The human body appears to have its own built-in safety mechanism for breaking down questionable pharmaceutical components and rendering them inactive. A recent study published in the journal Science reveals that gut flora, which naturally populate human intestines for digestive and immune system purposes, render useless the active drug compounds in some heart failure and cardiac arrhythmia medications, a mechanistic action that has baffled scientists for decades.

For the past several decades, the scientific community has been aware of the fact that gut bacteria are capable of inactivating certain pharmacological components. A team of scientists from Columbia University in New York, in fact, identified back in the 1980s one bacterial strain in particular, known as Eggerthella lenta, that deactivates digoxin, one of the oldest glycoside compounds used in cardiac medications.

But in the decades since this groundbreaking discovery was made, scientists have been unable to determine with any sort of precision how, exactly, E. lenta deactivates digoxin, or whether or not it utilizes the synergy of other bacterial strains in the gut to perform this function. A primary reason for this is the fact that, in isolation, bacterial samples taken from the human digestive tract react unpredictably when exposed to digoxin.

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