The Inhabitants Within
I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about our microbiome (the collection of microorganisms that inhabit our bodies) of late. I’m thinking that we (as an industry) have grossly underappreciated its importance to intra- and inter-individual variability in disease phenotype and response to therapies, especially oral drug therapies. Pharmaceutical scientists whose work involves studying such variability and designing strategies to exploit and/or overcome it should immerse themselves in this rapidly growing field. The blog post I’ve linked to provides a good initial reference list. The work of Jeremy K. Nicholson at the Imperial College in London and Jeffrey I. Gordon of the Washington University in St. Louis is particularly important and provocative. Let’s add microbiomics to our pharmaceutical lexicons and give the 100 trillion bugs that inhabit our guts the attention and respect they warrant.
Pharma’s Cutting Edge » Some very bright spots at year end for metabolism disease research said,
December 22, 2006 at 2:52 pm
[…] The other breakthrough is a bit earlier in its therapeutic potential, but I believe it is no less important or interesting. It concerns the commensal bacteria that live within our guts, a topic I called your attention to this past July. The research, consisting of two related papers by Jeffrey Gordon and his colleagues at the Washington University in St. Louis, is published in the December 21st issue of Nature (Subscription required). […]