SKINIPEDIA - Skin Encyclopedia: Human Skin Microflora
Human Skin Microflora: DNA Sequence-Based Approach to Examining Hand Disease by Dr. Julie Segre
Dr. Julie Segre's video presentation of Human Skin Microflora is here.
DISCUSSION CONTINUES...
Sarah Harding: Excellent. Okay. Now I was told that the lines should have opened. So if somebody has a question and they want to try asking it, hopefully we can all hear you.
Okay. Well we actually - I have gotten a number of questions over email. And if that is something that anybody would rather do that is fine. So I will just ask a couple more questions.
And so one of them has to do with the slide that - one of the last slides that you put up, and that is that there has definitely been a - it has to do with the picture of the Activia yogurt that you have and why that of all kind of yogurts of all, you know, what has made that special in terms of having a pretty big campaign and you kind of see it. I think everybody knows the jingle. And, you know, why has that necessarily been any more special than any of the yogurt we have had before?
Julie Segre: So, I think here we really need to get into what is science based. And that is what we are trying to create the foundation for is to understand really who would, you know, who would respond to these probiotic yogurts and who is this really benefitting?
And in the same way that we do double blind studies, placebo studies and, you know, to try to test most drugs, we would like to, you know, we would to have that same kind of science based, evidence based approach to other things that we, you know, we consider that we are taking to increase our health.
And I think that there is a great potential for understanding probiotics from many systems of our body and to really understand what on an individual level is making each of us healthy.
But I just think that this is something which we really want to understand not as marketing strategy but as a scientific endeavor. And in that same way, what we have - I mean Activia is just adding, you know, a probiotic to a yogurt.
But the Purell, the hand sanitizer, has really substituted now for soap and water and washing your hands. And so it is, you know, it is great in that we often have access to having clean hands when we might not otherwise, you know, if you are traveling or something in the airport or something like that. But we just need to, I mean we just need to understand what these products are really doing and how they are affecting our health and how they are preventing us from getting sick.
Sarah Harding: Great. Thank you. Are there any other questions from participants? Okay. Then I have one other question that has come in.
Jay Gee: ...hear me?
Sarah Harding: Oh. Yes. Hi.
Jay Gee: Oh, okay. This is Jay Gee and the CDC, just a simple question. Have you all gotten to the point where you can see if natural microbiota, the composition is preventing certain infections such as MRSA, I mean the ideal being the bacteria, the natural ones would occupy a niche preventing colonization? Have you gotten that far yet?
Julie Segre: So we have not gotten to the point where we know which bacteria are really having an effect of keeping others out. We recruit those patients to use the NIH Clinical Center. And patients we recruit are at an increased risk for developing staph aureus infections in some cases because they have eczema. And we recruit the entire family, you know, in to try to see if anyone else who has been exposed to MRSA is also a carrier for MRSA. And so that is really the goal of our study is to do an in-depth analysis of exactly that type of question - how do we control the transmission of MRSA and can that be controlled by other microbes and promoting the growth of other microbes because you can imagine that it could be very effective to try to over grow the MRSA rather than trying to wipe out the entire bacterial colony.
And so those are the goals and even ones that - harder than that is going to be to figure out what is causing these diseases.
But if we could even just figure out what is correlated with a protective effect, we could start to target that.
So no, this project - I should have said that - this project was launched just one year ago with the goal of trying to develop the basic understanding that would enable us to treat disease and also to control infection.
Jay Gee: Okay. Thank you.
Sarah Harding: Great. Any other questions from our audience? So I did just receive one question from (Tim Burke) at Access Genetics. And he had a question about - he mentioned you had three hypotheses about skin flora and their cause for skin disorders, which is assuming that eczema is caused by a lack of some bacteria or an overload of others.
And so he poses the question of what if it is because - what if it is the other way around, if the skin disorder is causing a certain variety of bacteria?
Julie Segre: And so I completely agree with that. And that actually takes us back to the first slide that I used to launch into the question about what are the types of cells that inhabit the skin. And there are the human cells and, you know, the skin cells, the immune cells and the microbes. And that it may very well be that the skin disease, which is caused by a defect in the human cells are then causing this scaly skin and that causes the microbes to be different.
And the - if it is only the skin cells, then affecting the microbial flora would not change that. But we know that in the case of eczema, what are the most common treatments for eczema are steroids, corticosteroids, antibiotics, sometimes even giving the kids bleach baths so that we can just reduce the microbial load. And that seems to make the kids look and feel a lot better.
So it is true that the root cause may be something in the human cells that maybe makes them make a less good barrier. But we already know that the treatments that we use are more likely affecting the microbial than they are the human cells.
So, it may be that the primary cause is something in the change in the human DNA. But what I am looking for here is how to really affect the greatest health for people with skin disorders or other disorders.
And so if I can intervene and give them a, you know, a topical therapy that increases their health even if it is not getting at the root cause, even if it is just getting at some other part of the pathway, I still think that that is our goal is to really be promoting health.
And so it will be very difficult to untangle what is causing the disease but really the outcome that we are looking for is to improve the health.
Human Skin Microflora Transcript Part X
