Michael Fischbach

Transcription

Hi, I'm Michael Fischbach, I'm a member of the faculty in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. I came from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I got my bachelor's degree and also my Ph.D. My lab research is drugs that are made by bacteria, and we do two different things: one is that we found a way to use bioinformatics - which is really just searching on the computer - to look through the genomes of bacteria for genes that make drugs. And that's been an important advance because what it means is that now we can do the hardest most painstaking part of the drug discovery process on the computer. We're very excited about using that to look through the genomes of all of the bacteria that have been sequenced recently, which is a lot, it's well over 1,000 now and growing rapidly, to find new genes that encode new drugs. Not only is this going to help us find drugs we wouldn't have found otherwise, like antibiotics and anticancer agents, but it's also going to allow us to change their genes around in order to make variance of these drugs, that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to make using just chemistry alone. And that's going to allow us to make better drugs with fewer side effects that are more effective. The other thing that my lab looks at is drugs made by a specific set of bacteria, and that is bacteria that live on and inside of human beings. You might not realize it, there are ten times as many bacteria cells that live on and inside of the human body as there are human cells itself. So when I look at a person, I don't just see a warm, shiny human being, I see bacteria crawling all over you, and are living all on every surface that's exposed and not exposed on your entire body. Now you're lucky that they're there because these bacteria are doing very important things for you: they make your immune system function properly, they help you digest foods, and they produce important chemicals that serve as vitamins for your body. What we think, though, is that they're actually making many more chemicals - I'll even call them "drugs" - than we had formerly realized, and that these drugs do one of two important things: one is that they might affect other bacteria that are living on or inside of you in a way that either changes their function, or changes the composition of the community in which these bacteria live. And if they can do that, then that's going to be an important thing because different people have different kinds of bacteria living inside them, and those changes correlate with diseases like Crohn's Disease and obesity. The second thing that we think that these drugs made by the bacteria living on and inside of you might be doing is to change your chemistry specifically: they might be interacting with you directly. What if a bacterium made a molecule that made you hungry, or not hungry? What if a bacterium made a molecule that made you tired or awake? What if a bacterium made a molecule that made you happy or sad? We're interested in things like that, and even things that might not be quite as flashy as that, but still very important, like what if bacteria are making molecules that change the rate at which stuff moves through your gut? We think bacteria might want to do that, and that they're probably already doing a lot of that. So we're looking for new chemical ways in which bacteria are communicating with, and maybe even subverting or helping, their host, which is us.