Did you know? ...

A coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of a threadworm, a parasitic nematode of the small intestines of numerous animals. Photo by Steve Geschmeissner/Science Photo Library

This amazing pix from Aeon, obviously, depicts a benign resident in our guts, an entity unfairly cursed for years until now as said "quest" is crucial to our health due to how they work with the bacteria living in our guts 24/7. 

To whit:

Did you ever wonder why one in six children has a mental health disorder? One in every six seems to be a few too many, I would think. Did you ever wonder why 20 per cent of women, in the United States at least, have been diagnosed with depression after menopause, and why ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ has mysteriously emerged? Why should almost half of us be allergic to something? Why should more than four in every 10 children be on medication for a chronic condition? Why do more than one in 10 women have an autoimmune condition? When asking why we get sick, we take the first step in understanding the origins of disease. If we find the answer to that question, we become empowered to prevent disease.

Modern medicine does not often bother to ask why. We don’t talk very much about it in medical school or during our internships or in residency. We don’t discuss it with our patients very much either. In line with this attitude, our biomedical research focuses on elucidating detailed mechanisms aimed at developing the next drug, but not on why we need a new drug in the first place. Modern medicine asks what and how: what conditions do you have, and how do we treat them? But we should be asking why – this is the first critical step toward prevention. If we don’t know why something happens, we can’t hope to stop it. We might or might not be able to pull drowning people out of the river, but we really should ask how these people got in the river in the first place. Where are the sinking boats that left these people stranded in the water?

Eureka!

Then one day 20 years ago, standing in front of the fume hood in my lab that is still there today, something clicked in my brain, and everything fell into place. The organisation of bacteria for gut health was immediately obvious, and numerous puzzling observations we had long struggled to grasp fell quickly into perfect order like brawling soldiers suddenly hearing the voice of a fearsome drill sergeant. The immune system was actually supporting rather than fighting off most of the bacteria in our body! This paradigm-shifting idea had far-reaching implications for the field of immunity. For example, the function of the vermiform (worm-like) appendix, that troublesome little structure in our gut, could now be seen clearly as a type of safe house for beneficial bacteria.

It's all about the money ... yet again.

Reintroduction of helminths to the human body and poop transplants share several things in common. First, they involve naturally occurring organisms that are difficult to patent. With no patent, or ‘intellectual property’, the financial incentive for developing the associated therapy vanishes. The prospect of striking it rich with a new drug under these conditions is nonexistent. One might think that the incentive to heal people and save lives would be sufficient, but the fact is that the current drug pipeline costs more than $100 million. That cost leaves the drug business in the hands of large corporations, and large corporations, regardless of the propaganda they serve in their advertisements, are not interested in making people healthy. If it doesn’t make money, large corporations are not interested. Worse, if the new therapy would undermine millions or maybe even billions of dollars in profit from pharmaceutical sales, corporations are obliged to shy away. It is not their business to put themselves out of business. In the assessment I published with several colleagues, we boiled down the problem to one factor: our government assumes that anything that will treat disease will make enough money to drive the drug past the current cost barriers. This is not true for ‘orphan drugs’ that treat rare diseases and conditions, and it is certainly not true of naturally occurring organisms that are difficult to patent.