Your gut microbiome could change the way you metabolize medicines, a new paper says

https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/03/microbiome-metabolize-medicine/ "It is possible that we can use genes or species of bacteria to predict the capacity of an individual's gut flora to metabolize a certain drug," study co-lead author Maria Zimmermann-Kogadeeva said in a university news release. "The work is a first step in identifying biomarkers that could help doctors prescribe the drugs that are the safest and most effective for individual patients," added Zimmermann-Kogadeeva. She's a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of senior study author Andrew Goodman, of Yale's Microbial Sciences Institute and the department of microbial pathogenesis. For the new study, the researchers investigated whether and how 271 drugs are chemically modified by 76 kinds of gut bacteria. Nearly two-thirds of the drugs were metabolized by at least one of the bacteria species, the findings showed. The researchers then identified many of the genes that enable the bacteria to metabolize the drugs. The team found wide variations in the number of these genes in healthy people. In some cases, these differences explain why some people's gut bacteria populations (microbiomes) metabolize drugs rapidly, while others act on the same drugs slowly or not at all. It was once thought that drug metabolism was carried out only by organs, such as the liver, Goodman's team noted.