The research of the new chair will focus on investigating communications in metabolic networks within microbiomes and towards the human host, in order to design and develop next-generation interventions that can productively interfere with these processes. Potential intervention technologies include prebiotics, synbiotics, spore formers, postbiotics, miRNA interference, microbiome editing and synthetic communities. Benefits from these interventions will address gut heath, oral health, mental health, immunity, ageing, where microbiome play direct or indirect roles. The research will also contribute to strengthening the microbiome expertise of SILS and involve significantly in the newly-presented Holomicrobiome National Growth Fund program designed to advance the holistic understanding of the microbiomes, their connections and influences on each other.

As professor at UvA, Schyns will investigate how microbiome modulators, such as glycans and vitamins, synergize productively to improve health benefits. He will also focus on deciphering microbiome axis communications, such as the skin-gut-brain. In the field of education, Schyns will develop specialized microbiome-related courses, such as Functional Microbiome Translation, Microbiome Modulation through Interventions or Communications around Microbiomes. Based on his background he will foster closer interactions between academic and corporate worlds and raise student awareness about the value of intellectual properties.

About Schyns

Schyns, a Belgian national educated at the University of Liege, was trained as a molecular microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute of Paris, where he got his PhD on cyanobacterial transcriptional regulation. He then moved to the US at Emory University in Atlanta to work on transcriptional regulation in Bacillus subtilis. Schyns then entered the corporate biotechnology world as he got hired at Roche Vitamins USA in New Jersey to work on process strain engineering and development for vitamins production. Back in Basel, as the company had been acquired by Dutch global nutrition and health DSM, he initiated early functional microbiome work for Animal Nutritional Health, aiming at translating gut metabolic functions to health benefits in monogastric production animals. That piece of work soon led to interfering into gut metabolism and modulating microbiome for the benefits of the host. Back in Boston in 2015, when he was tasked to lead a group focusing on gut microbiome modulation within DSM Corporate research, he successfully pioneered the use of synthetic glycans to modulate gut animal microbiome. This work generated multiple patents and paved the way to the use of glycans in Human Nutrition Health and the concomitant elucidation of mode of actions of natural and synthetic glycans in the context of host-microbiome interactions.

Returned to Basel after the pandemic, Schyns became Sr Principal Scientist Microbiome and Hygiene after the merger of DSM and Firmenich in 2023 and is now leading the Knowledge Creation Microbiome exploratory portfolio. Beyond gut microbiome, he is now involved in microbiome modulation within all human microbiomes (skin, oral cavity, vaginal), understanding their connections (so called axis) and cross-fertilizing microbiome sciences between DSM-Firmenich business groups.