Professor Luke O'Neill

You're increasing the response of the immune cells that show the bits of the tumor to the immune system.

They're called dendritic cells.

A bit technical now, but this is my profession.

And basically what's happening here is the immunotherapy gets the immune system going.

The immune system probably attacks the bacteria and releases loads of stuff from the bacteria to feed back and trigger more of an immune response is the idea.

So in other words, you're deploying, in a way, your own bacteria inside your body to help fight the tumor by triggering a really strong immune response against the tumor.

So it's a really good sort of feed-forward loop, we call this, is where the evidence for this lies.

And again, this is causing huge excitement because you may have heard of probiotics.

We're all familiar with these yogurt drinks.

That whole business of probiotics is to change the bugs in your gut to be beneficial, remember.

And again, we've known this for centuries, that certain foodstuffs, very often fermented foods, get the bugs in your gut to behave themselves and they can bring all kinds of health benefits as a reasonable scientific basis for that.

It's a bit like that.

So could you take a probiotic

in a yogurt drink with a particular bacteria and then give the immunotherapy, the checkpoint blockers.

They're called checkpoint blockers because the immune system often has these checkpoints that stop it working.

And tumors are very good at bringing down the checkpoint.

If you block the checkpoint, the immune system rushes in to kill the tumor.

And it turns out that certain bacteria are boosting the effect of the checkpoint blockers, if you can follow that.

So now they're doing trials.

If you take a certain bacteria with a checkpoint blocker, would it increase the response?