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Emerging data have highlighted a correlation between microbiome composition and cancer immunotherapy outcome. While commensal bacteria and their metabolites are known to modulate the host environment, contradictory effects and a lack of mechanistic understanding impede the translation of microbiome-based therapies into the clinic. In this study, we demonstrate that abundance of the commensal metabolite pentanoate is predictive for survival of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell patients in two independent cohorts. Its implementation in the CAR T cell manufacturing workflow overcomes solid tumor microenvironments in immunocompetent cancer models by hijacking the epigenetic-metabolic crosstalk, reducing exhaustion and promoting naive-like differentiation. While synergy of clinically relevant drugs mimicked the phenotype of pentanoate-engineered CAR T cells
Staudt et al. (Mon,) studied this question.