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Biography |
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Dr Alex Mira, is a biologist (Extraordinary Award of 1994 class, Alicante University) that obtained his MSc (Honor distinction) and PhD at Oxford University (United Kingdom), the latter with a Rhodes scholarship. He then obtained a Fulbright scholarship for doing post-doctoral work in the USA (Nancy Moran and Howard Ochman, supervisors) and Sweden (Siv Andersson, supervisor), where he was trained in the latest genomic and bioinformatic techniques. He returned to Spain under the Ramon y Cajal repatriation program in 2003. Dr. Mira has been one of the promoters of Genomics in Spain, being one of the founders of the National Network for Bacterial Genomics, as well as its coordinator since 2004. Due to his scientific contribution to the field of microbial genomics, he obtained the Jaime Ferran Award in 2009, awarded every two years by the Spanish Society for Microbiology. He obtained the Certification of Outstanding Research Trajectory by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. He is also one of the founders of the Spanish Network for Oral Microbiology and the only current Spanish senior member of the Organization for Caries Research (ORCA). Dr. Mira is author of over 100 contributions to national and international congresses and 80 publications in international journals, including Nature, Trends in Genetics, Nature Reviews in Microbiology, Trends in Microbiology or American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, among others. He has an H-index of 22 and over 2,000 citations, and is associate editor of Frontiers in Microbiology. He has reviewed grant proposals for different funding agencies, including MICINN-MINECO-ISCIII (Spain), Welcome Trust (UK), Science Foundation of Ireland, National Research Agency and Genoscope (France), and Proyectos Innovación (Chile). He has participated as invited lecturer in different international courses of DNA sequence analysis and bioinformatics, organized by the University of Valencia, the FISABIO Summer School, and the University of the United Nations. Dr. Mira's laboratory is encharged of studying the human microbiome and its contribution to health and disease, especially the oral microbiota. He has directed three national grants on the topic, as a consequence of which three patents have been registered, including new probiotic and prebiotic compounds to prevent oral diseases, a new diagnostic test that indicates a personalized treatment to prevent tooth decay and a method to diagnose colorectal cancer by the use of microbial biomarkers. One of these patents has already been licensed and has entered national phases in the EU and 12 other countries. His group has performed the first metagenomic, metatranscriptomic and metaproteomic studies of human dental plaque in the world, the first of which allowed them to win the Biomedal Research Award to the best molecular biology publication of 2011-2012, awarded by the Spanish Society of Microbiology. They have performed some of the first metagenomic studies on the breast milk microbiome, the lung microbiome and the stomach microbiome. The laboratory has also developed a new in vitro model to study the development of biofilms and therapeutic treatments, which can be visualized in real time, and that has been proposed to improve antibiotic treatment of infections in human implants. The group has discovered a new bacterial species that is being developed as a probiotic to include in functional foods with human clinical trials starting in January 2016.
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Abstract |
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Clinical Applications of Human Microbiome Studies |
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Bacteria inhabiting the human body play important roles for health that are still not fully understood. Those bacteria inhabit our gut, respiratory tract, skin, oral cavity, urinary tract, etc, and can be considered as an organ whose function needs to be elucidated. An important fraction of the human-associated microbiota has not been cultured and therefore the use of DNA techniques has revolutionized the research in the field. Metagenomics is the study of all genes present in the bacterial community obviating the need for culture and the recent development of second-generation sequencing techniques has allowed researchers to describe the composition and genetic repertoire of the human microbiome to an unprecedented level of detail. We have applied these techniques to describe the microbiota associated to the respiratory tract, the human breast milk, the stomach and specially the oral cavity, where we have identified a new bacterial species, named Streptococcus dentisani, that appears to protect the teeth against dental caries. Other microbiome research has allowed us to study susceptibility to stomach ulcer and to identify bacteria that can serve as biomarkers of colorectal cancer. Finally, the combination of flow-citometry and cell sorting with massive sequencing has served us to identify the bacteria recognized by different antibodies in the oral cavity, the gut and the breast milk. Thus, the combination of these techniques will serve to unravel the function of our microbial partners in health and disease, with important clinical implications. |
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