Cancer immunotherapies unleash the body’s immune system to fight cancer, but microbes living in a patient’s gut can affect the outcome of those treatments, two research teams have found.
Their studies, published on 2 November in
Science1,
2, are the latest in a wave of results linking two of the hottest fields in biomedical research:
cancer immunotherapy and the role of the body's resident microbes, referred to collectively as the
microbiome, in disease.
They also highlight the impact of antibiotics on cancer immunotherapies, particularly drugs that block either of two related proteins called PD-1 and PD-L1. One of the studies found that people treated with antibiotics for unrelated infections had a reduced response to these immunotherapies.
“It raises important questions,” says cancer researcher Jennifer Wargo of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and an author of one of the studies. “Should we be limiting or tightly monitoring antibiotic use in these patients? And can we actually change the microbiome to enhance responses to therapy?”
