OptiBiotix Health plc announced that its has reached an agreement with Fondazione Edmund Mach - Centro Ricerca e Innovazione, to jointly fund and carry out a research project examining the role of its microbiome products (LP LDL®, SlimBiome®/WellBiome®) to improve sleep, stress, and anxiety. FEM is an academic research institute operating in the agri-food and environmental sectors. It is located in the Province of Trento in the Italian Dolomites and is the first "One Health" research centre in Italy. Within the Department of Food Quality and Nutrition at FEM, the Nutrition and Nutrigenomics Unit ("NNU") has internationally recognised expertise in probiotics, prebiotics, polyphenols and functional foods. The NNU mission is to measure how microbiomes along the food chain can be harnessed to improve food nutritional quality, food sustainability and improve human health. NNU has a special interest in fermented foods (especially fermented dairy products), functional ingredients, whole plant foods, their bioactive fractions (fibers, prebiotics and polyphenols) and probiotics. This research project will be performed in the School of Human Development and Health in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton. HDH is internationally recognised for its multidisciplinary research in the area of nutrition and metabolism seeking to reduce the burden of non-communicable disease in both developed and developing countries. Research includes the application of systems approaches to understand the far-reaching effects of microbiome modulators on the biomolecular system of the host and their implications for health and disease. The agreement funds a PhD studentship to explore the potential of prebiotics (e.g SlimBiome®/WellBiome®) and probiotics (e.g LP LDL®) for their ability to manage sleep, stress and anxiety. The agreement includes a double blind, placebo controlled, human study carried out during a period of stress induced sleep disruption. The research follows on from a number of publications indicating a relationship between the gastrointestinal microbiota, neurobiochemistry, and emotional behaviour. It builds upon findings showing that prebiotics improved anxiety and depression in participants consuming = 5 g/day, and probiotic consumption improved psychological or biological measures of depression, anxiety, or stress in individuals predisposed to a mood disorder6. A study by Costabile et al. in 2020 showed ingestion of 7.5 g per day of SlimBiome® resulted in a statistically significant improvement in mood after 4 weeks (p = 0.0026).