“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,” the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed. Almost 2,500 years later, biologists and geneticists around the world have come to the conclusion that he was right.
With antibiotics in the water supply, fast food that sits undigested in our stomachs and food intolerances on the rise, our diet affects far more than just our weight, speakers at the Newtrition personalised health and nutrition summit held in Moscow earlier this month agreed.
Scientists say when cattle are given antibiotics to promote growth, the drugs end up in the stomachs of those who eat the cattle once they are slaughtered. Photo: Pixabay.
“We understand that genes, combined with the food we eat, have an impact on the diseases we get, and we also know there are also environmental factors,” Richard Kivel, who has managed several successful biotech companies, told the audience at the opening of the conference organised by Atlas Biomed Group on April 15.
“Genes are linked to metabolic disorders, obesity, cancer; all sorts of challenges we face throughout life can be linked to our parents and the genes we grew up with,” he explained.
This is not to say, however, that our genes predetermine our fates and that there is nothing we can do about it. On the contrary, genetic analysis is what makes personalised medicine a possibility – and one that can significantly increase the effectiveness of medical treatment.
“We’re seeing people use genetic information and genome information combined with drug development to create combination therapeutics, with great drugs like [the drug trial] Persephone, a breast cancer drug [Trastuzumab] that is proved to be wildly successful. The reason it is so wildly successful is because we’re able to identify patients who are more likely to respond to the drug before we give it to them,” said Kivel.
More crucially still, looking at biomarkers in our guts could help doctors to make dietary recommendations to patients that would help to prevent the onset of those diseases altogether.
“One of the areas many of us have an interest in – and it’s become a real area of investment for venture capitalists – is the field of the gut microbiome,” said Kivel, who is himself an investor in biotech and technology.
Kivel said that companies could now analyse people’s gut microbiome via a simple fingerstick blood test, which allows them in a matter of days to measure a series of biomarkers in the gut. Using these markers, scientists can help prevent diabetes, obesity and cancer, he said.
A still from the Happy Meal project, several months in. Photo: YouTube.
A gut feeling
In Russia, one of the startups harnessing this new area of research is Knomics, a resident of the Skolkovo Foundation’s biomed cluster.
There are 100 trillion bacteria in the human gut, but even that huge army is defeated by some dietary challenges, Knomics’ CEO Dmitry Alexeev told the two-day conference, which was organised in partnership with the Skolkovo Foundation.
Alexeev cited the example of the Happy Meal project, in which a Manhattan artist bought a McDonald’s Happy Meal for children and left it to rot. After more than 200 days, it was still showing no signs of mould or decay. Alexeev said this was due to the product’s high salt content, rather than to any chemicals (McDonald’s insists the meal is free of any preservatives), but said it would be difficult for the human stomach to break down the meal for the same reason.
“If we eat these products, they have the same influence on our gut – it's hard for the bacteria inside us to process the food,” he said.
Alexeev argues that the bacterial balance in our bodies has been disrupted by the permanent presence of low-dosage antibiotics in our stomachs. This presence is caused by giving cattle antibiotics to make them grow faster, he said. “Like the animals, the people who eat them start to gain weight,” he said.
And for any vegetarians wiping their brows with relief, there was bad news to come. The antibiotics are now present throughout the ecosystem in cities, Alexeev said, meaning they are also found in water and vegetables.
Knomics’ work is focused on helping people to adjust the balance of bacteria in their guts to keep people as healthy as possible.
In partnership with Atlas, Knomics recently launched the OhMyGut! project, a crowdfunding programme that sought volunteers and cash to kickstart its plan to analyse the microbiomes of 250 people.
People who donated 5,000 rubles or more to the project were able to submit a sample of their microbiota for analysis, and subsequently received personal dietary recommendations based on the results. After two weeks of following the advice, they submitted a second test and received analysis on the new state of their stomach and what effect the dietary changes had had.
The company expects to have its final results ready in May, and will then, together with Atlas, launch the tests for anyone who wants to receive personalised recommendations for dietary changes to help them stay healthy and decrease the risk of disease.
“The gut microbiome is the only organ capable of genetic change in the human lifetime,” Alexeev told the conference, explaining that bacteria in the gut mutate and adopt new genes.
Knomics aims to use the microbiome as a marker, and even as a drug, he said.
In China, Alexeev said, genes have been identified that can detoxify heavy metals, likely as a result of the high exposure there to the effects of heavy industry.
“The bacteria are trying to save themselves. We can use these enzymes to help detoxify the medium already in the gut,” he said.
In China, genes have been idenitified that can detoxify heavy metals - apparently an example of the microbiome adapting to cope with the effects of heavy industry. Photo: Pixabay.
Is ignorance bliss?
There have been ethical concerns raised over informing people of their genetic propensity to certain illnesses. What if it simply makes people fatalistic, and they stop trying to look after their health at all?
Daiva Nielson, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School, made this the focus of her PhD, and presented her findings at the conference. She conducted a trial in which a control group was given general dietary recommendations with no genetic information, while in the intervention group, those with a risk genotype were given targeted dietary advice regarding their intake of sodium, sugar, caffeine and vitamin C.
Far from giving up after learning about genetic risks, those told to limit their sodium intake, for example, showed changes in their diet and lifestyle over three months, and those changes continued over a 12-month period. They showed far more willingness to change their diet than those given general, non-targeted advice.
“This seems to suggest that individuals will respond to dietary information that has genetic information incorporated into it,” Nielson told the conference. “We didn’t see the opposite effect happening” – no one increased their intake as suggested out of fatalism, she said.
If nutritionists and scientists want the public to listen to them and take their advice seriously, they must, however, try not to contradict themselves every few years, said James Kaput of the Nestle Institute of Health Sciences in Switzerland.
We have to give one message that’s very clear and doesn’t change,” he said. “I grew up in a middle class family and they said, ‘I don’t trust any of you scientists, because one day you tell me that I can eat butter, and the next day you tell me I can’t eat butter because it gives me heart disease. So we have to be more consistent,” said Kaput.
A brighter future
Scientists assembled at the conference said the results of adopting personalised dietary recommendations could be dramatic.
“Modification of diet in laboratory experiments leads to an increase in life span of up to 50 percent,” Alexei Moscalev of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology told the conference.
“The medicine of the future is prevention, not treatment of chronic diseases to extend life expectancy,” he said.
Knomics is not the only company using the latest genetic and genome research available to work on improving Russians’ long-term health.
Yuri Nikolsky, science director of the Skolkovo Foundation’s biomed cluster, outlined the various initiatives being undertaken by the cluster to make Russia’s food production more efficient and self-sufficient in line with the FoodNet division of the National Technology Initiative, a state priority programme aimed at creating the conditions necessary for Russia to become a global technology leader in new markets by 2035.
“Foodnet is several markets that are supposed to explode over the next 15-20 years,” Nikolsky explained.
“Personalised nutrition is number one on this list,” he said, adding that the area was expected to see rapid growth during the next few years.
“The future is much brighter,” Nikolsky said, citing major growth in Russian agriculture during the last year, a proposed genetic centre at the Skolkovo Foundation and a new agriculture programme being launched at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech).
Biotech entrepreneur Kivel agrees.
“Wellness is taking on a much larger and more important role, and hopefully the healthcare system will take on a smaller role in our lives, and by doing so, we’ll be healthier and drive down costs,” he predicted.
“What we put into our bodies is as important as the things that we do and the medicines that we take. Nutrition is at the forefront of the industry of medicine, health and fitness,” he added.
“Many years from now … we will marvel at things happening in the future.”