Go with your gut
Scientists are already working to develop treatments that can be tailored to an individual’s genetics, but what about tailoring treatments based on the genetics of the trillions of microbes that live in a person’s gut? The idea might not be as far-fetched as it sounds, said Peter Turnbaugh, a Bauer Fellow at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Center for Systems Biology. In a recent paper in Cell, Turnbaugh and co-authors Corinne Ferrier Maurice and Henry Joseph Haiser, both postdoctoral fellows at the Center for Systems Biology, show that, as drugs are administered, the activity of human gut microbes can change dramatically. Understanding how those changes affect drugs could one day help researchers to design drugs that work more effectively and antibiotics that more specifically target pathogens. “The big question is: To what extent do the benefits and side effects of different types of drugs depend on the microbes in our gut?”...