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Tiny microbes make a huge difference in our health. These internal ecological systems utilize communication or signaling to maintain this health, effecting immune system function. This podcast shares an important discovery in this communication that influences receptivity to cancer treatment. Listen and learn.
Dr. Kathy McCoy is a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Calgary and the director of the International Microbiome Centre. Her research is focused on interactions between the microbiome and immune system and she shares an exciting just-published study that presents a key finding in cancer treatment. Specifically, her research asked how gut microbes play a rule in influencing or regulating the efficacy of immune checkpoint blockade therapy or cancer immunotherapy. She says that scientists have known for a few years that our microbiome is associated with immunotherapy success or lack thereof, but needed more information to make a difference in treatment.
Here's the big idea behind her findings: while researchers have known there's a microbial immune conversation, they now know that it's a three-way conversation rather than a two-way conversation. In addition to the microbes and immune system players, metabolites sent out by microbes have a say; furthermore, this conversation gets enhanced by cancer immunotherapy. More specifically, they found that one of these metabolites, inosine, binds to a receptor present on T-cells and causes a signal transduction cascade that makes that T-cell turn on an anti-tumor response—it makes the cytokines necessary to attack cancer cells. If a patient doesn't have this metabolite, the immunotherapy may not work as well. The hope is researchers can figure out how to encourage this metabolite in patients. Listen in for more details about this study and about its life-changing implications.
For more, see her lab website: kathymccoylab.ca.
Episode also available on Apple Podcast: http://apple.co/30PvU9C
Science journalist and author of a revolutionary book on psychobiotics shares compelling insight on the latest research in microbiome and gut-brain connection research.
Tune in to discover:
Psychobiotics are a class of microbes that help improve mood. In 2003, research on germ-free mice resulted in a shocking finding: there is a causal connection between bacteria and behavior.
Anderson explains all the details of this research and how it has served as a launching pad for additional research in the field. He discusses the production and function of serotonin in the body and as an antidepressant, and the questions that still remain as to why and how serotonin seems to improve mood in the brain.
One of the leading theories of the impact of psychobiotics in the brain is that they have the effect of lowering systemic inflammation, which is caused by bacterial dysbiosis in the gut, which in turn can lead to nearly every systemic disease that exists, including Alzheimer's, obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
Anderson discusses the connection between depression and anxiety and obesity, the research that's been done on the composition and diversity of gut microbiota in thin versus overweight individuals, how some people may be able to keep the brain healthy naturally with the use of probiotics or prebiotics, the advent of metabolomics and why it is so important to the study of the gut-brain microbiome axis, and shares a personal story about gut health and how he was able to correct it overnight.
Visit http://psychobiotic-revolution.com/ to learn more, and find his book, The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection on Amazon.
Episode also available on Apple Podcast: http://apple.co/30PvU9C
Gavin Douglas and colleagues published a paper assessing microbiome research and assertions that the human microbiome explains missing heritability in nature.
He discusses this issue and explains
Gavin Douglas is a PhD Candidate in the Langille Lab in the Deptartment of Microbiology and Immunology at Dalhousie University. His background is in human genetics and he has just published an intriguing paper called "Re-evaluating the relationship between missing heritability and the microbiome" in the journal Microbiome.
He helps listeners understand the basics regarding the issue by explaining heritability as the proportion of variation in a phenotype in a given population explained by genetic variance. He offers more background to this standard and then explains the "case of the missing heritability," which basically indicates the variation that isn't explained.
Several hypotheses have emerged to explain this missing heritability, several of which are tied to the human microbiome. He describes how, for example, a holobiont model of a human organism puts forward a hologenome—a combined genome that includes the microbiome and might capture the missing heritability. The article discusses this theory and points out ways it doesn't quite fit.
For example, the holobiont doesn't present a combined evolutionary unit that transmits over generations. But he does think the microbiome plays a role in this mystery. He explains how and why and different ways scientists use these ideas.
For more, follow him on twitter as @gavin_m_douglas and read the open-access paper here: Re-evaluating the relationship between missing heritability and the microbiome.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
Trent Northen studies the chemistry of microbiomes. More specifically, he studies how exogenous metabolites structure a microbial community, and, in turn, how those microbes change the metabolite pool and grow the microbial population. Because his work is primarily funded by the Department of Energy, he's focused on the microbial community in soil and on plant roots.
He describes
Trent Northen is the Interim Deputy of the EGSB Division and a Chemist Senior Scientist at the Berkeley Lab of Biosciences. He begins the podcast describing the rich and complex cycles of plant, metabolites, and microbes, noting how plants feed microbes that live in and around their roots and how those microbial populations in turn help the plants with nitrogen-fixing, excluding pathogens, and transporting phosphorous, among other processes.
His work mostly focuses on bacteria that live in close proximity to the roots, but he describes how fungi can interact with plant roots over very large distances. For example, biological soil crusts use fungal hyphae in extraordinary ways. He explains this process and ecology in more detail and then he describes his research into the microbial community attached to the roots of the plants—the rhizosphere.
He also explains the mechanism of soil depletion in big agriculture, how the compost and organic carbon cycle of decaying plant materials is absent from larger farming systems.
Furthermore, he elaborates on ways the work of his lab can and might address such problems as well as studying which plants might grow in low nutrient environments and heal the soil as well as practices for soil carbon restoration and other advances.
For more information, see his lab's website, northenlab.org, and eco-fab.org.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
Filipe Cabrerio researches how a host's microbiome and physiology interact in the context of different conditions such as aging and metabolic syndrome while taking various medications.
He shares some his lab's research with listeners, explaining
Filipe Cabreiro holds a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship in the London Institute of Medical Sciences at the Imperial College of London. His lab works to understand how the microbiome interacts with a host's physiology—how the microbes that one produces interact with others, especially when both are challenged by daily medications taken to deal with disease and in the conditions of aging.
The lab recently made an important discovery in the context of cancer drugs: they found that classic drugs for colorectal cancer were modified by microbial metabolism that reduced or amplified the action of the drugs. Further, they found that certain components of food could change that response.
He also discusses a study on metformin, a drug taken for type 2 diabetes, and its interaction with the microbiome. They found that nutrients, the host's microbiome, and the drug interact in an important way. Metformin makes selective pressures on certain gut microbes, which translates into longer lasting change associated with positive effects. They think metformin pushes for certain conditions that allow some healthful microbes to survive and also pushes strong metabolic change.
The consequences of that change is the production of molecules such as fatty acids and others that can actively regulate the host's physiology and metabolism. He explains the nature of this interaction and the significance in more detail along with challenges to these kinds of studies, further hypotheses, and future research he hopes to take on.
For more, see his lab's web page: cabreirolab.org.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
A microbiologist by training, Sam Minot now works as a computational biologist helping other scientists understand the data between of human microbiome and health connections.
In this podcast, he explains
Samuel Minot is a Staff Scientist with the Microbiome Research Initiative in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division of the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center. He begins this conversation with a foundational question in microbiology: how do the microbes on us impact our health? He then discusses the complexity of the interaction of bacteria and the viruses that infect them, also called phages.
He offers examples of new discoveries constantly upending our picture of what viruses and bacteria can do and ways infectious viruses impact some bacteria and cause disease. As an example, he discusses cholera, which is harmful because of a satellite virus that infects a bacterium: the two together make the disease.
He then lays the ground for why it is important to prioritize a gene-level study of our microbiome by describing the impossibility of culturing every bacterium. He describes what functional annotation is and how that concept allows him to identify genes that affect human health and work to understand data at this level. He talks about the big impacts in his field, namely newer findings on how the microbiome influences the treatment of cancer.
Studies show that the kinds of microbes in our gut relate to our immune response's handling of different treatments to fight the cancer. In other words, the immune system is poised to respond to cancer treatment based on the microbiome. This is leading to hopeful microbiome-based therapeutic treatments for cancer.
For more, see https://www.fredhutch.org/en/research/divisions/vaccine-infectious-disease-division.html and Sam Minot's blog at minot.bio.
Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9C
While scientists know antibiotic resistance is linked to the widespread use of antibiotics, understanding the physiology and microbiome of guts that have never been exposed to synthetic antibiotics might offer information to help address this resistance.
Researcher Sharmily Khanam designed a study to tackle this gap in knowledge. She explains
Dr. Sharmily S. Khanam is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology at the University of Oklahoma. She explains her initial question in her research, namely what the microbial population in our ancestors was like and how resistant they were to the current antibiotics. She and her colleagues are therefore studying a population in a remote village in the Amazon Forest in Peru.
Currently they are studying the scope and extent of antibiotic resistance in the gut microbiome population of this ancestral-like population, comparing them with the gut microbial population, physiology, and antibiotic resistant population in the microbiome of people exposed to modern antibiotics.
They are trying to see if our ancestral microbiome was well positioned to tolerate the modern day antibiotics. She explains that researchers need to fill the gap of knowledge in understanding the molecular mechanism involved in resistance to a diverse group of antibiotics.
She adds that at the same time, this will provide a foundation to investigate and characterize the molecular mechanism in the bacterial population and how that is related to host metabolism—the combination of host and microbial population is creating the outcome that scientists need to understand in order to interrupt this process and prevent resistance. She adds an explanation of their findings thus far and explains how this may help the medical community.
To learn more about this study, see her LinkedIn profile and Google scholar account.
Episode also available on Apple Podcast: http://apple.co/30PvU9C
In this episode, we discuss depression's causes and cures with Sarah Zabel, a writer who concentrates her work on this universal mental illness. Sarah retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 as a Major General, and since then, she has embarked on a new career as a science writer.
Inspired, intrigued, and frustrated by watching someone close to her struggle with depression, Sarah has made it her mission to educate people on this illness so that they can understand it better themselves…
In 2021, Sarah wrote Fighting Chance: How Unexpected Observations and Unintended Outcomes Shape the Science and Treatment of Depression, a book that looks inside the twisting search for the causes and cures for depression – the leading cause of illness and disability worldwide.
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Episode also available on Apple Podcast: http://apple.co/30PvU9C
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Jonathan Sadowsky, the Theodore J. Castele Professor of Medical History at Case Western Reserve University. In addition to his work as an academic, Dr. Sadowsky has written three books, the most recent being The Empire of Depression: A New History. He also has an upcoming publication from Routledge Press entitled Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy.
Dr. Sadowsky engages with a variety of interesting topics, including his primary concentration: the history of psychiatry in Africa and the United States. Although he didn't expect to dive so deep into this research area, his background in African history paved the way for his immense fascination with mental illnesses – specifically how they are quantified and treated across time and cultures…
Offer: Magnesium is integral for 600+ biochemical processes in the human body. The common misconception is that consuming more magnesium will automatically improve health and well-being. The truth is that there are various forms of magnesium, each of which is essential for a variety of physiological processes. Most people are inadequate in all forms of magnesium, while even those considered "healthy" typically only ingest 1 or 2 kinds. Consuming all 7 of magnesium's primary forms is the key to accessing all its health benefits.That's why we packed 7 forms of 450mg of elemental magnesium into each serving of Wild Mag Complex. One dose a day is all you need. Learn more and grab a bottle today at WildFoods.co. Use code GENIUS for 10% off your order. Jump into the conversation now to learn more about:Want to find out more about Dr. Sadowsky and his work? Click here now!
Episode also available on Apple Podcast: http://apple.co/30PvU9C
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Marc Milstein, an internationally recognized speaker on optimizing brain health, lowering the risk of dementia, and boosting happiness and productivity. He joins us today to discuss the many facets of brain health, and how he's made it his mission to educate people around the world…
Starting out as a researcher at UCLA studying breast cancer, Dr. Milstein learned that the same protein involved in breast cancer is also involved in learning and memory. This sparked his interest in brain science – and how it can be used to transform and maximize productivity, energy, and longevity.
Offer: Magnesium is integral for 600+ biochemical processes in the human body. The common misconception is that consuming more magnesium will automatically improve health and well-being. The truth is that there are various forms of magnesium, each of which is essential for a variety of physiological processes. Most people are inadequate in all forms of magnesium, while even those considered "healthy" typically only ingest 1 or 2 kinds. Consuming all 7 of magnesium's primary forms is the key to accessing all its health benefits.That's why we packed 7 forms of 450mg of elemental magnesium into each serving of Wild Mag Complex. One dose a day is all you need. Learn more and grab a bottle today at WildFoods.co. Use code GENIUS for 10% off your order.Jump into the conversation now to learn more about:
Want to find out more about Dr. Milstein and his work? Click here now!
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Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9C
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