DMPK Insights #11: Drug Meets Bug: How the Gut Microbiome Shapes DMPK

For a captioned version or to access the transcript, please visit https://www.pharmaron.com/knowledge-center/dmpk-podcast-11-gut-microbiome/.

In this podcast, Chris Bode (Pharmaron US Labs) interviews Peter Turnbaugh, a microbiologist and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California San Francisco. Over the past 15-20 years, Peter has produced so much groundbreaking research in the endlessly fascinating field of the gut microbiome. His work is not limited to DMPK by any means, but in this episode, we discuss drug metabolism by gut bacteria and its impact on pharmacokinetics. Clinically, reduced efficacy and/or increased side effects observed in some patients can be attributed to the gut microbiome, including narrow therapeutic index drugs such as digoxin. You will come away with an appreciation for scientific creativity and the sometimes unexpected benefits of doing an experiment that everyone thinks is going to fail. We speculate on how much there is to learn about the possible interactions between the gut microbiome and drugs for obesity, including GLP1 agonists. Finally, we talk about some practical considerations in terms of studying bacterial drug metabolism in vitro.  

 The episode explores the following: 

• How important is the gut microbiome in terms of drug metabolism? 
• What do we know about the balance between control of the microbiome by the host and control of the host by the microbiome? 
• What are some of the challenges of studying gut bacterial drug metabolism in vitro? 
• Could gut bacteria play a role in the efficacy and/or side effects of GLP1 agonists such as semaglutide, used to treat obesity and diabetes? 

Speaker:

Peter J. Turnbaugh – Professor, Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of California

Peter J. Turnbaugh, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology, the G.W. Hooper Research Foundation, and the Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also a CZ Biohub-San Francisco Investigator. For the past two decades, his research has focused on the metabolic activities of the trillions of microbes that colonize our adult bodies. Dr. Turnbaugh and his research group use interdisciplinary approaches in preclinical models and human cohorts to study how the gut microbiome influences nutrition and pharmacology. He received a B.A. in Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology from Whitman College and a Ph.D. in Microbial Genetics and Genomics from Washington University in Saint Louis. From 2010-2014 he was a Bauer Fellow in the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University, where he established an independent research group before starting his faculty position at the University of California, San Francisco. Notable honors include the Kipnis Award in Biomedical Sciences, the Needleman Pharmacology Prize, the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, the Searle Scholars Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Disease Award, and fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology.

Stay tuned for more podcasts in our Pharmaron DMPK Insights Series!