Immunotherapy is a mainstay in the treatment of various tumors, such as melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer, and genitourinary cancer. Administration of checkpoint inhibitors (checkpoint) -drugs that lift the brake patients’ immune systems to attack the cancer – has added survival, thanks to this innovative self-defense strategy, but it has also led to new side effects and toxicities to cancer plants.
One of them is the immune-mediated colitis. In fact, the gastrointestinal tract is among the organs most affected by inhibitors of checkpointand that translates into diarrhea and colicky abdominal pain of varying intensity.
Patients suffering from these symptoms have to discontinue cancer treatment or resort to immunosuppressive drugs. In both cases, there is risk of compromising the results of the treatment.
But there could be another possibility or at least those are being studied. A team of researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston has conducted a trial of twelve patients showing that fecal microbiome transplants from healthy donors reduce intestinal inflammation, diarrhea, and more intestinal side effects of immunotherapy.
More than half of the patients with severe colitis or diarrhea who did not respond to conventional treatments experienced a remission in symptoms. Ten of them showed clear improvement and seven complete responses.