FLICKR, NIAID
Antibiotics are known to influence the growth of bacteria in the human body. But new research led by a team at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany suggests that more than 200 non-antibiotic medicines with human-cell targets, from anti-inflammatory drugs to antipsychotic compounds, can also trigger changes. The findings were published yesterday (March 19) in Nature.
To explore the microbiome’s response to non-antibiotic drugs, the researchers individually tested nearly 1,200 medications—835 of which have human-cell targets—on 38 species of gut bacteria in vitro. The team found that around a quarter of medications with human targets, and 27 percent of the drugs over all, at least partially inhibited growth in one or more of the bacteria species. “For us, that was much more than ...
