Speakers

Dr Trevor Lawley is a Faculty member and Senior Group Leader of the Host-Microbiota Interactions Lab (HMIL, www.lawleylab.com) at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI) and the co-Founding Chief Scientific Officer of the clinical-stage biotechnology company Microbiotica (www.microbiotica.com). Trevor’s work has pioneered concepts, analytical tools and methodologies that, through data- and hypothesis-driven approaches, leading to foundational discoveries and enabling translation of medicines and diagnostics from the human microbiome. HMIL research helped overturn the long-held “great plate count anomaly” dogma by demonstrating the majority of the human gut microbiota is culturable. This significant breakthrough, that involved bacterial culturing, biobanking and genome sequencing at scale, led to the development of fast, affordable, yet sophisticated, high-resolution gut microbiome analysis. A major outcome of biobanking pure cultures has been experimental testing of biological hypotheses derived from metagenomic analysis, which moves the field towards studies of causation and enables the realisation of microbiome derived medicines. The role of the microbiome in infectious and autoimmune diseases, child developmental disorders, and cancer have been of particular interest.

The HMIL has trained scientists who have established independent academic research labs and are emerging microbiome science leaders in the biotechnology sector. Trevor is Chair of the Sanger International Fellows programme (https://www.sanger.ac.uk/people/international-fellows/) focused on empowering early career scientists from Low- and Middle-Income through access to cutting-edge genomic technologies, mentorship and training. The papers, methods and genomic resources generated by HMIL are publicly available to democratise access and amplify research impact. Research from HMIL has been published in Nature, Nature Immunology, Nature Genetics, Cell and Nature Biotechnology, and has been featured on BBC, CNN news and highlighted in The Economist.

In 2016, Trevor spun out and built the biotech company Microbiotica to develop Live Biotherapeutic Products (LBPs), biomarkers and microbiome-based technologies focused on autoimmune diseases and cancers. In 2018, Microbiotica entered into a collaboration with Genentech to discover, develop and commercialise IBD biomarkers, targets and medicines. In 2020, Microbiotica entered into a partnership with Cambridge University and Cancer Research UK to discover and develop biomarkers and medicines for cancer immunotherapy patients with melanoma, renal cell carcinoma or lung cancer. In 2024, Microbiotica initiated two Phase 1b clinical trials to evaluate two different LBPs (company assets comprising defined consortia of bacteria) for treatment of melanoma (MELODY-1, NCT06540391) and ulcerative colitis (COMPOSER-1, NCT06582264). Clincial trial readouts expected in Q2 2026.