How gut bacteria change cancer drug activity | Hacker News Reader

How gut bacteria change cancer drug activity

medicalxpress.com

98 pointsdnetesn7 comments

Interesting. I wonder if there's work being done to combine this approach with the modeling done for personalized chemo treatment to determine drug effectiveness against tumor tissues. It feels like combining modeling techniques for the disease + host would provide the best result.

All I got when I started reading papers and articles describing the function of gut bacteria in the body is that "it's complicated". So its interesting to see the words "manipulating gut bacteria".

There is Personalized OncoGenomics (POG).

> ...compares the patient’s normal DNA (each cell’s complete set of instructions) with the DNA of their tumours. It also compares the RNA of their tumours to reference RNA.

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/everything-you-nee...

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/bc-doctor-pioneers...

So, this work was done in C. elegans, a worm, on one class of drug used on colorectal cancer. So, obviously there's still a long ways to go, but there's enough noise in the gut bacteria space at this point to know that they're very important in a variety of ways to our health.

And, more research in there is needed.

I read a lot in various media, but I'm still ignorant how.

The vagus nerve has been mentioned; does that shuttle nutrients around, or what?

How exactly do these micros take digested chyme and make this incredibly efficient alcohol->waste reactor?

So the vagus nerve, when you sense that you are about to eat, stimulates your stomach to release enzymes that help break down what you intake. This leads to a feedback chain that releases and inhibits other enzymes down in your intestines to further break down this food.

As for the microbes that make up our gut Flora, the simple answer is: they have different enzymes that break things down. They may have an enzyme that adds a chemical group to a drug, activating it or inactivating it. It's far more complicated, and not something I'm very knowledgeable about.

Maybe this can make antibiotics work better.

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