Harmful Versus Good Microbes in Immunotherapy

Harmful gut bacteria might matter more than helpful ones for all those cancer patients on immunotherapy as per a study at the Oregon State University, published in Nature Medicine. The study thereby states that melanoma (most aggressive skin cancer) patients receiving therapy that helps their immune system kill cancer cells respond to treatment differently depending on the types of microbes in their gut.

Melanoma is ranked as the fifth most common cancer with 100,000 new melanoma cases to be diagnosed in the United States in the coming year, with more than 7,000 deaths as per the American Cancer Society.

“Our findings shed new light on the highly complicated interaction between the gut microbiome and cancer immunotherapy response and set a course for future studies. We established multiple microbiotypes and some of them were clearly correlated with response to cancer immunotherapy. Two microbial signatures — one comparatively heavy with Lachnospiraceae species, the other comparatively heavy with Streptococcaceae species — were connected to favorable and unfavorable clinical response, respectively,” says Andrey Morgun of the OSU College of Pharmacy.

The results thereby suggest that gut microbiota develops as a dominant factor in response to therapy.

Source-Medindia