Professor Luke O'Neill

And they gave the people fecal material from responders.

And guess what?

First of all, it was safe.

Very importantly, it was a safety trial, really.

And there was indications.

that doing that would increase the response to these checkpoint inhibitors.

So we may see this emerging as an adjunct to immunotherapy or indeed to chemotherapy.

Now, using faecal material does sound unpleasant, but they can do it.

They can clean it up a bit and stick it in a tablet and you can just take it.

Sounds unusual, but it is possible to do.

And that'll be one way to do it.

But it's very hard to control that and

you're trying to measure the bacteria in the donor fecal material, you're much better off finding what the bacteria are, identify them and put them in instead.

Or even more importantly, what are they doing?

If you could figure out what these bacteria are making.

to activate the immune response against the tumour in combination with the immunotherapy, that'll be a drug that'll be much more effective and more reproducible.

So it's just the beginning of this really.

It's going in that direction.

Very difficult to do, of course.

And there's been all kinds of problems trying to identify what the factors are because they're probably likely very complex.