Study connecting a person’s gut bacteria to how he or she ages could lead to new microbiomic precision medicine treatments
Do the bacteria living in our guts play a key role in how we age? Researchers in England believe they do, and that means it may be possible to develop personalized treatments that affect how we age and enhance the quality of our health as we do so.
In a study conducted by the Quadram Institute and the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England, researchers found that transferring feces from young mice to old mice reverses certain symptoms of aging.
This surprising discovery suggests that the bacterial makeup unique to each individual’s intestines—known as the microbiome—may play a more significant role in aging than was previously understood.
Healthcare leaders will recognize this as an important opportunity in the growing fields of intestinal microbiomics and precision medicine to develop personalized treatments based on individuals’ gut bacteria rather than genomics.
The scientists published their study in the journal Microbiome, titled, “Fecal Microbiota Transfer Between Young and Aged Mice Reverses Hallmarks of the Aging Gut, Eye, and Brain.”
Microbiomic Versus Genomic Personalized Treatment
The microbiome is comprised of bacteria that live on the surface of the skin, in the intestines, and other areas of the body.
Each individual’s microbiome is unique, making the microbiome a useful target for precision medicine treatment. Just as healthcare can be personalized based on a patient’s genome, so can medications or treatments be tailored to a patient’s microbiome. Unlike the genome, however, the microbiome can be altered to improve overall health.
One such procedure is fecal microbiota transplantation. The process is commonly used to alter an individual’s intestinal microbiome and involves the transfer of feces from one organism’s intestines to another.
The UEA study used fecal transplantation to demonstrate that in mice certain signs of aging could be improved or reversed.
“This ground-breaking study provides tantalizing evidence for the direct involvement of gut microbes in aging and the functional decline of brain function and vision and offers a potential solution in the form of gut microbe replacement therapy,” said Simon Carding, PhD, professor at Norwich Medical School and head of the Quadram Institute’s Gut Microbes and Health Research Program, in a UEA news release.
The fecal transplantation in mice led to improved function of older mice’s guts, as well as reducing signs of aging in their eyes and brains. The researchers also reversed the experiment, transplanting feces from older mice into young mice. This reversed the benefits, causing the young mice to experience multiple signs of premature aging and strengthening the interpretation that the results were related to intestinal microbiomics.
“We were excited to find that by changing the gut microbiota of elderly individuals, we could rescue indicators of age-associated decline commonly seen in degenerative conditions of the eye and brain,” said Aimée Parker, PhD, a research associate at the Quadram Institute and lead author of the UEA study.
Modifying the Microbiome to Improve Personal Health
The concept that microbiomics could play an important role in aging may be relatively new; however, the idea that microbiomics could be used to personalize healthcare is not. There is a plethora of ongoing research into how gut bacteria impact health and the potential that modifying this balance could have on humans.
Precision Medicine Institute’s sister publication Dark Daily has published dozens of ebriefings on research into human gut bacteria, how it impacts our health, and revolutionary new personalized treatments based on individuals’ unique microbiomes.
In “Dey Laboratory Research Finds Bile Acids Affect Gut Motility and the Human Microbiome, Insights That May Lead to New Clinical Laboratory Tests,” Dark Daily reported on research that resulted in new insights into the role the human microbiome plays in our digestive processes.
And in “Harvard Medical School Study Finds ‘Staggering’ Amounts of Genetic Diversity in Human Microbiome; Might Be Useful in Diagnostics and Precision Medicine,” Dark Daily covered research conducted at Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Joslin Diabetes Center into how individual microbial genes in human microbiome may contribute to disease risk.
While the full impact of this line of research has yet to be realized, it opens the door to new discoveries into how microbiomics can improve the health of individual patients. Microbiomic research coupled with a precision medicine approach also could ultimately result in new personalized treatments for disease as knowledge of the human microbiome and its function grows.
—Caleb Williams