AUTHOR=Wang Cheng-Yu , Wen Qing-Feng , Wang Qiao-Qiao , Kuang Xia , Dong Chuan , Deng Zi-Xin , Guo Feng-Biao TITLE=Discovery of Drug Candidates for Specific Human Disease Based on Natural Products of Gut Microbes JOURNAL=Frontiers in Microbiology VOLUME=13 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2022.896740 DOI=10.3389/fmicb.2022.896740 ISSN=1664-302X ABSTRACT=

The beneficial metabolites of the microbiome could be used as a tool for screening drugs that have the potential for the therapy of various human diseases. Narrowing down the range of beneficial metabolite candidates in specific diseases was primarily a key step for further validation in model organisms. Herein, we proposed a reasonable hypothesis that the metabolites existing commonly in multiple beneficial (or negatively associated) bacteria might have a high probability of being effective drug candidates for specific diseases. According to this hypothesis, we screened metabolites associated with seven human diseases. For type I diabetes, 45 out of 88 screened metabolites had been reported as potential drugs in the literature. Meanwhile, 18 of these metabolites were specific to type I diabetes. Additionally, metabolite correlation could reflect disease relationships in some sense. Our results have demonstrated the potential of bioinformatics mining gut microbes' metabolites as drug candidates based on reported numerous microbe-disease associations and the Virtual Metabolic Human database. More subtle methods would be developed to ensure more accurate predictions.