Fight Fire With Fire:Using Microbes Against Cancer

What if the key to fighting cancer was already inside you? Tiny microbes living in your gut could revolutionize cancer treatment by interacting with the immune system and enhancing therapies. In this talk, we’ll explore how these friendly bacteria offer a new frontier in medicine. I’ll talk about why gut bacteria matter more than you think and how they could shape the future of cancer treatment.

Since medieval times, the average human lifespan has practically doubled and we are now prone to age-related disorders. The most deadly is cancer which is estimated to affect 1 in 2 people in the UK. In this talk, I will discuss the modern drug discovery process and why cancer remains a major unmet healthcare need. Focussing on one approach to treatment - chemotherapy - and provide illustrative examples from my research ranging from discovering promising leads from nature to rationally designed molecules that have shown efficacy in animal models and human clinical trials.

It has been known for many years that microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses play a major role in cancer. With prostate cancer being one of the most common cancers affecting the UK population, research into the involvement of bacteria in prostate cancer has also increased over the years. In this talk, we will be looking at some recent findings from UEA and whether some bacterial species could actually be useful in predicting aggressive prostate cancer well before other routine diagnostic tests pick it up.