Utilizing research to explore the concept of “gut touch,” Arthur Beyder, M.D., Ph.D. , and Mayo Clinic GI researchers are identifying mechanistic pathways that are similar to other disease entities and collaborating with colleagues in other disciplines to identify new solutions and treatments.
my name is Arthur Bader. I am a consultant in the division of gastroenterology and Hepatology. When we put the patient in the middle, we stop focusing on just the gut or just the heart, it really start thinking about this from the standpoint of what's wrong and how do we fix it? We've been working on a concept that we call gut touch. So we recently discovered a system inside the gastrointestinal track that looks, feels and works very much like the touch system in the skin. A lot of patients who have problems with their skin sensory will frequently have problems in the gut. And so the goal then would be to leverage that dysfunction so that we can treat that like we would with the skin dysfunction. You've done a study, this is one patient and she ended up having a mutation in one of the receptor genes. And so we were able to use a medicine that's typically used in the heart in the gut to fix those problems. We collaborate very closely with folks in other disciplines, cardiology, pulmonary medicine that have organs that perform similar functions and might have similar problems and then we use the common knowledge to really target those mechanisms. It's gonna come down to finding the specifics of the diseases of the patients have and then figure out what the exact mechanistic problems there are. So we can target them selectively. I am very excited to train the next generation of physician scientist, a fearless bunch of people, I think challenging people to step outside of our dogmas is one of the biggest things to do. And I'm really hopeful that over the time of my career will be able to see really transformative changes that will allow these patients to have the better understanding of what diseases they have and how we might be able to help them. Mm.
