Professor Luke O'Neill

Now, first of all, a big striking finding, again, just a few years ago, if you take a tumor from the gut, guess what?

It's full of bacteria.

Bacteria infiltrate tumors and they live inside them.

Can you believe it?

And they're sitting there and they're often promoting the tumor to grow in various ways.

We don't know what they're doing half the time.

It's a very active area.

What are these bacteria doing inside tumors?

And again, they're trying to find which particular species of bacteria can be found inside the tumor.

One famous one is called Peptostreptococcus that's been found in a few tumours.

So what these bacteria like is actually the lack of oxygen because very often inside a tumour there isn't much oxygen.

It's a big bulk of cells and the oxygen is lower inside there.

Less blood is getting in there and some of these bacteria thrive in these anaerobic environments.

Now the question there would be

Is that bacteria living inside the tumour, helping the tumour or trying to fight it?

And we still don't know.

Overall, it seems to be helping the tumour, so it's very important as well.

And once those discoveries were made, of course, that made it even more relevant that certain bacteria live inside tumours.

But now we have the response to different drugs.

And if we start with chemotherapy, now chemo, of course, is a mainstay treatment for cancer.