From Oregon News — CSWS affiliate Karen Guillemin, Biology, has been named to the National Academy of Inventors, a designation that recognizes visionaries and innovators whose technologies brought, or aspire to bring, a real impact on society.
Guillemin and two other University of Oregon faculty — Mike Pluth and Ramesh Jasti — join a select group of 162 academic inventors welcomed by the academy this year. Senior members are active faculty members and scientists who have demonstrated success in patents, licensing and commercialization that tackle the world’s pressing issues.
The 2025 class of senior members is the largest to date, hailing from 64 member institutions across the nation and collectively holding over 1,200 U.S. patents. The UO now has eight faculty senior members in the academy.
“These faculty recognize that innovation requires imagining the impossible and then creating it,” said Anshuman “AR” Razdan, vice president for research and innovation. “They embody the entrepreneurial spirit of the UO’s mission by translating scientific discoveries into transformative ventures that serve both the state and the nation. We are incredibly proud of their work.”
Instead of chasing pathogens, Guillemin is taking a closer look at the helpful microbial companions housed on, around and inside us.
“We tend to notice the microbial relationships where things go awry, but the vast majority of microorganisms that we coexist with are really beneficial to us,” said Guillemin, a professor of biology in the UO’s College of Arts and Sciences. “I think of the microbiome as an untapped resource for learning about our own health and discovering new alternative approaches to promote it.”
As a researcher in the Institute of Molecular Biology, Guillemin pioneered the germ-free zebrafish model, building on the UO’s four-decade legacy as a leading center for zebrafish research.
Through her studies of zebrafish, she discovered a potent anti-inflammatory protein, called AimA, created by bacteria in the gut of the fish. The molecule has potential as a therapeutic for chronic inflammation conditions in humans, like inflammatory bowel disease.
While current treatments ease or block the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease, AimA could address the source of inflammation by rebalancing the overgrowth of beneficial microbes and calming the host immune system.
“It is really important to move microbiome science away from just a description of which microbes are there to understanding what those microbes are doing,” Guillemin said.
Guillemin has U.S. and European patents on the protein’s use for treating excessive inflammation, and she is the chief scientific officer of a biotechnology start-up company called KeyBiome that will further develop microbiome-sourced therapies.
See the full story at Oregon News.