Called ResBiotic, the product is the brainchild of Dr Vivek Lal, MD, who is the director of the Pulmonary Microbiome Laboratory at the University of Alabama Birmingham as well as the CEO and CSO of ResBiotic, the eponymous company. Dr Lal said the research that led to the product launch stretches back for some time.
“We started studying this almost 10 years ago,” Dr Lal told NutraIngredients-USA. “But the pandemic has really spurred interest in anything related to the lungs. Studies relating to the gut-lung axis have really spiraled in the past year.”
Rapidly expanding field of research
A search on teh PubMed database backs up Dr Lal’s assertion. Using the term ‘gut lung axis,’ there were 10 matching studies done in 2016. That number grew to 146 in 2021. Similarly, searchers using the terms ‘gut lung microbiome’ came up with 16 and 332 studies, respectively, whereas the numbers for a ‘gut lung microbiota’ search came up with 47 and 286 studies, respectively.
A number of his Alabama-Birmingham colleagues are participating in the new company, Dr Lal said. Together, they have been in forefront of research in the field.
“For us who were already in this field we can look back to a time when the lung was not identified as an organ that harbors a microbiome,” he said.
“We started by studying chronic lung disease in infants,” Dr Lal said.
In the years since, research done by scientists associated with teh brand have looked at a host of gut-lung interactions. Some of the various aspects of the gut-lung axis investigated by members of team include a study looking at interplay between the severe gut and lung problems that afflict many premature infants. Other studies looked at using a multiomics approach to longitudinal data relating to parameters of lung development in infants as well as a paper that looked to reconstructing the characteristics of the airway microbiome at birth.