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Fecal transplantation can improve cancer treatment
In trials, fecal transplants helped some melanoma patients.
The intestinal microbiota affects the body’s defense system and immunological drug treatments.
The effectiveness of immunotherapy varies according to people’s intestinal microbiota.
Cancer treatment can be cured by stool transplant, they say Nature journal the studies presented.
Today, cancer is often treated with immunotherapy, where the body’s own defense cells are induced to destroy cancer cells.
These treatments include so-called immune response liberators, i.e. drugs that, as the name suggests, release immune cells to attack the cancer.
Medicines however, the effectiveness varies from person to person.
Some patients have not been helped by them, and one reason seems to be found in their intestinal bacteria.
A few years ago, in two different studies, researchers tested whether faecal transplantation would improve drug treatment.
They collected stool samples from melanoma patients who had benefited from the treatment and transferred them to patients who had not benefited from the drug.
The drug now began to work even in transplant recipients.
In one clinical trial, six out of 15 transplant recipients benefited from the drug.
“The results were very impressive and very promising, although very preliminary,” commented the leader of the group that performed the experiment, a cancer researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, to Nature Hassane Zarour.
In a study published last year, a team from the University of Montreal tested whether the same would work with fecal transplants from healthy volunteers.
Yes, it worked. Out of 20 melanoma patients who received a transplant, 13 benefited from the drug. In four of them, signs of melanoma cancer were no longer found in the body.
In animal experiments, researchers have transplanted the feces of those benefiting from medical treatment into the intestines of mice. It has also led to an improvement in the treatment in mice.
University of Chicago cancer researcher Thomas Grajewski estimates based on mouse experiments that if immune response triggers do not work in a melanoma patient, the cause is intestinal microbes in half of the cases.
Helsinki director of the university’s translational immunology research unit The fairy tale of Black River it is not surprising that gut microbes can influence immunological drug therapies.
“It has been shown that the intestinal microbiome has an effect on the body’s defense system. For example, it can weaken immune responses. That’s why medicines that should activate the immune response don’t necessarily work as well,” explains Mustjoki.
The role of the intestinal microbiome has been studied especially in the treatment of melanoma.
According to Mustjoki, melanoma is typically a cancer of immunologists, because in it the defense cells have woken up to fight against the tumor
“That’s why even immunological drugs have worked better in melanoma than in several other cancers. In melanoma, the intestinal microbiota may have a greater effect.”
Excrement is a complex microbiological entity. Some researchers are trying to find exactly those bacteria that could help in the treatment of cancer and that could be given directly without a stool transplant.
A well-known way to care for the gut microbiome is to eat fiber-rich food. According to one study, people who get plenty of fiber in their diet also respond better to immune response liberators.
According to Mustjoki, intestinal microbes have not yet been tried in cancer treatments in Finland. The studies conducted around the world have so far been small
“The results are promising. But often the problem is that the results in large studies are not quite as good as in small ones.”
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