Why the growth of gut-tech could transform female health outcomes

The human digestive system is a complex, fascinating network of organs and tissues.

Home to trillions of bacteria, our gut plays a crucial role in an array of bodily functions beyond the conversion of food to energy – from the balancing of hormones to the prevention of disease.

Recent breakthroughs in our understanding of the function of the human gut have fuelled a significant increase in innovation in the gut health space.

As a result, the market is seeing a rise in ‘gut-tech’: technologies designed to aid or improve the important functions of our gut in order to improve health outcomes.

This is a trend that females can celebrate. At long last, attention commensurate with its significance is being focused on the gut, and this is having a transformative outcome on our understanding of the female experience of health and disease, and on the availability of therapeutics and treatments designed for the female body.

Mapping the growth of gut-tech

The majority of innovation in the gut-tech space is focused on the gut microbiome, a term referring to the trillions of bacteria that exist throughout the gastrointestinal tract, but especially in our large intestine.

Until the turn of the century, very little was known about the function or composition of the microbiome. This all changed following rapid advances in the sophistication and capability of sequencing technologies.

​​In 2007, Human Microbiome Project researchers at the United States National Institutes of Health started exploring the importance of microbiota for health, and in 2020, the European Bioinformatics Institute pooled more than 200,000 gut genomes to create a genetic database of human gut microbes.

By 2021, the extent of information and the consequences of this information for scientific research inspired James Kinross, a microbiome scientist and surgeon at Imperial College London, to name the gut microbiome as “the most important scientific discovery for human healthcare in recent decades.”

Today, we understand in more detail than ever before the mechanisms by which gut bacteria ferment dietary fibre to produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs).

These molecules are involved in the immune response, in digestion, in hormone regulation, and in the reversal and prevention of chronic diseases including cancer, depression, IBD and diabetes. It’s not a stretch to claim that nearly every marker of human health – including mental health – is in some way modulated by the activity of the gut.

It follows that technologies designed to aid or alter this activity will have significant health outcomes, explaining the huge growth in the valuation of the human microbiome market.

Currently estimated at a value of US$269 million, this market – of which therapeutics accounts for the majority share – has a compound annual growth rate of 31.1 per cent.

Should gut-tech be considered a subset of femtech?

For a start, we know that many of the chronic health conditions related to the activity of the gut microbiome are conditions that statistically affect women more than men.

These conditions include inflammatory and autoimmune conditions such as arthritis, IBD and IBS, as well as digestive disorders that cause nausea and/or bloating.

Women are also more likely to be affected by depression and other mental health conditions that are thought to be triggered by an imbalance of hormones in the brain – hormones that are directly linked to SCFA production by the microbiome.

Also on account of the hormone/microbiome relationship, researchers now believe that therapeutics targeting the microbiome represent a new frontier in treating menopause symptoms and managing peri- and postmenopausal health.

It follows that we can consider gut-tech to be a cornerstone of fem-tech, as these technologies translate our improved understanding of the gut and the microbiome into improved health outcomes for women.

Further progress in the development of gut-tech for the benefit of female health outcomes will require continued efforts to better understand the function and role of the microbiome, as well as concerted work to improve the geographic and ethnic diversity of microbiome samples used for research purposes.

Dr Caitlin Hall is the chief dietitian and head of clinical research at myota, a gut health start-up based in London that uses machine learning, microbiome sequencing and analytical chemistry to explore and promote the therapeutic benefits of a healthy gut microbiome.