Curiosity is a the key feature of living beings.
Curiosity drives the exploration and takeover of new
niches, thus allowing each species to perpetuate itself
despite an ever changing environment. Scientific
research is a special display of curiosity. It produces
models of the world which permit us to anticipate the
future and to construct relevant scenarios to construct
the future of our children.
Two major trends in the way research is organized are
often considered: research driven by pure curiosity
(exploration of the Cosmos, for example) and research
motivated by an incentive to satisfy real or imaginary
needs important for our immediate well-being. The
latter, however, can only be efficient if it applies
previous discoveries that have been the result of
curiosity-driven research. Louis Pasteur illustrated in
a particularly vivid way how one could combine both
aspirations. The key idea is to motivate
upstream research by concrete societal demands. This
explains why Pasteur studied the diseases of beer and
wine, or the silk-worm diseases, while paving the way of
modern microbiology, way upstream from the initial
social demand.
The business model of AMAbiotics is inspired by this
way to motivate research. While this is usually not
known, much of the present problems of our societies are
causing, and caused by implicit metabolic disorders. For
example, our health is negatively affected by
inappropriate behaviours, in particular in food
consumption, long term medical treatments, ageing of the
population... Visible and invisible alterations of the
environment (soil and water pollution) are modifying the
microbe communities, resulting in bioavailability of
toxic compounds. It becomes therefore necessary to
restore proper metabolism of complex commmunities of
living organisms. This requires construction of a rich,
much wanted, upstream knowledge: what is the metabolism
of large communitites of organisms, such as those which
make the human microbial flora associated to the skin,
the mouth, the gut... We participate in the creation of
the corresponding knowledge, which we will make freely
available to the academic community, in order to speed
up the advent of further discoveries. It is the applications
of this knowledge which will be submitted to
intellectual property rights, as we are proposing
concrete solutions to specific questions of economic
interest.
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