Opinion: Medicines from engineered bacteria offer promise — and pitfalls
Bacterial medicines hold immense potential to provide durable therapies for chronic diseases, succeeding where traditional pharmaceuticals have largely failed.
Medicines change when theories of disease change. Since the mid-20th century, the dominant theory of disease has been that of chemicals misbehaving. It followed that medicines were largely comprised of chemicals formulated in purified form, intended to rectify the lack or surfeit of other chemicals.
Genomics and microbiomics have done little to change or augment this paradigm and have yielded surprisingly few new. In part that’s because the , and most of the best ones have already been exploited. These disciplines did, however, create new appreciation for the dependence of health on autonomous or semi-autonomous agents in our bodies, particularly and immune cells.
