His cancer treatment was failing. A gut microbiome transplant turned it around.

New research shows that fecal transplants may boost the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy drugs called PD-1 inhibitors. The gut microbes can affect the immune system.

In the spring of 2022, Tim Story’s doctor told him that he likely had just months to live.

Story, a high school football coach in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had been diagnosed with Stage 3 small bowel cancer two years earlier, at the age of 49, after mysterious pains in his side turned out to be a tumor in his small intestine. Surgery and several grueling rounds of chemotherapy and immunotherapy had failed to stop the cancer, which had spread to other organs. 

“I’m not a crying man, but my wife and I shed some tears on the couch that day,” said Story, now 53.

There was one final option, however: He could join an unusual clinical trial at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston that had just started recruiting patients. Highly experimental — and with no guarantee of success — the trial involved getting a so-called fecal transplant from a patient with advanced cancer who had been completely cured by immunotherapy. The idea was that the unique populations of gut bacteria found within the stool might help kick-start the immune system to better recognize and fight the cancer.

It came with its own risks, but Story agreed to enroll in the trial. “I knew I was kind of a guinea pig, but the only other option was staying at home, and I wasn’t going to make it,” he said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/cancer-treatment-gut-microbiome-transplant-success-rcna193721

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