Focus: Why did you go on a hunt for a special probiotic in the first place?

Goldin: Both Dr. Gorbach and I were interested in colon cancer and the factors that may influence it. We started looking at ways to alter bacterially derived carcinogens in 1974, and we began to study probiotics. We decided to try and isolate one superior strain and our conditions were: good survival in acid, since the organism has to go through the gastric barrier; resistance to bile acids since it will confront bile in the duodenum; antimicrobial ability; and the ability to stick to the gut epithelium. LGG is among the stickiest to date of strains that have been tested by us and others.

Focus: How did you determine stickiness?

Goldin: We collected buccal cells from the inside of the cheek in volunteers. Basically we used a tongue depressor and scraped their cheek, then took those cells, put them on filters, and measured stickiness. We also got cells from ileostomy patients who’d had part of their bowel removed, and tested those cells in the same way. We isolated quite a number of organisms until we found LGG, which scored the best on all our criteria. In fact, it had a morphology that was distinct from all the other organisms. It would grow a white, milky kind of colony. It had this very sticky property, which I assume was the result of polysaccharides. To this day nobody has absolutely defined the cause of LGG’s stickiness.

Focus: And how did you determine antimicrobial ability?

Goldin: In the conventional way. We grew a pathogen out on an agar plate and then put the LGG (or other probiotic) in and if it was antimicrobial you’d see a clear area around the LGG colony.

Focus: When you isolated the organism, did you have any idea how beneficial it would turn out to be for human health?

Goldin: We had no idea. By pure serendipity a colleague of ours at Tufts, a virologist who had isolated the toxin produced by C. difficile bacteria, decided to add LGG to the C. difficile culture and found out it counteracted the toxin. So then we gave it to people who had recurring C. difficile infection, and relapses were prevented. Today LGG is the most widely studied probiotic in the world, one of the few for which there is good evidence for medical usefulness.

Focus: Do you use it yourself?

Goldin: My family uses it. I myself have a rock solid GI tract. But my wife and daughter use it. My daughter recently had severe tonsillitis and was miserable with a terrible earache and bad sore throat. I took her to the ENT, who prescribed her Clindamycin and LGG to prevent diarrhea. I looked over at him and said, “Hey, that’s the organism I co-discovered.” She took the LGG and didn’t get diarrhea.

Focus: Are you continuing your work on LGG?

Goldin: We’re studying the combination of prebiotics and LGG right now, to see if we can increase the counts or effectiveness of the organism. We also have a  research study looking at how LGG influences the gastrointestinal immune system.

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