Dr. Pimentel has been at the lead of SIBO research over the last few years and has uncovered the underlying causes of the illness, notably the autoimmune reaction causing the destruction of the vinculin protein that helps drive the migrating motor complex of the small intestine.   For the last few years he has been focusing on methane patients quite a bit and trying to find a new solution to the illness since those with vinculin antibodies relapse frequently.  It looks like he is in Phase 2 Clinical Trials now on a new drug that stops methane production in m.smithii.  You can read all about it at the Synthetic Biologics site – the drug is currently known as SYN-010.  This “cure” seems to really just be stopping the archea from producing methane which causes the symptoms instead of killing off the m.smithii directly.  Not sure how I feel about this, it seems to be treating the symptoms instead of the root of the problem and those archea and bacteria will still be in the wrong place eating your food in the small intestine.   The drug is a variation on lovastatin and statin drugs also have side effects that are pretty undesirable to me at least, especially myopathy.

Dr. Ruscio is running a similar study using Red Rice Yeast instead of a drug since that is a natural statin.  Hopefully he gets good results w/o the side effect rate of SYN-010.   Stay tuned.