Program Overview
The Weston Family Foundation, through its Proof-of-Principle program, funds Canadian scientists performing high-risk, high-reward translational research that leverages the microbiome towards improving human health.
Microbiome-based interventions, such as fecal microbial transplants, probiotics, prebiotics, and fermented foods, have the potential to improve human health. However, while significant strides have been made in the past decade to better understand the microbiome, there are likely several unknown microbiome-based interventions with significant potential for developing live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), preventative strategies, and personalized medicines. Thus, there may be opportunities to manipulate or target the microbiome to improve health outcomes for Canadians.
The Foundation is pleased to announce the current iteration of this funding opportunity to address these key areas in microbiome research. The Proof-of-Principle 2025 program supports high-impact, scalable projects that use microbiome-based interventions to modulate the microbiome, enhance therapeutic responses, or improve health outcomes.
Eligible projects will be in one of the three priority areas:
- Intervention: Developing novel therapeutic microbiome-based interventions for treating disease or improving health outcomes in a population.
- Modulation: Improving patient responses to already existing treatments or therapies by modulating the microbiome.
- Mechanism: Causally determining how the microbiome relates to a disease to identify new therapeutic targets.
Please refer to the Program Details for a full description.
Funding available per project: Up to $300,000 over a maximum of 30 months.
Important dates:
- Program information session: May 1, 2025 and May 6, 2025
- Letter of Intent deadline: June 2, 2025 at 2 p.m. ET
- Award announcement: October 2025
For more information about this program, including details on project and applicant eligibility, Foundation definitions, program review criteria and expected project outcomes, please see the relevant documents below.
We welcome you to contact us with any program related inquiries. Please send your questions to microbiome@westonfoundation.ca.
Relevant Documents