Showing posts with label FMT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FMT. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

This Month in Blastocystis Research (JUN 2016) - FMT Edition

From time to time, I've been touching upon the concept of faecal microbiota transplantion (FMT) in my blog posts. Now, there is a chance to familiarize yourself a lot more with this therapeutic approach to treating recurrent Clostridium difficile infection and other types of gastrointestinal diseases.

In my opinion, one of the more interesting aspects of FMT is to obtain knowledge about what microbes are actually being transferred (what microbes are allowed in stool selected for FMT?), and what are in fact the components in faecal transplants resulting in the high treatment success rates generally observed?

I dedicate this month's post to the launching of an online course in Faecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) supported and developed by United European Gastroenterology (UEG) in collaboration with leading Italian gastroenterologists, including Dr Gianluca Ianiro, who was recently appointed as a new member of the UEG Young Talent Group. I was lucky to involved in the editing of the course.

Targeted learners include not only gastroenterologists, but also endoscopists, internists, paediatricians, endocrinologists, surgeons, infectious disease specialists and clinical microbiologists who are interested in gut microbiota and who deal with diseases associated with gut microbiota perturbation (recurrent CDI, IBD, IBS, obesity, diabetes and other metabolic disorders).

If you wish to take the course, it can be accessed through your myUEG account.

For general information about UEG, please go here. And for more information on UEG Education, please go here.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

This Month in Blastocystis Research (APR 2016)

I thought I’d give examples of some of the Blastocystis-related activities in which I was involved in April.

I was lucky to be invited as part of the faculty for this year’s ECCMID conference in Amsterdam. I had an opportunity to give a talk on Detection of protozoans using molecular techniques in routine clinical practice (click link to watch it). I also co-authored a poster with the title Blastocystis colonization correlates with gut bacterial diversity which is one of several studies recently performed by our group that suggest that Blastocystis is a biomarker – or an indicator if you wish – of a healthy gut microbial environment and high gut microbiota diversity. 

This very topic was one of the two major topics of my colleague Lee O’Brien Andersen’s PhD work; Lee just defended his thesis this Friday and being involved in his work is some of the most interesting, rewarding, and challenging professional activities I’ve experienced so far. I will soon provide a link to an electronic version of his thesis here on this site. I hope that we will be able to fund his post doc aiming to expand his work on comparative Blastocystis genomics, since he only just started this work. Also, I hope that we will be able to do much more research on Blastocystis’ impact on host immunity and gut microbiota using in vitro and in vivo models. We need to know much more about to which extent Blastocystis can actually induce changes in bacterial communities and what these changes are. We also need to know whether manipulation of gut bacteria in a Blastocystis carrier can lead to eradication of the organism. 

Last week, I was so fortunate to oversee the production of an e-learning course in faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) for Unite European Gastroenterology (UEG), which will probably appear online already in June. FMT is currently used primarily for treating recurrent Clostridium difficile infections, but the application range may extend far beyond this. The presentations included both theoretical and live sessions, and it was a lot of fun to do, not only because of the topic, but also because my colleagues at the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital in Rome were extremely professional, enthusiastic and well-organised. The reason why FMT is interesting in a Blastocystis context includes the fact that while there are quite standardized guidelines as to what is not allowed in donor stool, there is no consensus on what is actually allowed in the stool. Obviously, Blastocystis will often be present in donor stool, and when conventional microbiological methods are used to screen donor stool for pathogens, Blastocystis will only rarely be picked up. Hence recipients may receive stool containing Blastocystis. And so of course we would like to know whether to recommend using or excluding stool positive for Blastocystis (and other common parasites such as Dientamoeba) for FMT.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

This Month in Blastocystis Research (JUN 2015)

I started developing this blog more than three years ago. After a bit more than a year, I collected a bunch of the posts, edited them and published them as a book on Amazon. Recently, I logged into my Amazon profile to see how the book was doing, and I was very pleased to notice that there were no less than four reviews of the book, and very positive ones too! Thank you to everyone who read/browsed it.

Blastocystis research is currently a quickly moving field, and I'm please to be able to inform you that one of the most interesting contributions to Blastocystis research coming out from our intstitute has just been published in Fems Microbiology Ecology. The article appearing in this journal was first-authored by PhD student Lee O'Brien Andersen (Statens Serum Institut) and post doc Ida Bonde (Danish Technical University) and describes how Lee and Ida took a retrospective approach to analysing metagenomics data originally generated by the MetaHIT Consortium and published in the often cited paper by Arumugam et al. (2012).

The abstract reads as follows:
Blastocystis is a common single-celled intestinal parasitic genus, comprising several subtypes. Here, we screened data obtained by metagenomic analysis of faecal DNA for Blastocystis by searching for subtype-specific genes in co-abundance gene groups, which are groups of genes that co-vary across a selection of 316 human faecal samples, hence representing genes originating from a single subtype. The 316 faecal samples were from 236 healthy individuals, 13 patients with Crohn's disease (CD), and 67 patients with ulcerative colitis (UC). The prevalence of Blastocystis was 20.3% in the healthy individuals and 14.9% in patients with UC. Meanwhile, Blastocystis was absent in patients with CD. Individuals with intestinal microbiota dominated by Bacteroides were much less prone to having Blastocystis-positive stool (Matthew's correlation coefficient = -0.25, P < 0.0001) than individuals with Ruminococcus- and Prevotella-driven enterotypes. This is the first study to investigate the relationship between Blastocystis and communities of gut bacteria using a metagenomics approach. The study serves as an example of how it is possible to retrospectively investigate microbial eukaryotic communities in the gut using metagenomic datasets targeting the bacterial component of the intestinal microbiome and the interplay between these microbial communities.

As far as we know this is the first study to sift out data on Blastocystis from data originally intended for analysis of bacterial communities only, and in the paper we describe how this was done. We believe that this approach has imminent potential for quickly advancing our knowledge on Blastocystis in a gut ecology context, including knowledge on the role of Blastocystis in terms of impacting/manipulating one or more types of intestinal bacteria.

I have a feeling that this is the first study in a string of similar studies that will soon hit PubMed, and within a year or two, we should be able to with confidence to hypothesise on the relationship between the structure and function on of the gut microbiota and Blastocystis, and–hopefully–other intestinal micro-eukaryotes.

Lastly, it was very interesting to note the article by Paramsothy et al. on donor recruitment for faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT; never heard of this? Watch the video below to learn more), recently appearing in the journal Inflammatory Bowel Disease. The study is interesting because it shows that most FMT donors are seemingly ineligible due to a variety of reasons, including colonisation by intestinal parasites such as Blastocystis... Given emerging data suggesting that Blastocystis is more common in healthy invididuals than in patients with gastrointestinal disease, the question remains whether Blastocystis-positivity should be a limiting factor for stool donation?



References:

Andersen LO, Bonde I, Nielsen HB, Stensvold CR. A retrospective metagenomics approach to studying Blastocystis. Published online 30 June 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/femsec/fiv072

Paramsothy S, Borody TJ, Lin E, Finlayson S, Walsh AJ, Samuel D, van den Bogaerde J, Leong RW, Connor S, Ng W, Mitchell HM, Kaakoush N, & Kamm MA (2015). Donor Recruitment for Fecal Microbiota Transplantation. Inflammatory bowel diseases, 21 (7), 1600-6 PMID: 26070003