We are pleased to announce that Dr. GwangPyo Ko from The Seoul National University, Korea will join Second Conjoint RIKEN – ISM 2026 as a speaker and give a presentation entitled “Development of Smart Biodelivery Systems for Personalized Disease Treatment Based on the Gut Microbiome“.

Summary:

Dr. GwangPyo Ko, Professor of Environmental Health Microbiology at Seoul National University, will present a creative new approach to treating intestinal inflammation: engineering the gut’s own bacteria to deliver therapeutics precisely where disease strikes.

During colitis, the gut microbiota undergoes dramatic shifts. Rather than viewing these changes as purely harmful, Dr. Ko’s team identified an opportunity: Phocaeicola vulgatus, a commensal bacterium that naturally expands in inflamed gut tissue in both humans and mice while remaining nonpathogenic. By engineering this inflammation-enriched resident to secrete anti-inflammatory proteins directly at disease sites, his team has created a living drug delivery system that works with the body’s own microbial ecology rather than against it.

This presentation offers a glimpse into the future of microbiome medicine: ecologically grounded, precision-targeted living therapeutics that harness the gut’s own adaptive biology to treat chronic inflammatory disease.