Jeffrey Gordon
For " transforming the understanding of human health and how it is shaped by the gut microbiome."
Jeffrey Gordon, the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor and Director of The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine is the recipient of the 2024 Mechthild Esser Nemmers Prize in Medical Science at Northwestern University.
Gordon — often referred to as the “father of microbiome research” — received his MD from the University of Chicago, completed his clinical training in internal medicine and gastroenterology at Washington University in St. Louis and was a research associate at the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the National Cancer Institute. Previously, he completed his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College.
Gordon has transformed the understanding of human health and how it is shaped by the gut microbiome. By utilizing interdisciplinary approaches for understanding how the gut microbiome contributes to disease and health conditions, Gordon’s research has founded a widely-adopted paradigm for establishing causal relationships between microbiome structure and function and health status, identifying therapeutic targets in the microbiome, and for developing ways to alter microbiome properties.
Gordon’s groundbreaking work in childhood undernutrition led to the discovery of “age-discriminatory” bacterial strains whose changes in representation in healthy infants and children define a shared normal gut microbiota development taking place largely during the first two years of life.
In following cohorts of children born in low- and middle-income countries, Gordon discovered that infants and children with moderate and severe malnutrition have impaired gut microbiota development that is not repaired with current nutritional interventions.
By transplanting microbiota from these children and their healthy counterparts into germ-free mice, Gordon identified bacterial strains that play important roles in various facets of healthy postnatal growth and development. Gordon then used these animal models, colonized with the gut microbial communities of the very population of children that his team wanted to treat, to develop microbiota-directed complementary food prototypes designed to repair their damaged microbiota. This repair involved changing the representation and augmenting the expressed beneficial functions of bacterial strains that they found to be connected to healthy growth.
A randomized controlled feeding study of 12-18-month-old Bangladeshi children with malnutrition found that one of Gordon’s food prototypes led to microbiota and repair and significantly greater rates of growth compared to currently available treatments.
A member of the National Academy of Science since 2001, Gordon’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, including most recently the David and Beatrix Hamburg Award for Advances in Biomedical Research and Clinical Medicine from National Academy of Medicine, the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research.