Is it not astonishing that the same level and extent of treatment especially the “cancer treatment” to those patients who are in the same stage- Some respond while some don’t.
Cancer patients respond best to treatment when they have the right cocktail of bacteria in their guts, new research indicates.
Two fascinating new studies in Science shed light on one potential contributing factor in treatment outcome for cancer patients: The trillions of microorganisms that live in our guts.
Microbiota are the tiny bacterial organisms that live in our gut. The community of these bacteria is called the microbiome.
“This research may be applied by developing strategies to change the microbiome to enhance responses to cancer treatment,” says the University of Texas’ Dr Jennifer Wargo, a co-author of one of the papers.
The team at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus in Paris also discovered that immunotherapy patients taking antibiotics, which disrupt gut bacteria, relapsed sooner or did not live as long as others.
The two new studies add to a growing body of evidence that suggests gut bacteria plays an important role in disease.
In one intriguing study published earlier this year, researchers traced the roots of a brain disorder that had long stumped scientists to a particular type of gut bacteria.
Other studies have linked gut bacteria to everything from athleticism to anxiety, although some of those results are sometimes controversial.
Recently, several other studies have shed light on just how important having the right cocktail of gut microbes may be in treating cancer in particular.
Immunotherapy is “one of the great hopes for cancer therapy”, says Professor Matthew Brown, director of genomics at the Queensland University of Technology.
A large number of patients don’t respond to immunotherapy and researchers have been struggling to discover why.
Cancer survival rates were significantly lower for patients who had been treated with antibiotics, the researchers found. Analysis of their gut microbiota showed they had a much lower diversity of gut bacteria, presumably caused by the antibiotics.
To cross-check the results, the researchers gave cancerous mice an antibiotic followed by a dose of immunotherapy. They too had failed to respond to the treatment.
The researchers then gave them microbiota transplants from the patients who did best on immunotherapy. The mice immediately began to respond strongly to the treatment.
It is often said that Diet matters a lot for leading a healthy life. And for the cancer patients it matters to respond to the treatment effectively.
However, the diet must be consulted from the doctor and then must be decided accordingly.