An estimated 200 thousand Australians have Parkinson’s disease and there is still no effective treatment. Now a team of researchers from Queensland are working to develop drugs which target bugs in the guts of patients.
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00:00Historically, Parkinson's, as we all know, is a disease of the brain.
00:05It's a disease of people over 65, and we have classical movement disorder symptoms like
00:12tremors.
00:13So, but over the last 10 to 15 years, there's been an overwhelming amount of evidence showing
00:18that the gut microbiome is changed in people with Parkinson's.
00:23And curiously, even before someone is diagnosed with Parkinson's, many patients we've worked
00:28with and interviewed, they've sort of told us that they experienced symptoms related
00:32to the gut.
00:33So things like constipation, for example, and slower transit time for the gut.
00:39So that's been known anecdotally for a while, but we've never been able to put a finger
00:43on what exactly could be driving this progression.
00:46So recently, we and other researchers have found that changes in the gut bacterial metabolites
00:52or what the products of the gut microbiota or the gut bacteria make, that end up in the
00:57blood and then reach the brain.
00:58So what we've found is that what we're trying to do here is to be able to target that bacterial
01:04metabolites, which we believe could be driving Parkinson's progression.
01:08And we're using drugs, two approaches.
01:10So we're using drugs that target bacterial cells for the first time, rather than human
01:15cells or the brain, which is what we and others have done for the last 50 years and hasn't
01:19been effective.
01:20And the second approach we're using is bugs as drugs, so to speak.
01:23So where we're using engineered gut bacteria, and we're using that to see if we can replenish
01:29the gut microbial ecosystem that's disrupted in people with Parkinson's.
01:32That is really fascinating.
01:34It's all been helped along by the award of, what is it, $4 million over four years by
01:39an American company.
01:41Now why did that come about?
01:43Yeah, so this is the US Department of Defense.
01:46So that's funded this work, and we're very grateful for this funding because that amount
01:50of funding lets us do incredible human research, which we so desperately need for a disease
01:56like Parkinson's.
01:57Beyond just studying animals or animal models of the disease, we're able to actually start
02:01with Parkinson's patient samples and go from there, which means our work is more clinically
02:07relevant and it's more likely to translate into new treatments for people with Parkinson's.
02:13So with the US Department of Defense, there's growing recognition now that chemical exposures,
02:18so occupations where there's a higher risk of chemical exposure, for example, farming,
02:23firefighters, or people who work on army bases.
02:25And this is not just in the US, this is worldwide.
02:29People like that who have increased chemical exposure decades before they've diagnosed
02:33with Parkinson's.
02:35So those occupations have a much higher risk of Parkinson's.
02:37So there's an intriguing link, which we and others have theorized where we believe that
02:42the chemicals that they're exposed to could be altering the gut microbial ecosystem, which
02:47is so vital to brain health.
02:50And our approach here is going to try and restore that using drugs, but also using engineered
02:56gut bacteria as treatments.
02:58Are you using this or trying this on humans at the moment or animals?
03:05So we're trying, we're starting with Parkinson's patient samples so that we understand at exquisite
03:12detail the changes in the gut bacteria linked to Parkinson's.
03:18And then we are going to take those Parkinson's microbiomes, the entire ecosystem of the gut
03:22bacteria from Parkinson's patients, and study that in animals to test our new drugs.
03:27So then at the end of this project, our hope is that we are able to sort of, because we're
03:32using what we call humanized mouse models of Parkinson's, that we can translate that
03:37research much faster.
03:38So things like for fecal microbiome transplants, for example, our current standard of care
03:44for bacterial infections of the gut, some bacterial infections of the gut.
03:47So it's not too far away in terms of being able to translate this into the clinic.
03:52Right.
03:53Okay.
03:54That was going to be my final question.
03:55As I mentioned, the funding is for four years.
03:58Might it take four years before you know how successful this has been?
04:02Yeah, most likely because it's going to take us a while to understand what we need to do
04:06is because the gut bacteria microbiome is such a complex ecosystem.
04:11And we've only recently been able to access technology that can study that gut microbiome
04:15in such detail.
04:17So we want to understand what is it about the gut microbiome that's altered in Parkinson's
04:22in much detail at the level where we can target it more effectively because of how complex
04:28this whole process is.