What is a primary challenge in fully leveraging the microbiome's potential in health and disease?

One of the biggest hurdles is that the microbiome is extremely complex and varies a lot from person to person, so a treatment that works for one person may not work for another. Scientists need to map out which microbes are truly helpful or harmful in each situation, but doing that requires huge amounts of data and careful analysis. Because the gut flora interacts with our genes, diet, and environment, researchers must untangle many intertwined factors, which is time‑consuming and expensive. For example, a probiotic that reduces inflammation in one patient might have no effect or even worsen symptoms in another due to different baseline microbial communities. Until we can predict these individual differences, translating microbiome discoveries into reliable therapies will remain difficult.