Pancreatic cancer patients may benefit from future precision treatments as a new study shows how some tumours may potentially be more susceptible to macrophage-based therapies, and clues behind why these tumours don't respond to existing immunotherapieis in a new Nature Communications paper.

The researchers showed that when curcumin is intentionally given to bacteria as food and then activated by light, it can trigger deleterious reactions within these microbes, eventually killing them. This process, they demonstrated, reduces the number of antibiotic-resistant strains and renders conventional antibiotics effective again.