The Innate Sense of Bacteriophages.

Perturbation of the gut microbiota is associated with inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, and even cancer. In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Gogokhia et al. 2019 sought to kill cancer-causing bacteria with bacteriophages. However, the bacteriophages themselves directly stimulated an immune response, which worsened inflammatory bowel disease pathogenesis.