Engineering the perfect (bacterial) cancer therapy

By Neil S. Forbes. Nature Reviews. Cancer, 2010

837 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bacterial therapies possess many unique mechanisms for treating cancer that are unachievable with standard methods. Bacteria can specifically target tumours, actively penetrate tissue, are easily detected and can controllably induce cytotoxicity. Over the past decade, Salmonella, Clostridium and other genera have been shown to control tumour growth and promote survival in animal models. In this Innovation article I propose that synthetic biology techniques can be used to solve many of the key challenges that are associated with bacterial therapies, such as toxicity, stability and efficiency, and can be used to tune their beneficial features, allowing the engineering of 'perfect' cancer therapies.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Biotechnology, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74649789884fd7416257e76a49bc319952f4b749

How researchers see this paper

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In Biomedical Engineering

1. Lev S. Tsimring
2. Jeff Hasty
3. Liuya Wei
4. L. Zitvogel
5. Tal Danino

In Genetics

1. Lev S. Tsimring
2. Rob Knight
3. Jeff Hasty
4. Zhesheng Chen
5. L. Zitvogel
6. Tal Danino

Citations in the corpus

• Microbiota in health and diseases (2022, background): “Bacteria can bypass problems associated with poor selectivity and limited tumor penetrability of conventional cancer chemotherapies and can be finely engineered to sense and respond to the tumor microenvironment.(392) One strategy is to utilize the native bacterial cytotoxicity to kill cancer cells.”
• Fusobacterium nucleatum infection is prevalent in human colorectal carcinoma. (2012, background): “the potential utility of bacterial cancer therapy (Forbes 2010), an approach that relies fundamentally on the availability of microbes”
• Synchronized cycles of bacterial lysis for in vivo delivery (2016, background): “Thus a synergistic effect may arise when bacteria are used to deliver drugs to the necrotic core of a tumor, while standard chemotherapy is used for the vascularized regions 11,26 .”
• The microbiome and human cancer (2021, background): “Though historically contentious, BCT is regaining attention through synthetic biology techniques that programmatically limit systemic toxicities while enhancing regional antitumor immunity (105, 106).”