safe implementation of cellular therapies.
4.5. Conclusions
The profound impact that microbial communities have on human
health is providing new diagnostic and therapeutic avenues for treating
disease. However, existing therapeutic approaches for modulating
microbiomes in the clinic remain relatively crude. Exciting research
into additive, subtractive or modulatory strategies for affecting the
human microbiota and, in turn, human health, are progressing towards
the clinic, powered by advancements in synthetic biology andmicrobial
ecology. While prototypical examples of these approaches have been
described, additional basic research to elucidate the function of hostassociated
microbial communities and host–microbe interactions and
progression into clinical trials is needed to guide the creation ofmore effective
therapies. Furthermore, enhanced engineering approaches to
enable the modification of a wide range of bacterial hosts, to create
disease-relevant sensors that can drive the conditional production of
heterologous therapeutics, and to achieve robust yet controllable function
of these sense-and-respond diagnostics in vivo will ultimately improve
the translation of microbiome therapeutics into real-world use.