The human gut microbiome plays a critical role in maintaining colon health. Metagenomics reveals microbial targets carrying genes of interest with high biomedical importance. Isolating those targets, preferably in pure cultures, is crucial for understanding microbial genetics and physiology and host-microbe interactions. However, the majority of microorganisms from clinical samples have not been cultured. A gene-targeted approach was introduced to improve the cultivation of unculturalble bacteria. We implemented this strategy on SlipChip, a handheld microfluidic platform that creates and manipulates thousands of miniaturized droplets in parallel. We applied this approach to cultivate microbes from the NIH Human Microbiome Project’s “Most Wanted” list, which contains microbial targets identified from 16S-based survey. We obtained isolates for several members from the list, and I will present the isolation of a novel genus from the high priority group from human cecum. This work provides a successful framework for isolation of “unculturable” bacteria from clinical samples, and may become useful for isolation of specific beneficial microbes for therapeutic purposes.