The Ick factor that could save a life: American cancer researchers turn to fecal waste for treatment indices | US News
A leading American clinic hopes that its biobank of fecal waste will help researchers make new discoveries on how to treat cancer patients – one of the many efforts to turn human waste in medicine.
The Mayo Clinic Biobank is part of the researchers' effort to “personalize” medicine by discovering how the microbiome changes how patients react to cancer drugs.
“If I can understand by looking at someone's microbiome and their genes about the medication to which it would probably be reacted, I would like to choose this medicine as the first step,” said Purna Kashyap, director of the Microbiomic program of the Mayo clinic, which supervises biobank.
In comparison, most cancer drugs are now used as a diet or, as Kashyap describes it: “Everyone gets this as front line therapy, and everyone gets it as second -line therapy and everyone gets this as third -line therapy.”
At the heart of clinical efforts to understand the microbiome is a biobank of more than 2,000 stool samples – a collection with an Ick factor – but that which, according to researchers, can help them understand why patients react differently to the treatment of cancer.
The idea behind research is that, in addition to human cells, each person has a microbiome, a collection of “microbial symbiotes” of 100 TN: bacteria. Microbiomes are what “we count [on] To help nutrition, resist pathogens and educate our immune system, ”the researchers wrote once for Science. These bacteria colonize our body, from skin to guts.
The work of biobanks on cancer is only one of the many large -scale efforts that seek to understand how the intestinal microbiome can mediate how patients react to cancer treatment – as if tumors shrink in response to chemotherapy or the severity of side effects.
In this sense, researchers have experienced With the colonization of patients' guts with new bacteria by fecal transplants. Although still in research phase, the tests produced some Promising results. The same idea made the researchers investigated the “Crapsules” and the “CRISPR-IG” The intestinal microbiome, according to a new book by Dr. Eric Topol, president of the Translational Medicine Department of the Research Institute scripps.
The work of private biobank, and the expectation of Kashyap that he could publish results this summer, especially while the wider scientific community is attacked by the Trump administration. The White House has offered disproportionately important cuts to American scientific institutions, including a 40% decrease to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
While private companies and hospital systems, such as Mayo Clinic, are working on individual studies, almost no one in the research community only thinks of “puny” private budgets can fill a federal void in government size.
Likewise, the Cup of the Secretary of Health Robert F Kennedy Jr of approximately 20,000 jobs from the Ministry of Health and Social Services compromised certain government biobanks – as is the case with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the bank of around 50,000 Gonorrhea samples, whose fate is unknown after all the staff was rejected.
“The types of biobanking and data collection The NIH funds are open and openly available,” said Derek Lowe, organic chemist and author of the popular In the pipeline Blog on the development of drugs.
“There are not too many other people who do things like that.”
