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Julia Ritchey/KUER
Instead of eating a typical breakfast every day, Jonah Reeder gulps down a
special protein shake.
"It's a really healthy drink," Reeder says. "It's basically protein, except
without phenylalanine."
But Reeder hopes a new approach for treating diseases could help people
like him. The idea is to use bacteria that have been genetically modified to
do what Reeder's body can't — get rid of phenylalanine.
"I'm really excited to help out and hopefully find a treatment for PKU,"
Reeder said recently, as he prepared to volunteer for a study testing the
modified bacteria.
The bacteria Reeder is helping test are part of a new field of medical
research that has emerged from two realms of biomedical science. One is the
study of the human microbiome, the microbes that inhabit our bodies. The
other is synthetic biology, a field that looks at genetically engineering living
organisms, including bacteria in the human gut.
"It's a new world of being able to use synthetic biology to program microbes
to treat diseases, which I believe is the future," says Pamela Silver, a
synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Scientists hope to genetically modify microbes from the human microbiome
to treat a range of diseases, including digestive disorders like ulcerative
colitis and inflammatory bowel disease.
"Microbes are something that we assynthetic biologists see as highly
engineer-able. We understand how to engineer microbes so it seems like the
perfect interface between synthetic biology and health," Silver says.
"When you hear about E. coli you think: sickness, throwing up. So I was a
little bit skeptical. I wasn't sure what to think because I was going to be
ingesting E. coli," Reeder says.
But the more he learned about it, the more excited Reeder got about trying
the engineered microbes.
"I think that's very cool that they found a way to use a natural probiotic that's
found in the digestive tract to help the human body," Reeder says.
Reeder spent the weekend in the clinic so doctors could monitor him closely
and run tests as he ingested what normally would be dangerous amounts of
protein. He then swallowed either the engineered E. coli or a placebo. He
wasn't told which.
"It was liquid solution. It tasted kind of like mint taffy. It was pretty sweet,"
he says.
"I could immediately feel my cognitive abilities falling down after drinking
the 20 grams of protein. And then I took the drug and I started feeling a lot
better. I obtained more energy and my cognitive abilities got quicker," he
says.
"It was really cool to feel that. I could tell it was working. It was pretty
cool," Reeder says.