Blocking Interfering Microbes

摘要

Irinotecan is a widely used anticancer pro-drug that is converted in the liver into the active form, but when it gets into the gut, the normally benign microbial flora can convert it into the toxic form, which kills the rapidly multiplying gut epithelium as it would kill rapidly dividing tumor cells, and thus causes diarrhea. Wallace et al. (p. 831; see the Perspective by Patel and Kaufmann) used high-throughput screening to identify inhibitors that target the offending bacterial enzyme, β-glucuroni- dase, without killing the bacteria or affecting orthologous mammalian enzymes.