In truth it's probably the other way around. In order to understand things like gut bacteria, researchers will often culture *everything* that is growing in human feces. Then they try to figure out what they are. Of course, it is interesting to find out if there is a difference between the bacterial cultures in an infant's gut vs an adult's gut. It's also interesting to find out if it can travel from the mother's gut to the baby's gut (and if so, how). Things like the bacterial cultures that produce stomach ulcers tend to be passed down in families and we know very, very little about how that works.
Companies like Hansen don't usually do that kind of basic research. Instead, they will pay university researchers money for new samples of things that might do something interesting. My dad was a chemistry professor and no matter what he was doing, there would always be some side product. He wouldn't know what it was. So he would test it to see if it would work as a herbicide or as a pesticide or about a bazillion other different things. And if it had any effect, the big chemical companies would pay him for it and would do more detailed testing. Probably half of his research money came from selling off these waste products, I think -- and didn't even have anything to do with his real research.
I assume it is the same here. Somebody cultured a whole bunch of stuff from an infant's feces. Then they said, "Hey, this seems to be some kind of lactic acid bacteria" and then they sold it to a big chemical company that will test to find out if it has any useful properties. If so, they give a bit of money to the researchers.
