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Immunotherapy, a type of intervention that unleashes the body’s own immune cells to better fight cancer, has been a lifesaver for some patients. But it doesn’t work for all, and researchers have been trying to figure out why that is. Now, results from a pair of small trials indicate that some patients with melanoma who don’t initially show a response to one type of immunotherapy can see their tumors shrink if the drugs are paired with a fecal transplant from a donor who had improvement after the same cancer treatment. The findings add to evidence suggesting that the mix of bacteria in the gut, known as the microbiome, influences immunotherapy’s effectiveness.
The studies “were both really exciting proof of principle to potentially being able to use FMT [fecal microbiota transplantation] to augment response to immunotherapy cancer patients,” says MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Jennifer McQuade, who ...
