By utilizing interdisciplinary approaches for understanding how the gut microbiome contributes to disease and health conditions, Gordon’s research has founded a widely-adopted paradigm for establishing causal relationships between microbiome structure and function and health status, identifying therapeutic targets in the microbiome, and for developing ways to alter microbiome properties.

Gordon’s groundbreaking work in childhood undernutrition led to the discovery of “age-discriminatory” bacterial strains whose changes in representation in healthy infants and children define a shared normal gut microbiota development taking place largely during the first two years of life.

In following cohorts of children born in low- and middle-income countries, Gordon discovered that infants and children with moderate and severe malnutrition have impaired gut microbiota development that is not repaired with current nutritional interventions.

By transplanting microbiota from these children and their healthy counterparts into germ-free mice, Gordon identified bacterial strains that play important roles in various facets of healthy postnatal growth and development. Gordon then used these animal models, colonized with the gut microbial communities of the very population of children that his team wanted to treat, to develop microbiota-directed complementary food prototypes designed to repair their damaged microbiota.

Source: https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2024/01/18/father-of-microbiome-research-awarded-2024-nemmers-prize-in-medical-science/