Michael Harrop
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The researchers on a quest to protect the gut from antibiotics. The crucial drugs can have unintended consequences. Innovative therapies could shield the microbiome from their effects (Feb 2025, Florey Biosciences) Antibiotics
- Thread starter Michael Harrop
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Too late for us whose guts are already messed up, but hopefully this will be around for patients in the future! It's an engineered strain of yeast that destroys antibiotics in the gut before they have a chance to deplete the intestinal microbiome.
Also, did you see the reference about probiotics cited in that article (Ref #2)? I only noticed it just now, but it's informative. The conclusion of that one was that probiotics actually delay recovery of the gut microbiome after antibiotics, relative to taking nothing except the antibiotics. The treatment that actually accelerated recovery, unsurprisingly, was autologous FMT (using feces collected and preserved before the start of antibiotic treatment. That one is here, if you can't find the link in the article about the protective yeast:
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31108-5
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31108-5
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Michael Harrop
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I was the first person to label fermented foods and multi-strain probiotics as "disruptive" in my probiotic guide: https://humanmicrobiome.info/probiotic-guide/
That study provided supporting evidence for my statements. Unfortunately, even if they wanted to credit me for the idea it's likely against journal standards.
Unfortunately for me, this is a recurring phenomenon.
I do see that you already cite this 2018 in your probiotic page--good for you! But do you mean you had already concluded this BEFORE 2018? If so, was it based on an even earlier study, or simply on your own experience and testimonials from other patients? If the latter, then you do deserve credit for coming up with the idea, but not for rigorously proving it. So what you can criticize is not having the means/opportunity to test the idea, as opposed to the fact that the journal doesn't cite a statement without supporting evidence.
It's like you can be the only one to predict the outcome of a horse race, yet when the outcome of the race is reported, they won't cite your prediction. The difference is that betting on horse races is an established thing with lots of opportunities to win, yet there aren't nearly as many such prediction challenges in science--at least there weren't until recently.
I know this well--as a matter of fact just recently I participated in one of the few science prediction competitions that DOES exist, and did relatively well in a category that hasn't existed for long (even though the competition as a whole has). Comparing how I did to the baseline of methods that were around when I first became interested in this sort of prediction over 10 years ago, it's almost definite that I would have stood out a lot more back then had the contest existed then, but the field has since significantly caught up, and all this intervening time I wasn't able to use my skills to move science forward--it's really a shame. So I know that this can be frustrating--however the fact remains that even spectacularly prescient predictions are not the same as demonstrations by controlled experiment.
Getting back to the gut, I posted that paper about the hydrogen producers in the gut a few months ago that also seems to confirm things I've been speculating are true for a long time--but there again of course they wouldn't cite me even if I'd told them these things when I first thought of them, as I hadn't actually shown it. And still there's even a lot MORE yet to show there before all the implications are really proven.
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