POOP TO THE RESCUE?: Fecal transplants can help melanoma treatment, study says

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Poop transplants may benefit melanoma treatment.

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A clinical trial published in the journal Nature Medicine, by Lawson Health Research Institute, the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal and the Jewish General Hospital has found fecal microbiota transplants from healthy donors can improve response to immunotherapy in patients with melanoma.

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Immunotherapy drugs stimulate a person’s immune system to kill cancer but the drugs are reportedly only effective in 40% to 50% of patients.

“In this study, we aimed to improve melanoma patients’ response to immunotherapy by improving the health of their microbiome through fecal transplants,” says Dr. John Lenehan, Medical Oncologist at London Health Sciences Centre’s London Regional Cancer Program.

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A fecal transplant collects stool from a healthy donor and transplanting it to the patient.

The procedure transplants the donor’s microbiome so that healthy bacteria will grow in the patient’s gut.

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“The connection between the microbiome, the immune system and cancer treatment is a growing field in science,” explains Dr. Saman Maleki, Scientist at Lawson and LHSC’s LRCP, Assistant Professor in Schulich Medicine’s Departments of Oncology.

“This study aimed to harness microbes to improve outcomes for patients with melanoma.”

The first phase of the trial included 20 melanoma patients.

Patients were given 40 fecal transplant capsules orally one week before they started immunotherapy treatment.

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“We have reached a plateau in treating melanoma with immunotherapy, but the microbiome has the potential to be a paradigm shift,” says Dr. Bertrand Routy, Oncologist and Director of CHUM’s Microbiome Center.

“This study puts Canada at the forefront of microbiome research by showing we can safely improve patients’ response to immunotherapy through fecal transplants.”

“These exciting results add to a rapidly growing list of publications suggesting that targeting the microbiome may provide a major advance in the use of immunotherapy for our patients with cancer,” adds Dr. Wilson H. Miller Jr. of the JGH and Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Oncology at McGill University.

Previous studies looking at patients receiving immunotherapy who do not respond have found many had an unhealthy microbiome, said Dr. Lenehan.

“There’s a portion of people who don’t respond or the treatment just doesn’t work,” says Dr. Lenehan. “The hope with the fecal transplant is to make more people respond to treatment.”

These results had lead researchers to of the role to look at the microbiome in regulating how the body responds to disease and how the drugs themselves interact with the microbiome.

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