A probiotic therapy for patients with inflammatory bowel disease
About 1.6 million people in the U.S. alone currently have an incurable inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), such as Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, and 70,000 new cases are diagnosed in the country each year. IBD patients suffer from pain, extreme discomfort, and numerous other symptoms caused by continuously relapsing and remitting inflammatory lesions in the layer of cells that lines the intestinal lumen (mucosa). The exact causes for IBD still are poorly understood, but it is clear that a misdirected immune system is at work, and that certain components of the microbial community in our gut, known as the intestinal microbiome, and environmental factors contribute to its destructive forces. While anti-inflammatory drugs can dampen acute inflammation and antibiotics can fight local infections when IBD episodes flare up, their use also comes at a cost. Anti-inflammatory drugs can have severe side effects and antibiotics can disrupt the beneficial parts of the microbiome on...