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

Absolutely, they've spotted the types of bacteria can govern whether you respond to immunotherapy or not.

One really good one, there's been several studies on this, the ones I like, Ackermansia mucinophilia, that one, that will increase the response to what's called checkpoint blockade.

Another one called faecal bacterium proniti,

that will increase response to checkpoint blockade as well.

But if you have one called Fusobacteria, that decreases the response.

Now, what's going on here?

Well, if you have those ones that are good, the ones that are actually, if they're present, and you trigger the immune response, right, you're increasing the activity of what are called CD8 T cells.

You can kill the tumor.

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.

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