Drugs that you take interact with a complex microbial ecosystem in your gut. Trillions of microorganisms call the human digestive tract home and interact with one another and with their human host. This microbial world can directly modify drug structure1–4, influence host immune responses5,65,6, and alter pharmacokinetics4,7. Currently, most drug development programs choose to ignore the gut microbiome because a reliable method to predict how it impacts drugs does not exist.

Over the past decade, scientific understanding of the human microbiome has expanded far beyond the idea of a handful of commensal microbes. Researchers now recognize the microbiome as a vast and dynamic ecosystem that plays a central role in metabolism, immunity, and disease. However, understanding the microbiome is particularly challenging due to its scale and variability.

There’s a lot of attention on how AI can help model our genomes, proteins, and cells. But much of what shapes real-world health outcomes happens outside of our DNA, and rather within the trillions of microbes living in our bodies. Today, that layer remains one of the most complex and most under-modeled systems in human biology. That’s what Outpost Bio is tackling: building frontier models at this interaction layer.

The microbiome, the vast, tangled ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that live in and on us, is increasingly recognised as a major factor in health, nutrition and drug response.

London- and Boston-based Outpost Bio has secured $3.5 million in pre-seed financing to build a platform that links experimental microbiology with machine learning models of the human microbiome.