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Gut microbes eat medication
- ChuckMcM 7y agoThe more we know about the microbiome of the gut the more interesting its interaction with our health becomes. This is an example of a bacterium that eats L-dopa (a drug used to treat Parkinson's disease). There are a number of PhD's waiting to be handed out for additional research here I think.
- azinman2 7y agoI think there are Nobel prizes for more work here. We know so little about how bacteria affects our bodies and the true roles that they place, despite there being billions and billions of them.
- andy_ppp 7y agoI’m pretty sure if we aren’t careful the same replication crisis that happened in social science will happen here, the interaction of the gut bacteria is so complex it will be very difficult to get consistent results.
- newsbinator 7y agoI wonder how far away we are from simulating the human gut, so we can introduce a variable, hit 'run', and take a snapshot every x hours. I'm guessing we're 0.0000001% of the way there, given how complex all the interactions must be.
- acomjean 7y agoI work in a lab where some of the researchers are working on the much simpler fly gut. Even in the simpler fly It’s very difficult to get anything approaching causality because they’re are so many variables in gut bacteria populations. It’s a huge ecosystem unto itself.
- cheerlessbog 7y agoFlies can eat literal garbage so I am also curious how their guts do not have arbitrary digestive problems (let's just say there's not much quality control on the input). Also whether they develop infections.
- jgtrosh 7y agoI looked around a teeny bit and there's some stuff but what you describe doesn't show up right away. This is a chemical (?) simulator that's been around since 1993 I believe: https://www.wur.nl/en/product/Simulator-of-Human-Intestinal-Microbial-Ecosystem-SHIME.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/product/Simulator-of-Human-Intestinal-... I also found this numeric simulator: https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/microbiome/simulator/ https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/microbiome/simulator... but I can't view the content right now.
- gingabriska 7y agoThey already do this to design fighter jets, rockets and space suits.
- grey413 7y agoThose are much, much simpler systems. Your average human microbiome has 30+ trillion cells in it, too say nothing of the intestinal cells. That's not getting into the underlying complexity of the cells themselves.
- sndean 7y agoI think we're still far away from that, but we're trying to get there. Some successful work has been done based on AGORA models [1], where the simulations seem to roughly match the reality of simplified systems. For example, for a five-member community of bacteria, answering questions like "what happens if we remove bacteria B from the community?", but not too much beyond that yet. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3703 https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3703
- mswen 7y agoHaving lost my own father to Parkinson's Disease (PD), my mother-in-law to a different progressive neurological disease and now watching my father-in-law walk through PD as well, your comment caught my attention. So I wondered if clinicians are doing fecal transplants to restore function in PD patients? A bit of searching and scanning found the following review Gut microbiota: Implications in Parkinson's disease Parashar, Arun et al. Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, Volume 38, 1 - 7 [1] Key passage "This autonomic input from the gut is connected to the limbic system of the brain, which includes the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the limbic cortex. Limbic cortex is of importance since it regulates motor functions, which are impaired in PD. The connection between the limbic system and ANS is a critical factor underlying between gut health and brain & behavior [77]. Recently, it was found that fecal transplant from PD patients exacerbated motor impairment with reduction in Lachnospiraceae and Ruminococceae in recipient mice model of PD. Interestingly, same genera were significantly reduced in fecal samples from PD patients [27] link below [2]. Several case reports of patients with PD, multiple sclerosis, myoclonus dystonia, Alzheimer's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, and autism have shown that FMT and/or antibiotic regimen was helpful in treating GIT symptoms like constipation, ulcerative colitis, and bowel disorders. Further, the therapy was helpful in relieving several non-GIT symptoms too" [1]https://www.prd-journal.com/article/S1353-8020(17)30036-6/fulltext https://www.prd-journal.com/article/S1353-8020(17)30036-6/fu... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mds.26307 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mds.26307
- theseadroid 7y agoI wonder how many diseases are becoming more prevalent because we eat manufactured food on a long term basis. Additives have been approved on the ground that they are not harmful to our body, yet we know very little in which ways they may influence our gut microbes (e.g. [1]). A higher proportion of North Americans tend to find certain kinds of food/snacks from other cultures gross, yet the perfectly sterilized/packaged/high-sugar food options here are probably much more harmful. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181001101932.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181001101932.h...
- devoply 7y agoNot only is this a period of great extinction, this is also a period of great sterilization where we are trying to kill everything that eats anything that we produce... as if we are not one of those things and somehow separate from it all. In the end this war will either be won in which case we will probably have a number of other health issues to deal with or lost in which we recognize that there is no difference between us and the environment and that we are both part of a whole that we can shape immensely.
- rexpop 7y agoFor a visceral encounter with extremes on this theme, read Kim Stanley Robinson's novel "Aurora".
- cosmodisk 7y agoThe only way I see this being done is by running computer simulations. Knowing how complex our gut is, I'd say this can easily take another 100 years or so to get to the point where we can understand it in full.
- sjg007 7y agoHuh? Just survey people’s microbiomes, run cultures and use the drugs in the feedstock.
- WalterSear 7y agoA number of human microbes aren't culturable yet.
- sjg007 7y agoI guess you do an in vivo post hoc analysis then.
- WalterSear 7y agoIn vivo bacterial population data isn't all that accessible yet either. Faecal bacterial samples have turned out to be poor representatives of the gut microbiome, so in vivo sampling requires endoscopy. Fwiw, there are multiple biomes to sample too, with different types of bacteria lining the intestinal walls and other kinds populating the crypts, for instance. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4837114/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4837114/
- phnofive 7y agoNot that it’s not an interesting workaround, but my reaction to hearing that L-dopa is poorly absorbed by mouth was to wonder if other routes had been tried[0]; seems simpler and more effective for those suffering with Parkinson’s. [0]:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28405912/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28405912/
- maxerickson 7y agoThere's an inhaled form: https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/inhaled-levodopa-time-moves-fda-review https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/inhaled-levodopa-time-moves...
- Medicalidiot 7y agoIV will always be king for drug administration, but I'm not too surprised that it's oral absorption is poor considering amino acid absorption is fairly specialized within the GI tract.
- chiefalchemist 7y ago> “But this kind of microbial metabolism can also be detrimental,” said Maini Rekdal, a graduate student in the lab of Professor Emily Balskus and first-author on their new study published in Science. According to Maini Rekdal, gut microbes can chew up medications, too, often with hazardous side effects. “Maybe the drug is not going to reach its target in the body, maybe it’s going to be toxic all of a sudden, maybe it’s going to be less helpful,” Maini Rekdal said. To be fair (to our "hosts"), gut microbes do us far more good than harm. Yet we continue to prescribe antibiotics like they're Pez candies, and hand sanitizer'ed our way to "germ-free" because that's what sold the product.
- raverbashing 7y agoYeah but you don't get gut microbiota by eating with dirty hands, quite the contrary, a severe gastric infection can mess with your gut flora
- chillwaves 7y agoOur concept of "dirty" needs revisiting. What is the actual chance of getting the infection you describe? And in what conditions?
- mrob 7y agoI wonder if there's actually something to the Raw Foodism movement, not because of their nonsense claims about enzymes, but because raw food contains more viable bacteria.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoI've thought similar about microwaves. That is, using them to cook kills microbes - bad ones, but also good ones.
- mrob 7y agoHow does a microwave kill microbes more effectively than any other cooking method?
- yomly 7y agoAfter studying pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I lost a lot of faith in our current pharmacological medicine. The tl;dr is that chemistry is incredibly complex and then biology is even more complex and messy. Even if we think we understand the mechanism by which a medicine may work, we definitely do not know how something will certainly behave in the wider system OR whether something works the way we truly think it does (by the time a medicine arrives in the place it needs to be is it actually some chemical artifact after being "touched" so many times along the way). We have a complex system, and we don't have the author or source code to hand, and we're still quite limited in how we can observe any changes. Any time we do try to introduce something we basically have to pray that there are no side effects
- skue 7y ago> After studying pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I lost a lot of faith in our current pharmacological medicine. My reaction was just the opposite. There are so many aspects of physics or other physical sciences that we take as basic knowledge and learn in grade school, but which were discovered years ago by some of the greatest thinkers of the past. It’s deceptively easy to wonder what it would have been like to live back then when the science was young and discoveries seemed more readily available. When you didn’t need to build a massive supercollider to validate theories. Of course much of this thinking is probably a fallacy... hundreds of years from now people will think similar thoughts about where we are. And yet medicine quite clearly seems at this earlier stage. Think about how far we’ve come in just the last century... we’ve only known about antibiotics for 100 years and the structure of DNA for half that long. That’s not a reason to be dismissive, medicine right now is in its early days and the people doing the research are pioneers. Medicine today has so many opportunities for smart people to contribute.
- yomly 7y agoRight and that's fine - I agree an optimistic way to look at medicine is that we have yet so much more to discover. But I look at the massive pro-medicate industry that is incentivised to get us to take medicine which is built upon disappointingly unrigorous discipline and the confidence some doctors carry themselves on matters which really aren't as clear cut as they think and I kind of want to nope out of the system - I'd rather lean on my body to fix itself whenever I can. (ironically the best doctors I know generally advise the same, the exception being all the obvious cases where medicine has successfully intervened)
- superpermutat0r 7y agoDoes this mean that people from Awakenings could have prolonged their state of being functional through intravenous delivery of l dopa?
- dghughes 7y agoI'm amazed that even chemotherapy drugs are consumed by gut microbes. I would assume it's only the pill form taken orally. >The gut microbiota has the potential to directly metabolise chemotherapeutic drugs and also to modify the host metabolic milieu, indirectly altering host-chemotherapeutic metabolism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6145523/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6145523/
- ademup 7y agoIt appears to me that this may be an opportunity to harness the gut to intentionally deliver multi-stage options: perhaps relying on microbiome-consumption for timing and\or changing strategy mid-digestion? To what would have been my great loss, I almost gave up on this article after reading the first three paragraphs. They set the stage for an agonizingly long article that would have made me work hard to glean meaningful insight. However, the rest of the article was somehow both consice enough for me to stay engaged, and descriptive enough for me to learn. (This is my humble plea to journalists to please forego this type of writing)
- cryptozeus 7y ago“Why would bacteria adapt to use dopamine, which is typically associated with the brain?” As we train ourself with instant hit of dopemine every 10 seconds using social media and other stuff, we have trained our microbes to do the same :)
- mamon 7y agoIs that the reason why it is advised against washing down pills with grapefruit juice? I know that it can cause overdose of the drug, but I'm not sure if it works by affecting those gut microbes or by blocking some digestive enzyme that normally destroys like 90% of drug's active substance before it can be absorbed.
- ncmncm 7y agoGrapefruit interferes in a certain pathway in the liver. Some drugs are broken down in that pathway, so they stay longer in the body and build up, dose on dose, if you get too much grapefruit for too long. Other drugs are altered into their active form, or an intermediate; then, interfering with that keeps the drug from working at all. Furthermore, an intermediate form that is not supposed to last may be toxic, so you not only lose the dose, but get poison in its place. It has lately become difficult to find grapefruit candy in the US. I wonder if there has been a public health directive from the FDA or someone.
- srndh 7y agoReading this, I cannot help but wonder. We are clueless about the gut microbes in our body, but know a lot about dinosaurs. Most of the ocean floors remain inaccessible, yet we have a picture of the black hole. We have no idea where exactly are airplanes in the sky, but we are controlling rover on the surface of Mars that is sending us selfies. I cannot help but wonder what if the Rover is actually on some unknown island on Earth itself & the picture of the black hole is actually something else. FYI: I am just bored & hungry.