Your gut microbiome may have much to do with how you respond to cancer therapy, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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The wealth of bacteria resident on and in your body may have much to do with your overall health, including how you respond to different therapies for cancer. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson explains views from a recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Nelson: The microbiome are the bacteria that live on your body. There are more bacteria on your body than there are your own cells, the majority of it lives in your colon. They describe a circumstance that they call eubiosis, reasonable healthy state in which there's a big diversity of the bacteria, the microbes that are in your colon, that is generally anti-inflammatory and is capable of immune responses that can for instance attack and eliminate cancers particularly if given some of the new immunotherapies.   :29

Nelson says the converse is also true: an unhealthy microbiome, known as dysbiosis, may create a pro-inflammatory state that both enables cancers to develop and gain a foothold, and may suppress immune responses. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.