We brought a Portuguese study, a Portuguese cohort of patients with lung cancer and controls. What we’ve been seeing in the past years is there’s a crescendo in the microbiome, the human microbiome, at various sites like gut microbiome, and lung microbiome has been scarcely studied actually. So we wanted to understand, since there is some information that this dysbiosis can lead to chronic inflammation, to alterations, to pre-cancerous alterations, we wanted to study that in our cohort.

Basically what we did, we gathered a Portuguese cohort of 257 patients. Patients had the indication to have a bronchoscopy and we would seize the moment within the bronchoscopy unit to recruit our patients. So half of our patients have lung cancer and half are controls. What we saw was that our cohort has a very distinct signature between the lung cancer patients and the controls.

What could be the clinical importance of these results?

Next steps, we would like to further look into the clinical characteristics, blood tests that we also collected, and treatment, because many of these patients were already on treatment, to see the difference and to see response to treatment. Obviously here we can look into a score to see if we can predict whether patients will respond and construct a score that can help us in dealing with these patients.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

The microbiome, there’s very little information, there’s very little literature about the lung microbiome and the collection within the lung. It's different about the gut and there’s always the combination of gut and lung. So this is something that we’re starting to open up, it’s an unseen, unstudied part of lung cancer and the lung itself. So maybe in the beginning we’ll have more questions and that will lead us to more lines of investigation.