Professor Luke O'Neill

speaker

1,535 appearances 7 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Professor Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

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Show Me the Science with Luke O'Neill · The Science of Gut Health · 21 May 2026 podcast

But Larry is asking about cancer because he's spotted, I'll bet you, a growing literature about this.

And again, what's happening here is scientists who work on cancer are looking at the microbiome, trying to see if it's relevant for maybe developing cancer.

Secondly, maybe certain combinations protect against cancer.

And there is evidence, as I will come back to for all of that.

But the most compelling evidence by far, so far, is there are studies now showing that the type of bacteria in your gut will determine whether you respond to chemotherapy or immunotherapy.

Now, this could be extremely important because if you get the bugs in the gut right, there's a bigger chance that things like immunotherapy will work.

And we know there's variation.

I've covered this in other podcasts.

So overall, at the moment,

The frontier in cancer research is to get the immune system to kill the tumor.

It's called immunotherapy.

But the trouble is many people don't respond.

And we'd love to see more and more people responding.

Overall, 20-30% response.

Some are higher, depending on the type of cancer, of course.

But overall, we'd love to increase that.

And there's evidence that the types of bacteria in your gut might predict whether you will respond or not.

And in fact, again, Larry must be observing the recent literature.

There were three papers back to back in a journal called Nature Medicine, one of the big medical journals, very eminent journal.

And a few weeks ago there, there were three papers back to back on trials of trying to manipulate the bacteria in your gut and then look at the effect of immunotherapy and getting some very interesting data.

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