Background

Access to a patient’s GI tract, either for purposes of delivery of therapeutic agents or collecting samples for diagnostic purposes faces a number of challenges. For the former, oral administration, requiring transit through the stomach and upper GI, can impact the stability and solubility of therapeutic agents such as antibodies or probiotics. For the latter, current procedures for retrieving microbiome samples rely on the use of highly invasive endoscopic procedures. Consequently, many diagnoses of gut health (for example to monitor diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or cancer) rely on analysis of a patient’s stool, material that does not reflect the conditions that occur higher up in the GI tract. There is therefore an urgent need for both