Why does strong microbiome science still fail to create business value?
The microbiome field may not have a science problem. It may have a value-conversion problem.
Christian Roghi · Independent Strategic Adviser · Bridgyz
The issue
The microbiome field has spent two decades demonstrating that microbes matter. They influence health, disease, medicines, nutrition, agriculture and the environment. Yet important science has not produced an equivalent number of durable products, services and businesses. When progress is slow, organisations often respond with more science. More data. More studies. More indications. More features. Sometimes this is necessary. Sometimes the missing step is adoption.
Why it matters
A company can spend years reducing scientific uncertainty while leaving the uncertainties that determine adoption untouched. Will the science change a real decision? Will somebody change their behaviour, workflow or priority? Will that change continue when the initial enthusiasm and support disappear? Without sustained use, scientific value does not become durable business value.
My judgement
I use four connected forms of value:
Scientific value → Decision value → Use value → Economic value
Scientific value
Does the work reveal something credible, differentiated and important?
Decision value
Does it help a defined person or organisation make a better choice?
Use value
Does that choice become a sustained change in behaviour or organisational practice?
Economic value
Can the company capture enough of the value created to support a durable business? Adoption is where decision value becomes use value.
Three signals to notice
The platform is relevant to many markets.
Breadth may indicate scientific power. It may also show that no adoption pathway has been chosen.
The evidence is growing, but behaviour is unchanged.
The company may be reducing scientific uncertainty while the reason to act remains weak.
The product creates information, not movement.
A result can be accurate and interesting without changing what anybody does.
The bottom line
Strong science creates possibility. Business value appears when that possibility changes a decision, becomes sustained use and supports an economic model.
The tension
Scientific relevance is often treated as though it were already a commercial proposition. It is not. A biological association can be real without changing a decision. A biomarker can be reproducible without entering routine practice. A platform can generate valuable data without creating a reason for an organisation to behave differently. The mistake usually appears in one sentence:
The science is important, therefore the market must be important.
The distance between those statements contains the strategic work. Who needs the science? What decision should it change? What behaviour or workflow follows? Who must support that change? Who benefits, and who pays? A field can be biologically central and commercially peripheral when those questions remain unanswered.
What I have seen
My view comes from moving across cancer research, technology transfer, microbiome institutes, therapeutics, diagnostics, sequencing, bioinformatics and software. Three patterns continue to return.
Breadth is mistaken for opportunity
Microbiome technologies often appear applicable to many diseases, markets and industries. This creates excitement because the theoretical opportunity looks large. But each application introduces a different user, buyer, evidence requirement, workflow, regulatory environment and reason to change. Scientific optionality can become strategic ambiguity. A platform that can address ten markets may be powerful. It may also be an organisation that has not chosen one adoption problem it is prepared to solve completely.
More science becomes the default answer
When progress is weak, organisations often return to the part of the system they understand best. They generate another dataset, add a cohort, improve the analytical platform or explore a new indication. This can create genuine scientific value. It does not necessarily resolve the uncertainty preventing a clinician, laboratory, customer, partner or board from moving. Data is seductive because it postpones the moment of choice. The question is not only whether more evidence is needed. It is whether the next evidence changes the behaviour on which value depends.
Value is assumed to appear later
Companies often believe that the commercial proposition will become obvious once the science matures. Sometimes it does. But time does not automatically reveal a market. It can allow a company to build a more sophisticated asset around an unresolved adoption pathway. The earlier question is more useful:
Where, exactly, will this science enter a decision and change what happens next?
Case in point: microbiome testing
Microbiome testing makes the value-conversion problem visible. The technical promise is compelling. Analyse a sample, describe the microbial community and provide information that could guide health, nutrition or clinical decisions. But a detailed result is not automatically a useful result. A 2025 international consensus statement concluded that evidence supporting the clinical usefulness of many commercial microbiome tests remained scarce. It highlighted methodological complexity, clinical validation, interpretation and implementation.
A 2024 interlaboratory study involving 44 laboratories found that methodological choices introduced variability and bias into microbiome measurements. A further study published in 2026 assessed seven direct-to-consumer services using standardised material and found substantial discrepancies within and between providers. These are scientific limitations. They are also adoption limitations because they weaken confidence in the decision that should follow. The customer is not buying a description of the microbiome. The customer is buying greater confidence about what to do next.
That requires several questions to be answered. Is the measurement sufficiently reliable? Is the interpretation meaningful for this individual? Does the result identify a problem worth acting on? Is there an action supported by evidence? Is that action different from advice available without the test? When these questions remain unresolved, the product may create interest, conversation and a first purchase. It does not necessarily create sustained behavioural change. The company has converted a sample into information. It has not yet converted the information into adoption.
Strategic interpretation
The testing example shows how value can be lost at each transition.
Scientific value
The ability to characterise microbial communities is scientifically important. But scientific value does not establish that every measurement is reproducible, clinically meaningful or useful for an individual decision.
Decision value
The test becomes valuable when its result improves a defined choice. “Understand your gut microbiome” describes an activity. It does not specify what the user should decide differently. A stronger proposition begins with the decision, not the report.
Use value
A decision creates use value only when somebody can act on it and continue acting within ordinary conditions. That may require a clinician to interpret the result, a nutrition professional to adapt a programme, a laboratory to deliver consistently or a consumer to sustain a new behaviour. This is adoption. It is not awareness or one transaction. It is a durable change in what people or organisations do.
Economic value
The company must capture enough value to support testing, interpretation, service, evidence generation and continued development. Curiosity can generate an initial purchase. Durable economics require a sufficiently valuable decision and a reason for use to continue. The complete chain matters. Strengthening one link does not automatically repair the others. This also changes how traction should be read. Interest, a pilot or a first sale may show that the proposition deserves attention. They do not yet show that decision value has become use value. The stronger signal is continued behaviour under ordinary conditions, with a clear reason for the organisation to keep going.
The future
The next microbiome era will not be defined only by better sequencing, larger datasets or more sophisticated models. It will be defined by where microbial knowledge becomes adopted. Inside drug development. Inside treatment selection. Inside food design. Inside agricultural systems. Inside preventive and continuous care. The strongest microbiome companies may eventually stop selling the microbiome. They will sell a better therapeutic response, a more precise decision, a more resilient crop or a more adaptive health service. The microbiome will become an intelligence layer that makes the outcome possible rather than the category written on the front of the product.
This is how important technologies mature. They move from being the object of attention to becoming part of the infrastructure.
What changes now
Begin with the behaviour.
Identify who must do something differently for the science to create value.
Choose one adoption pathway.
Select the use case where the journey from evidence to decision and sustained use is shortest and most defensible.
Generate evidence for movement.
Ask which uncertainty is preventing the next important stakeholder from acting.
Design for ordinary use.
Understand workflow, incentives, interpretation and responsibility while the proposition can still be shaped.
Make value capture explicit.
Identify who benefits, who pays and why enough value returns to the company.
Three questions for the executive team
What sustained change in behaviour or practice must occur for our science to create value?
Does our evidence support that change, or only the underlying biology?
Where is conversion currently breaking: decision, adoption or economics?
The bottom line
The microbiome field has generated more scientific possibility than it has converted into sustained use. This should not lower our scientific ambition. It should raise our strategic ambition. Strong science creates possibility. Adoption is what allows that possibility to become value.
Selected references
Porcari, S. et al. “International consensus statement on microbiome testing in clinical practice.” The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, 10(2), 154–167, 2025.
Servetas, S.L. et al. “Evaluating the analytical performance of direct-to-consumer gut microbiome testing services.” Communications Biology, 9, 269, 2026.
Forry, S.P. et al. “Variability and bias in microbiome metagenomic sequencing: an interlaboratory study comparing experimental protocols.” Scientific Reports, 14, 9785, 2024.
Mirzayi, C. et al. “Reporting guidelines for human microbiome research: the STORMS checklist.” Nature Medicine, 27, 1885–1892, 2021.
Proctor, E.K. et al. “Outcomes for implementation research: conceptual distinctions, measurement challenges, and research agenda.” Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 38, 65–76, 2011.