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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Libusha Kelly, Ph.D.
Department of Systems & Computational Biology
Department of Microbiology & Immunology
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
ABSTRACT
The microbiome is unique in individuals, associated with numerous diseases, and rapidly changeable by diet. Despite many studies profiling the microbiome in health and disease and insights into how our microbiomes can influence our physiology, to date the only condition for which we use the microbiome as a treatment is recurrent infection with the bacterium Clostridium difficile. I will discuss the promise and current limitations of using the microbiome as a clinical diagnostic and treatment tool. I will argue that we still need discovery-based basic research, particularly when it comes to the viruses that stalk the microbial allies and enemies in our bodies. We recently reported a novel family of tailless viruses that are major unrecognized killers of marine viruses with the Polz lab at MIT. With this work as a foundation, my lab discovered and is characterizing related, broadly distributed, viruses in the human microbiome. In the clinic, we aim to provide patients and their doctors with actionable information about their microbiomes to improve health and treatment plans. We recently reported that the microbiomes of different individuals have different capacities to activate irinotecan, an anti-cancer drug. We linked this differential metabolism to specific microbial carbohydrate active enzymes. We hypothesize that the life-threatening diarrhea that afflicts metastatic colorectal cancer patients who take this drug might also be caused by microbial turnover. We are working with oncologists to analyze the fecal microbiomes and metabolomes of patients receiving irinotecan. Our goal is to provide patients with early warnings that they are likely high irinotecan metabolizers, enabling prophylactic diarrheal treatment and closer monitoring. More broadly, we are constructing a chemical landscape of the gut to identify new microbe/drug/food interactions that influence drug efficacy and toxicity and suggest unrecognized off-target effects driven by microbial activity.
