Meeting of the Minds

If you had talked with David Cumming, BA ’95, MBA ’16, about the microbiome 25 or 30 years ago, he might have thought you were a little crazy.

“My brother and I both started hearing about the gut microbiome and the importance of it many years ago, and it was so weird to me at the time—I didn’t trust it. I just thought, ‘How is it that we wouldn’t already under-stand this?’” Cumming said.

The idea that bacteria in our gut affects everything about our health felt, to him, a little “kooky.” But the more he read, the more fascinated he became.

Fast-forward a few decades, and it turns out that the scientists were substantially right. Maybe they weren’t right about everything, Cumming said, but about enough of it that he wanted to learn more—and financially support the work.

Cumming is an owner of Powdr Corp., an adventure lifestyle company founded by his brother, John, that operates ski properties, adventure camps, and lodging in the United States and Canada. He is also a principal of his family office, Cumming Capital Management, and chairman of the Cumming Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds projects largely focused on the environment, education, family, and medicine. Having grown up in Salt Lake City and attended the University of Utah, he turned to the U to see how the foundation could assist researchers focused on the microbiome—and, ultimately, future therapeutics.

But first things first: “One of the things that’s so fascinating to me about the topic of gut microbiome is that there’s still a huge amount of basic science that needs to be done,” Cumming said. “For example, we seeded some basic research around diversity in the gut, and then the researchers got a National Science Foundation grant to do more work on that. This system is clearly important. We just don’t know how important yet.”

One of Cumming’s worries is that getting those answers can be a slow process when research is done in academic or laboratory siloes. It’s not often that universities, researchers, and donors come together and ask not just what’s best for an institution but what’s best for an entire field.

Cumming’s initial gift was to fund an online symposium in 2021 to discuss the connections between multiple sclerosis and the microbiome and to share knowledge in an effort to move the research along and help future patients more quickly.

The online meeting prompted Cumming to fund and host subsequent meetings at Snowbird, a ski resort owned by the Cumming family, which were hosted by the University of Utah’s Microbiota and Gastrointestinal Immunology Consortium (MAGIC), to bring together researchers from Colorado, Montana, Arizona, and Utah. 

From those meetings, an entirely new group was formed: the Mountain West Microbiome Alliance a collaborative think tank dedicated to furthering a relatively young field that expands upon MAGIC, which was founded by Daniel T. Leung, MD, professor of internal medicine; June Round, PhD, professor of pathology; and Ryan O’Connell, PhD, chief of the microbiology and immunology division and professor of pathology.

“Because the microbiome is new in terms of research, we have the opportunity to come out of the box a little differently than other sciences that have been around for a long time.”

“Because the microbiome is new in terms of research, we have the opportunity to come out of the box a little differently than other sciences that have been around for a long time,” Cumming said. “And what that means specifically is that we’re trying to build a community of people who are not siloed and who are eager to share their information, resources, and research with others.”

The collaborative model fits with Cumming’s vision of the University of Utah in general. “I have found the U to be an incredibly open and collaborative place,” he said. “Any place where you can make a phone call about something some might consider eccentric, like gut microbiome, and find there’s already a group of people who are coalescing around it and willing to take on an outsider, a non-scientist like me, to help move it forward—that’s just part of the university’s DNA.”