Recent studies have suggested that the microbiome can impact cancer patient responses to treatments, such as immunotherapies and stem cell transplants.
Moffitt Cancer Center physician-scientists teamed up with MD Anderson Cancer Center and three German institutions – University Hospital of the Ludwig Maximilian University, University Hospital Heidelberg and University Hospital Regensburg – to assess whether the gut microbiome impacts outcomes for patients receiving CAR T-cell therapies. The study is published in Nature Medicine.
CAR T is a personalized treatment approach where a patient’s own T cells are harvested, genetically engineered in a laboratory to target a specific cancer marker, expanded in number, and then reinfused into the patient. CAR T cells are approved to treat several types of blood cancers, including lymphoma, leukemia and multiple myeloma.
Microbiome analysis
For this study, the research team analyzed the microbiome from 172 non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients who relapsed or were refractory to prior treatment. They discovered that patients who had taken strong, broad-spectrum antibiotics before receiving CAR T cell therapy had less microbiome diversity and poorer outcomes to treatment.
However, the researchers found that these poor outcomes could also have been due to a higher tumour burden among the patients who received antibiotics and a more suppressed immune system. Additional factors associated with microbiome diversity included country of residence, general health before treatment and tumour burden.
Because tumour burden could influence antibiotic use and outcomes, the researchers decided to focus on patients who received either no or lower-risk antibiotics. Among this population, the researchers discovered that patients who had higher levels of the bacterium Bifidobacterium longum had an improved overall survival rate after CAR T.
Predicting outcomes
They used this data to create a machine learning algorithm to predict patient CAR T outcomes based on their microbiomes. The algorithm was tested with patient data from Germany and validated with patient data from the U.S.
Their analysis identified bacterial groups associated with either improved or poorer CAR T outcomes. For example, the bacterium Bacteroides eggerthii was associated with a higher chance of developing a response to treatment, while the bacterium Bacteroides stercoris was associated with patients not achieving a response.
“We hope these data will lead to an improved understanding of the relationship between the microbiome and patient responses to CAR T-cell therapy. Understanding the causal nature of possible microbiome contributions to CAR T effectiveness and adverse effects may enable better understanding of differential CAR T-cell activation, persistence and clinical efficacy, and ultimately the prediction of response to CAR T prior to treatment,” said Michael Jain, M.D., Ph.D., co-senior study author and associate member of Moffitt’s Department of Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Immunotherapy.
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