A new partnership is helping bring gut health testing out of the lab and closer to the people who need it most.
Arome Science and LECO Corporation have been working together on a partnership aimed at one goal: getting accurate, meaningful gut health testing into consumers’ hands faster than the current research-to-market pipeline typically allows.
LECO is well known in the analytical chemistry world for building instruments that push the boundaries of what is measurable. At Arome Science, we bring the metabolomics side — the assays, the sample workflows, the data interpretation, and the real-world validation built on years of metabolomics research. Together, we are working on the LAB² platform, a joint development effort to build a faster, more accessible path from sample to gut health insight.
What We’ve Been Working On
Our joint work has been moving on several fronts at once:
- Instrument development for high-throughput stool metabolite profiling that does not require a highly specialized operator
- Integration of Arome’s S’Wipe stool collection technology with LECO’s analytical platform, so the sample-to-result chain is aligned from day one
- Validation of key gut health biomarkers, especially short-chain fatty acids, in real-world cohorts, not just controlled lab conditions
- Defining a regulatory and commercialization roadmap so that, when the science is ready, the product path is already in place
Why This Matters
Gut health has gone mainstream as a topic, but the measurement side has not kept pace. Most consumers still rely on questionnaires, generic probiotic recommendations, or, at best, a handful of 16S sequencing results that show what microbes are there, but not what those microbes are actually doing.
Metabolomics helps fill that gap. It shows what is being produced, what is being consumed, and what the net biochemical output of the gut looks like on a given day.
The bottleneck has always been the lab infrastructure. Our work with LECO is specifically designed to help reduce that bottleneck and make the instrumentation faster, more robust, and eventually usable in settings beyond a specialized CRO or academic core facility.
What Comes Next
We are not ready to put a launch date on the calendar just yet, but the partnership is moving forward. Both teams have been aligned on what good analytical performance looks like, and on who this is ultimately for. The consumer-facing gut health testing space is crowded with noise right now, and we want to help bring more signal to it.
More details will come as we reach milestones worth sharing. In the meantime, if you are a researcher, clinician, or company thinking about how metabolomics fits into your gut health work, we would love to talk. The same platform we are building with LECO is grounded in the same science that underpins our CRO services today.
Reach out to the Arome Science team to learn more or to explore what a collaboration might look like for your work.
