Maxwell Kraft

The trillions of microbes that call us home –the human microbiome – perform critical functions that preserve our health including helping develop our immune system, manufacturing nutrients such as vitamins, and harvesting energy from the diet. Alterations of the human microbiome are increasingly recognized as a key factor in autoimmune, metabolic, infectious and many other diseases. For millions of years, humans have co-evolved with this community of microbes, communicating in an ancient language that holds critical clues about how autoimmune and infectious diseases develop. This language is based on a system of signals that our resident microbes use to successfully colonize us, such as byproducts of bacterial metabolism and factors that bacteria use to adapt to human niches. Recent discoveries have shown that most of these signals do not lead to disease, rather, they promote our long-term survival. Vedanta is developing a novel class of therapies that modulate pathways of interaction between the human microbiome and the host immune system. Vedanta was co-founded by PureTech Health and a group of world renowned experts in immunology and microbiology