The Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics (CMIT) at MIT was founded in 2014 with a $25 million grant from the Neil and Anna Rasmussen Foundation to better understand the human microbiome—the community of trillions of symbiotic microbes that reside in the gut and the impact they have on human health and development.
Researchers affiliated with CMIT have published more than 200 scientific papers, and the center has established one of the world’s most comprehensive microbiome “strain libraries.”
It has also funded a team at the Broad Institute that does assays and gene sequencing for scientists doing microbiome research, and it has facilitated studies by collecting stool samples from indigenous populations around the globe.
CMIT’s flagship effort is a 100-patient clinical trial to study inflammatory bowel disease, monitoring two cohorts of patients over the course of a year while amassing continuous physiological data from Fitbits and more.