So. Hi, I'm Christopher Stewart.
I'm a research fellow at Newcastle University.
So the gut microbiome
is the collection of micro-organisms which colonize the gut.
And by micro-organisms we mean things like bacteria and fungi.
So most of the time you can't see these, but they line the mucosal surfaces
of our bodies.
It's particularly important to understand the infant microbiome because we know
the microbial community changes most over that first year of life.
So we regard this as the sort of critical window of development
and how that microbiome changes over the first year of life.
And what factors are influencing that development are important to understand,
not least because the microbes that colonize the goat are interacting
with our own human cells that line the epithelium and also our immune system.
And that interaction
over the first year of life in particular can predispose an infant to both short
and much longer term health and disease outcomes.
So actually, I started my research career as a Ph.D.
student exploring pre-term infant microbiome,
and I moved away from that a little bit during postdocs.
But I've gone full circle now, and in my own
independent group, we extensively study the pre-term gut microbiome
both characterizing
how it develops from birth, the factors that impact the microbiome development.
But we are taking it one step further
now to unpick how the microbes are interacting with each other.
But also the infant's own host cells.
And we do this using a model system, and we can then unpick that microbial host
interaction and how that potentially is involved in multiple disease processes.
For my Fleming lecture, I'll be starting with the Ph.D.
work, which was very much focused on pre-term infant
and in particular looking at a disease called necrotizing negative colitis,
which is an inflammatory mediated disease of the bowel.
And it's also the leading cause of death in that population.
So that's where it all began for me
and that's where I'm going to start the lecture
and I'll talk about some of our early evidence that suggests the microbiome.
Probably we don't see a particular signature associated with disease onset,
but on the flip side, we do see that infants who have a high abundance
of a bacteria called bifidobacterium never went on to get this disease.
And so that really was the start of a long journey for me, which is now
I will end the talk, and that's talking about our most recent results,
unpacking that a bit further, looking at the impacts of probiotics
containing bifidobacterium and how that impacts the pre-term
infant gut microbiome, but also the microbes host interaction
using an organoid model system that we developed over the last few years.
My entry into research career was somewhat
unexpected to me even as I approach the latter stages of my Ph.D.
But it was during this period that I got to do a microbial ecology project,
which actually was looking at lake sediment core
and trying to understand how the microbes change through time.
But then when I finished that, I found out there was a PhD opening
using similar techniques.
But looking at the infant gut and how that sort of viewing
that as a microbial ecology landscape and trying to understand more about that
as an ecosystem.
And so it was basically applying the techniques from the micro
environmental project and applying that to a clinical project.
And I got incredibly fascinated about the concept of doing that and then meeting
the clinicians involved in the project, seeing firsthand their excitement passion
and frankly determination to improve the outcomes of their infants
was incredibly inspiring for me and ultimately what led me down this path.
So as I look back on my short career to date, I can certainly recognize
now, I guess inflection points or particular moments that in retrospect
were quite critical
to the path that I then went down, which has led me to be here today.
And certainly one that springs to mind is as a Ph.D.
student, I was working with Suzanne Kennedy, who was helping me by sending me
kits to test, and I was helping in return by testing these kids for the company.
My interaction with Suzanne really just started out as email exchanges
and very much focused on the science
and really began to develop into a strong collaboration.
And in the end, that led to her inviting me out to America, to Baylor
College of Medicine, to do a postdoc with her and Joe Petrosino.
So an absolutely fantastic opportunity for me that I really don't think otherwise
would have came about without that sort
of serendipitous interaction with Suzanne and then all the work that then followed.
Winning the 2022 Fleming Award,
it means so much to me and I know it means a lot to my team.
And ultimately these awards, while t's given to an individual or really
a recognition of the many, many people who have contributed to, to the work,
and that is from PhD supervisors to the clinical collaborators
I work day in and day out with, as well as the students and postdocs
who have contributed enormously of course to the experiments
and also must pay particular recognition to microbiology.
Society members such as Alan Walker
and Lindsay Hall, who over the years have been incredibly supportive of me,
have offered critical advice when I've needed it.
And that for sure has played a huge
part in me getting to here and accepting this award today.