Bytheway...Gutbacteriamayhelpcancerpatients,too

SEWAGE has long been of great interest to me. As a schoolboy 50 years ago I had to give a lecture to the Waterton Society, our biology club.

I chose the subject of the biology of sewage disposal, only to find posters around the school advertising the talk as ‘Scurr on Sch… you know what.’ (In that era there was an advertising campaign for Schweppes Indian tonic water, which used the slogan: ‘Sch… you know who.’)

Now, five decades later, those friendly microbes in the last few feet of the intestine — previously only viewed as sewage, a waste substance and the source of much crude humour — are now known to be a health boon, and my own enthusiasm for what we are learning about the microbiome continues unabated. Some recent research underlines a vital role that the billions of bacteria in our intestines play — a study has shown that these bugs have an ability to influence our immune responses to cancer — and specifically, how the body responds to cancer treatment.

Increasingly, the immune system is being harnessed to obliterate cancer cells in a technology known as immunotherapy. Normally, cancerous cells trigger a response by T-cells — important components of the immune system — which kill them off. However, s ometimes t he c ancer causes these T-cells to produce molecules t hat act as a brake on t heir own destructive function.

Now scientists have been able to derive antibodies that block these molecules, so the T-cells can do their job properly.

Unfortunately this dramatic turnaround does not work in all cases, and this is where the microbiome comes in.

Animal research has shown that adding certain friendly bacteria to the intestine greatly improves the success rate of immunotherapy — the enhanced microbiome turbo-charges the killer cells.

These studies pave the way for some very important advances in cancer treatment. They also potentially open avenues of cancer prevention through encouraging dietary changes that rejig and preserve the quality of the microbiome.

There is a whole new world ahead in healthcare — and it’s all about sewage, it seems.