Microbiota and Drug Metabolism: Towards a Personalized Medicine

Dr. Cristina Giaroni from University of Insubria, Italy will be joining us this October to moderate a session entitled "Microbiota and Drug Metabolism: Towards a Personalized Medicine". 

The gut microbiota plays a pivotal role in human health by modulating gut epithelial and immune cell functions, preventing pathogen colonization, and providing essential nutrients and bioactive metabolites. From a metabolic standpoint, gut microbes actively participate to drug metabolism, influencing drug disposition, half-life, and efficacy. Gut bacteria are not only a major source for local drug metabolism but can also indirectly affect xenobiotic stability by modulating host-mediated metabolic clearance as well as by competition of bacterial-derived metabolites for host drug metabolic pathways.

In view of the existing bidirectional drug-microbiota relationship, drugs themselves can influence the composition and function of the gut microbiota. In this context, alterations of the gut microbiota homeostasis after broad spectrum antibiotic administration does not only deprive the host from essential bacterial metabolites but may also profoundly alter drug metabolic pathways. A further critical issue is the development of antibiotic resistance in some species of bacteria. The human gut is considered the main reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes. Antibiotic treatment may rapidly increase the pool of resistance genes, favouring the formation of a biofilm rich of microorganisms resistant against several antibiotics thus contributing to reduce host defence and hampering the efficacy of treatments for bacterial infections.

Overall, these considerations open a new avenue for a research aiming at evaluating the relevance of drug-gut microbiota interplay in the variation of individual responses to disease treatment, thus opening the possibility for more personalized therapeutic approaches.

Join us in Targeting Microbiota 2022 and benefit from the experience of Dr. Giaroni. Don't forget that you can share you work in this session by submitting your abstract.

Targeting Microbiota 2022 Congress
October 19-21, 2022 - Paris, France
www.microbiota-site.com