Alimentary pharmabiotics: common ground for academia with the food and pharmaceutical industries

Abstract

Despite major technologic and conceptual advances in biology, new drug development in gastroenterology appears to be in decline. While large fortunes have been expended by the pharmaceutical industry in synthetic drug development, it is noteworthy that about half of the drugs approved by the FDA in the past twenty-five years have been derived from natural living material in the wider environment. Therefore, it seems logical and timely that the inner microenvironment of the alimentary tract might be another rich repository from which functional-food ingredients and new drugs can be mined. An alimentary “pharmabiotic” is the name that we have given to products derived from mining host-microbe interactions in the gut that have a proven health benefit.