MIT researchers work to use microbes in the body to fight diseases

A report in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT News said scientists on the university campus are researching how altering the behavior of millions of microbes existing in the human body can be used to combat diseases.

Unraveling the physical properties of what scientists call “microbiomes” could result in advances against diseases such as diabetes, bowell disease, Alzheimer’s and several forms of cancer.

“In almost every disease context that’s been investigated, we’ve found different types of microbial communities, divergent between healthy and sick patients,” MIT professor of biological engineering Eric Alm said. “The promise [of these findings] is that some of those differences are going to be causal, and intervening to change the microbiome is going to help treat some of these diseases.”  

Research is ongoing both at the MIT Broad Institute and Harvard, the report said.

The field of study analyzing the bacterial strains of microbes in the human body was almost unknown until the early 2000’s.

Researchers indicated getting microbes to behave in a manner that can fight disease will be a step-by-step process in the coming years.

“There’s an opportunity to more precisely change a microbiome,” Tammi Lieberman, professor at MIT said. “There’s a lot of basic science to do to figure out how to tweak the microbiome in a targeted way. Once we figure out how to do that, the therapeutic potential of the microbiome is quite limitless.”