It has become clear in recent years that use of antibiotics to treat pathogenic bacteria also has unwanted detrimental affect on the innocent by standards which have a role to play in overall health of the host. In the process, equilibrium of bacterial populations is disrupted. This change could be temporary, fully restored after cessation of the treatment or not fully recovered. Studies on the details of effect of dysbiosis on chronic health conditions is becoming increasingly desirable. In fact, FDA is beginning to require data on effect on microbiome for every new drug tested for toxicity.  At the same time, there is an urgent need to define normal microbiome for an healthy individual.

Efforts for defining composition of microbiome of healthy individual is complicated by the following facts. Variations in microbiome composition are observed within an individual over time depending on the life style of an individual, between individuals within similar geographic location and definitely individuals from diverse geographical and diverse cultures.

There are attempts to address this very important issue. It is imperative to have this issue addressed in such a way that it can be streamlined for clinical evaluations in the near future. 

KamTek is participating with one such a group of investigators at George Washington University, FDA and other local institutions to provide such a solution to this important new public health and clinical issue of these times. These studies are accomplished by performing all bio-repository and molecular biolab procedures at KamTek facilities and work with bio-informatics groups for analyses of sequences generated by nextGen sequencing system from Illumina.

KamTek participation in such projects include the following:

• Sample receipt, and safe cryo-storage without compromise to their integrity till use
• DNA isolations
• validation of DNA quality to proceed further
• DNA Library Preparations for metagenomic studies
• Purifications and size selections of the amplified DNA segments
• Validation of the resulting preparations of defined amplified DNA segments
• Pooling of libraries of a number of samples, 24 samples for this metagenomic study
• NextGen Sequencing on MiSeq instrument from Illumina
• Upload raw sequence FASTA files to base space for bio-informatic analyses by our collaborators.

Manuscript of study for facilitating to define healthy gut microbiome with our lead collaborators at George Washington Univ. is being submitted for publication. KamTek, offers to participate in such studies on contractual basis to other groups.

KamTek project on development of Clofazimine to treat CDI includes gut microbiome studies of hamster and mouse model for CDI treatment studies.

This project is in progress.

KamTek also intends to collaborate with clinicians currently treating MDRTB and Leprosy patients with CFM to establish the extent of effect of this antibiotic on the rest of microbiome of the gut to start with. As pointed out, these studies are accomplished by performing all molecular biolab procedures at KamTek facilities and work with bio-informatics groups for analyses of sequences generated by nextGen sequencing system from Illumina.