Good germs to fight bad germs.
Penn Medicine researchers have singled out a bacterial enzyme behind an imbalance in the gut microbiome linked to Crohn's disease. The new study, published online this week in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that wiping out a significant portion of the bacteria in the gut microbiome, and then re-introducing a certain type of "good" bacteria that lacks this enzyme, known as urease, may be an effective approach to better treat these diseases.
"Because it's a single enzyme that is involved in this process, it might be a targetable solution," said the study's senior author, Gary D. Wu, MD, associate chief for research in the division of Gastroenterology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "The idea would be that we could 'engineer' the composition of the microbiota in some way that lacks this particular one."
[...] In a series of human and mouse studies, the researchers discovered that a type of "bad" bacteria known as Proteobacteria feeding on urea, a waste product that can end up back in the colon, played an important role in the development of dysbiosis.
The "bad" bacteria, which harbor the urease enzyme, convert urea into ammonia (nitrogen metabolism), which is then reabsorbed by bacteria to make amino acids that are associated with dysbiosis in Crohn's disease. "Good" bacteria may not respond in a similar manner, and thus may serve as a potential therapeutic approach to engineer the microbiome into a healthier state and treat disease.
If the technique works, it could open the door to treating other conditions like obesity.
Josephine Ni, et al A role for bacterial urease in gut dysbiosis and Crohn's disease. Science Translational Medicine, 2017; 9 (416): eaah6888 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aah6888
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The EPA has approved the use of bacteria-treated mosquitoes to help reduce mosquito populations. The approval will be effective for five years in 20 states and D.C.:
On November 3, 2017, EPA registered a new mosquito biopesticide – ZAP Males® - that can reduce local populations of the type of mosquito (Aedes albopictus, or Asian Tiger Mosquitoes) that can spread numerous diseases of significant human health concern, including the Zika virus.
ZAP Males® are live male mosquitoes that are infected with the ZAP strain, a particular strain of the Wolbachia bacterium. Infected males mate with females, which then produce offspring that do not survive. (Male mosquitoes do not bite people.) With continued releases of the ZAP Males®, local Aedes albopictus populations decrease. Wolbachia are naturally occurring bacteria commonly found in most insect species.
"It's a non-chemical way of dealing with mosquitoes, so from that perspective, you'd think it would have a lot of appeal," says David O'Brochta, an entomologist at the University of Maryland in Rockville."I'm glad to see it pushed forward, as I think it could be potentially really important."
MosquitoMate will rear the Wolbachia-infected A. albopictus mosquitoes in its laboratories, and then sort males from females. Then the laboratory males, which don't bite, will be released at treatment sites. When these males mate with wild females, which do not carry the same strain of Wolbachia, the resulting fertilized eggs don't hatch because the paternal chromosomes do not form properly.
The company says that over time, as more of the Wolbachia-infected males are released and breed with the wild partners, the pest population of A. albopictus mosquitoes dwindles. Other insects, including other species of mosquito, are not harmed by the practice, says Stephen Dobson, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and founder of MosquitoMate.
NPR has reprinted a 2012 article about the idea. Also at Newsweek.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday November 16 2017, @11:48PM (3 children)
Puree someone's poop in a blender (single use only, no smoothies in that one (hopefully...)), put it in a pill, and down the hatch.
It's actually science that holds promise, see Mary Roach's book Gulp for an entire chapter on it. She's much funnier and sciency than I'll ever be.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @11:59PM
More like quit washing your hands every 5 minutes and eat some dirt.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday November 17 2017, @12:09AM
Yep :)
That's what I came here to point out, the delivery. You're literally eating shit to shit better. I don't understand how it might affect obesity, but I find nature deeply weird in that it can heal me by eating the qualitatively better shit of another animal. Reminds of the Road to Wellville with Anthony Hopkins happily telling people how superior his shit was. They would've had a medical breakthrough, but were delivering the medicine to the wrong hole.
You just can't make this shit up :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @03:13AM
It makes far, far more sense to take it as a suppository, even if it's a pain in the ass.
Personally, I'd hesitate to do that until there's a much greater understanding of the relevant roles of bacteria in the digestive track. Some bacteria are clearly helpful, but others seem to be just there or are actively harmful. For individuals with this sort of severe distress the trade off is possibly worthwhile, but it's still a risk.
The best thing would be if doctors would have take a relevant sample from the patient prior to prescribing antibiotics so that the original bacterial mix has some hope of remerging.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 17 2017, @12:45AM (12 children)
10 years ago this might have been news.... have they gone any further than simply transplanting from a healthy subject?
By the way, suppositories are preferred to oral ingestion.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Snotnose on Friday November 17 2017, @01:06AM (6 children)
So.... someone makes a steaming pile, you lay on your back legs spread, and use an ice cream scoop to transfer the steaming pile into your colon.
Yeah, I know this is a serious subject and has serious science behind it, but the giggle factor can't be denied.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 17 2017, @02:06AM (4 children)
The real problem is the reimbursement factor: how much can you really charge for an injection of someone else's feces?
Back around 2001 we had an acquaintance with severe Crohn's, woman otherwise vibrant and healthy in her mid 20s. The recommended line of treatment was removal of the colon and lifelong use of a colostomy bag. That's a reimbursable surgery, lots of profit there. The poop injection was still deep in giggle-land at the time and poo-poohed by any MD you suggested it to. Think about that for a minute: they weren't even willing to try putting "healthy poop" into the diseased colon, but they were willing to give a woman a colostomy bag to carry for the next 60 years. h pylori had been established as the root cause of ulcers a decade earlier, but they were still scratching their heads over whether or not Crohn's might have a bacterial factor.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @03:17AM (3 children)
This is ignorant right here. Doing a fecal matter transplant involves risks that still haven't been fully identified. Not only do you have the risk of communicable diseases, but you also have the unknowns associated with the new bacteria and what they're going to do in somebody elses colon. Not to mention that the bacteria in a persons colon evolved for the specific diet and lifestyle of the person who has that colon. Just assuming that doing a transplant is going to go well is rather naive. I'm sure we'll get there, but we're not there yet.
By contrast removing the colon while drastic, is something that's relatively well understood in terms of procedure and consequences.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday November 17 2017, @04:43AM (2 children)
Yes, well understood to cause permanent irreversable harm.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @05:11AM (1 child)
And precisely what is your point? We know what the results are going to be from that, but a fecal matter transplant can cause other problems which are much more significant than that and we're still not sure what bacteria should be present and in what concentrations.
The whole thing sucks, but let's not pretend like we know more about this than we really do. In the long run, I'm sure that fecal transplants will be more widely utilized, but considering the number of connections back to the brain, as well as the possibility of bacteria slipping into the blood stream, it's rather arrogant to suggest that we know that the result wouldn't be as bad.
It sucks to lose a body part, but it also sucks to get experimental surgery that goes wrong.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kawumpa on Friday November 17 2017, @08:49AM
You're not completely wrong in that the long term effects of FMT need further research, but it has been proven successful in the treatment of recurring C.diff. infection (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24440934 [nih.gov] for example).
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday November 18 2017, @03:35AM
Of course you disagree, I was going for funny you humorless moderator. Jeez, some people's kids.
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(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Friday November 17 2017, @01:47AM (2 children)
This appears to work for people with compromised protein handling in the gut, whereas the transplant helps with a gut population problem in an otherwise healthy person (or possibly a person who can function as normal if they've got a bacteria strain they're not getting naturally where they live). It's cheating to engineer replacements that don't make the problem protein but otherwise perform the gut function we need.
I know someone who suffered lots of painful health consequences from the auto-immune side effects of crohns before finally having to have their colon removed. A really tragic situation. Something like this could be profoundly life altering in an awesome way.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 17 2017, @02:17AM (1 child)
We also knew someone who was on the verge of a colostomy for Crohn's shortly before I got involved with the world of epilepsy. There the great travesty of medicine is the ketogenic diet - doctors will literally let families rot in epileptic hell, offering damaging lobotomies and not even suggest trying the ketogenic diet first. The ketogenic diet isn't a 100% cure, nothing is (though, if you don't mind the side effects, you can usually improve epilepsy with the lobotomy...) but it _is_ a 100% cure for some people, and it's a significant improvement in symptoms for at least 1/3, about the same as most epilepsy meds.
The world of medicine is seriously warped by the money factor. Something without a focused profit center, like a diet change, or a poop transplant, just doesn't get respect or adoption that a pharmaceutical or surgical procedure does.
This thing for Crohn's has been kicking around since 2004-ish, about the same time the gluten-free diet started really gaining mind-share. Any MD who offers a colostomy to a young person without at least trying both (gluten-free and flora transplant) first, multiple times, really should have their license stripped. "First, do no harm" seems to have fallen out of practice, and it needs to come back.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @05:15AM
This kind of paranoia is ridiculous. The medical system has a lot of issues, but you don't think that health insurers would rather pay for a diet to solve things like this than the surgery? Precisely whose crack are you smoking?
Dietary changes are virtually always preferred by insurance when the medical evidence backs the treatment up. It's not something they have to pay for and even providing a few sessions to give the patient the necessary information is significantly cheaper than performing those surgeries that may or may not actually work and result in the risk of serious harm.
As far as doing no harm goes, doctors are supposed to make their recommendations on the basis of medical research. Just because you hear stories of something that people did and were successful does not mean that the treatment works, the people you hear from tend to be the ones for whom the effect was the most profound. For every one of them, there's other people who may not have been so lucky and without conducting proper medical testing, you don't have any way of knowing if it works and if it does work, whom it works best on.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday November 17 2017, @02:49AM (1 child)
It was news to me 30 years ago while in College. The guy from Australia had these pills he would take before flying home thereby avoiding the three days of gut aches upon arrival because there was just enough difference in the food that his fauna (or was it flora) could no longer deal with Australian grain after a year in the US.
His doctor (over there) gave him the opposite pills when first came th the US.
He told me it was somehow grown from poo, and was known in Australia since world war 1.
Prior to world wide shipments of grain, even British wheat was substantially different and required different yeast varieties. And US soldiers arriving by the boat load took a while to be able to digest it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Friday November 17 2017, @02:51AM
https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/is-american-wheat-different-than-european-wheat.htm [howstuffworks.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Friday November 17 2017, @01:12AM (7 children)
After all, all the bacteria colonized from the outside. I don't see any reason why this process should ever stop. Therefore, unless the "bad" bacteria strains are unusual, I would expect them to slowly reestablish after the treatment.
(Score: 2) by Post-Nihilist on Friday November 17 2017, @01:35AM (1 child)
Sometime the "bad" bacteria are there because of a lack of competitive "good" bacteria occupying that niche. Once a competitive strain it is implanted in an resources ritch environment, it usually stays until a broad spectrum antibiotics is used... broad antibiotics don't care wherever it's a good bacteria or not
Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @03:20AM
Usually bad bacteria are there in large quantities because the good and neutral bacteria aren't competing with them. The whole business of antibiotics makes little sense in most cases as it's almost always preferable to add benign bacteria rather than try to remove harmful ones. The antibiotics that get prescribed have an impact on not just the ones that the doctors are targeting, but the rest of them as well.
Unless you're dealing with a situation where not getting antibiotics is likely to lead to permanent injury or death, you're usually better off not using antibiotics.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday November 17 2017, @01:44AM (3 children)
Both good and bad bacteria are always in all of us, but are normally in balance. Many factors cause candida overgrowth, including oral antibiotics, certainly diet (too much sugar/carbs). There are many symptoms from mild to bad, short-term and long-term problems. I have a bit of a problem with it- too much carbohydrate feeds the bad bacteria: candida albicans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_albicans [wikipedia.org] A good, balanced diet, certain veggies, some probiotics, acidophilus, yogurt help.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @02:32AM (2 children)
Historically, humans have eaten a lot more fermented foods than is currently popular. Nowadays, most stuff that we think of as fermented isn't even fermented, just flavored because it's cheaper. Pickled stuff, yogurts, sourdoughs, etc, all have positive health effects because they're "natural probiotics".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @03:22AM (1 child)
A lot of the fermented stuff can be made at home. Sauer kraut is more or less trivial, you mostly just need shredded cabbage, salt and a jar to leave it in. Just be mindful to use one with a pressure release or to burp it from time to time or the whole thing will explode.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday November 17 2017, @05:34AM
This is awesome- thanks. Everyone should take this seriously. I know some people who are very intensely dedicated food / nutritionists. Yes, they're into organics, etc., but with reason. They stay away from certain chemicals, "processing" (what does that mean!?!), etc., and rave about Sauer kraut, apple cider vinegar (I think that's it), and some other things I can't imagine eating but they do. One of the aforementioned people is the mother of a friend of mine- she will be 99 in January and still lives by herself. She's got a few issues, but overall amazing, and very careful / picky about what she eats. Another friend grew up in Germany and she gets very unhappy when she reads food ingredient labels on stuff in US stores.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 17 2017, @02:23AM
Depends... of course they could, but if you think of gut bacteria like a lawn - the established groundcover has a significant advantage over invaders. A lot depends on how you maintain the lawn: regular mowings favor hardy fast growing low lying grasses, while infrequent mowings will allow tall seed spreaders to flourish.
In the gut, if you regularly flush with soda-pop and street tacos, you might encourage a different type of thing to grow as compared to a diet of yogurt and well washed greens.
I wonder if oral hygiene has any significant linkage here - and I'm thinking in the polio sense: if you don't allow some dental plaque to establish, maybe that's an invitation to bad gut-bugs?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @04:06AM
Eat fermented food: yogurt, sourkraut, kimchi, pickles, even beer and salo. Lutefisk, no scratch that. Fermented food, not corroded food.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @02:44PM
The only way to stop a bad bacteria? With a gun. Is a good bacteria and a gun.