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 0-13 years old. 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

Founder & CEO

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.

Co-founder & CSO

Prof. Willem M 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.

How it all began

Fifteen years ago, Willem discovered the bacterium Akkermansia muciniphila, shown to slow down cardio-metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity. After pioneering microbiome science, he moved to Finland to tackle the next big challenge: the early life microbiome, including pregnancy and the first years of life. He launched the HELMi Cohort to explore how disease might begin early in life, and was one of the first to research gut microbiome restoration after C-sections and antibiotics.

Nora has multiple food allergies and eczema, and knows how strongly lifestyle – especially diet – affects her symptoms. She began researching why chronic conditions develop and what it would take to prevent them for good. She was surprised to learn how much early life gut health can influence the risk of allergies, eczema, and other conditions later in life.

In 2022, Nora and Willem founded Alba Health to empower families to build healthy lifestyles – while collecting anonymised data to advance chronic disease prevention.