Association Between Gut Microbiome and Improved Outcomes in RCC

Nazli Dizman, MD, internal medicine resident at Yale Department of Internal Medicine, discusses what community oncologists should keep in mind about gut microbiome when treating their patients.

Gut microbiome impacts an individual's immune system in various ways, including metabolites going to circulation, stemming circulation, changing immune responses, modulating immune-risk cancers, and with there being a presence of bacteria in tumor microenvironment.

According to Dizman, there is currently research being done regarding how gut microbiome diversities work in modulating response to immunotherapy in patients with cancer. With there being limited yet impressive data obtained from previous studies, further understanding of gut microbiome diversities is needed to discover how they can be associated with better outcomes for patients, particularly with renal cell carcinoma.

Transcription:

0:08 | When we treat our patients, mindful use of antibiotics is a key point. At this point, we have a very big reliable meta-analysis showing the mental effects of antibiotics on response to immunotherapies. I assume that community oncologists are probably getting questions about provider cues and even the use of live bacterial production given those impressive results that we obtained. As an answer to those questions, we have limited data obtained from a small study, despite that it is very impressive.

0:57 | We are currently working on gut microbiome and trying to understand how we can modulate gut microbiome and perhaps get better outcomes in larger data sets. I think one thing to know is that research is still evolving, and there are a lot of unknown unknowns as well. Keeping track of what's happening in the field would be a recommendation from me to them as they might get questions from the patients about modulation. If they have a close-by center with clinical trials that evaluate gut microbiome or its modulation, referring interested patients into those places might be a recommendation as well.