The discovery has one immediate application: identifying children with a high risk of asthma in their first 100 days of life, says pediatrician Stuart Turvey of UBC Vancouver, a co-author on the paper. “Those children could be followed or treated more quickly if they end up with asthma,” he adds. But it also suggests that providing this group with the unique mixture of four bacteria—a combination not found in current commercial probiotics—could prevent the onset of asthma.
But developing therapeutics will be harder than just mixing the microbes together into pill form, Wills-Karp says, because babies already have guts that are teeming with other bacteria. These “first colonists” may prevent new strains from easily taking over. And another study has suggested different bacteria as protective. “It’s not clear right now that there are ways to induce the growth of these particular bacteria in kids,” she says. “But it certainly starts to open the door toward that possibility.”