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You’re on a crowded subway car and someone nearby sneezes. Influenza viruses shed by your fellow rider are expelled in droplets of saliva that land on you and the person next to you. Two days later, you begin suffering from the classic flu symptoms of fever, aches, and runny nose, while the lucky rider next to you somehow dodges the infectious bullet.

In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that our bodies are not entirely our own: each of us contains a delicate ecosystem comprised not only of human cells, but also trillions of microorganisms – bacteria, viruses, and other assorted “bugs” – that reside in our bodies. Within the human gut, as in any ecosystem, this balance can easily be disrupted, with devastating consequences.

What: For patients with T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL), a rare form of blood cancer that mainly affects children and young adults, drug resistance poses a major threat to a promising treatment option currently in clinical trials. About half of patients with T-ALL have mutations in NOTCH1, but drugs that target this gene have so far produced only short-lived effects: at first, the cancer seems to respond, but in a short period of time, T-ALL returns.