Fecal Transplant May Help Skin Cancer Patients Respond To Treatment Better: Study

There are some melanoma patients who do not respond to immunotherapy drugs, but researchers have now found that adjusting their microbiome through fecal transplants may actually help them respond to treatments better.

Melanoma is a serious type of skin cancer. It is quite dangerous compared to other skin cancer types as it can quickly spread to other organs, The Skin Cancer Foundation said. Because of this, it's imperative for a patient with the condition to get it treated during the early stages.

However, there are some patients who don't really respond to treatment.

In a new study, published in Science, a team of researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center for Cancer Research and the University of Pittsburgh tested a rather unique approach to help the patients respond to the treatments better: fecal transplants.

Fecal or stool transplant is the process wherein the stool from a donor will be transferred to the patient's gastrointestinal tract, Johns Hopkins Medicine explained.

For the study, researchers developed a clinical trial for patients with advanced melanoma whose tumors did not respond to one or more rounds of treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors. These drugs essentially "release a break" that prevents the immune system from attacking the tumor cells, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) explained in a news release.

The researchers collected fecal microbiota from advanced melanoma patients who previously responded to the treatments and transplanted them via colonoscopy to the patients who did not previously respond.

Among the 15 patients who received the transplant, six eventually responded to the treatment and even had their tumors reduced or the disease stabilized.

"One of these patients has exhibited an ongoing partial response after more than two years and is still being followed by researchers, while four other patients are still receiving treatment and have shown no disease progression for over a year," the NIH said.

The researchers also observed that the levels of the patients' immune system molecules linked to being resistant to immunotherapy decreased, while the ones linked to response increased.

Although more research is needed, for instance, to determine exactly which microorganisms are responsible for the positive response, the study is quite promising for patients who are not responding to immunotherapy drugs.

"Our study is one of the first to demonstrate in patients that altering the composition of the gut microbiome can improve the response to immunotherapy," study co-leader Giorgio Trinchieri said in the news release. "The data provide proof of concept that the gut microbiome can be a therapeutic target in cancer."