For people who suffer from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the daily burden of chronic pain can become unbearable. Dismayingly, doctors and medical researchers still don’t have a clear picture of what causes IBD, so the mainstays of therapy are usually surgery or immune suppressant therapies that can wreak their own kind of havoc and impinge just as much on daily life as the illness itself. For one patient who wasn’t satisfied with any of these options, relief came in the unlikely form of tiny parasitic worms.
Over time, swallowing a dose of worm eggs worked to keep this intrepid patient’s symptoms at bay where all else had failed, which led parasite immunologist P’ng Loke and his team to probe the patient’s guts to find out exactly how these microorganisms had worked their therapeutic magic. They seemed to do so by curbing inflammation, but it wasn’t until Loke teamed up with microbiologist Kenneth Cadwell’s group at New York University that they hit upon a crucial finding. It wasn’t the worms themselves that were the cure, but the way they were changing the communities of microbes that live in our guts.
“We collaborated together so that we could reproduce this in a mouse model of inflammatory bowel disease, where you could give the mouse the parasite, and it cures the disease in the mice,” Cadwell explains. “What we found was that it changes the composition of the microbiome.”
