- Combining fecal transplants with immune checkpoint inhibitors such as pembrolizumab or nivolumab showed the procedure was safe in people with advanced melanoma, according to a phase 1 clinical trial.
- Of the study participants, 65% responded positively to immunotherapy treatment.
- Positive responders also showed an increase in beneficial bacteria and a decrease in harmful bacteria in their gut microbiome following the fecal transplant.
- The researchers plan to conduct larger phase 2 trials and explore using fecal transplants in hard-to-treat cancers like pancreatic cancer.
In recent years, a type of treatment called immunotherapy has been helping many people with cancer by harnessing their immune systems to recognize and destroy cancer cells.
Some drugs used in immunotherapy, like pembrolizumab (Keytruda) and nivolumab (Opdivo), work by stopping the mechanism that allows cancer cells to hide from the immune system.
These ‘anti-programmed death (PD-1) drugs’ or ‘
Recently, scientists tested combining immunotherapy with fecal microbiota transplants in patients with advanced melanoma to see whether this could improve their response.
Not only was this combination safe, but most patients also saw a positive response to the treatment, with some achieving complete remission.
The study is published in
In the phase 1 MIMic trial, the researchers combined fecal transplants with the approved drugs pembrolizumab or nivolumab, which are already used as standard treatment for advanced melanoma.
The goal of the clinical trial was to assess if it is safe to combine these two treatments in people with melanoma. The effects of fecal transplants on the immune system and the gut microbiome were also assessed as secondary objectives.
Healthy donors were carefully selected according to Health Canada-approved procedure. The fecal samples from healthy donors…
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