About Alba
We’re on a mission to give every child the healthiest and best start in life. Our vision is a world where chronic diseases can be prevented and solved, powered by microbiome science and AI.
Our product is a gut microbiome test developed specifically for children, from newborns to 4-year olds. That’s based on the insights that in the first years of life, we develop the fundamentals of our future health. That’s when we develop our immune system, our metabolism and our brain cognition. In that time, the gut microbiome is very important. Hundreds of studies have associated that with health risks, with chronic conditions and with a lot of symptoms.
Founded by experts
Nora Cavani
Nora has a background in Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and she gained most of her professional experience developing digital products based on machine learning for Healthcare companies, at Boston Consulting Group. She grew up with several allergies and severe eczema and learning about the gut microbiome and changing her diet was life-changing to reduce her eczema to a minimum.
Prof. Emeritus Willem de Vos
Willem is a key opinion leader in Microbiome Science, with over 800 publications, and in the past 20 years he has focused on studying how the gut microbiome in the first years of life affects health in later life, in particular chronic conditions. He co-leads one of the largest child gut microbiome studies in the world: the HELMi Cohort at the University of Helsinki, counting over 10,000 microbiome samples and 50,000 lifestyle data points.
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How it all began
15 years ago, Willem discovered an important bacterium called Akkermansia muciniphila, which was shown to slow down cardio-metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity. After pioneering microbiome science, Willem decided to move to Finland to tackle the next big topic in microbiology: the early life microbiome, including pregnancy and the first years of life. Willem started pioneering the HELMi Cohort to discover how disease might already start in the first years of life. He's also been one of the very first to pioneer research in gut microbiome restoration after C-section and antibiotics.
Nora has multiple food allergies and eczema and knows that lifestyle, in particular diet, strongly affects her symptoms. She started to research why chronic conditions start and what it would take to stop them for good. She was surprised to find out that lifestyle and gut health in the first years of life can affect the chances to have allergies or eczema later in life.
In 2022, Nora and Willem then started Alba Health, to empower families in achieving a healthy lifestyle whilst collecting anonymised data to advance chronic disease prevention.
We are on a mission to help parents raise a healthier generation.
Join us in advancing gut health understanding for the generations to come