PIXABAY, PEDROSERAPIOMaria Dominguez-Bello of the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine and colleagues in February published the results of a small study showing that swabbing babies born by Cesarean section (C-section) with microbes from their mothers’ birth canals could partially restore the microbial diversity that is lacking when compared with vaginally delivered infants. Now, the startup Commense—of which Dominguez-Bello is a cofounder—has obtained an exclusive license from NYU to extend “this approach by developing microbial and non-microbial interventions that could benefit millions of children each year worldwide,” the company said in a statement released today (March 31).
The approach, called “vaginal seeding,” is not without its critics. In a February editorial published in The BMJ, researchers at Imperial College London and their colleagues urged clinicians against the “increasingly popular but unproved practice.” The authors cited the risk of transferring pathogenic microbes from mother to child, among other things.
“To be clear, if a mother tests positive for any pathogens that could harm her child, we agree that clinicians should not perform vaginal seeding,” Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego, and Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago wrote in a March opinion piece for The Scientist. “But based on the evidence to date that your child’s microbiome at birth is important and modifiable, we think that parents should make ...
