Sometime next year, volunteers in the U.S. could start swallowing capsules stuffed with genetically engineered E. coli.
The experimental pills, designed by Synlogic, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, synthetic biology startup, contain bacteria designed to treat a rare metabolic disease by recognizing when they reach a person’s stomach and then soaking up large amounts of ammonia.
The treatment, slated for its first clinical test during 2017, is an early example of what the company’s founders call “synthetic biotics”—or intestinal bacteria endowed with genetic programs that allow them to sense something going on in the body and then take an action, like deliver a drug or release a colored chemical useful in a diagnostic test.
The idea of swallowing genetically modified bacteria might seem odd. But purpose-built germs could be a new way to take over physiological functions that people’s own bodies can’t perform if they are sick, and a substitute for pills or injections…
Source: MIT Tech review