Professor Luke O'Neill

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.

And I'm going to describe some of that as well.

Now, we've known for a long time that certain bacteria in your gut do increase the risk of cancer.

So, for example, Helicobacter.

That's the best example we have.

Helicobacter was discovered, oh, it must be 30 years ago now, as a huge risk factor for ulcers in your stomach.

If that bacteria grows and grows and grows in your gut.

Now, remember, your gut is full of bacteria.

It's a bit of the Amazon rainforest down there in terms of species, though.