Intestinal Blautia is associated with reduced death from graft-versus-host disease

By Robert R. Jenq, Y. Taur, S. Devlin, D. Ponce, J. Goldberg, Katya Ahr, E. Littmann, Lilan Ling, Asia Gobourne, Liza Miller and 15 more. Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, 2015

657 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The relationship between intestinal microbiota composition and acute graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) after allogeneic blood/marrow transplantation (allo BMT) is not well understood. Intestinal bacteria have long been thought to contribute to GVHD pathophysiology, but recent animal studies in non-transplant settings have found that anti-inflammatory effects are mediated by certain subpopulations of intestinal commensals. Hypothesizing that a more nuanced relationship may exist between the intestinal bacteria and GVHD, we evaluated the fecal bacterial composition of 64 patients 12 days after BMT. We found that increased bacterial diversity was associated with reduced GVHD-related mortality. Furthermore, harboring increased amounts of bacteria belonging to the genus Blautia was associated with reduced GVHD lethality in this cohort and was confirmed in another independent cohort of 51 patients from the same institution. Blautia abundance was also associated with improved overall survival. We evaluated the abundance of Blautia with respect to clinical factors and found that loss of Blautia was associated with: 1) treatment with antibiotics that inhibit anaerobic bacteria and 2) receiving total parenteral nutrition (TPN) for longer durations. We conclude that increased abundance of commensal bacteria belonging to the Blautia genus is associated with reduced lethal GVHD and improved overall survival.

Subfields: Hematology, Parasitology, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fdd780145b643d877633eed4b2e6f30fe0beabd4

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Citations in the corpus

• The Influence of the Gut Microbiome on Cancer, Immunity, and Cancer Immunotherapy. (2018, background): “A high abundance of the genus Blautia of the Clostridia class was found to be associated with reduced GVHD lethality in two independent cohorts of patients undergoing treatment with allo-HSCT (Jenq et al., 2015).”
• Blautia—a new functional genus with potential probiotic properties? (2021, background): “A study with biomarker analysis revealed that increased diversity of intestinal microbiota in patients undergoing allo-BMT, particularly increased abundance of symbiotic bacteria of the Blautia genus, is associated with a reduction in lethal GVHD and an increase in overall survival.(111) A few studi”