A Pig for Peptic Ulcers

Readers may remember that there’s been a lot of controversy recently about the bacteria species Helicobacter pylori.  Here’s what I wrote about it, in a feature on the microbiome earlier this year in Smithsonian:

For Blaser, the decline of one “bad” bacterial species represents what’s happening to the entire microbiome.   Helicobacter pylori, which lives in the human stomach, became notorious in the 1980s after University of Western Australia scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren demonstrated that it is the essential precondition for almost all gastric ulcers.   The microbe was already on the decline from sanitary improvements and routine antibiotic use, but doctors then began directly targeting H. pylori in adults, incidentally meaning parents were less likely to pass the microbe on to their children. Today, while up to 100 percent of children in developing countries have Helicobacter, fewer than 20 percent of kids in some developed countries do —and the latter is ostensibly a good thing.)

“It’s good and it’s bad,” says Blaser.  A study last year traced the human association with H. pylori back at least 116,000 years into our evolutionary history.  “The idea that an organism that has been with us that long is disappearing in a century is striking,” says Blaser.  “The good news is that it means less ulcers and less gastric cancer.  The bad news is that it means more childhood-onset asthma and more esophageal reflux, both of which have been linked to a lack of Helicobacter.”  In certain circumstances, Blaser argues, H. pylori may have protective effects we don’t yet fully recognize.

The medical community has thus far resisted the rehabilitation of H. pylori …

So now there’s a pig bred to serve as a model for better research on how H. pylori or harms. Here’s the press release:

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have developed a new large animal model to study how the immune system interacts with the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori, the leading cause of peptic ulcer disease.

The discovery in the October edition of the journal Infection and Immunity may inform changes in the ways doctors treat patients. An estimated 4 million Americans have