Bioremediation--Using Microbes to Infect Us into Wellness

The concept of a benign infection with helpful micro-organisms is not a new one. Our normal bacterial flora on the skin, in the gut, and other body locations--all of these bacteria protect us from pathological infections and provide us with other benefits as well. Now, researchers are looking into using benign infections to combat atherosclerosis--the major killer of persons in the western world. From the Methuselah Foundation:

The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University has awarded biochemist John Schloendorn a $30,000 scholarship that will enable him to pursue anti-aging research as a Ph.D. student in the School of Life Sciences. Schloendorn is part of the institute’s inaugural doctoral graduate assistantship class of 2006.

Schloendorn’s pioneering work concerns a new field of research called medicalbioremediation. The research focuses on identifying microbes that possess particularly effective mechanisms to biodegrade the molecular “junk” thataccumulates inside cells over time, and is at the root of many of the debilitiescaused by aging. Schloendorn’s research has been and is supported by a seedgrant made by the Methuselah Foundation, a charity dedicated to accelerating theprocess of discovering methods to defeat the debilities caused by aging.

Schloendorn’s work has led to the isolation and characterization of bacteriathat efficiently degrade several recalcitrant cholesterol breakdown products,among them 7-ketocholesterol, that are thought to play a major role inatherosclerosis (the cause of almost all heart attacks and strokes). His futureobjective is to isolate the enzymes responsible for the breakdown and test theirtherapeutic prospects in cell models of the disease, with the ultimate goal ofcreating medical bioremediation treatments for humans.

See the Methuselah Foundation website for more information.

Of course using viruses to introduce new genetic sequences is another way of using microbes in a hopefully benevolent way. As scientists learn more sophisticated and multi-level ways of affecting the human organism using microbe genomes and other cellular machinery, they will need to understand both human biology and microbial biology at correspondingly more sophisticated levels. Micro-organisms are a biological form of nanotechnology, and will no doubt compete with other forms of nanotech medicine to perform similar cellular rejuvenation tasks.