Dr. Johnston follows the research on gut bacteria and cancer immunotherapy from mouse experiments to a small human trial in which 6 of 15 patients with advanced melanoma had a clinical benefit after a microbiome transfer and restarted immunotherapy. He also describes his own clinical experience, which he notes is not a controlled trial.
Hey, I'm Dr. Johnston at Oh My Soul Vegan Restaurant in downtown Charlotte, and I'm drinking actually a Smoothie King probiotic shake, mango papaya with fiber. It's delicious. And that's a good segue into what I want to talk about today.
Did you know the bacteria in your gut can affect how well your cancer treatment works? Researchers first noticed this when they looked at people who responded well to immunotherapy, which is a therapy that helps your immune system fight cancer, versus patients who did not respond well. They tended to have a different combination of bacteria in their gut. Then they tested this theory in mice with melanoma, and they found that Bifidobacterium was much more prominent in mice who responded to immunotherapy versus mice who didn't. And when Bifidobacterium was combined in patients taking immunotherapy, the combination worked much better.
But mice aren't people. So researchers tried something remarkable in patients with advanced melanoma whose cancers had already stopped responding to immunotherapy. They took gut bacteria from cancer patients who had responded to treatment, transferred that microbiome into patients who had not responded, and restarted immunotherapy. Six of 15 patients experienced a clinical benefit.
I've been fascinated by the gastrointestinal microbiome for decades. In 25 years of family practice, I have treated 25 patients I diagnosed with Clostridium difficile, which causes life-threatening diarrhea, and I have used probiotics rather than the recommended antimicrobial therapy. The antibiotics often recommended are metronidazole and vancomycin, which can have as their chief side effects gastrointestinal intolerance and diarrhea. And the last thing any patient wants with severe diarrhea is to take an antibiotic which has as its greatest side effect severe diarrhea, FDA indication for Clostridium difficile notwithstanding.
And in 24 of those 25 patients I treated with Clostridium difficile using over-the-counter probiotics, I saw complete remission of their symptoms within weeks. Now that's my clinical experience, not a randomized controlled clinical trial. But it definitely piqued my interest in trying to pursue non-toxic, well tolerated, inexpensive remedies for problems whose best remedy, according to modern medicine, had a lot of intolerance.
What researchers did next in cancer patients was much bigger. I'll show you in part two.
Educational research summary, not medical advice. Talk with your oncologist and pharmacist before starting, stopping or changing any treatment or supplement.