, 2024, 08:15 ET

The new platform, CODA, employs AI and ML to translate insights from the Human Phenotype Project into advancements for metabolic health, brain health, menopause, and longevity

CODA bolsters Seed Health's end-to-end platform for microbiome science to advance breakthrough research from discovery to real-world impact

BOSTON, April 11, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Seed Health today launched CODA, a computational biology platform for the discovery and development of next-generation precision probiotics and microbiome-directed interventions. The platform is powered by the Human Phenotype Project—the world's most comprehensive multi-omics data set, emerging from the lab of computational biologist Professor Eran Segal, Ph.D., at the Weizmann Institute of Science. CODA elucidates previously unknown connections between the microbiome and health to develop targeted, outcome-specific interventions. First programs include cardiometabolic health, brain health, menopause, and longevity.

CODA's dataset integrates over three million phenotypic data points from more than 13,000 individuals across 40,000 cumulative subject years, combining microbiome analysis with genetic, immune, metabolomic, and proteomic data. This multidimensional approach captures the diversity of human health factors, including biological, environmental, and dietary influences, lifestyles, and medical histories, to clarify critical interactions between the microbiome and host health and reveal unique insights into the mechanisms underlying health and disease.

"Our CODA platform is tracking the health data of tens of thousands of individuals over decades, offering a comprehensive, multi-omics perspective," explained Raja Dhir, Co-Founder of Seed Health. "This allows us to uncover and address critical connections between the microbiome and health, enabling the creation of targeted interventions to improve outcomes across diverse populations."

CODA enhances Seed Health's full-stack platform, bolstering the company's computational microbiome capabilities across various microbiomes of the body and strengthening Seed's capacity to propel microbiome science from discovery to real-world impact.

The Next Frontier of Microbiome Science
CODA's combinatorial dataset unlocks a new level of insight into the microbiome's complex interactions with key biological systems, including the gut-brain, gut-heart, gut-liver, gut-skin, and gut-eye axes. This has enabled the groundbreaking development of organ-specific clocks, revealing the diverse aging rates of different organs within the same individual. Such insights reveal a clear distinction between biological and chronological age, offering a more comprehensive understanding of health and disease patterns. Notably, the microbiome clock emerged as a key predictor of biological health across multiple organ systems, highlighting its critical role as an interventional target for enhancing human health.

"Our development of organ-specific clocks has revealed the microbiome's extraordinary capacity not just to predict but to actively shape health outcomes across key biological systems," said Prof. Segal. "CODA empowers the transition from insight to action, enabling the creation of interventions that target health outcomes across these different organ systems to support lifelong health."

The CODA platform utilizes microbial genomics to identify specific bacterial genes and employs network effect analysis to understand these microbes within their ecosystems, many of which have not been previously discovered or even named in existing microbiome databases. This comprehensive approach is powered by advanced AI and ML algorithms, capable of processing immense amounts of data, including 200TB of human data from The Human Phenotype Project.

First programs include:

Metabolic Health: CODA's method for microbial gene-based analysis was recently featured in Nature Medicine. The study, led by Prof. Segal, reported a direct correlation between variations in microbial genes and body weight and composition (based on 3,500 unique DEXA scans). A second study from the group, published in Nature Communications, revealed how diet modifies metabolic parameters through microbiome modulation, highlighting a causal relationship. CODA is translating these groundbreaking discoveries into consumer health products.
Brain Health: CODA investigates the crucial links between the gut-brain and gut-eye axes, illuminating how dietary compounds interact with the microbiome to impact brain health. Early findings underscore the significant role of microbial metabolites in brain development and function, setting the stage for microbiome-targeted interventions to enhance neurocognitive health.
Longevity: CODA provides unprecedented insight into the distinction between biological and chronological age, focusing on organ-specific functions and sex differences. Using this insight, Seed will develop targeted interventions to support immediate health, as well as long-term well-being and longevity.
Menopause: CODA's menopause program is grounded in the discovery of a significant acceleration in Biological Age (BA) during menopause, providing a strong signal for targeted intervention. This initiative will develop innovative solutions to mitigate menopause-induced symptoms and age acceleration.

"CODA enables the development of next-generation precision probiotics in a uniquely powerful way," said Dirk Gevers, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Seed Health. "Rather than relying on a few biomarkers in isolation, CODA empowers us to examine them within a network of hundreds of other biological data points. This comprehensive approach allows us to unravel the complex interactions between diet, supplementation, the microbiome, and multi-system human health more effectively than before."

"CODA significantly expands our platform's capacity to realize the full promise of the microbiome," said Ara Katz, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Seed Health. "With a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the microbiome's role in human health, we are better positioned to translate these breakthrough research findings into interventions that have a meaningful impact on human health globally."

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About Seed Health
Seed Health is a microbiome science company pioneering innovations in probiotics and living medicines to impact human and planetary health. Founded to realize the potential of the microbiome, our platform enables the translation of breakthrough science across a portfolio targeting health outcomes from infancy to aging. Our consumer innovations are commercialized under Seed® Our pipeline encompasses both indication-specific and preventive applications for gastrointestinal and digestive health, women's health, skin, pediatrics, mental health, metabolic function, and nutrition. Our environmental research is conducted under SeedLabs, which was founded to advance novel bacterial interventions to enhance biodiversity and restore ecosystems impacted by human activity.

About Eran Segal, Ph.D.
Eran Segal, Ph.D., is a Professor of Computational Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science and served as an advisor to the Israeli government in its response to the pandemic. He heads a lab with a multidisciplinary team of computational biologists and experimental scientists in the area of Computational and Systems biology. His research has driven multiple innovative and breakthrough discoveries, such as gut microbial composition and its significance for personalized diseases and nutrition.

His group has extensive experience in machine learning, computational biology, probabilistic models, and analysis of heterogeneous high-throughput genomic data. His research focuses on Nutrition, Genetics, Microbiome, and their effect on health and disease. His aim is to develop personalized medicine based on data from large-scale and deeply phenotyped human cohorts.

Prof. Segal has published over 200 publications that were cited over 65,000 times, and received several awards and honors for his work, including the Overton Prize, awarded annually by the International Society for Bioinformatics (ICSB) to one scientist for outstanding accomplishments in computational biology, and the Michael Bruno award. He was recently elected as an EMBO member and as a member of the Israel Young Academy of Science.

SOURCE Seed Health