Unraveling the association between gut microbiota and chemotherapy efficacy: a two-sample Mendelian randomization study

Emerging evidence has underscored the complex link between gut microbiota and chemotherapy efficacy; however, establishing causality remains elusive due to confounding factors. This study, leveraging bidirectional two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses, explores the casual relationship between gut microbiota and chemotherapy efficacy. Utilizing genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from the MiBioGen consortium for gut microbiota and IEU Open GWAS for chemotherapy efficacy, we employed genetic variants as instrumental variables (IVs). The inverse variance weighted (IVW) method, weighted median estimator (WME), and MR-Egger regression method were applied, with sensitivity analyses ensuring robustness. Furthermore, we conducted reverse MR analyses between chemotherapy efficacy and identified significant gut microbial taxa. The results indicated that