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Drugging the gut microbiome

Nature Biotechnology volume 33, pages 228–231 (2015)Cite this article

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An Erratum to this article was published on 09 May 2017

This article has been updated

Using conventional drug discovery and novel synthetic biology approaches, some investigators and companies are mining our resident microbes and their metabolites for targets in small-molecule drug programs. Ken Garber reports.

In January, Janssen Biotech, a Johnson & Johnson company, announced that it would license a gut microbe cocktail developed by Boston-based Vedanta Biosciences, for treating intestinal bowel disease (IBD). The deal, potentially worth $241 million to Vedanta, is the largest yet announced in the microbiome space. But Janssen is also developing gut microbiota–derived therapies on its own—not whole organisms, but small molecules. “Drug development could have many different flavors,” says Scott Plevy, a Janssen vice president and its IBD group leader. “It might be, if we're lucky, that an active metabolite or even a gene product of a microbe could be a drug in and of itself.” Janssen is also identifying targets for its own novel compounds. “Through characterization of host receptors that interact with these metabolites, we could make a small molecule to these host receptors,” Plevy says. “We've been studying several.”

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Figure 1: The metabolites produced by gut bacterial fermentation of dietary fiber induce Tregs and dampen inflammation.

Change history

  • 12 October 2016

    In the version of this article initially published, on p.231, left-hand column, the maker of linaclotide was said to be Redwood rather than Ironwood Pharmaceuticals. In addition, linaclotide is no longer referred to as a “homolog of the enterotoxin peptides,” but as “similar to the enterotoxin peptides,” and it has been clarified to be “rationally designed.” The errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. Ann Arbor, Michigan

    Ken Garber

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Garber, K. Drugging the gut microbiome. Nat Biotechnol 33, 228–231 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3161

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