An innovative therapeutic food designed to treat childhood malnutrition has been named one of Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2025.
The team behind the therapeutic food is led by Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and his collaborator Tahmeed Ahmed, MBBS, PhD, at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b).
This therapeutic food, called microbiome-directed complementary food-2 (MDCF-2), is specifically designed to repair the abnormally forming gut microbiomes of children suffering from malnutrition. Clinical trials in Bangladesh have established that the food boosts the activities of gut microbes that play key roles in many facets of growth and development, including effects on proteins involved in regulating musculoskeletal development, brain development, metabolism and immune function. The benefits produced by MDCF-2 are far greater than those produced by a commonly used therapeutic food that was not designed to repair the microbiome.
