Last year, three research papers published in Science rocked the cancer field by showing that it might be possible to manipulate the microbiome to affect treatment responses. In a series of “man-meets-mice” interspecies experiments, a French team transplanted human gut bacteria into mice from both successfully treated cancer patients and patients who did not respond to checkpoint inhibitors. Two weeks after the new bacteria had been introduced to the rodents’ guts, the researchers injected cancer cells and checkpoint inhibitors every three days for another two weeks. The drugs worked to reduce tumors in mice that had received human bacteria from successfully treated cancer patients, while the drugs were not effective in the mice that received bacteria from humans who did not respond to treatment.

    Teams from the University of Chicago and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston have conducted similar experiments using gut microbes from metastatic melanoma patients who responded well to checkpoint inhibitors. Those mice improved, too. “We basically put a little tube into the mouse’s esophagus and put in the poop sample. It reconstituted the mouse’s gut so that it now contained microbes from the patient,” says Deepak Gopalakrishnan, a postdoctoral research fellow and lead author of the MD Anderson study.



Devac:

With the amount of articles linking gut bacteria and various bodily problems, I'm beginning to think we (at least laymen like me) don't understand either how it changes or how we change in response to their changes. Between articles like Role of the gut microbiota in nutrition and health and Baby feces may be source of beneficial probiotics and a staggering number of others, I'm basically going to wait for something more conclusive and do what I presume is healthy: exercise, eat vegetable and fruit without going full vegetarian/vegan since there are benefits to diverse diets (look at the daily cuisine and health/mortality statistics for Japan or Italy).


posted 1868 days ago