The manipulation of the gut microbiota is associated with weight gain, which has been used in the farm animals, as growth promotors, for more than 50 years. The antibiotics were very much used in farm animals. In Europe, their use is not authorized any more since 2002 whereas it is it always in the United States. Probiotics have been used as growth promotors, and are regulated, for 40 years in the farm industry in Europe. Most antibiotics are secreted by Actinomyces used like probiotics, to promote animal growth. The tetracycline was discovered in a probiotic. There are a specificity of the gut microbiota of the obese patients and a specificity of the microbiota of the very thin patients (anorexia or malnutrition). A literature analysis carried out in farm industry, in experimental models and humans, shows that some probiotics, in particular Lactobacillus, can be associated with a significant weight gain (in the birds, the pigs, the mice and humans) while others seem to have a protective effect against obesity. The effectiveness in weight gain is dependent on species and strains. In addition, the antibiotics prescribed in childhood, or for long periods (for example in the treatment of Helicobacter pylori or for endocarditis) are likely to cause very significant weight gain. The gut...

Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux Head of Laboratory for Data Security (LDS) Academic Director of the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) School of Computer and Communication Sciences EPFL «Data Protection for Personalized Health» With the fast development of -omics, the biomed community is facing an unprecedented challenge in terms of data protection. In this talk, we will explain why existing information security solutions, such as the ones used in the financial sector, are not sufficient in this case. We will then refine the data protection requirements of P4 medicine and show how modern protection techniques, including homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, differential privacy and private blockchains, can help responding to this challenge, even at very large scale. We will talk about the privacy precautions to be taken before deploying medical apps. We will describe the SPHN/PHRT DPPH project (dpph.ch) as well as the MedCo toolbox (medco.epfl.ch) under experimental deployment at HUG, CHUV and Inselspital, for secure medical data sharing. We will also describe the ongoing collaborations with Harvard Medical School. Finally, we will summarize the data-protection activities of GA4GH. Biography Jean-Pierre Hubaux is a full professor at EPFL. Through his research, he...