Professor Anne Kiltie and PhD student, Chee Then, who are part of a team looking into the relationship between the gut microbiome and radiosensitisation in bladder cancer, sit down with CRUK to discuss the implications of treatments in an ageing population. The discussion has been published on the CRUK Science blog:
Anne and her team have also published their findings in the journal BMC Biology:
Patients with pelvic malignancies often receive radiosensitising chemotherapy with radiotherapy to improve survival; however, this is at the expense of increased normal tissue toxicity, particularly in elderly patients. Here, we explore if an alternative, low-cost, and non-toxic approach can achieve radiosensitisation in mice transplanted with human bladder cancer cells. Other investigators have shown slower growth of transplanted tumours in mice fed high-fibre diets. We hypothesised that mice fed a high-fibre diet would have improved tumour control following ionising radiation (IR) and that this would be mediated through the gut microbiota.
The full article can be found in the following link: doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-00836-x