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Sami Mansfield: What if the Next Breakthrough in Cancer Treatment… Starts with a Squat?

Sami (Papacek) Mansfield/LinkedIn

Aug 7, 2025, 10:26

Sami Mansfield: What if the Next Breakthrough in Cancer Treatment… Starts with a Squat?

Sami Mansfield, Founder of Cancer Wellness for Life, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“What if the next breakthrough in cancer treatment… starts with a squat?

I’m digging into new research on how movement affects the immune system—and it’s making me wonder: Did we have it all backwards?

For years, rest was prescribed as the best protection during and after cancer treatment when someone had low white blood cell counts and while we thought we were protecting the immunune system, were we just putting on a band-aid?

A new study out of the University of Pittsburgh just flipped an old script.

Published in Cell, this groundbreaking research links exercise-induced changes in the gut microbiome to improved immune response and better cancer outcomes in mice—and connects those dots in humans with melanoma, too.

The missing link? Formate—a powerful metabolite produced by gut bacteria during exercise. It supercharges CD8 T cells (aka the immune system’s cancer-fighting army) and makes immunotherapy more effective.

Key takeaways:

Without a healthy gut microbiome, exercise had no anti-cancer effect in mice.
Transferring stool from high-formate humans to mice improved tumor control.

Patients with higher formate levels had better progression-free survival.

Daily oral formate mimicked the benefits of exercise in enhancing T cell response and reducing tumor growth.

And here’s the exciting part:

This study doesn’t just change how we think about exercise and cancer care—it shines a light on the gut microbiome as a powerful therapeutic target.

Not just who’s living there, but what they’re doing—and the metabolites they produce—could be key to unlocking better treatment responses and gives us even more consideration for our gut microbiome!

This opens the door for:

– Identifying “super donors” for fecal microbial transplant (FMT) based on metabolites
– Exploring formate as a potential adjuvant therapy
– Understanding how daily movement fuels immune resilience through gut health!!!

Whether you’re a clinician, caregiver, or survivor—this is why exercise isn’t optional in cancer care. It’s a form of immunotherapy!

Paper: Phelps et al., Cell, July 2025

Save this to share with your teams or patients who ask, “Why bother moving during treatment?”
Let’s keep asking: What if the next breakthrough in cancer treatment… starts with a squat?”

Sami Mansfield

Title: Exercise-induced microbiota metabolite enhances CD8 T cell antitumor immunity promoting immunotherapy efficacy

Authors: Catherine M. Phelps, Nathaniel B. Willis, Tingting Duan, Amanda H. Lee, Yue Zhang, Daphne M. Rodriguez J, Surya P. Pandey, Colin R. Laughlin, Aaron B.I. Rosen, Alex C. McPherson, Jake H. Shapira, Simran K. Randhawa, Lee Hedden, Tanner G. Richie, Hallie M. Wiechman, Mackenzie J. Bender, Ina Nemet, Patrick A. Zöhrer, Rachel A. Gottschalk, Kathryn H. Schmitz, Steven J. Mullett, Stacy L. Gelhaus, Diwakar Davar, Hassane M. Zarour, Reinhard Hinterleitner, Thomas Mossington, Jonathan H. Badger, Richard R. Rodrigues, John A. McCulloch, Sonny T.M. Lee, Karl-Heinz Wagner, Maria G. Winter, Sebastian E. Winter, Jishnu Das, Joseph F. Pierre, Giorgio Trinchieri, Marlies Meisel