The 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.
> “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.<p>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.
It 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?<p>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)
Not 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.<p>[0]:<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28405912/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28405912/</a>
“Why would bacteria adapt to use dopamine, which is typically associated with the brain?”<p>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 :)
I'm amazed that even chemotherapy drugs are consumed by gut microbes. I would assume it's only the pill form taken orally.<p>>The gut microbiota has the potential to directly metabolise chemotherapeutic drugs and also to modify the host metabolic milieu, indirectly altering host-chemotherapeutic metabolism<p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6145523/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6145523/</a>
Reading this, I cannot help but wonder.<p>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.<p>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.<p>FYI: I am just bored & hungry.
Is 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.
After studying pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I lost a lot of faith in our current pharmacological medicine.<p>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).<p>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