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Microbes make metabolic mischief by targeting drugs

Tests of whether a range of gut bacteria can metabolize a diverse group of drugs has revealed that all the microbes metabolized some drugs and that more than half of the drugs were metabolized.
  1. Kim Lewis

    1. Kim Lewis is in the Department of Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.

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  2. Philip Strandwitz

    1. Philip Strandwitz is at Holobiome, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.

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All humans are different and, unsurprisingly, also differ in their response to drug treatments. It is usually thought that this variation is due mainly to differences in liver enzymes that specialize in detoxifying ingested molecules. Such enzymes can metabolize drugs, with consequences that include reducing or eliminating drug potency or making them toxic. Understanding how an individual will respond to a given drug is important in developing treatment plans. Yet our knowledge of drug fate in the body is still rudimentary, despite a long history of studies in this area. Writing in Nature, Zimmermann et al.1 put human gut bacteria in the spotlight in the quest to understand how drugs are naturally metabolized.

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Nature 570, 453-454 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01851-x

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