Snehal Chaudhari is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry. Her research investigates relationships between the gut microbiome and metabolic diseases, and how research on gut bacteria can be used to identify and inform therapeutic treatments. She sat down with Department of Biochemistry science writer Renata Solan to talk about her research, collaborations, and experience as an innovator.
What is your research about?
My lab studies how small molecules made by trillions of bacteria in our intestines influence disease. We take a multi-disciplinary approach to studying these small molecules, testing them in cells and animal models to understand their functions and how they ultimately can influence organ function and metabolism in health and disease.
What excites you about scientific research?
The potential for discovery and invention. While significant progress has been made in the past few decades, research on the gut microbiome is still relatively new. A large number of bacterial species and their functions remain unknown, and we are still developing methods and tools that will lay the foundation for future research.
How do you develop research questions?
In my research, we work to understand the causational relationships and associations between microbiome components and disease or health parameters, including the molecular details of how individual gut bacteria influence disease. This is the future of the field: identifying molecular interactions between our gut microbiome and us, the “host”.
How does your work benefit from research partnerships and collaborations?
As an early-stage investigator, having collaborators interested in working with me is a testament to the impact of my work. We have collaborators across the UW–Madison campus, at other institutions in the United States, and around the world. It is exciting to work with people with such varied scientific and personal backgrounds, to learn from them, and to work together to solve life’s scientific mysteries. These partnerships allow us to get a comprehensive view of what important questions we need to ask, any new and revised approaches we should consider, and ultimately how our research can help cure diseases.
What inspires you to innovate?
Investigating interactions between bacteria and humans is a huge challenge. We still don’t have tools to co-culture bacteria with human cells in the lab, for example. Further, we don’t yet know how to impact only parts of the microbiome when we use medications such as antibiotics. Understanding the basic molecular mechanisms underlying host-microbiome interactions will allow us to develop microbiome-targeted therapeutics.
How have the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and entrepreneurial programs across UW–Madison’s campus contributed to your experience as an innovator?
We’re working with WARF on anti-diabetic and anti-gut inflammation therapeutic treatments. We screen our library of unique compounds that gut bacteria produce to identify which ones trigger cellular pathways that are relevant for disease and to understand the under-lying mechanisms. WARF researchers mine large compound databases to test how modeled effects of compounds can be more effective at triggering these cellular pathways. Then my lab uses our tools to test the new compounds to find the most potent therapeutic.
The Chaudhari Lab is funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, Pfizer, Inc., and WARF.