2025 Viome Science Highlights

2025 marked a year of significant scientific progress for Viome, as cutting‑edge research translated into tangible advancements in precision health. From breakthroughs that make advanced metatranscriptomic testing more scalable and reliable, bold ideas for how science could be better organized to support longevity, and inspiring results from a personalized health pilot with a major law firm, our work is about turning deep biology into better lives. These highlights showcase how Viome’s research is helping people understand their bodies in new ways and empowering them with actionable insights for long‑term health.

Synthetic Control Samples

A study in Scientific Reports introduces a breakthrough that could accelerate the adoption of metatranscriptomic (MT) tests — tools that read all RNA in a sample to gain insights into biological processes that detect disease. Lack of inexpensive “positive controls”, which labs need to verify that each test run is working correctly, is a significant barrier to inexpensive scaling of tests. Traditionally, these controls came from real patient samples, which are limited, inconsistent, and very expensive.

The paper presents a solution: Synthetic Control (SC) samples — lab-generated materials that accurately mimic the RNA signature of real patient specimens. Once the signature is captured, these synthetic controls can be amplified to produce hundreds of thousands of identical control samples from a single preparation.

Viome scientists showcased the technology by creating Synthetic Positive Controls (SPCs) for an MT-based oral and throat cancer test. These SPCs performed with high stability in an automated clinical lab, demonstrating consistent results across large batches.

Toma, R., Hu, L., Banavar, G., Vuyisich, M. (24 March, 2025). Scientific Reports 15, Article number: 10101. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-95020-y

Manhattan Projects for Preventive Medicine

Watched the movie Oppenheimer? The original Manhattan Project, carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II, was the motivation for this peer-reviewed Expert Opinion article.

A group of scientists, clinicians, and philanthropists published a landmark paper calling for a new, more coordinated approach to advancing long-term health and wellness research. The authors note that while scientific knowledge and technology have rapidly advanced, progress toward improving population health may be limited by how research efforts are currently organized. Instead of thousands of small, isolated research projects chasing separate goals and academic publications, they call for a unified, mission-driven effort modeled after the Manhattan Project’s organizational style, emphasizing collaboration and alignment rather than competition.

In this model, scientists across many fields would work together toward one shared objective: identifying the true causes of chronic diseases and developing ways to prevent, reverse, or cure them. According to the authors, this coordinated, collaborative approach could finally give humanity the focus and momentum needed to leave most chronic diseases behind.

Vuyisich, M., Toma, R., Goodreau, H., Hanon, E., Tanton, D., Auber, L.A., Schultek, N., Aujla, R., Zuckerberg, E., Banavar, G. (24 July 2024). DrugRXiv. DOI: 10.58647/DRUGARXIV.PR000015.v1

A Healthier, Happier, More Productive Workforce

Lessons from Viome’s Personalized Nutrition and Coaching Pilot with MSK

Leading law firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP (MSK) partnered with Viome to pilot an innovative personalized nutrition and health coaching program that achieved remarkable results for employees facing high-pressure professional demands. The six-month pilot program provided 19 participants with Viome's Full Body Intelligence™ testing, personalized nutrition recommendations, custom supplements, and monthly coaching sessions. The results were highly encouraging: 79% of participants reported overall health improvements, 58% achieved weight loss (averaging 10 pounds), and participants showed significant reductions in gastrointestinal symptoms including occasional acid indigestion, gas, bloating, and constipation.* Perhaps most notably, 71% of participants with mood concerns showed improvement in feelings of sadness, while 60% experienced reduced feelings of anxiousness.*

The program's success extended beyond individual health metrics to create lasting lifestyle changes that rippled through participants' families and professional lives. Employees reported increased mindfulness around nutrition, improved energy and productivity, and even positive influences on family eating habits.* Participants praised the comprehensive nature of the program, with some noting improvements in biomarkers validated by their physicians. The compelling outcomes prompted MSK to not only continue the program but double its participant capacity for the next phase. The initiative demonstrates how targeted, personalized wellness programs can address the complex health challenges facing today's professional workforce, delivering benefits that traditional wellness offerings like gym memberships simply cannot match.

Hu, V., & Banavar, S. (2026, January). Viome Life Sciences Research.

2025 BMC Gastroenterology:

Altered Gut Microbial Functional Pathways in People with Irritable Bowel Syndrome Enable Precision Health Insights

Eric Patridge, Anmol Gorakshakar, Matthew M. Molusky, Oyetunji Ogundijo, Cristina Julian, Lan Hu, Grant Antoine, Momchilo Vuyisich, Robert Wohlman & Guruduth Banavar

Viome’s new manuscript showcases the power of stool metatranscriptomics at scale—using real-time microbial gene expression (KEGG Orthologs/KOs) to generate actionable functional “pathway scores” designed to provide early insight into disorders of gut–brain interaction. Using digestive dysfunction (DD) as a validation case, we developed a normative scoring framework in a large discovery cohort (n = 9,350) that classifies each pathway as "Good", "Average", or "Not Optimal" based on population distributions, then confirmed performance in an independent validation cohort of 71,220 individuals. In this study, odds ratios can be interpreted as the likelihood of having digestive dysfunction when a pathway score is "Not Optimal", across constipation, diarrhea, and mixed type.

The manuscript highlights eight Viome pathway scores: ButyrateProductionPathways, GABAProductionPathways, LacticAcidProductionPathways, LPSBiosynthesisPathways, MethanogenesisPathways, OxalateMetabolismPathways, SulfideProductionPathways, and UricAcidProductionPathways, which capture microbial functional activity rather than relying on taxonomy alone. To demonstrate clinical relevance, Viome applied a robust matched case/control design (accounting for age, sex, BMI, and sequencing month) and evaluated both self-reported DD and as defined by the Rome IV Diagnostic Questionnaire, while adjusting for potential confounders such as medications and antibiotic exposure. Across 32 total tests (eight pathways x four phenotypes), “Not Optimal” categories were frequently associated with higher odds of DD-related phenotypes, with results that were consistent across definition methods.

Most importantly for translational impact, Viome’s findings surface biologically interpretable, subtype-specific functional signatures: lower GABA-production activity tracks with DD across all subtypes, higher methanogenesis aligns with the constipation-predominant subtype DD, and lower butyrate-production activity shows the strongest associations with diarrhea-predominant DD. Other findings include elevated odds of DD with “Not Optimal” lactic acid, oxalate, and sulfide pathway scores, highlighting how Viome’s functional readouts can distinguish meaningful mechanistic patterns that align with symptom phenotypes and support precision, pathway-informed gut health insights.

Patridge, E., Gorakshakar, A., Molusky, M.M., Ogundijo, O., Julian, C., Hu, L.., Antoine, G., Vuyisich, M., Wohlman, R., Banavar, G. (20 November 2025). BMC Gastroenterology, Volume 25, article number 823.

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