Update on Wellcome LEAP's $50 million program on autism and the microbiome

Exactly five months ago, I blogged about a program entitled Foundations of a Resilient Microbiome (FORM) that Wellcome LEAP was funding to the tune of $50 million. I had major reservations about the foundations of the research program, which seemed based on flaky research.By coincidence, the 2025 funding call for FORM came out a couple of weeks before publication of a review that I co-authored with Kevin Mitchell and Darren Dahly, entitled "Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism". We'd done a fair bit of reading for that review, and featured the work of two of the luminaries of the field, James B. Adams and Sarkis Mazmanian. The list of successful applicants to the FORM program was recently announced, and, yup, these two guys were on it. I could not find any details of the specific projects that were funded, but I think that on the basis of track record, this is not a good investment of valuable research funds. Here I…