How might gut bacteria impact cancer treatment? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A type of cancer treatment known as an immune checkpoint inhibitor may be stymied by the type of bacteria someone has in their intestine, a new study shows. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins explains.

Nelson: The bacteria that lives in your gut might affect your response to particularly immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment, and there have been a bunch of reports associating some bacteria with better responses other bacteria with less responsive. But these people took on as I said you just get all the DNA from the stool and it's all from bacteria. Go sequence all of that, figure who all the bacteria are. What they found was there was 37 species of the many that they looked at which were associated with resistance or poor responses to the immune checkpoint inhibitor. That was about half the advanced cancer patients.  :32

Nelson says now the question is if you modify gut flora can you improve response to treatment. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.