Back to theodicy and David's theories (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by David Turell , Friday, February 05, 2021, 15:31 (1169 days ago) @ David Turell

Gut bacteria help fight our battles:

https://theconversation.com/fecal-microbe-transplants-help-cancer-patients-respond-to-i...

"The effect of a drug, or impact of a treatment like chemotherapy, doesn’t just depend on your body. The success of a particular medicine also depends on the trillions of bacteria in your gut.

"The 100 trillion bacteria that live within the human digestive tract – known as the human gut microbiome – help us extract nutrients from food, boost the immune response and modulate the effects of drugs. Recent research, including my own, has implicated the gut microbiome in seemingly unconnected states, ranging from the response to cancer treatments to obesity and a host of neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia and autism.

"What underlies these apparently discrete observations is the unifying idea that the gut microbiota send signals beyond the gut and that these signals have broad effects on a large swathe of target tissues.

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"Gut microbiota have been linked to to the success and failure of multiple cancer treatments, including chemotherapy and cancer immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab. In the more recent studies, the species and relative populations of gut bacteria determined the probability that a cancer patient would respond to drugs known as “immune checkpoint inhibitors.”

"This research showed that differences in the gut microbiome between individual patients were associated with various outcomes to these drugs. But the precise mechanisms underlying microbiome-immune interactions remain unclear.

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"To investigate whether certain types of microbes could boost the efficacy of PD-1 immunotherapies, my colleagues and I developed a study in which we collected fecal microbes from patients who had responded well to this therapy and administered these to cancer patients who didn’t benefit from the checkpoint drugs.

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"Following this fecal microbe transplant treatment, tumors of six out of 15 patients in the study had tumors that shrank or remained the same. The treatment was well tolerated, though some of the patients experienced minor side effects including fatigue.

"When we analyzed the gut microbiota of treated patients, we observed that the six patients whose cancers had stabilized or improved showed increased numbers of bacteria that had previously been associated with responses to immunotherapy.

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"These results suggest that introducing certain intestinal microorganisms into a patient’s colon may help the patient respond to drugs that enhance the immune system’s ability to recognize and kill tumor cells.

"Ultimately we hope to move beyond fecal microbe transplants to specific collections of microbes in cancers besides melanoma, paving the way for standardized microbe-based drug therapy to treat immunotherapy-resistant tumors."

Comment: This may be the beginning of seeing God's reasons for gut bacteria. Good, not bad