Gut microbiota-restoring food for undernourished children named among TIME’s best inventions 2025
Despite progress in recent decades, undernutrition remains a major threat to child survival and development worldwide, contributing to nearly half of all under-five deaths.
A gut-restoring complementary food for undernourished children, developed through a long-standing collaboration between the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) and Washington University in St Louis, has been named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2025 list in the Social Impact category.
Despite progress in recent decades, undernutrition remains a major threat to child survival and development worldwide, contributing to nearly half of all under-five deaths. The global burden is being worsened by wars, displacement, and natural disasters, leaving millions of children at risk of stunting (low height-for-age) and wasting (low weight-for-height), reads a press release.
The innovation, called MDCF-2 (microbiome-directed complementary food), contains a precise mix of chickpea flour, soybean flour, peanut flour, and green banana. These ingredients were selected for their ability to nourish specific beneficial gut bacteria that support healthy growth, immune function, and neurodevelopment in children affected by malnutrition.
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MDCF-2 was born from a collaboration between Dr Tahmeed Ahmed, executive director of icddr,b, and Dr Jeffrey Gordon, director of the Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University. The collaboration merged Dr Ahmed's decades of work addressing undernutrition in Bangladesh with Dr Gordon's pioneering research on the human gut microbiome.
"Our decades-long research indicated the gut microbiome plays a central role in how children grow and respond to nutrition," said Dr Gordon.
"The beneficial bacteria we identified help process vital dietary components that our bodies cannot on their own, providing a foundation for designing foods that restore healthy growth," he added.
Dr Gordon also said that well-controlled clinical trials of MDCF-2 in Bangladeshi children have shown its ability to repair these children's microbiome has effects that extend well beyond the wall of the gut — revealing how our community of trillions of gut microbes profoundly affects so many facets of human postnatal development.
"This recognition by TIME is very encouraging," said Dr Tahmeed Ahmed. "It shows how science and compassion can come together to address one of the most persistent global health challenges. MDCF-2 gives us new hope that locally developed, affordable solutions can help millions of undernourished children not only to survive but to thrive."
Major studies are now underway with this microbiome-directed therapeutic food in India, Pakistan, Mali, and Tanzania. The innovation has the potential to revolutionise nutrition interventions and help reshape how undernutrition is prevented and treated globally.
