Seerave Foundation is excited to announce that we have engaged in another significant global initiative: The Cancer Platform, designed and delivered by The Cancer Awareness Trust.

When health care systems are under ever more pressure, we strongly believe that well informed, pro-active patients can contribute significantly towards an effective and personalised treatment journey by enabling a more holistic dialogue with their oncologists. The Cancer Awareness Trusts’ platform will be crucial in enabling this dialogue by ensuring relevant and validated information is available to patients and their families.The Cancer Platform aims to provide free resources to support individuals affected by cancer at any stage of their journey, globally. It’s a unique initiative aimed at quickly connecting people with trusted expert information, equipping and empowering them throughout their cancer journey.

Seerave is particularly enthusiastic about this project due to its focus on patient empowerment and the utilization of existing health data.

Stay tuned for more in depth updates about this partnership as we continue our efforts to make a meaningful impact in the lives of those affected with cancer.

If you want to learn more, please feel free to read the news article released by The Cancer Platform.

#CancerAwareness #PatientEmpowerment #microbiome #nutrition #melanoma

Seerave is happy to announce another new partnership with the MVIF – Microbiome Virtual International Forum. The MVIF is an initiative aiming to replace multi-day microbiome conferences through regular 3 hour conferences suitable for all time-zones including a keynote as well as additional short talks from leading researchers in the microbiome space.

This innovative meeting framework was set up by a group of scientists around Prof. Levi Waldron and Prof. Nicola Segata. All of the involved individuals are coming from different parts of the world, with different backgrounds, different working hours… but with a great common passion: the microbiome. The challenge of global collaboration, travel logistics and associated CO2 footprint as well as the very dense schedule of researchers and clinicians led to the idea to set up the Microbiome Virtual International Forum (MVIF). MVIF aims to empower anyone in the world to regularly receive updates around state-of-the-art microbiome research including virtual networking with peers to catalyze collaboration, for free.

There is already a line up for the next forums and we are happy to share that also the Seerave Network is represented by Prof. Jack Gilbert from UCSD in the December Version, talking about “Microbial Precision Nutrition”.

Jump in and explore the upcoming agendas of future events here.

…and/or take the opportunity to submit your own abstract for a presentation!

As part of this year’s Seerave Scientific Retreat, we had the privilege of hosting the Dutch premiere of the award-winning documentary “The Invisible Extinction” on Tuesday, May 23rd, at the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam.

The film brings to light the remarkable work and charismatic personas of scientists Martin Blaser and Gloria Dominguez-Bello, who are dedicated to preserving the disappearing microbes crucial for our survival. The screening drew a very diverse audience, providing a glimpse into the scientific journey spanning several years.

Following the screening, a panel discussion with Seerave Scientists addressed any remaining questions from the audience. The event concluded with a delightful, fermented, and gut-friendly aperitif.

For a concise glimpse of the event, please watch the summarized clip:

https://youtu.be/3dO7ZQ-f8Pc

We’re excited to share highlights from The Melanoma & the Microbiome Workshop organized by Seerave in collaboration with the Melanoma Research Alliance, which took place in Washington DC on March 10-11, 2023!

https://youtu.be/xuHcFU3xUMg

The workshop brought together 45 key opinion leaders to shape the future of clinical translation of microbiome research for melanoma care/treatment.

The Mechanisms Session on Friday March 10th featured three insightful discussions led by renowned experts in the field: Innate and adaptive Immunity led by Kathy McCoy (UCalgary) and Marcel van den Brink (MSCC), Omics and inflammation led by Giorgio Trinchieri (NCI) and Guido Kroemer (IGR), and Intratumoral bacteria and tertiary lymphoid organs led by Laurence Zitvogel (IGR) and Ze’ev Ronai (SBP Medical Discovery Institute).

The Therapeutic Modalities Session on Saturday March 11th featured two more in-depth discussions led by Bertrand Routy (CR CHUM) and Jennifer McQuade (MD Anderson) on Nutritional Interventions and Hassane Zarour (UPMC) and Howard Hang (Scripps) on Microbial therapy of cancer: LBP, Consortia, FMT.

The outcome of the meeting will be a consensus paper published in #Cancer Cell, which will lay out the path to move novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches arising from this field towards patients as quickly as possible.

We want to thank all attendees and our co-organizers MRA for making this event such a success and for their dedication to advancing melanoma care and treatment!

Stay tuned for more updates on the impact of this workshop on the field of microbiome research.

Seerave Foundation is currently supporting the incorporation and building the team of a new Swiss Foundation, the Santorio Foundation. Santorio Foundation’s mission will be to translate innovation in the field of food, nutrition and health to society and market.

Santorio Foundation is hiring a Data and Algorithms Lead and a Data Science in Nutrition Internship to develop first-in-class AI-assisted food tracking solutions to revolutionize nutritional research.

Data and Algorithms Lead: To support the future Santorio Foundation’s engineering section, we are looking for a talented and motivated candidate to lead the Data and Algorithms team. This is a hands-on software development position to lead, conceptualize, plan, and execute advanced data science and AI/ML initiatives to build high quality digital healthcare solutions in the nutrition and health area. Please find more information here.

Data Science in Nutrition Internship: To support the future Santorio Foundation development team, we are looking for a talented and motivated candidate to join the team.

This position will provide hands-on experience with broad exposure to international nutritional databases and the preparation of datasets for machine learning & artificial intelligence algorithms. Please find more information here.

The Santorio team is looking forward to receiving your applications!

Please feel free to share.

Throwback: Seerave Retreat 2022

Already some time ago – we are delighted to retrospectively share some impressions of this year’s Seerave Retreat in Vienna. This year’s retreat aimed at reflecting on the output of our network to date, to update each other on the ongoing scientific projects as well as to share insights into activities of the different labs beyond the Seerave projects.

To get an impression please have a look yourself:

This year we held the fourth Seerave Fellows Retreat from November 1 – 4, 2021, for the second time in an online setting. Despite being spread all over the world, flourishing study results, intense academic discussions and highly interesting perspectives shared by the entrepreneurial partners of the network as well as short virtual lab tours made this year’s retreat a success!

Here are the key highlights from the academic projects of this year’s retreat:

Controlled dietary interventions in melanoma patients (MDA):

The recruitment for the Phase 1 study on high fiber diet in melanoma survivors was completed and preliminary analysis showed shifts in the gut microbiome, circulating metabolites and cytokines. For the Phase II study (high fiber diet in active melanoma patients undergoing immune checkpoint inhibition) the first melanoma patients (of 53 total) have been enrolled.

PRIMM UMCG & KCL:

The metagenomic analysis showed amongst other findings that antibiotic use of stage 4 melanoma patients undergoing immune checkpoint inhibition associates strongly with progression-free survival after 12 months. The full work on baseline metagenomic signatures will be published in Nature Medicine in the coming weeks. In addition, first data was presented around the correlation between dietary patterns as assessed by food frequency questionnaires and treatment outcome. We’re looking forward to this data being made available to the public soon as well!

Personalised Nutrition Study (Weizmann):

108 of a total of 200 patients have already been recruited and 48 patients finished the 6 month intervention. An intermediary analysis showed good adherence, weight loss in both groups and that the microbiome analysis can differentiate breast cancer vs healthy population. The full omics-analysis of stool and bloods will be initiated in 2022.

Antibody screening platform (Weizmann):

A platform to screen 200’000+ antibody epitopes per blood sample has been established. It showed that antibody patterns are a personal fingerprint and associate with age, gender and the inflammatory marker CRP (see here). The same platform was deployed for Sars-CoV-2 screenings, which established that antibody repertoires of recovered COVID-19 patients showed distinct changes compared to unexposed pre-pandemic controls. Find the publications here.

Characterising postprandial inflammation in humans (HUG):

This small feasibility study with n=3 has been successfully concluded, in which 92 inflammatory markers have been assessed 10h post-meal (every 20 min). An intermediary analysis showed personalised inflammatory responses depending on meal type (mediterranean vs junk food vs junk food + fiber).

Impact of microbiome-derived metabolites on immune cells (Technion):

The team could show that when you feed bacteria with different carbon sources, they will modulate immune cells differently, which is an additional proof for the diet-microbiome-immunity axis in vitro. It is still under investigation, which exact microbial-derived metabolites are relevant to this immunomodulation.

The last day of the retreat was dedicated to our “enabling initiatives”. The food tracking app “MyFoodRepo” and their plans to become the international gold standard for nutrition tracking in research cohorts was presented by Marcel Salathé and Andrea Maesani (Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne). Hexagonfab explained their expertise around field-effector-transistor technology which could be key in enabling wearable biosensors in the future. The smart toilet initiative and the current prototype of their GutLab, a fully automated, at-home minilab that replaces manual stool sample kits, eliminating patient friction and enabling continuous, at-home sample generation was presented by Kevin Honacker from BiomeSense. Micronoma pitched their approach to utilise cell-free microbial DNA biomarkers and machine learning technology to achieve early detection and classification of cancer from minimally invasive liquid biopsy samples. And finally current efforts and strategies on the Seerave-initiated and -led project for continuous inflammation monitoring were presented by the Seerave project leader Rossella Fontana.

We remain highly impressed by all the hard work that is carried out in the labs and look forward to another year full of new findings, mechanisms, biomarkers and surprises!

On World Microbiome Day we celebrate all things microbial, all around the world.

Today we would like to raise special attention to one of our initiatives: The collaboration between MyFoodRepo @EPFL and Microsetta @UCSD. Together they aim to roll out a US-wide citizen science project aiming to collect as much information as possible on everyday food items we consume. This information will help to train an algorithm that enables researchers in the future to better track nutrition and give more profound insights. Therefore…

We ask all of you to contribute to the microbe revolution: the “FoodRepo Scan” app is a new way #CitizenScientists can help advance the understanding between diet & microbes! Download the app on iOS or Android and start adding barcodes and images of food items you have at home or encounter in any store. The data will then become publicly available on FoodRepo. This will create a hugely valuable dataset, available to anyone in the world, with which research into nutrition and health will be accelerated. For example, it will serve as a nutritional library for the MyFoodRepo platform, a new AI-assisted tool that allows tracking of high dimensional nutritional data during clinical studies. Become part of tomorrow’s science today!

The collaboration between Microsetta and the Digital Epidemiology team at EPFL is made possible thanks to the support from the Seerave Foundation for nutrition and microbiome research @Seerave Foundation; please see http://www.seerave.org/projects for more details.

We had been looking forward to meeting in person in Vienna this year but a certain virus has meant that this year’s Seerave Fellows Retreat had to be held in front of screens at home or in the office. Nevertheless, we are pleased to announce that the third Seerave Fellows Retreat from November 2nd – 6th, 2020 was as inspiring as always. A series of virtual meetings allowed the members of the network to update each other on the different research projects and also enable everyone to exchange skills and knowhow and discover further synergies within the network. 

Next to holding the meeting virtually, this year’s meeting was set up slightly differently: Over the first three days outstanding presentations were given by the fellows on the current projects. Furthermore, high level introductions by the principal investigators of the different scientific projects were aiming to further explore synergies between the diverse research strategies of the members of the Seerave Network and set the ground for new collaborations. Summarized, as the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to add pressure on clinical and research resources at all levels, we are very proud to be able to say that all members of the Seerave Network found a way to drive and develop the science around the virus or even reallocated resources towards fighting the pandemic. This has included developing rapid COVID diagnostics and serotyping approaches, investigating the effects of COVID on immunotherapy and also offering epidemiological insights to health care providers and governments. 

Day four was aiming at presenting initiatives by the Seerave Foundation beyond purely scientific research. In this context, a sneak preview of the documentary “Missing Microbes” by Sarah Schenk and Steven Lawrence was presented. Updates on the feasibility study of “The Microbiota Vault” was given by Dominik Steiger (EvalueScience). Current efforts and strategies on the “Continuous Inflammation Monitor” were presented by Seeraves CSO Manuel Fankhauser. The food tracking app “MyFoodRepo”  and their plans to scale up to the US and Germany was presented by Talia Salzmann (Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne). The smart toilet initiative and their current prototype has been presented by Kevin Hoenacker from BiomeSense. And finally the most recent project of the Seerave portfolio: the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) by John de la Parra (Rockefeller Foundation). 

In conclusion, after an extraordinarily difficult year we, as the Seerave Foundation, would like to thank all the members of the Seerave Network for having contributed to furthering Seerave’s vision of broadening and enhancing the focus on the nutrition, microbiome and immune system axis. We remain convinced that this becomes ever more relevant in today’s world.

We are pleased to announce that the Seerave Fellows Retreat from 6. – 8.11.2019 in Berlin has been a great success. For the second time the fellows of the Seerave Foundation gathered to update on their current activities in different research projects, to further discover synergies and opportunities to exchange skills and knowhow.

In three days, outstanding presentations were given in a very open atmosphere and the room was filled with an enthusiasm to share and support each other. During the retreat, many new connections were made and ways to optimize current projects. For example, for observational projects at KCL and UMCG an explanatory video has been the result of a little brainstorming on how to improve current recruitment situation and how to ease the process for the researchers. First actions have been taken during the retreat and the process has kicked off already.  Another overarching point of discussion was the creation of a Master MTA (Material Transfer Agreement). Many projects of the Seerave Network are setting up collaborations and data sharing plans.

Finally, on day three, Johannes Richters, supported the process with visual recordings to facilitate the discussion. In this creative session, prototypes were created to evaluate the projects in accordance with the Seerave vision from a different angle. The goal was to understand why we are doing this research and how our projects, rationales and approaches are interlinked, as well as identifying gaps.

Summarized, “This was a great opportunity to join forces and work towards our shared mission of integrating nutrition into the health care paradigm – particularity for cancer patients.” (Ashley E. Holly, Phd; Seerave Fellow from MD Anderson)

Impressions of the Berlin Seerave Retreat 2020

Visual summary of the Berlin Seerave Retreat 2020 by Jo Richers: