Microbes that inhabit the human body make a treasure trove of small molecules that could be developed into drugs such as antibiotics, chemotherapy, cholesterol-fighters and other therapies, a new study reveals.
An analysis of 2,430 bacterial genomes isolated from a wide range of body sites shows that people’s bacteria are capable of making some 44,000 different small molecules, researchers report September 11 in Cell. Small molecules have been shown to be important for communication between bacteria and their hosts. Also, many drugs are small molecules.
“Many [microbes] can make drugs like those we’re already taking or evaluating in clinical trials,” says study coauthor Mohamed Donia, a biochemist who recently moved from the University of California, San Francisco to Princeton University. One of the drug candidates Donia and his colleagues discovered is a new antibiotic produced by vaginal bacteria to fight off pathogens.